DerrenWilson.net

Laura’s got to use our car today, and I’m dreading the phone call about the blimmin’ thing not starting. Again.

We’ve had an E-reg Volvo 340 for about three years. For two years it sat around in North London, being unused, except for rare occasions when we’d take it out and it would semi-terminally stall on us in difficult locations (the top of Islington’s Upper Street, for example).

Up North it behaves itself a bit better, but it’s getting crotchety in its old age, and has been refusing to start-for-no-apparent-reason lately. Taking the it-seems-to-be-charged battery out, charging it, and putting the battery back in again sorts it out, but it needs looking at by someone who knows what they are doing.

I pop the bonnet and look around in a slightly-scared way, fiddling with cables and getting oily fingers, but it means very little to me. I can change an oil filter or spark plugs, but that’s about it. I must be a terrible disappointment to my Dad, who I watched (when very young) take the gearbox out of our Renault 17, strip it, fix it and put it all back together again, on the garage floor.

Give me an Audi A2, with its holes for oil, petrol and water (the ‘service module’) and NO USER SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE any day.

I’ve been working my way through 37 signals’ reading recommendations (for free, thanks to the Library here at the University). The first book off the shelves was The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman.

Norman believes that it’s not our fault if we find something difficult to use: toaster, computer, 747. Rather, that the process designers go through, and the way style affects the finished object results in things that aren’t geared to the end user’s needs. An example: a tap that needs instructions on how to get the water out, instead of transmitting its function through its shape and design.

I like books like this that challenge assumptions about ‘clumsy users’ and ‘common sense’. It’s a good time to be reading a book like this, that gets you thinking about the usability of an end product, while I’m working on two rather big websites.

However, the typographically aware may be annoyed by the use of a sloped roman serif rather than a true italic in body text (2002 edition). Battle through, anyway…

An interesting subtext, at least for me, is Norman’s experiences while writing the book. He says the book was inspired by his American perceptions of how Europeans do things during a sabbatical in England.

A few examples: badly signposted A and B roads (I can agree with this one), old slam door trains where you reach out to turn the handle on the outside to open the train door (He’s not convinced that the procedure stops people opening the doors while the train’s moving), and non-standardised hot and cold taps (our house sports a good example in the kitchen – cold on the right, hot on the left). All this confusion might help explain why American tourists get in your way on the tube…

These stories aren’t on their website, but if you have a print copy, please turn to:

Page 28, col 3: ‘While EL DJ offers such esoterica as Giant Sand’s Ramp, Died Pretty’s Doughboy Hollow…’

this should read:

‘While EL DJ offers magnificent records like Died Pretty’s Doughboy Hollow, which should be part of any self-respecting music fan’s collection: the soaring Godbless, the anthemic D.C. are just two of the highlights of the band’s best record…’

Page 72: ‘…Unlistenable music like (photograph of King Kong record) and (photograph of Smudge CD sleeve)’

change to

(delete King Kong record) ‘…Incredibly awesomely great music like (photograph of Smudge CD sleeve)…’

I think that’s about it. Admittedly some of the b-sides of Smudge’s Impractical Joke single are a bit ramshackle, but the A-side is magnificent. It is one of the few songs I can play all the way through and remember (most of) the words to, probably because it’s well under three minutes long.

Unusually, though, I’m not going to just talk about a record I’ve heard and you don’t know from adam: here it is.

Impractical Joke by Smudge (3.2MB 192k .mp3) All gone, sorry.

So I’m redesigning the Media Services and Customer Services websites for work, and I need a way of explaining what these two bits of the University offer in the smallest possible space on the homepage.

In a typical bit of overkill, I start coding a drop-down with a list of questions that people might ask, e.g. ‘Where can I get some keys cut?’, etc etc that goes into a MySQL database to pull out the answer. It works, and seems to be a solution, but an important part of my brain doesn’t quite think it’s there yet.

How do you relate the answer to the question to the rest of the content on the site? What about people that hate pulldowns? What about questions that aren’t in the pulldown list?

So I leave it for a bit.

This morning I check my e-mail and there is a new Digital Web article about content. So I pop that into a tab and read it. It’s a good article, so I visit the writer’s page mentioned in his bio. This is also good. I’ve decided to follow this web-content stream now, so I open most of the links on this page, look at them, and end up the Web Style Guide. This is very good. It’s an entire book about Web Design free on the web. I print out the sections on Page Design and Editorial Style. I now have 49 sheets of A4 on my desk.

I start reading. On page 23 of the Site Design section, I find a screenshot of the Video Production page of the Yale Medical School Media Services website. It looks vaguely similar to the ideas I’m working on for the MMU Media Services page. Back to the browser, type in the URL. The homepage of the Yale Media Services site is a revelation.

Instead of a tricksy pulldown, there’s a simple, immediately understandable directory of the services they offer. Name of service, links to important sections. It’s one of those moments. I can do the same thing, and have the directory go to bookmarks in the content on other pages. No more pulldowns. Thank you Yale Media Services, and thank you internet.

For the last three weeks, I’ve been walking home from New Mills Central train station to Hayfield via the Sett Valley Trail, covering about three miles in forty-five minutes.

The A6105 road from New Mills to Hayfield runs along a slightly different path (the Sett Valley trail was once a branch railway line). There are things you can spot from the trail that aren’t obvious in a car, like a cobbled lane leading to a cottage, and the reservoir in the valley. The reservoir’s sheet of water plays tricks with your eyes as you approach it: there seems to be nothing behind the trees along the path, and then you realise it’s the light from the water.

There’s no long straight bits; the path is always mysteriously bending off into the trees that run alongside. But I can tell I’m nearly home when I see the Waltzing Weasel pub up on the hill and the Georgian farmhouse across the road. Once the trail has finished, and spat me out into the car park, the bright lights of Hayfield beckon…

WireTap 1.0.0 is a free, small, Apple OS X.2 application that allows you to record any audio playing on your machine as a .aiff (which you can then convert to a .mp3) file.

It sounds simple, but think of the applications:

• You can capture a radio broadcast and burn it to CD
• You can listen to all your old cassette tapes in iTunes by hooking them up to the microphone socket on your Mac
• You can keep those horrible 128kps audio files that you might find on band sites, and listen to them on your PDA until the proper record comes out.

PC users? Erm, ahh, I dunno.

This is about the only bit of Manchester I know. There’s quite a good place to eat and drink along Oxford Road (top right to bottom left on the picture) and, er, three guitar shops in the vicinity. Oh yes, and a couple of universities.

I keep seeing a bright yellow SAAB in the village with a license plate that ends DTD, so I went and had a look at how much some other web development TLAs would cost me in number plate form, should I suddenly forget the value of money:

I’m in the wrong business…

Spotted in the paper yesterday:

It’s a group called Litmus, and there are music samples of their versions of Oasis, Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays and Stone Roses songs on the site. I’m not sure if this is a good idea or not, even after listening to the excerpts. What do you think of them?

Well, I nearly jumped out of my chair last night watching Teachers on Channel 4. Half way though the program I heard a very familiar voice start up on the background music with ‘Long ago and what’s his name…’. English TV was playing Ribbons and Bows, track four of Deliverance, You Am I’s sixth unbelievably-ignored-by-the-world studio album. How did that happen?

You should all go buy a copy of this record immediately.

Keeping with the music theme, here are some things you can enjoy right now:

1. Very cool Saul-Bass-mixed-with-Blue-Note-cover-art video by one9ine for a song called Slim’s Return by Madlib.
2. The Webb Brothers are back with a be-flashed website, which plays a new song called Ms Moriarty, sporting a most throbbing bassline. I’m always interested in a song with one of those.
3. Last, but not least. I bought my copy of Smudge’s record Manilow in to rip onto iTunes today, so here, for your listening delectation, is the pure pomp and majesty of Scary Cassettes, all 1 minute, 11 seconds. All gone.

R.O.C.K. in ten foot high burning letters!