American spellings drive me crazy

I was in Glasgow last night. There’s a new hotel being built next to Renfrew Street, and it has some cool, hip brochure copy on the windows to get you excited. It’s a call to “travelers”.

Travelers?

I was driving home the other day, and just after Crow Road there’s a billboard that currently promotes a new dentist. It’s a new and exciting dental “center”.

Center?

I don’t know why this annoys me so much, but it does: it’s not endearing like an extra apostrophe turning tomatoes into tomatoe’s and pizzas into pizza’s, and it’s not a genuine typo like the ones you’ll occasionally spot on the sides of builders’ vans. It’s just bloody lazy, the result of firms either copying American copy without checking the spellings or, like I suspect Microsoft did with its Media Center, thinking “you know what? We can’t be bothered changing it. Screw you!”

You know you spend too much time on social networks when…

…you catch a spectacularly minging throat infection and catch yourself thinking “I should post a pic of this!”

Fear and loathing and Facebook

I don’t like Facebook. I don’t trust it. I don’t like the way it enables people you’ve avoided for 20 years to annoy you. I don’t like the way its privacy settings are so complex it needs an enormous article to explain them. And I don’t like its ambitions to enclose the entire Internet. There was a good example of that this morning, when it asked me to “Try Friend Finder”. All I need to do is give Facebook my email address and password.

Friend Finder has been around for a while, and what it does is simple: it uses your email account to email your contacts and tell them to join Facebook. I think that’s a step too far, and so do the German authorities, who may fine Facebook for breaking the country’s strict marketing regulations.

It’s no secret that when you use Facebook you’re its product, not its customer – its customers are the marketers who want to precision-target you – and yet I still have an account. If Facebook is so evil – and I think it is – why keep using it? Instead of keeping the “keep me signed in” button unticked and keeping your personal data to a minimum, why not just commit Facebook suicide?

The answer’s simple enough. It’s where my friends are. I’d much prefer it if they used email and Twitter, but they don’t, so I have a choice: put up with Facebook, or lose touch with people I don’t want to lose touch with.

A post on Metafilter - in a discussion about blocking Facebook Connect - last night expressed it perfectly. Over to you, Manjusri:

It’s like everyone I knew in highschool, and all my former coworkers and extended family decided to get together for a party. But for some reason they decided to hold it at residence of the biggest dick in highschool. Apparently they don’t see this guy as a dick, or his dickishness doesn’t rub them the wrong way. In any case I can either skip the party on principle or show up and politely warn friends about the host and enjoy the opportunity to reconnect with people. Just because I accept that this is where everyone is doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.

Not all comments are welcome at the Daily Mail

I tried to comment on a Daily Mail article earlier. It’s a report about the inquest into the death of a young woman from a heart attack, and the report goes into quite a lot of detail because – and here is the “public interest” bit – she was sexually aroused and watching pornography when she died.

As one poster on Fark.com put it:

instead of simply putting up a brief article saying that she died of a sudden heart arrhythmia and that foul play isn’t suspected, they have to print every freaking detail down to her state of dress, the sex toys, the laptop showing porn, etc. Her family and friends are devastated by this, and now she’s been turned into an international joke because a bunch of reporters thought it would be funny to point at the woman who died fapping.

I tried to put a comment on the article – you should be ashamed of yourselves for printing this – but for some mysterious reason the comments system is running very slow today and spent several hours saying that no comments had been submitted. Now the commenting bit has been removed altogether. Funny that.

Could the iPad save publishing? Not if publishers have anything to do with it

From the Turkeys Voting for Christmas department, or rather AdAge, via Business Insider:

Consumers who think iPad editions should cost no more than print editions and perhaps should cost less — given all the money publishers save on paper, printing and distribution — are going to be disappointed.

I suspect the correct version of that is: “Publishers who think iPad editions should cost more than print editions are going to be disappointed”.

So why on earth do some publishers think we’ll pay more?

“The question is what the app subscription costs against buying the app 12 times,” Maxim Editor in Chief Joe Levy said.

Readers won’t see it that way, but they’ll need to adjust their expectations, said Andrew Degenholtz, president at ValueMags, a magazine-subscription marketer. “They’re thinking, ‘We’re not knocking down any trees, there’s no ink being used, and there’s no truck being used to deliver it,’” he said. “But there are significant editorial costs, creative costs and research-and-development and production costs,” he said.

That’s pretty much what the music business said about digital music for the last ten years. Worked out just great for them, didn’t it?

Update:

It’s worth mentioning – as Adam Banks did on Twitter when I posted the AdAge link – that in the US, print subscriptions cost a pittance. For example, Popular Science is about ten, twelve dollars as a subscription but the official newsstand price is four dollars and ninety-nine cents per issue. Then again, hardly anybody pays the newsstand price: unlike the UK, most mags in the US are sold via subscription.

Schemes o’ mice and men

BBC Scotland’s showing a new documentary programme, The Scheme. If you’re in the UK you can watch it on iPlayer here. I’d love to know what you think of it.

For those of you who don’t speak Scotland, a scheme is a housing estate. This particular one is in the Onthank area of Kilmarnock, about half an hour southwest of Glasgow, and if you believe what you see on the programme it’s a pretty hellish place. Everyone appears to be on drugs, selling drugs, getting beaten up or beating up pregnant women.

Naturally a lot of people are appalled by this, arguing – quite rightly – that the programme makers have distilled a year’s worth of footage down to the most sensational stuff. People doing nice things or even normal things aren’t exactly riveting TV, so there’s precious little of that in the programme. What you get instead is a freak show, a “look at the funny poor people!” programme for the smug middle classes.

All perfectly true. And yet… I know, or rather knew, loads of people like the unfortunates in the first episode of The Scheme. Some of them in the town I grew up in, others as “clients” of the back-to-work training programmes I used to teach in Ayrshire and Clydebank in my previous, pre-writing life. And of course you don’t need to live in the West of Scotland to encounter similar characters.

They might not be the majority, but they do exist, and watching them makes for incredibly uncomfortable but compelling viewing.

Is it irresponsible for the programme makers to devote an entire episode to them without showing the positives? Is there a responsibility to do anything other than make an interesting programme? The local MSP says there is:

“The danger with programmes like this is that they give a misleading impression of an entire community. Featuring the chaotic lifestyles of one or two families might make for interesting TV but it does nothing to support the positive regeneration that has been going on in this community for the past few years.

Here’s a bit about it from The Scotsman newspaper.

FOR its part, the BBC said the documentary makers – the award-winning Friel Kean Films – had looked at various towns, before settling on Onthank due to the number of families who agreed to be filmed over a sustained period of time. A spokesman said The Scheme will look at a number of different families with a “mix” of stories.

While later episodes promise to capture some of the regeneration work in Onthank, concerns remain the picture will be one-dimensional. After watching the opening show, Paul Whitelaw, The Scotsman’s television critic, said that “it remains to be seen whether The Scheme has any purpose other than wallowing in their misery.”

That raises another question: should documentary series be balanced on a per-episode basis, or is it fine to show the other side of the story in separate episodes that people might not watch?

As I say, I’d love to know what you think.

Ash clowns

I’m just back from a short holiday, which went a bit like the General Election: we booked Portugal, but got Aviemore. The culprit was, of course, the volcanic ash cloud.

There’s not much you can do about an Act of God, but it’s quite exceptionally frustrating when you’re also dealing with the Acts of Sods. It turns out that – surprise! – some firms are complete bastards, so even when they’ll cover you for volcanic eruptions, they won’t actually cover what you think they’re covering.

I’ll spare you the minor ones, but this one struck me as a contender for the Big Book of Bastards: my in-laws, who booked the accommodation using their credit card, have been informed by their insurers – Royal Bank of Scotland – that RBS will only pay for two-fifths of their costs.

The problem, apparently, is that while RBS’s travel insurance covers any travel you book with your RBS card, the cover only extends to the account holder(s), not the entire party – so in our case, I’m supposed to claim the remaining three-fifths of the cost from my own travel insurance.

Problem is, the booking wasn’t in my name, and it wasn’t booked using my card. So I can’t claim it on my travel insurance at all.

I’m sure that with sufficient threats they’ll pay up eventually, but it does demonstrate that the whole point of travel insurance (or any other insurance) is to find ways not to pay in the event of a claim. I know that the B in RBS stands for Bastards, but I’m still quite shocked at just how bastard-y RBS’s travel insurance wing has been.

The point to all this? With Mount Unpronounceable kicking off for the forseeable future and perhaps bringing its friends to the ash cloud party too, don’t just buy travel insurance on price or on headline benefits. Look for the loopholes.

Life, death and the Digital Economy Bill

The Digital Economy Bill gets rushed through Parliament today, potentially leading to whistleblowing sites being blocked. I’ve written a wee bit about it:

The bill doesn’t include anything about banning sites politicians and the military don’t want you to see, but it doesn’t need to. By including a clause that could enable the blocking of sites accused of copyright infringement, the bill could block WIkileaks, and collateralmurder.com, and any site that attempted to mirror the clip. The footage, like many things Wikileaks is given by whistleblowers, is copyrighted material.

Something kinda ewwwwww

I have no idea whether this is real or not, but it certainly isn’t safe for work. As Metafilter puts it:

The Joydick is a wearable haptic device for controlling video gameplay based on realtime male masturbation.

Heyho’s comment cracked me up.

I’m comforted by the idea that any guy who’d be interested in this would also spend the bulk of his time at home. Instead of being outdoors, where I may be.

As did Rhomboid’s:

Something something Cock Band.

Other people’s privacy

I meant to blog this earlier and completely forgot: it’s a typically incisive piece by Nicholas Carr on Google, Facebook and privacy.

Reading through these wealthy, powerful people’s glib statements on privacy, one begins to suspect that what they’re really talking about is other people’s privacy, not their own. If you exist within a personal Green Zone of private jets, fenced off hideaways, and firewalls maintained by the country’s best law firms and PR agencies, it’s hardly a surprise that you’d eventually come to see privacy more as a privilege than a right. And if your company happens to make its money by mining personal data, well, that’s all the more reason to convince yourself that other people’s privacy may not be so important.