I’ve been idly perusing the Animal Welfare Act 2006 and am slightly concerned by one of the provisions:

Duty of person responsible for animal to ensure welfare
(1) A person commits an offence if he does not take such steps as are reasonable in
all the circumstances to ensure that the needs of an animal for which he is
responsible are met to the extent required by good practice.
(2) For the purposes of this Act, an animal’s needs shall be taken to include—
(a) its need for a suitable environment,
(b) its need for a suitable diet,
(c) its need to be able to exhibit normal behaviour patterns,
(d) any need it has to be housed with, or apart from, other animals, and
(e) its need to be protected from pain, suffering, injury and disease.

This concerns me, not because I want to mistreat my cats (although that’s not what *they* say when the Wrong Food has been provided..), but because I’m concerned about part C.

Does this mean that you can no longer keep a cat totally indoors, as that’s hardly normal behaviour for a cat, and what about the fact I put a Liberator collar on her to stop her eating every single baby blackbird she can find? That’s cramping her style somewhat.

While most of the provisions of the Act are long overdue, and much needed, I’m a bit concerned that this puts a little too much power in the paws of my cat. There is insufficient detail as to what constitutes ‘normal’ behaviour. I’ve been careful not to leave the information up on screen in case she sees it and there will be no discussion about it in this house, but I’m worried a neighbour might let slip and then she will be unstoppable. “Yes it’s normal for me to be driving your car, get out of my way puny human.”

I’ve just been sent a copy of the contact list for our major client. Listed within are instructions as to how to navigate the automated switchboard to reach various people.

As some of you may know, I’m in the throes of redesigning the software our company uses to manage its contracts/contacts/operations and stuff. What didn’t occur to me was to build in some facility for storing pathways through switchboards. Maybe I’ll just make the telephone field a bit bigger…

It seems to me that I’ll never be done designing, never mind building - there’s always something that no-one thought to tell me, or that I didn’t question sternly enough what I was told.

This is one of the thoughts that stops me from being self-employed: I’d never be able to get the full picture out of the users, not being fully immersed in the situation, so I’d never be able to design something that matched exactly to what is required and I’d be so fearful of making a shoddy system that I would be quite unable to produce anything at all for fear of it being unhelpful. That tells you too much about me, I suspect.

Having said that, I did spend some time working on a system for a local council, and managed to conquer my fear of producing Bad Things enough to deliver a system that seems to have made them happy. It would be too much to expect *two* such happy outcomes from freelance work..

Maybe I’m just too much of a perfectionist, but everywhere around me I see the results of bad software causing people to have to do daft things and I’d never want to do that to anyone. The infamous doom-system that I babysit here has a screen that I can’t even begin to fathom how to use, and apparently you can’t add more than one entry at a time, you have to close the screen and go back in every time. Personally, that would make me stabby if I have a pile of 50 things to process, but apparently ‘it’s always been like that…’ so it’s okay. No damnit, it’s not okay. If we put up with things like that then standards won’t ever improve.

I learned today that one of the more pleasant and amusing members of our company is off to fulfil her dream of working with her twin sister on her glassworking hobby and hoping to make a business out of it. I’m jealous beyond all measure.

There appears to be yet another reason why I am cheerful about running Ubuntu Linux: not because it’s pretty and runs nicely on my laptop (better than XP does), but because I don’t have to sit here widdling myself everytime I open my web browser. Seriously, Windows makes me nervous. I use Firefox, with the NoScript extension and use the McAfee Site Advisor thingy, but still I’m nervous.

Not because of the quality of the code (hey, mine isn’t perfect either) but because it’s the ubiquitous operating system and therefore the target of choice.

I’ve always maintained that there is a certain level of stupidity beyond which you should not be allowed near a computer. In the past, the skill level required to do anything useful on a computer made this self-regulating. Now dear old Windows, with its lowest-common-denominator approach and attempt to garner as much market share as possible, has lowered the bar so far it’s now nothing but a trip hazard.

The problem is, you can generally either have something that is easy to use, or you can have something that is secure. Compromises need to be made if you want to tip the balance in either direction. Having the same password for every login prompt is easy, but it’s not secure. Having different passwords made up of random letters, numbers and punctuation is secure, but it is not easy. Unless you’re a robot. Phil?

Making a computer so easy to use that anyone and their cat can get on ‘this internet thing’ has made life a lot less secure for the rest of us, as suddenly there’s a whole world full of people with computers, with big ‘kick me’ signs painted on their backs. So it’s tempting to search for exploits, and write malicious code, because there’s such a herd to aim at. Even blindfolded, you’re sure to hit someone..

I don’t blame Microsoft for spotting a crack in the door and wedging an elephant in it, it does make good business sense to do what they’ve done. Or does it? Suddenly they have a planet full of customers who are waking up and realising that they have a bullseye painted on them and are getting paranoid. Not paranoid enough to learn how to browse safely, but paranoid enough that Microsoft realise they need to do something to make people feel securer. Hence Vista. (I’ve not tried it, and won’t until it works.)

The trouble with Windows is that Bill’s plan worked too well. Software houses have written software that runs only on Windows, and by getting businesses dependent on this software have ensured tie-in to Windows almost as a by-product. I’m a case in point - I develop things using MS SQL server, and MS Access (and other bits of Office). I can’t not have Windows installed. I use those tools to develop with because that is what my employer requires. Because they run Windows. It’s all very clever, and all very dangerous.

The computer systems of the world are dangerously inbred and I’m not really sure what we can do about it.

As some of you may or may not know, I’m currently attempting to trace my family tree. I seem to be mainly using Ancestry.co.uk and enjoying myself greatly. Not to say that there aren’t a fair few changes I’d personally make to Ancestry’s software: it’s good, but could be better.

Having found the particular entry I wanted in a census, I was idly flicking through the other pages and it occurred to me that it would be really fabulous to have a map of London, with a layer for every point in time that there is data for, and be able to virtually wander round the map and visit each dwelling and see the layers of people that lived there over time. I don’t even want to begin to think about how challenging that would be to do, but I’d like someone to do it.

Rows of owlses,
originally uploaded by synx508.

I forgot to mention this, but it is an important moment. We have lived in this house for nearly 2 years. The owls have lived in tissue-paper cocoons in a series of boxes for many many more.

I have been stalking display cabinets for nearly 2 years. Finally I found one that didn’t cause philb to pull the toddler-face. So I bid. I won it for £15, but I gave them £25 as the husband delivered it to our front room, which was very nice of him.

So, owls now safely contained, although it is a little snug in there, almost as snug as the tissue-paper and box solution, but at least we can see the hundreds of staring eyes.

As I was putting them on the shelves, I kept thinking/singing ‘rows of owlses, are staring down at me’. Apologies to Radiohead: I’ve broken your song forever, in my mind.

new hair,
originally uploaded by Purplekitten.

Deep Purple by Special Effects stains like nothing on earth. I went to get out of the bath this morning when my husband pointed out that I was roughly the colour of Ribena. As this is not a flattering skin tone, I scrubbed once more.

I do like the hair though. Mmmmm purple

On the 07:38 to Basingstoke, there is generally a herd of college kids sharing the train with me. Mostly, they are unobjectionable, but there is one young man who insists on wearing his trousers only half-way up so that anyone walking behind gets a good view of his scrawny emo-kid be-panted butt.

What the hell is that about? I’m aware that I’m approximately 10 years older than him, but even if I cast my mind back, I’m still not empathising. It’s not like that other strange craze I observed a few years back: the one where men wore jeans with elongated posteriors so the crotch was at knee-level but the waistband was at normal height. I confess to not understanding *that* one either. What’s wrong with just having a butt in the normal place?
I see emo-pants-boy every morning, and every morning I get the urge to grab his trousers and yank them skywards (probably with a mad triumphant cackle, you never can tell) for the good of my fellow passengers. It’s not even as if he wears attractive pants. This morning’s offering were baggy and white.

I find myself wondering what his mother thinks about this (yes, I’m *that* old) and have come to the conclusion that he probably leaves the house in a normal state. Once out of sight of the parental abode, a hasty adjustment leaves his butt safely uncovered and he can walk tall and proud.

Emo-pants-boy, if you’re reading this (which you aren’t), for bob’s sake, keep it *entirely* in your painfully-fashionable trousers. Thanks.

Human beings have always sought to make sense of their environment by labelling things (even if it was just different shades of “ugg” for a while). The modern (don’t make me say Web 2.0) web projects are popular, mainly because they give us a chance to label things for ourselves. Everyone’s understanding is different, and the same symbol will usually conjure up a whole range of labels, depending on the observer’s own experience of that symbol. With this is mind, it is necessary to agree some common ground, and a dictionary of agreed associations and meaning for a particular symbol.

I look after a quirkily-written application at work, where the symbol for ‘click here to go into the details page from the summary page’ is a dustbin. Yes, a dustbin. The (clearly only *almost*) obvious symbol for deletion/discarding/removal is actually the button you need to click to go into the screen to deal with the item on the list. This actually causes me pain when I click on it, as my brain is screaming no from the symbol-recognition point of view, while also telling me that I know how the button works and it’s safe to click on it. This kind of conflict makes it very difficult for users to use the application, as the brain ‘forgets’ the real use of the button and sees only the symbol.

Choosing appropriate representations of a particular concept or action is an often-underestimated skill: it requires the empathy to put yourself in the position of your user and what they might have been exposed to and how they might classify the action they need to take. It’s all very well that we have absorbed certain standard symbols for certain concepts and actions, but what if the user has not been exposed to these symbols? I found myself trying to explain how to save a file in Word, to someone whose computer didn’t have a floppy drive. Why is the ’save’ icon a disk? Why would she associate saving files, with a floppy disk? What’s a floppy disk? This is an example of a symbol that made sense at the time, and users have become accustomed to seeing it, so it still makes sense as it is familiar. But to a user who does not understand the symbol, it is no longer possible to grasp it even in a physical metaphor sense, as the physical method has changed. Saving files no longer ‘looks like’ floppy disks.

Like it or not, Microsoft have had a considerable influence upon the way we develop software interfaces. Through their sheer dominance, they have exposed most computer users to their way of doing things, so that any other way seems ‘wrong’ and ‘difficult’ for a user to grasp. If you want to write an interface to a word processing package, you had better make sure that it functions as the user expects it to i.e. like Word, or it will have to be *really* spectacular to compete. I wouldn’t say that this is necessarily a bad thing for those of us who have to support and train users!

But having a single driver of human interfaces with computers is probably not healthy. Having a single commercial company in charge of human-computer metaphors ties in the majority of users to doing things the Microsoft way, as anything else doesn’t fit their trained knowledge of symbols.

Part of the problem is superstition: the symbol *becomes* the thing, rather than a representation of the thing. In my experience, the user doesn’t think about how and why they are performing an action, and what the mechanisms are. The number of times I’ve been told ‘I just click on this button when I’m done’. When questioned as to what the button is supposed to achieve, they don’t know. Such brittle understanding isn’t solely confined to computer use, I know, but it is one of the things that makes innovation in interface design so daunting a task. Yes, you can come up with fantastic and nifty ways of representing what the user should be doing, but unless it translates on some level to something they are familiar with, you will have an uphill struggle.

Most of the problems I get with the Quirky Application are through misunderstanding of the interface - symbols are misused, buttons are in odd places and perform strange functions. I don’t blame the users (even when laboriously cleaning up the sorry state of their data), I don’t really blame the developers (although it might not sound like it sometimes, when I find some of the more interesting features)- user interface design is a tricky skill to master, especially when you don’t have the R&D resource of a software monolith.

Where the whole social web software concept is helping, is that it is training users to think about what something represents and how to summarise it. Think about tagging: what you are essentially doing (if you are a responsible tagger, that is) is boiling down an entire page/site into just a few words that will represent that article/site. You have to pick words that other people will think of and might be searching for, and you have to think of as many possible alternatives that describe the same thing. As an English teacher I would be jumping for joy about this concept: a chance to demonstrate that a good grasp on language and synonyms is useful for *trendy* things! It is finally cool to flex your vocabulary.

What I like most about the phenomenon of tagging and collaborative works is the idea that it gives everyone a little more insight into how other people might be thinking. I’d be really interested to put up a site full of common and proposed user-interface symbols and see what they get tagged with. Maybe we can collaboratively brainstorm our way into a new era of symbols.. I’ll get right on that.

As a precocious (their words, not mine) 10/11 year old, I used to be given the books of my peers to check spelling tests, and was assigned as mentor to a couple of the less able members of my class. I wonder how Daniel is getting on these days.. I also have some memories of listening to the really young ones read, in the reading area of the primary school. I’ve no idea how that would have come about, as surely I’d have been in lessons, but the memories are there nonetheless.
When I was studying for my A-levels (although studying may be a bit too strong a word) I spent a good many of my free lessons helping teach science lessons to the younger kids. Our school was experimenting with something called ‘CASE - thinking Science’ which I don’t remember much about except that I approved of the techniques of stimulating thinking through practical work. I thoroughly enjoyed both the preparation and the delivery of each lesson, although I’m exceedingly grateful I never had to help with the class my brother was in. I also ended up actually teaching a lesson, as the teacher had gone off sick and the supply teacher taught English, not this scary science stuff, and basically left me to it. At 18. It went okay, despite my fear of the 14-year-olds.

For my work experience/community service, at more or less the same time, I was placed in a pre-school group, helping with the children. Mostly playing, if truth be told, but still educational playing, honest. Mmm Duplo ™.

Several years on and I found myself back in school, albeit as a lab technician. The school was a lot ‘rougher’ than the mildly genteel secondary school that I attended personally, and it was a bit of a shock to see how little respect the children had for certain teachers. Mind you, kids can certainly tell if you are confident or not and will take advantage of any lapse in discipline. One poor Indian lady, aged about 60 or so, was so cowed by her classes that I could scarcely hear myself think in my prep room. I resorted to standing at the doorway and glaring until they got the message. Poor Indira.

You would have thought that this would have put me off teaching, and to a certain extent, it has. I don’t think I would ever go straight to secondary school teaching. I think that would be something you have to work up to once you’ve found your feet.

I do, however, want to be a primary school teacher, in Scotland, on a remote island. Which seems a far cry from where I am now - working in Basingstoke, writing a ridiculously-ambitious piece of software, living in a ghastly town, in a cookie-cutter house. I long for the boundless skies and breathtaking scenery of Scotland. I long to do something useful, and I love teaching: whether it be demonstrating how to use some software, or explaining how something works. The joy of passing on understanding to another person is beyond compare.

Oh I know it’s not always a joyous experience. Nothing is. Many’s the time I’ve left a meeting frustrated because I’ve not been able to make myself understood. I assume that’s why some training is involved. It’s not enough to know your subject, you must be able to inspire, provoke and entertain your audience. I’m thinking this is where my drama classes might come in handy.

My mother trained as a primary school teacher, and did teach for many years. I find it weird that I want to follow in her footsteps, when we’ve disagreed on so many subjects in the past. But it’s not necessarily her that has inspired me. If I had to blame anyone for even putting the thought into my head, it would have to be the late, great Richard P Feynman. If I could only learn to emulate his talent for breaking the problem down into the simplest form, I would be a happy lady. I believe that anyone can understand anything, as long as the presentation is suitable. He had a knack of finding a common ground that most people could meet on.

I was lucky enough to be taught by a wonderful teacher at secondary school. His name was Pete Kaufman, and I’ve heard that he has since died. I mourn his loss, not only for myself, but for all the people who will never have a chance to be taught by such a truly great teacher. I don’t think many of us realised just how good he was. I certainly didn’t at the time. He was always the eccentric one, humble and kind, slightly zany, always had time to talk something over. He didn’t come from the traditional educational conveyor-belt - he did his chemistry degree through the Open University, which I think caused a few of the staff to look down on him slightly, but he did have the knack of making a potentially gnarly subject relate to everyday terms that we could understand. That is a priceless skill, and I only realise later how precious he was. Mr Kaufman, I may have disappointed you with only a C at A-Level chemistry, but you’ve left a far more profound mark on me than a grade could ever measure. I want to be like you.

A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless as one day he hopes to be a respected lawyer, came out with the following (during a conversation about latin phrases used in law):

“assuming polar bear poo freezes, so decomposition is very slow, if the ice melts due to global warming, will we get flooded with water AND poo?”

Just how do you get to that from “malum aut est malum in se, aut prohibitum”??