Archive for August 8th, 2005

Posted on August 8, 2005 - by jono

Fine grained annoyance

Headed over to Swansea on Friday to do a talk at the UKUUG summer conference. Good to see Alan, Telsa, Sladen, Josette, Matt Garrett and others. The talk went well, although the lunch provided was a Chicken Vindaloo and it burnt like a good ‘un.

This weekend was good fun. On Friday night Jon and I were booted out by our better halves. Sooz was throwing an Ann Summers party, so Jon and I ended up at the Pie Factory. We had a few beers and returned at about 11.30pm when the pub closed. On the Saturday I spend some more time hacking the new site. It is getting there, but this is taking quite some time to develop, particularly as I only get a chance to hack on it at weekends really.

Playing with GStreamer is continuing to go well. Wrote a few lines of code to test changing attributes in GStreamer elements. The general stack is starting to sink in a little better. Credit to Edward who is battling some pretty tough bugs in gst-python and gnonlin to bring it up to state for 0.9. Keep going dude, you are getting there!

My interest in usability continues to grow and I have been ploughing through The Design Of Everyday Things. The problem when reading this book is that you question even the minutest of usability issues. I have found myself looking blankly at car temperature control systems, drink dispensers, posters and of course general software tools. I added some new usability blogs to my reading list and I also joined the GNOME usability list. She doesn’t know it yet, but the new admin assistant who is joining us soon is going to be my usability Guinea pig.

Today I called a well known insurance company to make a claim for a digital camera that has gone missing. when I got through to speak to someone, I was confronted with a real pencil pushing jobsworth. She proved to be rather patronising and unhelpful so I asked to speak to her manager. Unfortunately my hopes turned to despair as the manager proved to be the yoda to all jobsworth jedis in the world. I hate this kind of thing.

The problem with this sorry story is that insurance firms seem to assume that you are fully versed in all of the terms and conditions in your agreement. Well, I must be some sort of idiot as I have not fully digested the 54 pages of terms and conditions that were sent to me. The problem was that I should have reported the loss within 24 hours. This ultimately proved difficult to do when my insurance details were back in England while I was away. I was told by Ms Jobsworth that I should have taken my policy with me. This seems crazy to me – why on earth would I take my annual insurance policy away on a trip? It certainly makes more sense to come back home, refer to the policy and then make the claim. It is as if after 24 hours the camera loss stops becoming their responsibility. What a bunch of money grabbing bastards. Not amused I can tell you…