TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

I Actually Can’t Stop The Music

I’m trying to talk to someone, I forget who, and the music is just so ridiculously loud that I can’t even hear my own voice. I indicate non-verbally that I’m going to turn off the MP3 player – which I think is theirs – but the thing won’t shut down. It’s a Sansa, like mine, and no matter how long I hold the ‘off’ button it just goes through different shutting down procedures without ever stopping. The music is pounding, unrelentingly repetitive – a few deafening bars and then the vocalist sings, “I’m tired of singing,” – repeated ad nauseam.

Eventually I just tug the wire from the player, and it still doesn’t stop. It’s so loud I feel like my head is bleeding – that the song itself is about the singer being tired of singing seems like a sick joke. “I’m tired of singing.”

I burst into the lounge, where my dad is explaining how a DivX player works to someone, and I ask if this is where the music is coming from. “I’m tired of singing.” My dad doesn’t know, so I borrow a likely-looking remote from him and try everything: volume down, mute, off. Nothing works. “I’m tired of singing.” By this stage the house is full of people, wearing chicken suits, walking slowly around its corridors and stopping every time the song gets to that unbearable “I’m tired of singing” line, whereupon their fake chicken heads flip back so they can sing it unmuffled. “I’m tired of singing.” I wish they wouldn’t. But most of all, I wish this fucking song would stop singing this fucking line again and again every five seconds for two fucking hours. “I’m tired of singing.” Shut up.

Finally I find the source. “I’m tired of singing.” I’m lying down, “I’m tired of singing,” I’m not sure where, “I’m tired of singing,” and there’s a single huge black speaker in front of me, “I’m tired of singing,” volume knob clearly visible. “I’m tired of singing.” I’m paralysed. “I’m tired of singing.” I know this knob will work, “I’m tired of singing,” that I can finally shut this unbearable “I’m tired of singing” twat up, “I’m tired of singing,” but I can’t move. “I’m tired of singing.”

“I’m tired of singing.”

“I’m tired of singing.”

“I’m tired of singing.”

“I’m tired of singing.” Finally I feel my arm start to shift, “I’m tired of singing.” I discover I’m naked, “I’m tired of singing,” but at this stage I don’t care – I can shut this thing up. “I’m tired of singing.” I manage to stagger to my feet and make it to the speaker, and twist the volume knob down for what feels like minutes.

It’s stopped. I see now that the speaker is beneath a monitor, behind a mouse and keyboard, and the track was playing through Winamp. I permanently delete it from the hard drive.

I look at the time – 8.30. I’ve slept through ninety minutes of music at this volume. It wasn’t all “I’m tired of singing” – a song called Running Out by Mates of State, not a single fucking bar of which I ever want to hear again as long as I live – that just happened to be the one that finally woke me up. I guess that means it was playing throughout the final couple of minutes of sleep where my dreams evidently take place.

There’s got to be a better way to wake up than this.

Offlyin’

Okay, it’s been 48 hours, I’m calling it: I’m back online. I’ve been off for six weeks, during which I started eating breakfast, and showering every day. Most of that was because Be (my new ISP) were telling me it must be a problem with my phone line, and British Telecom were telling me that it wasn’t, and if I wanted them to send out an engineer to check if it was, he’d charge me a minimum of £110 and refuse to fix it.

I solved it by lying: I just told Be that BT had checked my phone line and found that it was fine. Satisfied that I had performed the requisite dance, they just flicked the big switch they evidently have labeled “Work”, and now it does.

I had another card to play if that didn’t pan out: I can accurately call myself a technology journalist, we genuinely are considering an article on the abysmal state of internet sevice providers in this incompetent country, and as an absolute last resort, when companies are being utter fucking pricks about something, I’m not above role-playing a self-important twat to get it resolved.

But this story has a cathartic ending: on the day I get reconnected, I hear the BBC’s iPlayer, which lets you download a good quality copy of anything from the last week’s telly, is causing ISPs such chronic bandwidth problems that they’re trying to force the BBC to pay for overhead. “According to figures from regulator Ofcom it will cost ISPs in the region of £830m to pay for the extra capacity needed to allow for services like the iPlayer.”

At this, I laugh; bitterly and at length.

I guess you could summarise my position as in your fat, sweat-wet fucking faces, you unctuous fucking stoats. ISPs have survived thus far by lying exuberantly to their customers, selling them transfer rates they cannot possibly hope to provide, and relying on the vast majority of their customers wasting money by paying for a level of connectivity they never fully use. Now they’re fully using it. Now grandma has found BitTorrent, assholes, and she’s going to destroy you with it.

Fail Dogs

It turns out dogs aren’t very good at stuff. Most of these are funnier if you don’t think about how their owners put them in these situations, whereupon they become kind of disturbing. Except the chess one, which just gets funnier the more you think about it. I’m pretty sure that’s the fewest possible moves you can get checkmated in. (Thanks Ross.)

Austin Translation

I look bad, I smell bad and I feel bad, but I’m back. I was taken to Texas by a guy named Pete, but alas not Texas Pete from Superted. There I:

a) chinwagged with cigar-chomping bigwigs, immediately accepting their offer of a cigar and necessary ‘cutter’, despite having no idea how to cut a cigar, no memory of how to correctly smoke one and a physical reaction to tobacco that borders on allergy. Continued

James 2.5 Explained

Welcome, to the all-new James! The partly-new James! The slightly-altered James! I’m calling it 2.5 – it’s the third redesign of my fifth personal site, but it’s not exactly a generational jump. I coded my first blog when I was fourteen, so I’m littering this post with embarrassing shots and links of the older incarnations. Sadly Archive.org only goes as far back as the first James, so the design marvels of, er, “Pentadact’s Site”, “Ugly Fruit”, “The Open Focus Network” and “Politics” are not on shown here.

Turns out I liked dark blue in 1999 too. And I took my tea black? Was I ever that young?

Very nearly changed the name this time – for a long time the prototype read ‘Pentadact’ at the top. There’s every reason to make that change, not least of which is that people might finally spot that it doesn’t have a ‘u’ in it. But no matter how long I left it like that it just looked wrong. This obviously isn’t Pentadact – that’s me. It would be like calling my house Tom Francis.

The smallest change is the new visual motif; that didn’t take long. In a weird way I hope making it narrower has made it look wider – when it greedily filled the whole screen, it had no shape or size of its own. Filling the screen used to be one of my design commandments – I loathe sites that cower in a column on the left-hand side of any reasonably-sized display. Now, I’m starting to see that there are readability reasons why ultra-wide isn’t always awesome, and I prefer sites with a sense of place to sites with a design philosophy.

Weird, news-style proto-meta-blog

The idea behind the stuff in the sidebars – which took all the time – is that as much as possible, it should be different each time you come. Almost everything is either automatically-updating, easy to update, or just randomised. Instead of a static set of dozens of nameless thumbnail shots of things, I wanted to actually explain what each thing is that I’m featuring. But for the number of things I want to feature, that takes a prohibitively large amount of space. So instead, the template randomly chooses two items and I attempt to explain what they are.

I also wanted to dredge up some older stuff occasionally – hence the At Random panel. Blogs are all about what’s new, my sites never were: I like to create a load of stuff and leave it all hanging there, like so much dirty laundry. I’ve read everything on this site at least twice, and I wrote all of it, but even I see things cropping up in that box that make me think “What the hell was that?” If you ever see it blank, by the way, click the Full post link and let me know where it takes you. Every post is supposed to have an excerpt, but I think one or two slipped through the cracks.

Apparently I actually had other people submit reviews and stuff to the first James. I invented Web 2.0?

It’s not supposed to hit you in the face or anything, but there is a logic to what goes in the left as opposed to right sidebar. Left is stuff by me or on this site, and right is elsewhereville, things by other people that I liked. The Favourites panel is a solution to the problem of distinguishing between the types of places I link. I don’t link anyone’s blog unless I read every post of it, but that doesn’t always mean it’s essential reading I want to push on everyone. I wanted a separate place for the stuff I truly couldn’t live without, and to give it a little love. It’s also the first thing I did, and trying to articulate why you like your favourite sites is not a bad way to start a blog redesign.

The channels at the top were supposed to be a bigger deal than they’ve ended up being. I thought that since virtually no-one is interested in everything I talk about, and since I personally stop reading a blog after one or two posts I wasn’t interested in, it’d be useful to be able to filter it by topic. Everything here does legitimately fit into one of those, and if you’re an RSS user you can subscribe to each of the ones you care about to get a sort of custom feed. Update: stats show people really like to click the word ‘Games’ up there. Knock yourselves out, chaps!

I was fond, perhaps too fond, of the left-centre-right alignment pattern.

The subscription stuff is technically not new, but I want to highlight it this time: RSS means new posts get sent to you rather than you having to check for them, which in turn makes me feel less guilty about erratic posting. Jason L’s already requested the ability to subscribe to the comments that get made here, so I’ve implemented that too. Google Reader makes the internet a single page that can be read by repeatedly pressing a single key: Space. So at last, we can start out-evolving these pointless limbs. I’m just trying to help that along.

And as you’ve probably seen, I’m embedding MP3s a lot now – I’ll also add a direct download link for them soon. I want to post more than just music, and I’m thinking of a new regular related to that. I have 1.5 terabytes of storage space now, and ten times that in bandwidth, so I might as well put it to use.

2003 – first recognisably bloggy incarnation. Hopelessly dark.

Oh yeah, the hosting: James was long overdue for its own domain, I got constant complains about the acronymic URL (good luck spelling this one, whiners!), and the real reason: my ISP now sucks so hard that I have to leave them as soon as I humanly can. A load of providers now owned by Tiscali are now getting horrible service as people are moved to cheap, shitty servers in a bid for the parent company to turn a profit for the first time ever. So that really filled me with the warm glow of consumerism.

I chose BlueHost because a hundred blog posts told me to choose AN Hosting. I don’t know if you know this, but there are no longer any objective reviews of this kind of thing – every major company offers a huge cash kickback to bloggers sending new customers their way. The most trustworthy you get are the minority who admit they’re being paid to recommend you.

Holy shit I used to write a lot.

I almost went with AN Hosting anyway, but I happened to have their page up when I closed my browser for the day. It stopped me with a flashing alert claiming that a customer service representative for AN Hosting was trying to talk to me, and even lamely generated her (of course her) introductory lines. I almost spat. When I tried to close it, it generated another alert trying to panic me about that.

If these guys invent a cure for cancer, and I actually have cancer, they will still never see a penny of my money as long as I live, in cancery pain. BlueHost feel nice. Their CEO blogs. Their website lets you try out a dummy account. In fact, I like them so much I’m not going to link them, just so you know this isn’t a pay-per-post.

That would actually violate the prime directive of James, by the way, which is never to make money or sense.

PC Gamer Podcast: March

Tim calls this episode 11, because it’s the 12th, and I call it March, because it’s out in February. I’ve numbered the file 185, after the issue of PC Gamer that’s coming out this week.

In it, I do an impression of the bartender from the Witcher, we discuss the worst games of the year, gasmasks, some new information on the Team Fortress 2 changes, pleasing pirates in Sins of a Solar Empire, and our crack legal team’s advice on how to say things we’re not allowed to say.

Editor Ross Atherton is the smooth-talking host, Deputy Editor Tim is the one with the emphatic voice, I’m the low drone, and News Editor Craig is the Scot.

Come In

So this is the new layout I’ve been tinkering with. There’s still some tinkering to do, but it’s very time-consuming tinkering about fancy niceties for which I have long since lost my enthusiasm. The only major thing missing is a box with links to friends’ blogs, but the way I wanted it to work relied on some highly unstable technology that I’m not going to be able to code robustly anytime soon. It involves tachyons.

I was going to talk you through why I’ve done some of the new bits, why I scrapped some of the old bits, and why it’s slimmer. But it’s kind of late, and I’m kind of burnt-out on thinking about it now. I’ll edit that stuff in later – for now, let me know what you think, and have a listen to this while you look around:

Powered Down For Redesign

Because testing this stuff offline is an enormous hassle, and WordPress has masses of functions that are only valid when used in this: the main index file; James will be down, malfunctioning, hideous or utterly screwed up for many many hours tonight. If it’s not fixed by the time I get bored of fixing it, I’ll revert to this design and give up. Either way, it’ll be a working website again on Sunday.

Things Round Here Have Changed

But I’m tinkering with a redesign for this site that will likely go live in the next week. I like what I’ve got so far, but every time I look at it I half-glimpse something much, much better, and I’m trying to work out what to change to make it into that. In the meantime, and in the spirit of preparing for a New Year’s reboot, I’m posting things I’ve been meaning to post for ages. From the TV show Carpoolers:

I’m actually not wild about it as a sitcom, but there’s something brilliantly infectious about the radio singalong scenes. See also the ad.

Life Complete

In the TV ad for Valve’s Orange Box, the robo-voice from Portal – who you will eventually discover is called GLaDOS – uses journo quotes to summarise each game in the package. One of them is mine! To reiterate, the GLaDOS reads out my words. It will be on American telly. I’ve had a quote in foot-high letters on buses before, but now I can truly die happy. This basically makes me a writer at Valve.

Oh yeah, and I guess the issue with my three Orange Box reviews is on-sale now. It comes in a pretty awesome orange box, but the cover inside is even plus awesome.

For once I’m almost completely happy with my reviews, particularly the insane diagram in the Team Fortress 2 one. Tim deserves the credit for making sure that happened, and our Deputy Art Ed Amie Causton for turning my hilariously rubbish notepad scribble into what you see on the page. I also offer mad props to Valve’s super-artist Dhabih Eng, for painstakingly posing the beautiful lineup that opens the review. It makes me smile every time I look at it.

The Team Fortress 2 review is now online, sans diagram and awesome opening spread, and the other two reviews will go up when the Orange Box itself is live.

My Favourite Disaster

Back from further secret adventures in the world of exciting things, spent thirty-eight hours on planes this month, tired in a way that sleep won’t fix. It’s breaking season again: came home to a soaking kitchen, TV blew up, network down, new bike tyre immediately flat, PC unupgradable, and laptop took two days to rescue from a series of disasters. The main reason I’ve done so much travelling is that the game broke during my first trip, and couldn’t be repaired for two weeks.

My favourite disaster was when finally managing to get an operating system on my laptop left it unable to recognise its own network card. I had the driver – a 612KB file – on my PC, having found and downloaded it with surprising ease. But I lost my wonderful 4GB USB drive on my way back from my last trip (whoever finds it will have the magnificent ending scene of Portal completely ruined for them by the movie found thereon). I’d used up all my blank CDs burning duff copies of various operating systems after each disc – legit and otherwise – seemed to have at least one essential file corrupt. I had blank DVDs, but the laptop only has a CD drive. I had a floppy disk, and the laptop even has a floppy drive, but nothing else I’ve owned in six years has. I had SD cards, but no card reader. I had a camera that takes them, and the USB cable to connect it, but Windows XP won’t let you write files to my camera because Windows Media Player doesn’t think of cameras that way.

I also had a SIX GIGABYTE MP3 player, but it’s long since stopped working in USB storage device mode. This leaves only Media Transfer Protocol mode, the same infernal madness that dictates that a camera is not a device to be written to. It admits that an MP3 player could conceivably need to receive files, but stops you if you attempt to transfer anything it wouldn’t know how to play through speakers. At this juncture, after curtly informing you that what you’re trying to do is idiotic, it presents you with three options: Skip, Skip All, or Cancel.

This is perhaps the single dumbest problem I have ever encountered. I could almost write out a file of that size in a hex editor if I had a few hours longer. So I used my usual method of getting to the heart of how stupid stuff works: if I was an utter idiot, how would I design this? Well, I certainly wouldn’t actually verify if anything was really a playable music file, I’d just see if the extension was .mp3 and throw a hissy fit if not. By the same logic, a clever man like Tom could easily bypass my angry stupidity by just renaming any old file to MP3, however unmusiclike, then naming it back when successfully transferred.

This is how I came to coin a catchy little ditty called R34071.mp3. It goes a little something like this – and please do sing along if you know the words:

Well, I’m sure you know the rest.

British Airwaves

You’re supposed to feed a cold and starve a fever, I think, but I’m not sure what you do if you have a cold and a throat so sore that you can’t swallow food without hitting something and saying “Motherfucker!” afterwards. So far I’m dosing Halls, Lockets, Oraldene, 300% of my RDA in Vitamin C and Zinc and 200% of my RDA in sleep – to no avail.

I’m blaming British Airways, this time, for sitting me next to a door. a) Why would you put an Expensive Class seat somewhere too cold for human survival even under a blanket with the heating on maximum, and b) shouldn’t the doors on a plane be, like, airtight? Might my freezing be a symptom of a rather more serious problem at umpteen thousand feet? The two things BA can’t seem to get right are sending your baggage to the same hemisphere as you and an in-flight entertainment system that actually works. If they’re also failing to maintain hull integrity, I’m not sure they even qualify as an airline anymore. ‘Airborne torture wagon’ might be closer.

Are flights in one direction faster than in the other direction because you’re so high up that the air you’re flying through isn’t quite rotating on the Earth’s axis as fast as the ground? Because that’s kind of awesome if it’s true.

Anyway, since actual remedies aren’t working and pretty much everything causes an equal amount of pain now, I’m coiling up with chorizo cheese on toast, a flagon of coffee and a Damages triple-bill. I’m slightly gay for Tate Donovan.

The Machine Of Death Winners

The winners have been announced for that short story competition I entered a while back, for a collection of stories based around the idea of a machine that can tell you how you’re going to die. They all sound extraordinary. When the winner-notification date came and went without e-mail, I tried and failed to imagine what the winning stories were like, and the selections really show how small-minded I was being.

One of these is about paramedics in the future. One’s about a magician. There are stories about class, revolution, family, the third world, and one that’s just a series of personal ads. And one, inexplicably, is mine. They told me two or three days after I was entirely sure it had been rejected, which I can now confirm is the best way to win something.

The editors – Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics, David Malki of Wondermark and Matthew Bennardo of the world – had planned to self-publish the collection, but have apparently had some interest from actual publishing houses since. So I imagine they’re going to shop the manuscript around for a while and see if someone who could get it out to more than just Amazon.com will snap it up.

Either way the text will be free online, and eventually as an audiobook – sorry, podiobook (spit!). On my contract I waived the right to insist on reading it myself, because I couldn’t decide whether it would be more exciting to be on an audiobook in person, or to have someone good reading my thing. Instead I’m going to audition to read my own, and let them decide. If my voice really is as grave and dull as it sounds to me, hopefully they’ll tell me so and get someone else to do it. I’ve shot myself resoundingly in the foot, of course, by implying my narrator is North American.

What I didn’t know until that announcement post was that all three editors of the collection are including a story of their own. Since Ryan North basically invented a new grammatical logic for the English language in Dinosaur Comics, this is rather exciting. Inevitably his story has the best title of the lot – MURDER AND SUICIDE, RESPECTIVELY – and an immediately enticing concept: two scientists realize that the Machine may allow them to send messages backwards through time.

These three are in addition to the 29 chosen submissions, from 681 entries, so the final book with be 32 stories of something like 4,000 words each. Mine is one of the longer ones, at 6,600, and earned me the king’s ransom of $45, so I’ll be quitting my day job shortly and vacationing on the moon.

That fee is only for the First English Anthology rights, so I can still keep it online here, and will do so until the book itself is out and the whole text of that is online – when I’ll probably link to that instead. I’m imagining it’ll be something like a year before that actually happens, which sucks because I badly want to read almost all of these.

System Failure

Preface: I need to get this one out of my Drafts folder before I resume the positivity. I wrote it a while ago, at my parents’ place, in such a fury that I barely remember typing a word of it. To break up its somewhat critical tone, I have inserted some of my Eve Online screenshots. Here goes:

My Gran knows a lot about wood-working. She likes wood, she likes working with wood, and she likes things made of wood. My friend Steve knows a lot about bikes. He likes riding bikes, he likes tinkering with them, and he even seems to like trying to explain to an idiot like me which one I should buy.

I know a lot about computers. I hate computers.

I’m part of one of the first generations to grow up with them – we’ve had at least one in the house as far back as I have memories, and I’ve had my own from secondary school onwards. So I’ve sort of hacked away at the most maddening idiocies that would normally get in the way of the things I use them for, but I still don’t think a forty-eight hour period has gone by without one of them making me swear, and I’m extremely difficult to anger.

The problem is that they don’t occur naturally, they have to be built. And they have to be built by people who are very intelligent in precisely the way that typically only people who are hopeless at understanding people are. Then they have to be used by people.

It’s incredible that there’s even such a topic as ‘usability’, laughable that it’s a relatively new one, and embarrassing that we haven’t actually done anything in it yet. Things like iPods are still seen as examples of it, which makes this era a lot like the one when fire was considered technology.

Linked computers are the single most important non-medical advancement mankind has made since the wheel, which I’m increasingly of the opinion was a mistake (except perhaps for bikes, which have broadly seen a net benefit), and we haven’t got round to figuring out how to make them usable yet? Usable. As in, so peope can use them. What have we been doing?

\i tend to notice what’s most heinousy wrong with computers when \i have to use someone ese’s to show them how to do something. \the pacement, for exampe, of the forwards sash key on a \toshiba \sateite \pro\; precisey where the shift key is on every other computer in the word. \or the fact that the ” key barey works on this particuar machine.

I was trying to make BBC website’s radio work on my mum’s, this, laptop. I fixed the first problem in three seconds – the volume was set to zero – but it’s four hours later now and I still haven’t actually managed the broader task.

And it’s worth saying that no-one ever tells you those concentric ellipses next to the clock represent a speaker rather than the Death Star (which they much more closely resemble) and that they summon no, not the speaker volume (that would almost make sense (spit!)) but the Windows volume, which is a range of meta-volume sliders that govern and multiply with all other volume settings, of which there can be up to five nested levels at any given time, sometimes in geometric and other times exponential proportion, and that they produce two different interfaces for these meta-volume sliders depending on whether they were single- or double-clicked, meaning that attempting to activate the double (which appears in a conventional window format) frequently creates an instance of the mini-interface triggered by the single (which manifests itself in a narrow, windowless overlay that steals focus but is not recognised by the operating system or Start Bar as an application, and presents the user with no obvious way of dismissing it, and which frequently encounters an unhandled exception that means it can’t be dismissed), sometimes followed by a second instance, sometimes moving to follow the cursor as it clicks again, sometimes actually blocking the second click, and jumping the volume to zero in doing so – quite often (and in this case) the very misconfiguration you are attempting to reverse.

When I said that was worth saying, of course, I had imagined I would be able to do so in fewer than a thousand words and four-hundred overlapping nested clauses.

Clicking the Listen Now link from the homepage of a BBC programme launches a new window which immediately notes that you do not have the RealPlayer plugin installed, which I took to be a compliment – the Windows equivalent of saying “Oh, you’ve lost weight!” or “So you finally realised puffer jackets weren’t even cool seventeen years ago?”

Mostly, I admit, out of disbelief. RealPlayer went out of fashion on websites to the extent that fascism did in Germany, some time before puffer jackets outlived their fad. Five years before their invention.

But this was not my own computer, and I thought there would be no harm in installing a small plugin which I happen to hate. I committed the very fallacy that is responsible for the ridiculous state of all computer software today – I thought something would be ‘good enough for normal people’.

If I were King God of Earthtopia, supporting RealPlayer would be a criminal offense. The punishment for requiring it would be watching your children die. So discovering that my technical savvy wasn’t actually up to the task of installing it, I couldn’t entirely suppress a noise that cause my mum to immediately ask what was wrong.

“There’s a picture of the download link.”

A picture. The BBC whisk you to their Help page, which is really a FAQ, rather than pointing you to the plugin, and then when you finally find the question that relates to the problem they already know you’re having, it has no link to the piece of software you need. Instead, it offers you an installation guide, the first step of which is to install the software. To illustrate how you do this, they show you a picture of the download button that you will find four pages later, just after step – and please excuse the large font you have by now already seen coming – FOURTEEN.

The picture is not a link. It is a picture of a link. It is a picture of a link you must click to complete step one, but which you cannot click until you have skipped steps 1-13, at which point it takes you away from the guide entirely. Nevermind why, how, in all conscience, there can be a FOURTEEN step process to install what PC World Magazine rated number two in their worst 25 technology products in the history of human civilization, in order to listen to the fucking RADIO; something people have been doing since before the FIRST WORLD WAR.

No! Actually, do mind that. Mind exactly that. Mind it furiously, because putting up with this shit is exactly the reason we have to put up with this shit.

Here’s the reason this matters: if you’re responsible for a feature of a site which, over your site’s lifetime, causes five million visitors five minutes of frustration, you are responsible for a lifetime of pain. That’s not a figure of speech, I actually worked it out – that’s seventy years of torment. If I were in charge of a team making a website, I’d have the designers watch the user tests with their hands splayed out on a table, and every time someone so much as frowned, I’d smash one of their fingers with a claw hammer six times. There’s no maths behind that figure, that one just feels right.

I didn’t read it, I skipped to the download link for the thing I didn’t want, it downloaded, I ran it over Internet Explorer 7’s apoplectic objection to me running a file I deliberately downloaded (to be fair, on this occasion it had a point), and it ran the RealPlayer downloader. This is an application consisting of a single blank horizontal progress bar that never progresses, a pause button that doesn’t do anything, and a mysterious ‘down’ button that depresses slightly when clicked. By flatly and categorically not working even a little bit, without explanation, it proves itself far superior to the program it’s trying to download. A Real program that doesn’t do anything is a relief on the scale of a cancer that doesn’t do anything – the word is not ‘malfunctioning’, it’s ‘benign’.

It’s not good enough for ordinary people, because ordinary people is everyone. Developers assume, when so few people seem able to intuitively understand their products, that people are stupid. In response, they hide the advanced features in future versions, insert big, colourful images, constant pop-up windows that try to explain what’s happening, and extensive help files. And of course, even fewer people understand this newer version, because hiding complexity adds a whole new layer of complexity.

Since DOS, computers have been getting harder to use. If you use XP, the easiest way to work with it is to also install Google Desktop, and use its quicksearch function to just type in the name of the thing you want to open or run, and press enter. Even if you’re an ordinary person. My gran can type ‘calculator’ more quickly than she could locate and click on it in the Start Menu. I can type Firefox faster than I can click on its quicklaunch icon.

Writing the name of the thing you want is dramatically quicker, more logical and easier to do than stroking the narrow slats of a clickless location-sensitive nested lateral hierarchy of hundreds of wildly diverse items that are categorised not by function, not by type, not even by name, but alphabetically by the name of the company that published them – not even the one that made them.

A search box is the low-water mark against which all interfaces should be judged, because it’s a complete lack of interface. And yet so far, we’ve yet to come up with anything more efficient or self-explanatory. It’s actually quicker for me to find something on the internet by typing it into the Firefox address bar (which Googles it) than it is to get back to it again via my bookmarks.

Windows Vista makes an almost sane gesture by adding a search box, but again it’s a step back: slower, harder to get to, harder to select a result from and limited to certain folders. Right now the only people even breaking even on an interface front are Google, who don’t even make operating systems, just by adding in the crudest and most basic possible interface concept into the OS they know we all have to put up with. It’s only by comparison to the excruciating insanity of modern interface design that it seems like an actual achievement, and it’s virtually the only thing we’ve got that just about qualifies as usable. Everything else is a fucking disgrace.

This Month In Terrible, Part 1: Anti-DRM T-Shirts

To fight the good fight against the evil legions of Digital Rights Management that are currently making it impossible for anyone on the planet to enjoy music, people who like to steal things have banded together to come up with a T-shirt design that will shame all multinationals into simply cancelling their copy protection plans and releasing all of their music for free, ceasing to exist in the process. Some highlights:

Ohh, now I get it!

 

Quite a reasonable point.

 

I- no hang on, what?

 

Ahh. Right. Well, I think this is clear enough. DRM must be stopped to save the king of puppet-berets from pointing to the trolley of film reels.

The only thing I’m still not sure of is what would actually happen if you did cut the string in this diagram.

 

Whatever they’re paying the guy who came up with this, it’s not enough.

 

The gentleman’s protest.

 

When those suits see this, it’s gonna blow their minds. “That’s- that’s what we were! All along!”

 

I don’t get this one. Is the dove music, and he’s been locked up but can still fly somehow, or has the dove stolen the padlock of DRM from the olive tree of music and is now taking it to the trash out back?

 

Intellectual property regulation? Sir, I refer you to my cock.

 

As a satirical acrostic backronym, this only really fails by one letter.

 

This may actually be the best diagram ever drawn. I hadn’t realised before how many games and documents from space were simply bouncing off our atmosphere because of the Anti-DRM padlock. We should get rid of that thing. I don’t know why the Australians even built it.

 

Yeah! Let DRM out of the cage that is music! Music is killing DRM!

 

I hadn’t really thought about it before, but preventing me from copying music is a little like raping me.

 

I think we can all agree with whatever the hell this means.

 

See, because it’s like, DRM is the three-legged green-eyed Giraffe of Dismay, and the RIAA is the elderly man riding it, and that makes people with fans dance like John Travolta.

 

Yes. This is just like that.

 

And we all know how rubbish disabled people are.

 

Isn’t that just kind of annoying?