Solitude 

There is a museum in a quiet town, next to which there is a stretch of grass that the Crazy Pigeon Woman frequents. It’s not that she is necessarily crazy (no-one has asked), it’s not that she’s a pigeon (of this we are relatively sure), and the fact that she is a woman has little bearing.

The town has pigeons. Lots of them. Flocks, some might say. One particular flock knows where the sweet spot for bread collecting is: it’s on that spot of grass next to the museum. The Crazy Pigeon Woman arrives every now and then with a bag of bread that she throws to the pigeons. The birds, normally frightened of even the slightest human contact, are drawn to her. They cover her blue anorak like she is a statue, they know she is not a threat.

She has named many of them. A pedestrian walking past will no doubt here her call out to them by name, and one or more will respond. She feeds them, they go back to the flock. Who this women is and why she does this is unknown. That she cares is laudable, that she named them is worrying.

Pigeons, strangely loved in a quiet town.

Despite being a quiet town, there are 4 railway stations within its borders.

The first takes pride of place in the town centre, modernised inside and part of an ongoing regeneration by the local council. It leads to the big city in one direction and to all of the local coastal stops in the other. It is the last switching point between the big city and the diverging coastal areas, meaning trains are in ready supply.

The second was once part of a main line to the rural areas further away from the big city than the quiet town itself. It is now the terminating stop of the line, covering the southern area of the town; an area that, while not deprived, is devoid of anything worthwhile.

The third sits near a grave yard in the hilly area of the quiet town. It’s as dead as the commuters.

The last sits in a wasteland that used to be a sprawling and vibrant community. A decade or so earlier, the area had started falling into disrepute, with mild gang activity and crime not an uncommon sight. Housing redevelopment was supposed to fix the problem. The people moved out, the old tenement houses came down, and the area has lain in rubble ever since. A desolate area.

Train stations: a metaphor for a quiet town.

There is a lamp post in the West End of a quiet town. It holds a sign carrying directions to an even quieter town nearby, but that is irrelevant. What is relevant is March.

Every March, inexplicably, something happens to that lamp post, something rather strange. You see, for several years now at the same time of year, a rather nice piece of steak is tied around the lamp post (using no tape or string, just the meat itself). It hangs there, rotting after a few days, yet giving out no smell, until it wastes away so much it falls to the pavement.

No-one knows who does it or why. Meat can be strange in a quiet town.

A television breaks in a quiet town. Relatively speaking, this means nothing. It’s not a profound cosmic event. It won’t mean anything to most people. Bruce isn’t most people. Bruce is a touch mad. Not in a scary or clinical way though. He’s just eccentric at times, in a charming rather than “let’s cross the street away from him lest he tries to borrow our shoe laces” kind of way.

Having been in the television repair business in the same spot for decades, he knows a thing or two about televisions too. In fact, he knows pretty much everything there is to know. Got a problem? Phone him up. If he needs to come out to repair it (perhaps you’re too infirm to bring it to him), you’ll likely hear his never-faltering battlecry of “Never fear, Bruce is here” followed by an analysis of the TV based on the symptoms (without looking at) which is invariably correct.

Go to his shop, conveniently located just outside the quiet town’s central area, and you’re in for a treat. You’ll get explanations of how to quickly shunt the mask in your TV to fix discolouration, how you can fix your VCR problems with a hair dryer, or one of another dozen seemingly crazy solutions that always work and you won’t be charged to hear. It’s surprising that he has been open as long as he has with that kind of generosity.

Bruce, an eccentric TV repairman in a quiet town.

In a town near Glasgow, in the middle of a belt of towns and villages that stretch to the Ayrshire coastline, there lives a man called John. A man who is every bit a part of the towns heritage as the war memorials, the mills (and the well-known design that gave them fame in their day), and the abundance of churches. His life story is somewhat sketchy in places but the towns people who know him, and that amounts to most of the 74000 residents, know he has lived it his own way.

John is a survivor. He’s seen much of the town come and go, made it through a tragic disaster that killed more than 70 of his peers and, for much of his life, lived rough on the streets of this quiet town. Through bad weather and good, John has been seen in his favourite haunts and doorways preparing for the night ahead. Some say that he does not need to live his life this way, that his supposedly wealthy family could easily look after him. It’s the life he chose and that we must respect.

The townspeople know and love John. If, heaven forbid, anything were to happen to him, the funeral would be the best attended in the towns history. Understand, there are generations of families who have helped him whenever they can, going back many decades. If you ever see him, with his long coat and walking stick bumbling through the town centre, you may wish to do the same.

John, an iconic figure in a quiet town.

Carnivale: easily the best show I’ve seen in years. Season 1 screened in the UK last year on FX UK, and season 2 should be starting any time now. Just finished watching it and it’s stunningly good.

I’m a sucker for long, well-planned story arcs; the kind where stuff that happens in the background of episode 1 is resolved several years later, where the writer has the patience and skill to weave hundreds of tiny details into a masterwork. Dan Knauf has achieved this.

For those who haven’t seen it, it defies being turned into a blurb. The best I can do is to say that it centres around the depression-era dustbowl, and how two men (a priest and an escaped convinct) become the key players in a centuries old struggle. The other characters all have a story to tell from Lodz (the blind man who can see the future), to Samson (the dwarf who runs the show), to Management (the owner of the carnivale who controls the show from behind a curtain, never revealing himself or his plans for the protaganist). Expect to take in a lot of mythology on the way as well. Obligatory Day of the Dead and Templar mentions are present and corrrect.

The kicker? It’s been cancelled. What was a five year story arc, will stop now that two have been shown. Don’t let that put you off though, it does have enough finality to work as a decent ending, but it’s a little annoying that you can see the next few years falling into place (having already glimpsed the last scenes of the five years fairly early on).

Highly recommend watching both series and then looking at sites like Save Carnivale. Although they’ll likely fail, at least if they finish the story another way, you’ll know about it.

I was recently going to join the cult and buy an iPod, but then I saw the Archos AV4320 and knew it was what I wanted. So what’s it packing?

• A very good LCD screen (clear and crisp).
• Miniscule start-up time (good for what is essentially a stripped down computer).
• Video recording stuff (including a cradle to hook it up to the TV).
• Fairly intuitive UI.
• It’s small.
• A day’s battery. The battery has only cut out once on me, and that was after a full day’s use and then hours loading stuff onto it.
• Video and audio playback and recording (it has it’s own mic and a selection of inputs and outputs that can be used with the correct wires).
• The easiest firmware update I’ve ever seen.

All the good stuff you’d want in a pocket video and MP3 player. Downsides?

• No AC3 support, making watching some videos impossible.
• Default headphones are shite. Really bad. Thankfully, I have a nice pair of Sony Fontopia. If you get one, bin the headphones immediately.
• The built-in speaker is a touch quiet. This probably won’t matter.

All in all, I’m happy. The commute to work and back has become a much more pleasant time.

One of the many strong principles in interface design is that of consistency: the idea that the interface components use obvious language, behave as expected given the context and similar components elsewhere, and generally fit in with the users expectations. A million books, lectures and workshops have been devoted to this subject, so discovering more on this is left as an exercise for the reader. As important as consistency is, sometimes user interfaces are best sculpted through inconsistency.

Mobile phones represent a good counter-example to traditional thinking. Many of the important cues provided by the interface are not in the form of visuals, rather they are audio based. Since your phone likely spends most of its life in a pocket, ringtones and beeps are used to communicate information. If the phone rings, you know someone is calling. If it makes a certain series of beeps, a text message is waiting.

Let me tell you a little story though: a few weeks ago I was at a fairly relaxed but sizable gathering. As one would expect, everyone had a mobile. As one might not have guessed, there was an improbable number of Motorola phones present. This would have been fine if one of the batteries hadn’t gone flat; a low battery warning beep is standard across most Motorola phones. Every 5 minutes when this beep went, everyone checked their phone like their Pavlovian training had taught them. Amusing, but not particularly great design (especially since you can’t turn it off without switching the offending phone off, and that is outwith your control).

What can you do about this? I’m not sure. The first suggestion I have is to create a multiple cues for each major interaction. Say you have 10 ringtones, 10 alerts for messages, and so forth. You can them take the phones in-built ID’s (they have several that are unique for our purposes) and hash them to a set of these cues. Most of the time, chances are that users won’t get cues that are not for them.

Beyond that, I’m not sure. It’s an interesting area though.

A simple two way film fight this month.

First up is Steven Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds, another film that was good the first time but they decided to mess with anyway. Genius. In all honesty, it’s not a terrible film, when taken as a dumb visual spectacle. There are plot holes you could drive a tripod through (camcorders unaffected by EMP, plot important streets being the only ones unaffected, etc), and the story surrounding our heroe’s family is annoying and superflous, but it doesn’t matter all that much. It’s still a good watch.

The contender is Silver City: a film that opens with some very subtle humour and, unusually for American films, dry wit. It degenerates into a total farce featuring some of the worst acting and dialogue imaginable. Who, I ask you, who thought it was a neat idea to make a joke out of irregular verbs? You, my friend, are wrong. Worse than this is the fact the plot begins to move in so many directions that it gets nowhere and falls on its arse. The director should’ve cut, oh, minutes into the film. Abysmal.

Strangely, War of the Worlds wins.

First bit of news for the month is that new band Institute have finished work on their debut album. Featuring ex-Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale, it’s expected to be pretty decent and the first track, “Bullet-Proof Skin”, seems to indicate that (albeit only a portion of the track has emerged).

This month saw the finals of the Emergenza UK new band competition. Although I saw relatively little, what I did see was disappointing; a lot of derivative, talentless bands, doing nothing very interesting at all. The exception was Edinburgh’s Amplifico who burst their way through in terms of both style, energy and performance. Pretty songs and a catchy chorus do a good band make. Ones to watch.

Epitaph released the tenth annual Punk-O-Rama compilation CD at the start of the month. While it features far fewer exclusive tracks than in previous years, the quality remains high and the bonus DVD is, well, a bonus. It’s also in the mid-price sampler range, so should be fairly cheap.

Both Idlewild and The Mars Volta released new singles this month; “El Capitan” and “L’via L’viaquez” respectively. Neither is worth getting. While the album the Mars Volta track is taken from is excellent, “The Bible and The Breathalyzer”is a typical piece of Mars Volta editing room trash put out as a B-side. The guys have serious talent, but they don’t make much of an effort for singles.

That’s all I know about this month, haven’t been paying a great deal of attention to music.