A Short Break in London

It's half term this week, and my wife fancied a bit of a break so she took the week off to look after our daughter. One of the things she said she fancied doing was to go up to London. So that's what we decided to do.

Hotel

We only wanted 2 days in London, so we decided to book one night in an hotel. Our credit card has a points scheme, which allows us to book flights, hotels, etc., so we took a look what our points would give us. We wanted something central, and ended up booking one night in the very new Park Plaza Westminster Bridge. After making the booking, my daughter suggested we go up the night before (after work for me). So I called back to try to book an extra night. We didn't have enough points for that, but we could pay cash. I won't say how much they wanted (it was a lot). When I phoned the hotel, they wanted a lot too, but less than the bank were asking for. We decided to forego the extra night.

Lesson: Reward schemes are not always cheaper.

The hotel was wonderful. We had a large room which had a sleeping area, a bathroom (obviously), and a lounge area. It even had a fridge and microwave oven. It was all very modern and stylish. I liked it a lot. The reception staff were very friendly. The porters and concierge staff were fantastic - extremely helpful and friendly. Breakfast let it down though. The full English breakfast was in fact a buffet. It cost about £25 each in addition to the high room rate. It was greasy and over-cooked. It was very tasty but looked awful - not what I'd expect from a hotel of this quality. They really should be ashamed of this, especially as everything else exceeded my expectations. I would definitely stay there again if I had enough points. Next time though I'd skip breakfast, and go to McDonald's instead :-)

Wicked

This was excellent, though not as good (in my opinion) as The Lion King. It was a great spin on the original story (The Wizard of Oz). The music was great, the singing was great, and the acting was great.

Abercrombie and Fitch

My daughter wanted to go to the Abercrombie and Fitch shop in Burlington Gardens. So we went there. We queued for about 20 minutes to get in. Once inside, it soon became apparent that the average age of the customers was 12. This was probably because it was half term.

Suggestion: Have a creche during school holidays so that the kids have somewhere to leave their parents.

Another suggestion: Hand out torches to help customers read the labels. Or turn the lights on.

We spent about 40 minutes looking around. My daughter picked out a hoodie and a t-shirt that she liked. We then queued up to pay. And we queued. And we queued. And we queued. We must have queued for about an hour, all around the shop. The till operators were more interested in chatting, dancing and having a laugh than serving customers. The only effort I could see being made by any of the staff in reducing queue size was one girl asking me to move up a couple of centimeters. Get a grip A&F, me not moving far enough was not the problem. The problem was more to do with your lazy/inept till operators and only having 4 tills serving hundreds of customers. Fix that, you plonkers.

Yet another suggestion: Employ grown-ups, not children, to operate your tills.

Benares

Benares is Atul Kochar's Michellin-starred restaurant in Berkley Square. We had a reservation for 1 pm  and only just got there in time - no thanks to Abercrombie and Fich's useless till operators.

The food, as expected, was wonderful. I had the soft-shelled crab starter. Marvelous.

The Natural History Museum

We queued for about an hour to get in, and queued for another 20 minutes to get in to see the dinosaurs. We didn't have to queue for anything else. I could quite happily spend hours in this place. Unfortunately my feet couldn't - I had what my wife refers to as "museum feet". I can't solely (geddit?) blame the Natural History Museum for this though - it was all of the walking required when you visit London. So after a coffee and a (slightly stale) carrot cake we headed for home via tube, train and car. It was rush hour, so the tube was busy. Very busy. I've never experienced the tube so full. I couldn't believe people's determination to squeeze into an already jam-packed compartment. They're either mad or stupid. Probably both.

In Summary

I love London, but have no desire to live there nor to work there. My advice would be to visit if you get the opportunity, but stay away during school holidays (the queues are horrendous) and when it's raining (because you'll get wet and taxi drivers rip you off).

It's Getting Colder

If you live in the UK, you will have probably noticed that the weather's getting colder. I've been reliably informed that one morning last week it was -4C (24.8F) near where I work. The coldest I saw that morning was -2.5C (27.5F). Nevertheless, pretty damned cold I'm sure you'll agree.

At work, my office is quite cold too. So cold that I often have to turn the air conditioning on. This is also true for my colleagues. The only downside with the controllers we have in our office is that they only have an on switch. There's no off switch. If you switch the air conditioning on in the morning, it stays on until lunchtime. If you turn it on after lunch, it stays on until sometime in the evening. It's not possible to turn it off manually.

Imagine my glee when I was informed that the controller units were going to be replaced. Mine was replaced over the weekend, so now I'm trying to figure out how to use it.

The dial is obviously something to do with temperature control (if the little thermometer picture is to be believed). There's no numbers on it so all I'm able to deduce is that it's allowing me to set the temperature to an undefined value plus-or-minus an undefined amount.

The grey buttons allow me to move the yellow light between the symbol on the left and "Auto". What does that achieve? I have no idea. I'm guessing that auto means it maintains the selected temperature. What does the other symbol mean? On? Off? It's not obvious.

It would be easier to figure out how to use this controller if any of the controls actually made the air conditioning come on. Maybe it's a cost cutting exercise. Maybe whatever we do, the air conditioning is supposed to stay off.

I'll keep you posted, if I don't freeze to death first.

UPDATE

The air conditioning is now on! About 10 minutes after moving the light to "auto", the air conditioning burst into life. It's now blowing cool air into the office, even though what I assume is the temperature dial is on maximum. Switching from "auto" to the other symbol turns it off, so I guess that's the "off" setting we didn't have before. Switching it back to "auto" switches it back on after a few minutes.

ANOTHER UPDATE

I was just talking about the air conditioning with one of my colleagues. He made an interesting observation. If the light is on "auto", where should it go if you press the right arrow? What actually happens is nothing. We think it should either "rotate around" to the "off" position or, for a more interesting behaviour, should go to the controller in next door's office. The same is true for the left arrow. In this way you can move your light up and down the corridor.

Viral video? Who cares - it's great!

On Friday, I stumbled across a video of a group called Atomic Tom performing a track called "Take Me Out" on a subway train in New York. What was amazing about it was the fact that they were playing the music - keyboards, drums, guitar and bass - on iPhones. It was brilliant, and I don't care that it might be a viral video.

If you want to see it for yourself, it's on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAllFWSl998&feature=player_embedded.

Error handling: Could do better...

I downloaded a new game on my iPhone today - Cut the Rope. I thought my daughter would like to play it on her iPhone, so I decided to copy it from my phone to hers. This is a 2-step process for iPhones, using iTunes. Step 1 was to synchronise my phone with iTunes to upload the game into iTunes. Step 2 was to synchronise her phone with iTunes to download the game onto her phone.

Once my phone was connected and had been detected, I noticed that iTunes thought my phone was full, even though I knew it wasn't. The graphic representing the phone's memory usage showed much more memory being used by apps than I knew was actually being used. Unchecking an app restored it to where it was supposed to be until I pressed the sync button, when it jumped back up to nearly full again.

A quick bit of Googling revealed this to be quite common. The consensus was that the data associated with one (or more) of my apps was corrupt. There was no indication in iTunes that this was the case, or which app (or apps) might be affected. Common sense suggested that the last one added, or the last one used, would be the culprit, but removing and then re-adding these made no difference. So I had to go through all of my apps, one at a time, until the problem went away.

Ok, so I got everything back to normal, and this made me happy. At the same time I was unhappy because I lost the data associated with the apps that I had uninstalled/reinstalled. Also, what I did was not a proper fix - all I did was uninstall/reinstall apps to make the problem go away. I had no idea what the problem was nor what I could have done differently to avoid the same problem in the future.

Software developers around the world are increasingly taking the usability of their products much more seriously these days. Modern software development paradigms pay a lot more attention to what their users want, and how they're going to use the software. A lot of effort goes into designing user interfaces.

It could be argued that Apple are particularly good at this, especially with the iPhone and iPad. Not only are they intuitive and easy to use, they are also stylish and, dare I say it, sexy.

But what this little incident has made me realise is that all of this effort is going into making what I call the "positive" user stories work. Less thought seems to be going into the "negative" user stories - typically when things go wrong.

As a user, I don't want the products I buy to go wrong. I want them to intervene when things don't work, or are wrong, or don't look right, and to try to put them right. If they can't, I want a message in a language I can understand explaining what's wrong, and what I can do to fix it. What the hell, for example, am I supposed to do with an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException or with a NullPointerException? No idea, do you?

So come on software developers, think about how users are going to use your product AND how they're going to deal with any errors you're going to throw at them. I would argue that it's even more important to get usability right when things are going wrong than when things are going right because that's when user's are going to be less tolerant.

Incidentally, I did eventually get the game installed on my daughter's phone, and she loved it. Getting her to stop playing it and go to sleep was a different problem.

Nos da.