Spot the irony

Those whale-murdering lying bastard Japanese appear to be hypocrites as well.

Look at the cute little baby seal. All together now: Awwww.....

Oh, wait. It's a robot baby seal. Stand by for giant robot krill-munching aquatic mammals, coming soon to a popular tourist beach near you.

P.S.: And exactly how do you get into the Guinness Book of Records for Most therapeutic robot?

P.P.S.: Robotic fluffy animals suitable for retirement homes and hospitals wards are not what I think of when I hear of a film called "Mechanical Love".

Anti-product placement?

What does it say about an apparently well-funded TV series that none of the mobile phones used by any of the protagonists are obviously identifiable by brand? No product placement at all.

And then when it does become clear, via a two-second screen-shot, that at least one of the mobile used in an iPhone, the plot thickens when it becomes clear that the Apple logo on the back has been covered up by a diamond-shaped sticker.

I'm thinking that the actors were told to use their own phones, and the producers are desperately trying to find a sponsor.

Little, obvious things to want from a mobile phone

Continuing with the basics that companies persist in getting wrong:

I like predictive text. Having used Siemens, Sony-Ericsson and Samsung phones, that means T9. On each of those phones, I have entered large numbers of words into the dictionary, most of them names, some swear-words, some obscure. Occasionally, due to rushing, I will get it wrong and have to start again. Which leaves an incorrect word in the dictionary. I would like, therefore, the following features:

Being able to edit the dictionary.

Why is this so hard? Surely I should be able to remove words as well as enter them? Granted it's not, given a decent amount of RAM, something that should ever be necessary unless the user makes a mistake. But at that point, the user should have the ability to fix said mistake. Or the sheer satisfaction value of eliminating a name, perhaps.

Little things to want from a mobile phone

Something that would be nice, would be really nice from a mobile phone - just a simple device that you can make calls on, use a hands-free set and, hopefully, listen to MP3s - is a standard headset socket.

I'm serious. Getting away from Bond-esque dreams of combining GPS, broadband speeds, a web browser that can do full flash and AJAX and everything else, a high-speed text input system (however you want to do it) and, well, let's say a 5MP camera with an optical zoom (why aim low?), let's get back to basics.

I would like to be able to buy a good set of earbuds to replace whatever came with the phone, maybe a wired handsfree to save on batteries or something, and be able to plug them in.

At the moment, my Samsung uses a different socket to my girlfriend's Samsung, and I can't use the earpiece at the same time as the USB cable or the charger. Neither of them share a socket with any Sony-Ericsson, Motorola, old Siemens, BenQ, HTC, O2... So you're stuck with whatever you get given, which is frequently pathetic and, if you should lose it or not get given one to begin with, expensive.

I would like (although I don't hold out much hope) for my next mobile to use the same headset socket now used by radios, mp3 players, and computer speakers.

We can all dream.

It's the little things... (yes, again)

Microsoft Office Outlook. De-facto standard for groupmail (email and calendar, for those of you who are lucky enough to have never heard that term) software in business. We are looking here at the Office 2003 version.

Go to the calendar view, and the sidebar on the right (unless you've turned it off), will show a mini version of that month, and probably your task list. Which, being me, is empty because my mind just doesn't function with task lists.

One reasonably useful feature is the ability to expand the monthly calendar list to show lots of months. So you do that, because you want to select something in the future. Then click on the title of the month you want.

WTF? No, you don't get that month displayed in front of you. In order to do that, you have to select a day, or range of days.

I must be tired: I can't really get up the energy to bitch about how uselessly and infuriatingly this breaks any reasonable conception of user interface user-friendliness.

So I'll leave with: Outlook, you suck.

For god's sake, keep your eyes open!

It is a great and noble truth that a leopard does not easily change its spots. This gives an advantage to those who realise it, by allowing you to, reasonably confidently, predict the behaviour of complete strangers based upon how they've just been behaving. Or, any other evidence that comes to hand.

And as anybody who pays attention to being a road user knows, reading the traffic and other people's intentions is a vital part of staying alive and comfortable. As a motorcyclist, I am keenly aware of this even more.

Take this morning. Approaching a large multi lane roundabout, I noticed that the car to the right of me has the front of the bonnet staved in and pushed back, as though it had run under the back of a truck, but just not enough to damage anything vital. So I kept my eye on that car, and when the traffic passed and we could set off, I was cautious.

Which was good, because he zoomed off, cut it very fine missing the traffic going across the other way, and pulled in front of me without indicating, braking very late and hard behind the trunk in front of both of us.

Which, as I slipped sideways into a different lane and went sailing off up the hill and away, gave me a warm glow of satisfaction that I could guess how he had damaged his car, and had avoided having to take any evasive manoeuvres myself.

There's a lot of argument over what's the most important factor in the road toll, but from personal observation simply not paying attention is a good candidate for the top spot.

It's the little things redux redux redux

It almost seems superfluous to suggest user interface improvements for XP, given how it's been replaced by Vista... No, wait. It hasn't. Never mind.

Problem: When you click on a desktop shortcut and the destination file has been moved, you get a message politely telling you that Windows has no idea what you're talking about, and would you like to delete the shortcut?

Now why the hell would I want to do that, if I've just asked to open that file or program?

What would be really useful (big ask for Microsoft, I know), is if the warning dialogue box included the path of the file, to give you some idea of where you (or, in this case, my network administrator) may have moved the fucker to, so that I can find it and restore a working shortcut.