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.