Posted: Wed 24 November, 2004 Filed under: General Leave a comment »
Transplants
The UK Transplant Service is celebrating it’s 100th anniversary over the next year, and as part of that it wants to add another million people to the NHS Organ Donor Register by the 5th October 2005.
It’s a good cause – but remember, don’t just add yourself to the register, make sure your next-of-kin and family know what you want to do too.
Posted: Wed 24 November, 2004 Filed under: General Leave a comment »
Squalor
Words fail me. Seven years isn’t anywhere near enough.
Posted: Wed 24 November, 2004 Filed under: General Leave a comment »
Surge
via Gordon (who got it himself from somewhere else), some photos of the japanese G-CANS project, which is the storm-surge defence project for Tokyo. From the photos, all I can say is that they must be expecting one hell of a storm!
The G-Cans Project is a massive project, begun 12 years ago, to build infrastructure for preventing overflow of the major rivers and waterways spidering the city (A serious problem for Tokyo during rainy-season and typhoon season). The underground waterway is the largest in the world and sports five 32m diameter, 65m deep concrete containment silos which are connected by 64 kilometers of tunnel sitting 50 meters beneath the surface.
The whole system is powered by 14000 horsepower turbines which can pump 200 tons of water a second into the large outlying Edogawa river.
© Boing Boing.
Posted: Tue 23 November, 2004 Filed under: General Leave a comment »
Countdown
In one month’s time I’ll finally have finished working in my current job. Not that I’m counting the days, or paying attention to it or anything. Honest.
Renewal
Posted: Tue 23 November, 2004 Filed under: Customer Services, Thoughts 24 Comments »NOTE :If you’ve come here via Google, click here to go to the Royal Mail Renewal page.. This here is a blog entry about the renewal process, which has managed to get to #1 on Google.
Added 4/7/07
At long last, Royal Mail has started realising how useful the internet can be. My mail redirection was up for renewal, the letter came through about it, and yes, now I can do it online.
Simply go to www.royalmail.com/renewal and quote your reference number and PIN details as listed below.
Simple. Well, not quite. In a simple, yet silly, mistake, the form on the website has swapped the two numbers round, so that where the letter has Reference Number then PIN, the site has PIN then Reference Number. That’s just a niggle though, although personally I’d have thought it would be better to aim for consistency and thus making the process even easier. So you enter the numbers and ta-da, the redirection is renewed.
Except actually, no, it’s not. You then have to go through a registration process – email address, password, blah, blah, and when you complete the registration it takes you to a logged-in homepage, but doesn’t remember what else you were doing, so you have to go back and type in the Reference Number and PIN all over again. Another example of “usable, but not as easy as it should be”.
The rest of the process is a breeze, just credit card number etc. But that still doesn’t come down to “simply enter in the reference and PIN numbers”, does it? I know it’s only small niggles and irritances, but it doesn’t take much work to fix them. In fact even simple usability testing would/should have brought these to the attention of the developers.
Posted: Tue 23 November, 2004 Filed under: General Leave a comment »
VCR
I find it quite interesting that Dixons has decided to stop stocking video recorders in favour of the more modern technology such as DVD players and recorders. As Diamond Geezer says, while it may be an old technology, it’s not one that no-one uses any more.
I’ve got a lot of videos (and TiVo can archive stuff to videotape, although I guess it could do it to a recordable DVD just as easily) although to be honest I don’t really watch most of them any more. But plenty of people _do_ watch stuff on video (my parents, for example, and their video must be just about due to break) and don’t want to re-buy everything on DVD.
Posted: Mon 22 November, 2004 Filed under: General Leave a comment »
Organisation
Regular readers will have noted that to some degree I’ve recently given up ranting about our piss-poor train service, and in particular that bunch of profiteering arselice known as Virgin Trains. I admit, because of the regular use I’ve made of the *cough* service, I’ve become either jaded or browbeaten into submission a bit. Delayed by an hour? Ah, that’s about normal. Train loaded to the gills with people? Yup, that’s about standard too. Self-centred bumfaces with the social awareness of an animal-rights person eating at Macdonalds – who also, by lucky coincidence appears to have a deafess problem, requiring their mobile phone to be on “ULTRA-FUCKING-LOUD” and to shout any conversation so the entire train can hear it? Yup, that’s not even 5 points in the “I-Spy book of fucktards”. In the quiet coach? Even more common.
But today’s effort still manages to rankle. Monday morning, a train from Reading to Manchester via Birmingham. Five carriages, so obviously there’s going to be no-one on it. And what’ve they managed to do? Get the entire train with no working toilets. Not one. The fucking thing’s ended up 30 minutes delayed because they’ve had to stop at stations for toilet breaks. You just couldn’t make it up – no-one would believe it if you made it into a comedy script.
The new(ish) Voyager trains are a huge leap forward from the older 125s, I can’t deny it. They’ve even taken into account things like growing use of laptops etc., and each pair of seats has a power socket so laptops and mobiles can be used/recharged. But they still haven’t quite mastered the intricacies of a working shitter.