Apathy Sketchpad

You may remember I was fairly unimpressed with the claim that

At exactly 06 mins and 07 seconds after 5 o’clock on Aug 9th 2010, it will be 05:06:07 08/09/10. This won’t happen again until the year 3010.

Well. I’ve just been told

AN INTERESTING FACT ABOUT AUGUST 2010. This August has 5 Sundays, 5 Mondays, 5 Tuesdays, all in one month. It happens once in 823 years.

And while the first claim was mostly unimpressive and only slightly false, this one is just false. Massive, shovel-loads of false. Honestly, this may be the falsest (earnest) statement I’ve read all year.

August contained five Sundays, five Mondays and five Tuesdays in 1999. It will happen again in 2021. Okay, so that’s still quite a while, but I can’t imagine how anyone arrived at the figure of 823 years. August is 31 days long. It necessarily has five of three days of the week in it. Why on Earth would it be these three so rarely? How can people not see how implausible that is? Quite aside from anything else, the calendar loops every 400 years. Nothing could possibly happen every 823 years any more than Wednesday could happen every nine days.

It fascinates me how these stories come around. It’s everywhere. This may be my favourite example, for this paragraph:

In 1187, or 823 years ago, the Gregorian calendar hadn’t existed yet (it was introduced in 1582) so there was no ado about this strange happenstance.

And it’s not just this year. August 2009 (which started on a Saturday) was just as special. It’s beginning to look like 816/823 years just don’t have an August. And look, here’s a version with the ridiculous 05:06:07 08/09/10 ‘fact’ glued onto the bottom. This version (quite aside from trying to credit God with the whole thing)

August 2009 is a unique month which has 5 Sundays and 5 Saturdays.  Experts says to see another month with 5 Sundays and 5 Saturdays, we need to live another 823 years. We are blessed to go through and experience this unique month.  Now we have to wait for generations to see another month with 5 Sundays and 5 Saturdays. Let us thank God for allowing us to see this unique month.

even ignores the Mondays, so this amazing, once-in-823-years freak of nature actually rolls round after only five years. In fact it doesn’t even specify that the month must be August, by which standard it happened again the following January. I especially like the use of the word “experts”, in this case to mean “people who own calendar software”, as if somehow predicting what dates will occur in the future is some kind of complex science that us mere mortals can’t be expected to follow. It’s nice to see that in many of the discussion threads someone eventually does bother to sit in front of Google Calendar and click through checking.

I keep being told people aren’t interested in maths. Clearly they are. This stuff is pure mathematics, and it’s capturing people’s imaginations.

Just a shame it’s total bullshit.

The only difference between something that can go wrong and something that cannot possibly go wrong is that when something that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it is generally impossible to get at or repair.

—Douglas Adams

The above quote is interesting because Douglas Adams was a great evangelist of Apple products, which are the archetypal Thing That Cannot Possibly Go Wrong. They famously “just work”. You open the box, plug the thing in, and away you go, doing things.

So I’m told. I have in my life owned exactly one Apple product, an iPhone 3G, and my experience is that actually you take it out of the box, plug it into your PC, charge it for a few hours, install iTunes, set up an account, sync the phone to the account, and after a bit, away you go, doing things. But yes, thereafter it was a dream to use. Save for a handful of niggles, the UI was incredibly intuitive and user friendly and the screen is gorgeous, and so forth. You don’t get to customise it all that much, but you don’t want to — beyond choosing whether you want to use a 12- or 24-hour clock, customisation is an exercise in blaming the user for poor design anyway. Users want to change things to how they incorrectly believe they’d like them, but if you let them then they will and then they’ll like it less than they do with the set-up designed for them by an expert in how to set things up so people like them. That’s why games with level designers built in aren’t as good as games with loads of good levels built in.

That is, until the iPhone 4 turned up like Hudzen 10 and started pummelling it into obsolescence. iOS4 added spellcheck, app folders and — because I jailbroke it — home screen backgrounds and multitasking. Except… the spellcheck is slow, and the app folders all look virtually identical so it’s no longer clear at a glance where I should jab, and the multitasking only works with apps that specifically update to allow it, which isn’t many or the ones I want it to work with…

And basically, iOS4 doesn’t work. I don’t mean that iOS4 doesn’t live up to what I hoped; I mean it doesn’t work. It actively works less well than iOS3.1.3, and in fact less well than my old £50 handset which couldn’t run Reeder either but at least didn’t charge me £1.79 to find out. You might argue that Reeder’s constant crashes are the fault of developer Silvio Rizzi, but Apple approved it. If they’re going to run the absurdly restrictive app policies they do, they have to accept responsibility for ensuring all the apps work on all the devices they sell them on. (This isn’t related to hacked multitasking support; it even happens when I’ve run nothing else since booting the phone.) Apple have gone to great lengths to ensure the iPhone Cannot Possibly Go Wrong and that means it’s their fault when it inevitably does.

So I suppose I can downgrade to iOS3. I don’t know how to do that, but I’m sure I can find out and do it because I’m a colossal nerd. It’s going to be a pain, though, because Apple are so confident in their new OS that there’s no button in iTunes to downgrade, and indeed the iPhone 3GS and 4 have a digital signing system in place specifically to prevent users from downgrading the OS.

Apple don’t want you downgrading the OS because old versions of iOS have security holes that new ones don’t. These holes allow hackers (by which I mean owners of the phone) to add apps and features Apple haven’t approved. For example, I have a torch app on my iPhone which turns the screen white and sets the backlight to maximum. Apple don’t allow developers to mess with the backlight in this way, so that app can’t be released in the AppStore. Meanwhile the hacked multitasking feature in iOS3 worked with all apps and, if it ran out of memory, crashed background apps rather than the one you were using at the time.

But I think I’m going to have to go through the hassle of downgrading the undowngradable, because a few days ago the telephone app crashed. The fucking telephone! My phone, the most sophisticated mobile phone it was possible to buy just two years ago, suddenly didn’t have enough memory to make a fucking telephone call! Eventually I managed to get it to call through the phonebook app, but apparently the “end call” button is part of the Actually Being A Phone app, so unless I wanted to leave a voicemail of me jabbing at the status bar and yelling “hellbastards” until my credit or battery gave out I had to reboot the phone just to make it hang up. This is not what I expect from a product that Just Works. This is not even what I expect from a product that only just works.

A man more cynical than I might suggest that Apple are attempting to make me upgrade to an iPhone 4 by remotely breaking my 3G. I don’t think that’s the case; I think they’ve just set themselves the clearly impossible task of trying to run the same apps on the same OS on maybe seven different devices with three different screen resolutions, and predictably failed to do it. Not that it makes any difference, because in either case the arrival of a new, more powerful phone was inevitably going to break mine.

Anyway, I’m not going to get an iPhone 4, at least not any time soon. I don’t phone much, so it’s not worth me getting a contract. I buy (or win) myself a nice handset every few years, so as you can imagine one of my criteria is “probably won’t be broken next May by some git in Cupertino who wants to sell me the new model”.

I just read this post on Bad Linguistics about the Queen’s English Society. And I’d like to like them because I can be a stickler for language. I love that their chairman is a woman and they call her the chairman and not the chairperson because it turns out artificial language patches are just patronising. But I am not impressed with the Queen’s English Society, and mostly that’s because of their total failure to live up to their own standards in anything at all. Their website is an affront not only to web design, typographical and technical standards, and any sense of perspective or priorities, but also to the very subject they strive to promote.

I mean, these are people who use two spaces after a full stop, which warrants a place in the first circle of Hell on its own, but since HTML doesn’t render consecutive whitespace they’ve tricked it by using a space followed by a non-breaking space. So not only are there big ugly gaps after sentences, but the indentation is fucked up. The site itself is divided into “Cover Page”, “About”, “Academy”, “Books”, “Contact”, “Join”, “News”, “Page One” and “Site Map” in that order so apparently they’re more keen on alphabetisation than on logic, structure or counting.

As for their attempts at English, an example will help. Their news page shows a photo of the Stella Artois advert which says “less glass/less CO2 emissions”, and comments

Should it not read…..Less C02 emission, or better still, FEWER C02 EMISSIONS?

Leaving aside the dismal attempt at an ellipsis, and the almost random application of capitalisation, and generously assuming the author had just finished a Paul Auster book and forgotten what quotation marks are, there is no such thing as ‘a CO2 emission’. “Fewer CO2 emissions” isn’t “better” and in fact doesn’t make any sense. Not only that, but they’ve written the number zero instead of the letter ‘O’. If they’re going to insist I learn the subjunctive, I’m going to have to insist they learn basic science or have the decency to look it up. This is the equivalent of grammar sauntering up to me at a party and saying “what was that subject you used to go out with? Susan?” “Science.” “Whatever. Shall we dance?”

That’s a particularly offensive sentence, but grammatically it’s fairly representative. The site is littered with clumsy, run-on ambiguities like

Today, we have a membership of around one thousand, mostly United Kingdom residents, but interest is growing worldwide.

and Deepwater Horizon punctuation-explosions like

Mrs Williams, (a short profile is available here,) is also a QES English Academy Board member.

or

“mother-tongue”

or

We can raise issues in our journal, QUEST or in our blog pages:- listen to the radio, watch television and read the papers and tell them when they have got it wrong:- form pressure groups (branches of the Society), in the regions and make ourselves known to the Education Authorities, libraries, local newspapers and broadcasters.

Colon dash! What the hell is colon dash? And that’s not even a dash — that’s a hyphen!

These are people who have appointed themselves guardians of the English language, and not only do they not understand its intricacies, they don’t understand the basics. I actually half expect them to spell ‘lose’ with two Os somewhere.

Their slogan, pasted in ugly italic print across every page on the site, is “Good English Matters in Education, in Business, in Life and in the Future”. Surely that should be “…and will matter in the Future”? I mean, I don’t care. I think it’s fine how it is. It’s clear what it means and scans better this way. But that’s because for once I’m not the joyless pedant.

I have been writing to companies again.

Hi,

I just found the “Meebo Bar” on the website at https://fusefm.co.uk/podcasts and I thought you could give me more information about it. I guess my question is, what the hell is it for?

Possibly I’m outside the target audience. I think I might be a bit too web-savvy to really get the full benefit. Certainly I didn’t find the chat panel useful, because I have an IM client installed to handle that and I wouldn’t normally think to visit a small University radio station’s podcast download page if I want to check if my flatmate will be home for dinner. I suppose that’s just a quirk of how I happen to use the web, and other people might not have an IM client installed, and instead rely on every website they visit to support chat individually. I’m not sure how these people ended up with instant messaging accounts, but I expect they filled in the Windows Messenger sign-up page before their children uninstalled it so they would stop downloading viruses from robots posing as teenaged girls.

I guess the Twitter button is the same. Being a nerd, obviously I have a Twitter account (@Andrew_Taylor – follow me!), so I don’t need a button on every website I visit showing me its latest tweets and would ideally like a button that allowed me to follow them using actual Twitter, but I realise you’re going for a more ‘newbie’ market than that so your solution is probably best. Adding any kind of interaction to the Twitter panel would doubtless only confuse them. They would probably tweet their bank details or something. I imagine people who don’t really know what Twitter is probably click it and think “ah yes, I’ve heard about this on the news, it’s what all the kids are using. And now, so am I! Wow, it looks like a tiny version of the site I was already looking at, but more inane and with little gibberish weblinks all through it. Not really sure what it’s for but I do feel very modern”. I imagine they enjoy that.

The YouTube integration’s the same, isn’t it? You don’t need a button to subscribe to, or even view, their YouTube channel; just show the videos and let them watch a bit of telly in a tiny box at the bottom of a website. Us major web-nerds will be able to find it through the player-integrated menu or a normal link or Google or maybe we can just regexp the whole internet or something.

Presumaby you’ve taken the same attitude with the RSS button. Its purpose, clearly, is to flash up a message saying “Sorry, RSS is not supported in your browser” so that they can feel like they’re engaging with Web 2.0 without having to learn anything. They no longer have to say “I don’t understand” when their colleagues or children mention RSS! Now they can just say “yeah, but my browser doesn’t support it” and when asked what browser they use I imagine they say “Google” or “Dell” or something. Everyone will laugh at them behind their backs, of course, but they know better than to laugh in front of people that ignorant because then they’d have to explain what a browser is and that would be like explaining what a planet is to a crab. The Meebo Bar has granted them an illusion that they understand the modern internet.

Have I got this basically right?

One thing I did like about the Meebo Bar is how you’ve implemented a way to view tweets and RSS updates from a website without having to leave that website. Normally if I want to view all my Twitter updates I have to go to Twitter and read them all there, whereas with Meebo I can simply view every website and blog individually and click the buttons on the Meebo Bar, except for the websites that haven’t got a Meebo Bar which is all of them.

In a similar vein, I use a bookmarklet to share webpages with my friends. Sometimes I use a browser extension or copy-paste the URL, but mostly I use a bookmarklet. Meebo Bar allows me to do it without my bookmarklet, and instead to search each webpage I want to share for an individual button to share that page in whatever services it happens to support. This is clearly far more convenient, and I’m thinking of removing my bookmarklet, but before I do that would it be possible for you to add support for webpages without Meebo Bar (which as I say is all of them) by either having a page on your website listing every page on the internet with a share button for each one, or else some kind of bookmarklet?

Thanks,

Andrew

I hope they appreciate my comments.

Hi there. Thanks for your interest. Some quick answers:

• The idea of placing the bar on a site is so a site visitor can access these features without leaving the site. If there was something on a site you liked, you (and more to the point anyone else, regardless of whether they were using their own computer or had a chat app) could chat to a friend about it without firing up another application.
• The RSS button does not work in Chrome because Chrome does not support RSS. It should work fine in IE or Firefox.
• The Twitter/Facebook Friend/RSS/Youtube button allows the site’s publisher to let site viewers access the site’s Youtube/Facebook Friend/RSS/Twitter feed without leaving the site. The idea is that people who are looking at a site might be interested in seeing more information about the site (for example seeing if the content on the YouTube/Twitter feed is worth subscribing to for them).

We appreciate your interest and your comments!

Chris

Oh, good.

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your prompt reply.

The idea of placing the bar on a site is so a site visitor can access these features without leaving the site. If there was something on a site you liked, you (and more to the point anyone else, regardless of whether they were using their own computer or had a chat app) could chat to a friend about it without firing up another application.

Ah! Sorry, I misinterpreted “leaving a site” as “closing the tab”, but thanks to the magic of multi-tasking operating systems I can write a short novel without in that sense leaving a website. Obviously what you meant is that one can share a webpage without deflecting one’s attention or mouse pointer from the webpage for even a nanosecond. Now that you mention it, it does enrage me so when I find a webpage I want to share and have to move my eyes and mouse pointer to my Google Reader bookmarklet or Shareaholic extension button, which can be anywhere up to six pixels away from the webpage. Aside from the sheer Herculean effort of moving my relatively light mouse the extra millimetre required to achieve this, there’s a constant irrational panic that the webpage may be gone when I allow myself to resume my otherwise unremitting stare. I shouldn’t have to put up with this in the twenty-first century.

With the Meebo Bar I can share any webpage I want without any of this danger, provided that I only ever want to share the FuseFM podcast download page.

The RSS button does not work in Chrome because Chrome does not support RSS. It should work fine in IE or Firefox.

Okay, I think I understand this. I’d assumed Chrome didn’t support RSS because it’s a web browser, and a web browser no more needs to support RSS any than it needs to support iCal or zip files or coffee filters but obviously we expect more than that from modern browsers. Meebo’s servers shouldn’t have to read the RSS file, extract the post data and compile it into browser-readable HTML when it can simply sit back and wait for Google to write this code and bundle it into everyone’s browser, any more than you should have to write an entire website when you could just put <website intent="sell the meebo bar" awesome="true">Unfortunately, your browser does not support the 'website' tag yet.</website> and wait for Google to learn how to parse it.

Some would say it’s not Google’s problem, but obviously if Google expected webservers to parse RSS feeds into HTML previews with convenient subscription buttons for popular feed readers they’d have bought FeedBurner or something. Although FeedBurner’s not a good solution because you can’t use it without glancing momentarily away from the webpage whose RSS feed you’re viewing. Some people might suggest that by the time you’re looking at the RSS feed you no longer have any need for the original webpage to be on your screen, but those people will change their tune when they see the Meebo Browser which I assume is the next step in your business model and which I assume will run within the existing Meebo Bar and allow users to view entirely different webpages without “leaving” the FuseFM podcast download page. And the best part is that it will be easy to build because Chrome already supports webpages.

The Twitter/Facebook Friend/RSS/Youtube button allows the site’s publisher to let site viewers access the site’s Youtube/Facebook Friend/RSS/Twitter feed without leaving the site. The idea is that people who are looking at a site might be interested in seeing more information about the site (for example seeing if the content on the YouTube/Twitter feed is worth subscribing to for them)

This is a good feature, to be fair. On my website, presently devoid of a Meebo Bar, Snap Shots, or any other obnoxious JavaScript pop-up books, my Twitter integration is a bit of a kludge: I have a hyperlink to my Twitter page in the navigation bar. Users interested in my Twitter page are expected to click the link and see my tweets in the annoyingly familiar environment of Twitter.com, and if they want to follow me they will have to go through the confusion and hassle of clicking the large “follow” button underneath my name.

When I have installed the Meebo Bar, on the other hand, they will be able to read these tweets in a smaller font in a pop-up layer at the bottom of my website, and if they want to follow me all they’ll have to do is jot down my username, leave my website, navigate manually to Twitter.com/Andrew_Taylor, and click the large “follow” button underneath my name. And they can do all this without leaving my website except for the part where they have to leave my website!

Andrew

Apparently they have stopped appreciating my comments.

On March 17th, my local MP, Labour’s Gerald Kaufman, wrote me a letter regarding an email about the Digital Economy Bill which I sent using 38 Degrees’ website. His letter said:

Thank you for your letter dated 16 March. I agree with you that laws of such sensitivity ought not to be rushed through Parliament. I have taken up these issues with the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and assure you that I shall remain alert on this issue.

On April 7th, the Digital Economy Bill was voted into law and if Gerald Kaufman MP bothered to turn up, he didn’t vote.

That is not “remaining alert” and on May 6th I will not be voting for Gerald Kaufman.

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In news that doesn’t mean anything, Mattel are changing the rules of Scrabble so that proper nouns such as brand names will be allowed. I’m not sure of the specifics, although “Mattel said there would be no hard and fast rule over whether a proper noun was correct or not”. It sounds to me like basically any combination of letters you happen to draw is a legitimate move.

But more to the point, nobody plays the official rules of boardgames. You buy them, read the rules, play them a few times, and alter them to suit your play styles. Then you visit a friend and discover that not only do they play different rules to you, but have a wildly different theory as to what the official rules are. We use the spinner to choose categories in Articulate. A friend puts tax money on Free Parking in Monopoly. Nobody uses the Mission Cards in Risk. Mattel can write whatever they please on the bit of paper that comes with the game and gets accidentally binned on Boxing Day along with all the wrapping paper; it won’t make a jot of difference to what actually happens. The only people who play Scrabble strictly adhering to the official rules are tournament players, and they need “a hard and fast rule” about what words are allowed. This change will simply be ignored by everyone in the world. Mattel simply don’t have the power to change how people play Scrabble.

They don’t even have the authority. Scrabble is owned by Hasbro in America. Even if everyone does adopt the new rules, they won’t apply in the US or Canada. It’s difficult to split the userbase of a board game but Mattel are having a good try.

They say,

This is one of a number of twists and challenges included that we believe existing fans will enjoy and will also enable younger fans and families to get involved.

This is not a good plan. If you want to enable younger fans to get involved, make Scrabble available in a way that makes sense for younger fans. While EA (of all people) have the electronic rights in both territories, the US version of the Scrabble Facebook application can’t play against the International version, and the app itself is clunky and awkward and generally a bit pants. Before the game was launched, a far better Facebook Scrabble app, Scrabulous, was available. This was forced to shut down by Scrabble’s rights holders shortly before the official one was launched. So now the userbase of 2 million is split across Scrabble US (900k), Scrabble International (700k) and Lexulous, the reanimated corpse of Scrabulous (450k).

The same situation exists on the iPhone. The official Scrabble application, which costs £1.79, has an ugly, non-standard interface, and doesn’t support asynchronous or local multiplayer — you need two phones but you can’t play in different buildings. Essentially, it’s everything you expect from EA. And it’s not compatible with the Facebook version, even though it was advertised as compatible. Meanwhile, Words With Friends does allow you to play against anyone in the world, and has a nicer interface and (if my Twitter followers are anything to go by) a far larger userbase. And it’s free. But it’s not allowed to use the official Scrabble board layout, presumably because EA have exclusivity. There’s also a Lexulous application which actually does offer Facebook compatibility, again splitting the userbase.

So here’s my advice to Mattel:

Young people are involved in Scrabble. They just aren’t playing your version of the game, because your version is only available in “boxed” and “crippled” formats. Ditch EA, and try to license the game to the fans who have already made far superior electronic versions of the game for a share of their profits. If you want to engage younger people, employ one. The boat has probably sailed on Facebook and iPhone, but get to future platforms before young people write their own brand crossword game. Write a third tweet. This does not count as a Twitter presence either.

If you want young people to play your game, improve and unite the electronic versions until they are a genuinely better offer than any of the knock-offs. Don’t cripple and divide the boxed version in a desperate appeal to the illiterate.

The latest version of Skype believes that the ‘pin to taskbar’ feature in Windows 7 is so wonderful that it does not allow me to use the program any other way. This is achieved by dint of a rather ugly kludge: the main window cannot be closed; merely minimised. There are separate minimise and close buttons, but they are are exactly equivalent. Skype so resent the idea that I would want to pin Chrome to my taskbar but not their IM client that the only way to close their window is to run it in compatibility mode for Windows Vista, which didn’t have ‘pinning’ and so couldn’t offend Skype’s delicate sensibilities.

The problem here is that while Microsoft have spent the last 25 years building Windows, tweaking its usability, testing it, and building interface elements for application designers to use, application designers often reckon they know better. Even if that was true, the inconsistency would still be confusing, just like DVD menus are that bit harder to use for all being laid out differently. Nobody likes DVD menus. They’re spoiler-filled, self-congratulatory exercises in form over function designed by failed Flash-game developers. There isn’t one user in the world who wouldn’t rather have a straightforward list of options in a clear font on a plain background. Media playing software  is particularly bad for this, second only to laptop manufacturers, who invariably think they need to make usability a unique selling point, and so write their own software to control wifi and touchpads and so forth. It’s always fucking awful, with shitty, blurry buttons made in Paint Shop Pro 5, scrollbars that don’t quite work, oval windows that look like an MP3 player from 1998 when a native square one would suffice… But it’s more annoying when big, dedicated software companies do it. Here, for example, is McAfee Security Centre, which came preinstalled on my otherwise lovely new Dell laptop:

If it was me, this would look like part of the Windows Control Panel. But, no. Its labyrinthine navigation city can only be explored using a mouse, and if there’s an option to just turn the wretched thing off without uninstalling it completely then I can’t find it. I suspect there isn’t, since it describes turning itself on as ‘fixing’ a problem; an action which is ‘required’. To me, a seasoned geek, this is simply patronising. To a novice user, it’s intimidating. I would go so far as to say it is deliberately intimidating, bullying the user into paying the subscription using threatening language and graphics. I say this in part because of the email Ben got from them which reads

Internet thugs are motivated, ruthless…and silent. They use stealth to invade your computer system. It can happen so quickly, you won’t even realize it—at least not until after your credit score plunges.

But my issue here is not their Mafia-style marketing techniques, but the interface. Keyboard shortcuts allow the user to ‘click’ the left hand menu and the logo (which doesn’t do anything) but not any of the actual controls. I can only assume none of it responds to Windows’ accessibility options. Certainly none of the controls feel familiar. Look at the ‘minimise’ and ‘close’ buttons. Look at the title bar (or, more accurately, the bar). Three of the entries on the left hand menu are weblinks, the rest are menu items. You think they’re the three at the bottom that look different? You’re wrong. The software tells me I’m using parental controls to protect my children from online threats. I haven’t got any children (precisely because I’ve always been careful to use “parental controls”).

My employer kindly supplies the infinitely preferable Sophos package, so rather than take up McAfee’s kind offer of a year’s free protection, I’m going to remove their software and install a competitor’s, purely on the basis that their interface is nicer. I would have disabled Skype entirely had I not been shown how to circumvent its dismal interface choice. My favourite iPhone apps are Tweetie 2 and Instapaper Pro, largely because they feel like part of the phone. While I like that my phone can run Gmail or the tvguide.co.uk app, it feels like it has in-built Twitter and read-later functionality, and that gives me a better overall experience of using the phone as a single coherent device.

The point is that interface design is a hugely complex and fascinating subject about which most people know literally nothing. And as a general rule, the best thing you can do is to use the native interface elements everyone else uses because they’re tried and tested and even when they’re not ideal all your users already understand how to use them. But no. Everyone wants their application to look different and special and interesting, and what actually happens is that their application is difficult and confusing. More to the point, your application is not special. It is one of many I run on my computer and it should look and feel that way. If it doesn’t, then I can’t be bothered using it and will find an alternative.

I know it’s only February and I know there’s an election to look forward to, but if there’s a more completely absurd news story this year than the Gordon Brown bullying debacle then I’ll be very, very impressed.

The original story was pretty weird. The idea that the country was effectively run by a short-tempered, foul-mouthed Scot is, while not implausible, at least a bit derivative. It was pretty uninteresting when it was just allegations in a book, but then Christine Pratt of the National Bullying Helpline told ITN that they’d had several calls from Downing Street staff and rather than everyone saying “that’s shocking, thankyou for raising this important point,” which is presumably what she was expecting, everyone said “hang on, isn’t that a massive breach of confidentiality?” and then every single one of the charity’s patrons resigned. That two of those patrons were members of the Conservative party (one Ann Widdecombe, one a London councillor) and the website carries an endorsement from David Cameron doesn’t make the whole thing look any better. Pratt responded to this by promising to dig through thousands more confidential emails so she’d have “proof” (as if that was the problem). Now there are concerns that the whole charity was never anything more than a front for an anti-bullying consultancy firm. They’ve spent almost nothing and are behind filing their paperwork.

That alone would be plenty of stupid for one story, but then an Asian news channel helpfully animated the whole story in GTA-style. That, I would say, is the second layer of absurdity in the story.

The last story they animated is an enraged Gordon Brown hurling a tangerine into a laminator. This never happened. It was in fact a story invented by Robert Popper, author of The Timewaster Letters, which he phoned in to the ever-credulous LBC radio station, and was somehow uncritically reported by both The Sun and The Telegraph.

I can only presume that The Sun, in their zeal to make Brown look just as bad as possible, will literally publish any old fucking nonsense sent into them. If someone told them that Gordon Brown heated his house by burning stolen babies I’m confident it would be front page news the next day. The Telegraph just print whatever everyone else print because why check something if the competition can do it for you? Essentially the press in this country is nothing more than an institutionalised grapevine.

Of course, this rather took the heat off the National Bullying Helpline, so it was good to see them back in the news today, when one of the other ex-patrons accused Pratt of bullying her.

TV presenter Sarah Cawood…, a former patron of the National Bullying Helpline, says Christine Pratt left her in tears after accusing her of failing the charity. ”She was really pushy and I felt bullied.”

If the worst Labour’s critics have to throw at them is obviously made-up stories and allegations from corrupt charities then (a) maybe we might be spared a Conservative government after all, and (b) they haven’t been paying close enough attention.

I await with baited breath next week’s developments in this story. For my money, I predict that David Cameron will ask Gordon Brown about the tangerine story in PMQ, Christine Pratt will peel off a rubber mask and turn out to be David Cameron (or, more probably given his complexion, vice versa) and someone at The Sun will read this blog and run with the stolen-babies story. I’m available for quotes.

The Church of England have launched a rather silly new website called sayoneforme.com. The site mostly consists of a big friendly green box into which you type a prayer. Then you click the button underneath, which I swear is marked ‘Amen’. A cynic might (and did) suggest that for all the difference it would make this might simply delete the text and say God’s read it, but instead the prayer is emailed to a selection of bishops who will pass it on to God for you if you’re too lazy to pray manually or if perhaps you don’t know how.

There’s also a page of submitted prayers, so we can find out what Anglicans feel is worthy of God’s time but not theirs. (To be fair, God has more.) There’s also a rather worrying amount of personally identifiable information in these prayers, for example at least one full name alongside a description of the person’s problems, which seems pretty inappropriate to me.

I pray for Andrew – that he may find meaning and purpose in his life, and peace which passes all understanding.

The first thing that struck me as odd was that people pray in text-speak.

i love you jesus
keep me surrounded you
fill me wz ur holy spirit
let me know about you -ur ways -ur service
i need u
i love you jesus

It just seems rude to me. There’s even some all in capitals, as if that will help God hear it.

we pray for simon our vicar on his move. please set us the righr peauson to be our right vicar.

I do get annoyed when I mean to type “R” but instead type “AU”.

World peace is a common theme:

O God almighty I pray for all the countries with wars to settle.

Dear god,

please stop the wars from all around the world and let there be peace. please keep my family and my pets safe.

Dear God

Thank you for life and other people so i can make friends.And thank you for famlies if we didn’t have them i don’t know what will happen and please end war

Amen

Please stop all wars

dear god
please put a end to war
please make us give up somthing for lent
thankyou for making me

I think the biggest prayer was this one, although it is at least helpfully divided up into four sub-tasks for God’s convenience:

Our Lord in Heaven.
Please:
1- Give Peace for all the world.
2- Give health for all sick people.
3- Give work for all jobless people.
4- Let us love you, because you loved us first.

This is how democracy works in the Information Age. I don’t know if God is going to get away with not ending all wars now.

I thought this one especially sweet:

Dear God

Thank you for food. Thank you for animals. Thank you for birds that sing beautifully. I really appreciate all you have given us .

Amen

It reads like they just bumped into God in the office or whatever and it occurred to them they never really said thankyou properly. “Look, God, mate, I know I don’t tell you often but I thought you should know, we all really appreciate the way you created the universe like that. I mean, we use it all the time. Seriously, good work on that one.”

dear lord
sorry for leaving litter on your beautiful earth.

Games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto come in for a lot of stick, from simpletons who assume we’ll be violent in real life after playing them, and from moralistic fools who think we shouldn’t be playing them anyway because it’s ‘wrong’ to press a button that makes a machine draw a picture of how it imagines a man killing a prostitute would look.

But then I read that someone’s released the Bible on Xbox Live Arcade. It occurs to me that the events of the Old Testament would make for a violent, sex-crazed, prostitute-laden videogame that nobody could criticise. You could play as the Angel of Death, and storm down Egyptian streets slaying babies, or you could, well, drive around killing prostitutes. If the indiscriminate killing in Grand Theft Auto is too offensive, why not make a game based on Deuteronomy 2:33-34, where you run around a city killing everybody? A lot of people would be upset at this game, but I don’t see how they could complain because most of them are big fans of the book.

The New Testament game would be less fun, but easier because you’d get two lives.

Also the real-time-strategy element would probably be a bit unbalanced if all you have to do is march around the city a few times playing horns and the whole place falls down. What Biblical stories would make good criticism-proof videogames?