Month: April 2005

Kids and perspective

I was in London and St. Albans today, looking around at couples with and without children. I thought about the time my wife and I had together before the kids came along, and about the career thinking I’ve done before and since.

You hear a lot of people say that when you have kids, they become the most important thing in your life, and I think that’s mostly true. But as well as shortening your perspective – down from career and social life towards kids and family life – they also extend your perspective immensely. So I’ve found myself much more drawn towards projects to make a difference to the world than before kids came along – partly perhaps because I’m getting older and more thoughtful, but also because I want to make a better world for my two, and everyone else’s.

How not to design a web site

Every time I try to buy a train ticket from the Trainline in the UK, I get angry. It just has too many brainless avoidable problems, such as:

  • The site is unbearably slow and clunky, particularly compared to something like Expedia
  • It only seems to work well on Windows PCs running IE
  • The error messages are of the classic Microsoft “Something went wrong, and it could be one of these twenty things, or something else”; and
  • It lets you try and buy cheap tickets before telling you that only the expensive ones are available.

All this is annoying in itself, but when you consider that the railways are competing against airlines for business, you would think that someone would try and sort the situation out. Apparently not. Even the market hasn’t worked (a common complaint in the rail industry) – when a better, speedier competitor (QJump) opened a couple of years back, the Trainline bought it.

I’m beginning to think it might be run by Microsoft.

ITV’s finest hour

Remember Rodney Hylton-Potts, the racist nutter who won ITV’s woeful “Vote for Me” a while back? Despite the overblown PR puff that preceded the programme, it was a ghastly, ghastly failure, shoved into a graveyard slot, and ‘starring’ seven would-be politicians who made my district councillor look like Gladstone. On a tiny vote (140,000), the most extreme voice won, which gave great pleasure to the fascists.

Despite the obvious flaws in the programme, Kelvin McKenzie said that any of the candidates would make better MPs than those (at that time) in the Commons. Well, perhaps, Kelvin.

Mr Hylton-Potts is standing for Parliament in Folkestone and Hythe for a party called Get Britain Back. In a recent delighted press release, Mr Hylton-Potts announced that the BNP candidate in Folkestone was withdrawing, and that all the people who voted for him on Vote for Me should vote BNP. Another triumph for the popular will!

Somehow, I don’t see Vote for Me II being on our screens any time soon.

Match of Tomorrow

The run in of the football season, and the game to watch tomorrow will be Carlisle United vs. Exeter City. Exeter need to win to have any chance of making the playoffs, but also need two of the three teams above them to fail to win. It might just happen.

It’s an exciting end to the season in this house, with Brighton being involved in a relegation struggle, and Tranmere Rovers almost certainly in the League One playoffs.

The Power and the Glory

Well, the Power Inquiry was just as interesting as I thought it would be. I’m still ploughing through all the meaty goodness at the site, but two research papers are well worth a read.

This paper discusses the picture of disillusionment with party politics in the UK, while this one examines the possible causes in a little more detail.

They are an excellent overview of the various pieces of (disturbing) evidence on political disengagement, and made me think of Casca in Julius Caesar:

When these prodigies
Do so conjointly meet, let not men say
‘These are their reasons; they are natural;’
For, I believe, they are portentous things
Unto the climate that they point upon.