Real users

The other day I was reading an interesting article from the depths of the internet about 'real users', the vast majority of computer users and how they are different from the rest of us.

It was from 2003, some website developer was talking about how on his ISP's home page there was a link to a 'search' page, which had a list of links to that era's top search engines, like Yahoo, and MetaCrawler and so on, sites that have all but disappeared now. The article went on to say that when it was time to revamp the site, the developer got rid of the search page and just replaced it with a google search windowy thing or something, if people really wanted to use Yahoo, or Metacrawler they'd know the URL by now and could just type that into the address bar.

When they changed the website, there was a avalanche of complaints from customers who liked the old 'search page', and who couldn't find Yahoo anymore, it was like it had ceased to exist. The developer couldn't quite understand it, but it seemed the vast majority of people who used their ISP, had set the ISP homepage as their homepage and were otherwise completely lost if they couldn't just click through to search.

They are the real users of computers, people who don't quite understand the way it works or even think they need to understand they way it works.

In the comments people added their own stories of woe, stories of encounters with 'real users' who used computers every day, but didn't quite 'get' it.

Like people who don't use the address bar in their browser, they only ever get to things through having google as their homepage, and just entering everything there. The very existence of a URL is a mystery to them. This still happens, in 2008 the technology blogReadWriteWeb was lamenting how the vast majority or respondents in some market research don't use the address bar.

Even in February 2010 ReadWriteWeb did an article that had the words Facebook and Login in the title, magic google juice flowed and it became the top result when you search google for 'Facebook login'. People arrived at as site that wasn't Facebook and complained they couldn't login, three thousand or so people leaving comments along the lines of

Ok If I have to I will comment,I love facebook so right now just want to log in if thats ok with you..lol Keep up the good work...

They were completely lost.

I've grown up with computers and the internet, I have a little bit of a blind spot for how other people can not have the same understanding. The other day I was asked "What's the difference between Chrome and the internet?" Sure there are gentle answers to such questions, but all I could do was pat their hand and say "Don't you worry your pretty little head."

'Real users' get scared on Microsoft Word when you put on to make nonprinting characters visible. They're having problems with the layout, so you click the icon to see what's going on, and suddenly they protest, "No, I don't want that!", so you patiently click them off, and mystically explain that there's a few tabs there and a section break where it shouldn't be. The 'real user' looks at you in utter disbelief, wondering how you can possibly know such things.

There's something in that "No, I don't want that!" cry, it reminds me of the sort of thing my three year old niece would say.

'Real users' get confused when you move the icons around on their desktop, or if an icon gets obscured by some other window in front of it. If they can't see it, it has ceased to exist. Its like playing peekaboo with a six month old nephew "Where's teddy gone?", "There he is... behind the cushion that I just put in front of him."

Hmm, a six month old can figure this out, why can't 'real users'? What's wrong with them?

I kind of understand, in the early eighties, about eight hours after we first acquired an Amstrad CPC 464, I remember my brother playing 3D Monster Chase, I watched him for hours, my brain/eyes couldn't understand what was going on on screen, its seemed like some kind of coloured bowtie matching puzzle game, rather than the low-tech Doom clone game that it was. It was a few days before I could comprehend the image as a 3D scene.

'Real users' haven't had that epiphany yet, of realising that Windows are representations layers of panes that can be moved about. 'Real users' don't get that nonprinting characters are helpful and don't print.

The thing is, 'real users' can be spectacularly successful in their endeavors. Just pressing enter lots of times to get to a new page in Word doesn't seem to affect the success of their careers. Sure it may mess up the rest of the document if you need to change something on the first page, but that can be fixed easily.

If people knew about manual page breaks then documents wouldn't need to be 'fixed easily'.

The success of Windows and Vista comes down to making computers dead easy to use, so real users can get churning out poorly laid out documents quicker, without having to learn the ropes. Google's success was in getting to porn just by typing the one word then clicking, without having to remember any of that "http://www." business.

As someone who isn't a 'real user', a geek possibly, it dismay's me that rather than making 'real users' understand things and expand their mind's instead life just gets easier for them.

But no no, the vast majority of people are real-users.

In most offices, when you stand up and look around, most people you see are real users. They're working hard, getting stuff done, but they don't know what they're doing really.

Windscreenhenge

Went away to the countryside this weekend, out towards Salisbury to track down ancient monuments.

Sadly, I missed the turn off to our hotel and a few moments later, in very slow moving traffic, the back windscreen of my Smart Car shattered. Apparently it happens quite often in older model Smarts where the demister heating element has such a shape that stresses build up and then cause a catastrophic failure.

As Monty Python taught us with Mrs. Niggerbater, well, things explode every day?

Although, for me, it kind of put a dampener on the whole weekend. The weather was pretty shite too.

The insurance mob were unable to do anything speedily, what with Smart car back windscreens not quite being an 'off the shelf' part, and it being a goddamn bank holiday weekend so no one really wanted to scour the nation's car parts depots looking for the blasted thing anyway. So, instead we soldiered on to Stonehenge and after discovering that the entrance fee was £6.90, we went and had a look at Woodhenge instead.

Torrential rain soon followed, I patched up my back windscreen hole with Lidl cardboard and we retired to the hotel for Eurovision.

The next morning, under beautiful sunshine, I drove back to London with my tail between my legs.

Paying for costs

Back to my theme of questioning why the government wants to extract as much money as possible from the population. Via Mark Wadsworth I stumbled on this blogpost where this bit jumped out.

Over 30 years, alcohol consumption has increased by just 19%. But the cost of treating alcohol-related conditions has increased by 100% in just 5 years. It sounds to me rather as if the problem is not increasing levels of drinking, but astonishingly rapid increases in the cost of related healthcare.

The report also mentions "the focus of the 2004 national alcohol reduction strategy". So that strategy has covered the last five years - the period over which the NHS Confederation is saying the cost has doubled.

So clearly the national alcohol reduction strategy has failed miserably. Three possibilities present themselves:-

• the strategy requires more funding to be effective
• the strategy requires less funding because its a bottomless pit, but nice to have ongoing
• cancel the whole damn exercise

One stat that's missing from the blogpost is whether alcohol deaths have increased, cos what I'm thinking is we can compare alcohol deaths to road traffic deaths, cos like road deaths are at their lowest level for almost a hundred years, whatever the powers that be are doing is working, whatever draconian laws, speedlimits, punishments and technological advances have been applied have reduced road deaths, whatever money has been poured into the issue has been effectively spent, but still the various lobbying groups are calling for more money and tighter rules.

Let me briefly summon the National Statistics Office website for alcohol-related deaths:-

Figures on alcohol-related deaths in 2007 indicate a levelling-off of the trend, following rapid increases since the early 1990s. There were 8,724 alcohol-related deaths in 2007, lower than 2006, but more than double the 4,144 recorded in 1991.

So what is it with alcohol deaths? Why isn't it working? Why aren't the numbers coming down. If its all bullshit, why do the numbers go up.

Has the doubling of the cost of treating alcohol-related conditions doubled the effectiveness?

For road deaths you could pull up the figures for car ownership over the last thirty years (28% increase from '79 to 2000) and then the death rates:-

The total number of deaths in road accidents fell by 7 per cent to 2,946 in 2007 from 3,172 in 2006. However, the number of fatalities has remained fairly constant over the last ten years.

The decline in the casualty rate, which takes into account the volume of traffic on the roads, has been much steeper. In 1967 there were 199 casualties per 100 million vehicle kilometres. By 2007 this had declined to 48 per 100 million vehicle kilometres.

So for driving, whatever has been spent has worked. For drinking, it hasn't, and there's no evidence that spending more or doing more will reduce deaths.

All this reasoning is of course a red herring, the cost to the NHS of alcohol related treatment has doubled or increased by whatever factor not because of people's behaviour, its barely a correlation, not causation. The NHS could easily reprioritise and half the spending regardless of how much you and I drink.

But no, any excuse for the state to justify trying to extract as much money as possible from the population.

406

Spent some time on the Northern Circular Road this morning, it makes me think of ex-girlfriends more than usual. Sad thoughts.

Why am I here now, and not with them? What went wrong? What did I do wrong? and how come other people do the same and it's right for them?

How come I can barely muster relationships lasting as long as four weeks now?

Starting to have teh fear for my birthday in December. How can I evade depression (the natural human emotion, not the serious mental illness which I would never consider making light of in a flippant blog post)? Resign myself drinking wine alone in my room with a packet of chocolate digestives, or make an efford to dig up and re-engage old friends to drink with (seems a bit mercenary to me). Not a chance in hell of having a party at the flat.

Last year was a bit of luck with mental judo and getting to Glasgow, but its too far away now, the light fading.

Thirty years for this?

Duty

Oh woe is me...

Its become my duty to write reviews of gigs, to go to these things and scribble or jab notes on my mobile phone, and punt it out onto the internet. Its not like anyone reads the damned things, just the bands themselves. My nuddy website, that gets thousands of hits a day as you might expect, but gig reviews, how many people? About twenty five hits a day.

Its almost completely hopeless.

I can't even stop doing it, I tried. I gave up months ago, it lasted about a week before I was back there, standing in the dark, glancing at 'the kids' (twenty-somethings) having fun, knives of jealous jagging from my eyes.

They stand with their friends and loved ones, chatting and laughing and thinking of the delights to come later that evening. But me, I scribble, cos if I don't, no one will.

I have become a quiet voice in a big empty room. "Readers, listen to this band, they are great", "This other band are crap", "This gig could be better if..."

I got home late last night, the train line from Highbury was closed for engineering work, I'd been to see Pocketbooks, The Zebras and Airport Girl at the Buffalo Bar, some Fortuna Pop pre-Indietracks show* . So it was late, I as tired, I wanted to get photies from the gig online, maybe stab out the review or just fuck it, not enough people read it to make it worth my time, or maybe they do, but I can't handle the ambiguity and the silence and the wait. Robbie pops up in messenger, he'd been out drinking with The Smittens, chatting to one of them who's heard of my gig reviews.

A slight fuzzy feeling spreads out in my tummy like the warmth of the first summer's day.

Then I think, oh, I've got to do this, haven't I. I don't get to lie down with my wife, or get a lift home with my friends. I just have to write the damned thing. All the time the shadow of Tasty looms over, sneering.

I don't even get to scrawl the vicious kick 'em in the balls and run away anger and frustration reviews of a year ago.

Erm.

Actually...

Its not true, I spent half of last nights gig chatting to MJ Hibbett and Camila from WeePop. It was nice.

Yesterday's favourite search to find this blog on google
'illandancient'

*see, technorati will find this post when you search for any of the band names now. I could even add links to every mention too, so google will wrap me in its warm embrace. But really, would it help me as a person? Would it help or hinder the bands? Doubtful all round.

Drive

This driving, this relentless driving. Its killing me, its not healthy in so many ways. I'm already dying of the cold, having infected everyone at work.

But, dear go, its so far, not like the old late night drives to and from Livingston, but hundreds of miles. I'll drive for hours and stop for a break and realise I still have hours to go.

And then the same, on the way home, only with more traffic, and at a slower pace and more in a hurry to get home before the morning.


There's nothing on the radio and this KLF tape has engrained itself in my soul, I can still hear Last Train to Transcentral when its switched off.

For company I have conversations in my head with ex-girlfriends and people I don't usually talk to. One and a half-sided conversations, completely unrealistic with intelligent replies and "so why is that?" questions, rather than the passive submissive reality fading into silence.

Heck, its why I'm pulled up on a hard shoulder, scrawling into my note book at 1am, just to shut out the thoughts.

Then again, I come up with ideas at times like this. Like sticking my full nae on the gig review website. And also doing podcasts, named "Radio 2's Indiepop Show" one hour of my take on it all. Maybe have studio guests. Fiona talking about the band she saw theother day, and promises of live sessions coming up in the next hour.

Ooh, ooh, I need to get in touch with Pete Ball or the Strath Manu course and demand they give kids SQL training and start a pHD project to create an MRPII/ERP for manufacturing program that can be used by idiots, using MySQL