Odious Cinemas get it (sort of)

I think I might be in danger of over-reacting to Odious Cinemas - after all, it’s not like I actually use them or anything - but what a tightwad, pursed-lip, arrogant bunch of pricks they seem to be. Once upon a time there was someone who spent his own time and effort - probably worth in the low six figures if you were going to buy that kind of consultancy off the open market - to make their site work, and instead of realising that he was doing them a favour, Odious laywergrammed him.

So then they get deluged with nastygrams from pissed-off geeks the world over, and how did they respond? Three months or so of complete silence. Finally, instead of realising that they could have retrieved some of their lost whuffie by being nice to Matthew Somerville, they slap a splash screen and a glorified text file on the front of the site, and pretend that this is somehow a big deal:

This page has information on accessibility matters. It will be updated with news if and when [my emphasis] there are any developments…

Note that it doesn’t say “we realise our website blows chunks and we’re doing something about it”. It’s saying “we don’t really give a shit what our customers think, but here’s a bone we’re going to throw to you little people over there”.

And then they go on to say:

We support the principles of the ‘Disability Discrimination Act’ (1995) and are committed to recognising and responding to the needs of all disabled people.

Call me cynical, but that looks like a lawyer’s idea of buying time just in case any of their pissed-off ex-customers decide that it would be fun to make an example of them by bringing a DDA case. Call me even more cynical if I point out that the change appears to have been sychronised with a less-than-complimentary article by Jack Malvern in The Times.

And then - and this is the funniest part of all - rather than spend a bit of time and money making the site accessible (after all, they’d get a cheap deal from Matthew Somerville) they go and pay a real live person to sit on the end of a freephone number to answer booking queries. Gosh, how positively 21st-century. Guess I should forget about ever getting an RSS feed from them, then.

I have to keep telling myself (aside from “calm down, you’re over-reacting”) that these people are the distribution arm of the clueless jerks at the MPAA, so why should they know (or even want to know) anything about online standards and how to keep their customers happy? After all, if we don’t play ball with them, they’ll just sue us, right?

Odious Cinemans respond

Well - not personally to my email snot-o-gram to Luke “Can’t Be Bothered To Answer A Customer’s Email” Vetere, marketing director of Odious Cinemas, but just look at this. An “accessible” splash screen, with text-based film listings, and a great screed of pious “we’re doing everything we can to make ourselves accessible” cant and waffle. Bollocks to that - how about starting with an apology to Matthew Somerville?

How to remember good passwords

It seems like the average person has about a billion user accounts these days, and remembering the passwords for even a small fraction of these is usually beyond the grasp of most people. So we either a) use the same password for everything, which risks affecting pretty much our whole lives if it it compromised; b) writing each password down somewhere - which is hardly much of an improvement; or c) muddling along and forgetting most of them. Not so bad when all you need to get a new password is clicking on the “I’ve forgotten it” link and awaiting an email; less convenient when it’s the kind of online banking account that required a blood sample and a written excuse from your mother before they’ll deign to change your access details.

So this article on macosxhints.com is worth a look. It has some very useful - and more importantly memorable - tips for creating passwords which are not only easy to remember, but also secure.

Unfortunately it doesn’t have anything to say about memorable account names - one of my abiding pet hates are sites that force you to use their format for account names - particularly if they’re of the timxyz423 variety. But a useful set of tips, nevertheless.

(For Mac users, macosxhints.com is definitely a site that should be in your bookmarks - or better still, your newsreader. A lot of the information is fairly technical, but gems like this one aren’t unusual.)

Why you should use RSS in plain English

Found on the excellent Ideal Government site, the clearest explanation I’ve seen so far why you should be providing RSS feeds on your site and for your data - in plain English:

• Having a way to get regular updates from a source you trust and want to follow without remembering to check it regularly is certainly convenient.
• Although updates by email can do that, our inboxes are already full of messages that we are not really interested in. The pull nature of syndication feeds puts the receivers of the information in control, as they can remove the feeds from their news aggregators.
• Newreaders allow you to aggregate feeds from various blogs and websites, which save much time. You do not have to download each page to read the content and you can avoid reading articles whose headlines do not interest you. This is a major advantage for someone (like me) who follows 60+ blogs that are updated a daily.

Breaking up in Powerpoint

Well here’s a use for Powerpoint you don’t see any day:

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately:  and here’s what I think

I love the idea of charting mood swings in a pie chart!

OMFG - you can hire Tesla coils!!

HVFX, producers of the world’s most spectacular electrical special effects

What’s going on at BBC News?

The online BBC technology news always used to be a diet of half-researched excitable regurgitations of anti-virus vendor press releases and oh-look-how-wacky-the-geeks-are stories about Kevin Call-me-Cyborg Warwick — now two days after they hit Slashdot, they’re running stories about rumours of a Google browser and Sony supporting MP3.

What’s going on? Are they now employing someone who’s got beyond the page of cartoons in their copy of Windows 95 For Dummies???

Vote for

Says the Lib Dems’ Simon Hughes:

“Like Radio 4’s classic Just a Minute, our challenge is to say - give us 60 seconds and we will give you a good reason to vote Lib Dem.”

Only if I can challenge for deviation, hesitation or repetition…

The modern way to break up a relationship

by Powerpoint…

Pros and cons of business blogging

Here’s an interesting summary of the advantages and disadvantages of blogs from an organisational perspective, which starts by pointing out something that I think gets overlooked a great deal:

Isn’t it interesting that some of the most significant ‘revolutions’ of the last twenty years have all had to do with writing? How retro is that? First we had email, then webpages, then mobile phone texting, and now blogs. All this reflects a trend whereby the world is becoming more formal in how it communicates. Instead of body language and endless conversations, communication has shifted towards endless words on a screen.

What makes the summary of pros and cons all the more unusual is that they’re written by someone who doesn’t maintain a blog himself:

There’s money in words; real value, real worth. I’m not a blogger but I do have this newsletter and I can tell you that these 500 or so words that I publish every week have seen a major return on investment for me…

…This is an age where you will build your professional reputation word by word.

Certainly an opinion that we’d strongly agree with.