Queen visits Google
Friday, October 24th, 2008
- A blog about
- customer experience
- design
- ideas
- me
- media
- methods
- miscellany
- reviews
- usability
Never mind putting your money into gold to weather the financial crisis, according to the missus’ latest shopping bill, manuka honey is the place to stash your cash.
Fantastic to see Mark Cavendish become the first Briton to win three stages of the Tour de France. (He even got a mention in the headlines on PM, a program that generally shuns sport in favour of lightweight political coverage.) Cav’s exploits have lifted a race that was always going to have difficulty competing with the drama and spectacle of last years event, but there’s one thing that stays the same no matter how the competition’s faring – you always ride that little bit faster when it’s on.
England’s recent friendly against Brazil gave me my first glimpse of the new Wembley stadium. For an architectural structure that’s created so much controversy, taken so long to build and cost so much it seems a bit, um, underwhelming.
The ‘triumphal’ arch is impressive from a distance, but there’s no element of surprise or delight to the stadium. No emotional connection.
Contrast that with Munich’s Allianz Arena.
The outer shell changes colour depending on which of the local teams is playing. Red for Bayern Munich, Blue for 1860 Munich (with white for derbies and Internationals). Amazing and guaranteed to ignite passions. Imagine being a home supporter and seeing your team’s colours enveloping your stadium. The simplest, yet most visceral connection for any football fan. Suddenly, all of the triumph seems to have disappeared from that arch.
Talking to a friend who’d visited Wembley a few weeks ago it seems that the architects got some things right. He marvelled at the number of toilets (it’s always details); 2,618 of them according to the official Wembley site. A lesson learned from the limited facilities at the old stadium which lead to some, er, interesting workarounds from spectators. At half-time there were usually three queues of people waiting to relieve themselves: one for the cubicles, one for the urinals and one for the sinks. Still, I suppose it makes for easy access to the taps afterwards.
Photography from sismastery, rp72, gonzales2010 and probek on flickr.
You’ll end up a lonely figure, unsure of what you believe in, forced to peddle your practice from an old garage whilst the global media watches on (AKA leader of the Conservative Party).
A while ago I wrote about my copy of Word developing a fear of flying. The neurosis seems to be spreading; now my laptop has become agoraphobic. Yesterday, I bought it into work to do some stuff with the tablet. As soon as I powered it up, it showed me the blue screen of death and nothing I could do (Safe Mode, Last Known Good, booting from a Linux Live CD) would make it work.
I travelled home trying to remember the last time I'd backed it up and wondering how much stuff I'd lost. In desperation, I thought I'd plug it in and give it one more try (a last gasp 'have you turned it off and on again?' fix). Lo and behold it started straight away without any problems (and this is the second time that's happened!). I feel like I'm living in a Woody Allen film.
Things have been a little quiet around here lately. One of the reasons (there are others, like house hunting and number 2 baby) is that I've been migrating my blog engine from LiveJournal to WordPress (sorry LiveJournal, I just couldn't get the hang of your templating language). To ease the transition I've copied my RSS feed to FeedBurner so that in the future it won't matter what engine I'm using for the blog, or where it's being served from. I don't know if I have any subscribers (I suppose I'll find out), but if anyone out there is reading along and you want to continue, then please seek professional help, er, point your reader at http://feeds.feedburner.com/userhappiness.
See you on the other side …
The Social Issues Research Centre’s Passport to the Pub reveals the exotic ritual and tacit knowledge in the everyday acts we pub-loving Brits take for granted.
It’s an amazing and thorough piece of work (the researchers claim observations in 800 pubs, consultations with over 500 publicans and bar staff, and interviews with over 1000 pubgoers), but they missed the most crucial bit of advice for anyone (tourist or otherwise) looking for a decent pub:
if the roof’s flat, don’t go in.
(All I’m saying is I’ve followed this credo, handed down by my forefathers, and I’m still here to tell the tale.)
