Suggestion: re-think Bond Street Station’s Escalator and Corridor directions

Organising life and people around London’s Tube network I presume is quite a challenge, and Bond street with its 38 million passengers per year (~105,000/day) is certainly not likely to be one of the easy ones. Much of the station has been built in the 1900s and 1970s and therefore struggles to cater for today’s crowds. The English are reasonably well known for their predictable behaviour and a generic love for queuing, and hate for queue-jumping. The ultimate example of this is what someone referred to as the one-person-orderly-queue, easily observable by looking at bus stops with one person standing spot on at the front of the stop, underneath the sign.

None of that applies to Bond Street station. For those who are unfamiliar with the actual site, the station is an interchange between the Central Line, built in the 1900s and the Jubilee Line (’70s) with narrow corridors and a smaller maze of escalators and more corridors. Although the various corridors are labelled accordingly to TfL’s crowd control intentions (exit, entrance, this way/that way), most passengers love to ignore these guidelines, practically resulting in extra time being spent trying to get around the station because of the ‘clashing’ direction of the moving crowds.

The actual layout of the station can be seen above. This is the best sketch I managed to find and annotated it with light and blue arrows. What’s referred to as Fleet line on the image is the Jubilee line nowadays. What’s on the image? We have two entrances running into a large chamber/ticket hall. Roundabout the middle is the interchange area. Light blue arrows mark the ‘down’ direction, dark blues mark the ‘up’ direction as currently designated on the station. The other details are unmarked and not relevant for this discussion.

The problem is the following: people descending from the main ticket hall are basically directed into the crowds that try to ascend from the Jubilee line. This is made somewhat worse by the fact that people descending from the main hall to the Central line corridors face a sign that says  “<– // –>” – in other words while passengers are encouraged to take either directions from the sign, in reality this confuses people who start standing around in an attempt to understand the sign. People are coming from the lower levels, people are coming from the upper levels and they all bump into the crowds wondering around or wishing to exit the station.

At this point, people start using all the narrow corridors in whatever direction they are taking. Since those corridors are certainly not wider than 3m/10ft, and can’t accommodate for more than 3 or 4 people walking past side-by-side, walking around becomes slow and somewhat dangerous as people may push each other and thus fall down the stairs.

IMO what would be a logical way to help the problem is to reverse the two escalators so that they’be going up to the ticket hall from the middle level. This would create a better ascending flow of the crowds and perhaps eliminate some of the ‘clashing’ of people around. I’ve sent the idea to TfL but they haven’t really replied to it. Too bad. Would be worth trying I think.

Get your Momma drunk this March….

Dependent on where you’re from and what/how much you know about British culture, the idea of pubs might come slightly unusual or unfamiliar. Although I guess there’s a translated word for pub in pretty much any language, however its cultural meaning is likely to differ from what a pub in this country is. So, a pub in the UK tends to be the place where people drink and wind their gloom, however it usually also presumes the idea of not being stabbed on the spot while there. This is a major “lost in translation” moment, because for example Hungarian pubs are the places where most ppl wouldn’t go unless they ether have a need for cheap booze, or being knifed. The majority of English pubs are neither that cheap, nor that dangerous.

The word pub is an abbreviation of “public house”, though also sometimes referred to as “free house”, because people are free to go in there. The specific photo on the left was shot at one of the pub chains yesterday, and it’s inviting the guests to book a place for Mothers’ Day. As for myself, I’m not much of a family-oriented person, which isn’t to say I don’t care about my parents, yet I don’t go head over heels to get them stuff each year just because it’s another marketing-driven day to celebrate. Living literally a thousand miles doesn’t help either.

Nonetheless, it’s supposed to be a sort of special event, and I am really wondering why people would feel like getting Momma to the pub is special. Then just do nothing instead, probably it’s for the better…

The mystery about OS management for parents.

Slightly random topic, but I dare to make an attempt at it. Long story short, I’ve been reading a number of amusing articles recently on how certain Linux users view Win7 and the other way around. I have little experience with non-Windows OSs, yet I am in a constant search for something for my mum. Try not to laugh.

I’m not an IT-pro, as in it’s not my profession, however I guess, while it’s not impossible for WinXP/Win7 to trick me, I can dodge most of the bullets, as I’ve been playing with the versions and their settings since around 1997. Unlike my parents, who’d panic if the Word icon moved a column. Then they’d Skype me, saying, “Johnny, my computer esta muy loca!” (well, kindof. I’m not Johnny, and they speak Hungarian [only]). So I set out on my quest once to try to find them an OS that requires minimal intervention on my side. I’m willing to learn and get my hands dirty, not the least because I can sandbox with virtual computers without harm. Try to ignore the legal aspect of the question for now.

• OSx: is a problematic one. The main issue is twofold: 1), it needs a Mac. I know, “no shit, Sherlock!“, but still. Although there are ways around this slight problem, I don’t really want an OS on my parents’ computer that keeps bitching about hardware glitches and lack of drivers, or just offering poor performance bcs of limitations. I think this is a bit of a deal-breaker here, because the price of Apple products are out of bounds with reality.  While I genuinely admire the “Jobsian” marketing machine, I am slightly unsure that a) my parents need an i7 with an SSD [or anything similar], b) Dell’s i7/SSD combo is really £800 worse than Apple’s, especially considering that they are both made by Foxconn. The other problem [2)] is that the system is very closed. Though there are software that can run Windows programs or even emulate it, that defeats the purpose. They don’t have any other Apple products. Furthermore, I don’t actually find the OSx to be that user-friendly. There are a lot of good functions in the OSx that can be useful for people who understand why iCloud is a great idea, but as long as my parents keep mixing up Picasa with Gmail and Dropbox (seriously), I wouldn’t force them too much. Perhaps this hinders the whole switching process, I acknowledge that.
• Ubuntu: I have a very amusing experience with this. Well, irony. As said, I’m somewhat inexperienced with Linux distributions, so, trying to be genuinely in the shoes of my parents, I downloaded what is supposed to be the most n00b-friendly distro, Ubuntu. Although installation went well, problems ensued when I tried to install Chrome on the system as I was asked to get a C-compiler. Well, compile my ass. Seriously, if I was my mother, I’d then be stuck with a system that doesn’t speak my non-technical language, and no Skype to call anyone to help out. Yes, there’s a version of Firefox, and people can google around for solutions, but that’s not for dummies. Parents are dummies. The same applies for downloading software for Linux. Many of them are poorly documented, and require in-depth knowledge of the system to install/work.  I have found the package manager to be more confusing than helpful. Someone was complaining that Windows does not have a package manager. While this is true, I think the everyday user doesn’t need to get involved with the depths of update-installations. Just update for god’s sake. On the positive side, there has been a positive progress in the recent years towards the ability to run Windows-software. Again, this somewhat defeats the point, yet going cold turkey with the parents is likely to cause an awful lot of headache for me.
• Unix: I didn’t even bother trying it. It’s not for people who get lost at the first prompt.
• Windows: what else, it’s still in the pot of options. In all fairness, I’ve still found Windows to be the most parent-friendly OS, but not at all costs. It requires a lot of testing. My parents were switched to Win7 only about a year ago, when I became assured that any silly things that crop up I can handle via TeamViewer. (TV is available for some other OSs, I know.) Win8 is completely out of the question, it won’t happen. Metro would freak them out. And me. Yet Windows is a very mysterious software. It doesn’t work out-of-the-box, because if reinstalled, it takes a long and expensive overseas phonecall to discuss where the (W)LAN drivers might be. And that’s to assume there are any at hand, otherwise, it’s dooooomed. That aside, computers that come with Win pre-installed come with a lot of crap on them. I need to remotely clear all of that. And then hope things work. I spent the last few weeks being annoyed the constant BSODs of my Win7 on a newly built computer, just to find in a forum post that D-Tools can cause cockups like this. No sign of it in the BSOD analyses, no sign of it upon running verifier, nothing. What’s dreadful about Windows is that one can get lucky, and have a (properly maintained) installation that lasts 5-6 years, or one that you do your best to maintain properly, and still dies every two months.

As a conclusion, I’d say two things. Since I’m pretty much an expert at what Windows can throw at a home user, for me that’s home turf, so I’ll probably have an affinity to it. This also means that I was an expert at say Linux, I’d most likely feel similarly about it. At the same time, I still think that once set up properly, Windows does a better job. This doesn’t require constant maintenance if the user understands that downloading all sorts of crap is not a good idea. I guess the last thing is simply that as long as the majority of computers run Windows, and the majority of software are written for Windows. This is an issue, when they need stuff like drivers and interface for a heart-rate monitor and what not. You can call this special needs, but in all fairness, I’m not sure it’s really that special. Perhaps mobile-based software will offset some of the current desktop computing in the future, but that’s still to come. And needs to speak Hungarian, or any other language for that reason.

SEO on a New Website? Content first!

I met up with a friend of mine today. She’s in her late 30s, has experience with events management, as well as professional engagement with make-up. At the same time she’s not a techy person at all, which is fine, as we all have our interests. She was asking for my opinion on how she should proceed trying to establish her website and getting it on the top of search engine results. Everyone’d like that I guess! Her aim is to set up two different websites, one for each of the areas mentioned (events [B2C, wedding-style] and make-up).

She was saying that she had conversations with different friends and business owners in the recent past that offered her various advice and services. Some promised PR, SEO, monthly updates and maintenance, Google AdWords, etc, for a hefty price, around $400+ per month. She was also interested in learning more about running pages on FB, and how she could attract more users. At this point, I think we were a bit ahead of reality. Again, appreciating she’s not a geek, she didn’t understand the difference between impressions and clicks. None of the previous contacts bothered to explain it to her.

Slowing it down a bit, I tried to explain/gave the following advice, which I’d generally suggest to anyone trying to get into the online world:

• Get the content sorted first. On the website. Do try to make the content SEO-friendly (obviously), but also user-friendly. Good SEO is based on good content, that is also actually relevant to the user. Putting just a load of keywords, even if as sentences might not be useful by itself. Even if she does enlist professional SEO help, the content matters a lot more, because once people click through, if the content is not relevant for the users, they won’t hesitate to close the tab. This is a waste of money even if she’s not specifically paying for it via AdWords.
• In case of a site selling products, another challenge is to get the product and design right, but that’s not directly related to the topic. (Well, not fully at least.)
• Relevant content is more likely to get picked up naturally than via small odd sites that just collect links and operate as the backbone of SEO. The other issue is that Google might occasionally cut off such links if they think there’s something dodgy going on there. There is always the problem of new sites not being found easily (as they don’t appear in search), but the content is still king IMO.
• Try to understand how AdWords work. It’s not rocket science and quite a bit of money can be saved with it. It’s also a great way of actually having an idea as to what’s hot and what’s not, rather than outsourcing this information and being dependent on advice from others regarding your own market/niche.
• Try to understand the basics. Knowing what the difference is between an impression and a click is actually useful, partially because it helps not appearing like a complete n00b. If you can convince the partners that you’re at least somewhat knowledgeable about the topic, you can get better prices and better cooperation from them.
• She was inquiring about setting up a FB page but not running ads for it. As such this is perfectly feasible, but again having a page just for the sake of it might not be useful. Users need to be driven to that site and they need to be engaged with. For the events site, this might be a bit more complicated, because while people buy make-up every-so-often, events are organised for a person/organisation less often. You’d hope not getting married on a weekly basis. In other words, putting up something cute for the ladies and chatting to them is a good idea, but people need to be aware of the page, not just to the extent of ‘liking’ it, but engaging with it.
• PR and newsletters are good when done properly. It’s a bit of a peacock-effect, but the more noise you generate (until a certain limit), the more likely is that there will be positive response. Once again, it matters what you put into the newsletter, which is in turn somewhat dependent on the product. AFAIK the response rate to such communications is around <5%, but it’s still a decent way to remind people that your company still exists.

Thoughts and comments are welcome.

How not to beat January – Nutritional Labelling

Not saying I live a healthy lifestyle. In general, though I actively avoid McDs style fast food, I don’t eat too much salad, don’t watch calories, do eat pizzas, and don’t really keep active. Been doing a bit of Krav for a year and a few months but got lazy recently and quit. Having said that, my weight’s been roundabout constant for the last 5 years. Oh and I don’t smoke. I drink a bit though, socially of course.

New year, is widely known as the time of the year to make promises we don’t keep. Because of this, I don’t even bother, but many people have the urge to start getting active and thus [hope to] look less fat. (remember the ad, which said “ugly and fat? join the gym and just be ugly!“)

Naturally, there are loads of companies, usually the food industry of course that tries to tell people that by having a balanced diet (as in eat loads of crap, and balance it out with eating photons), one can completely avoid the annoyance of having to get active and move those bums.

What specifically prompted me to write this article was the ad pictured on the left, basically an expensive piece of fruit juice (£1.70 for 250ml) made by Innocent. While I don’t have anything against premium priced products, I find the idea of a fruit juice, which has a lot of naturally occurring sugars in it as the way to beat obesity, slightly odd. I know, balanced diet. Balanced, yes, it has 2 of your “five a day'”-s, and 25% of your daily sugar RDA. Yet, don’t you think it’s a bit amusing?

The food lobby perhaps isn’t as powerful in the UK as it is in the USA, but some changes in legislation would still not go astray in this country either. One of my anti-favourites is the serving size of chilled and frozen products. A 600g soup (mostly water) contains 2 servings. A 550g ready meal contains 1 serving. A 370g pizza is 2 servings, though I’ve seen nutri info relating to a quarter of a pizza as well. Confusing? An official serving size for corn flakes and similar products is around 30-50g, plus a bit of milk. I think my stock-standard breakfast bowl fits a pint (UK pint, 568ml). Still not confused?

Nutritional values are usually displayed as per serving (or in worse cases, per 100g, if at all) on packagings, therefore whoever takes the time to actually read those values and attempt to calculate the proportion of RDA they’re getting upon consuming the product in question must do a bit of calculating on-the-fly to get to the proper values. Add this to the ongoing Sainsbury’s and Tesco promotions, where you can get a “Meal for one” deal, with a main (400g ready meal), a side (mostly a garlic bread, reasonably large), and a dessert (some sweet stuff of course). If a half container of soup is a serving, then what is a three-course meal? 6 servings? How is that in line with what’s on the back of the packaging?

Without trying to be bitching constantly, I think there are organisations that collect large amounts of data on grocery purchasing and consumption habits (such as Kantar Worldpanel, most of all). In an ideal world, these companies should be consulted when establishing what a proper serving size is. I would guess, that there are proportionately few people who have a half pack of microwaved soup as a starter, followed by a half serving of ready meal or a quarter of pizza. Especially because most people are in a dash to finish @ work, so in essence, whatever is in the packaging really becomes one serving. Something to keep in mind perhaps.

Not just Smeagol lied…

“Hobbits have roamed the land for centuries hiking all over the place” – said no one ever. I’ve lately been spending some time hiking in and around England, which is often known for its natural beauty and rainfall. Modern technology has done a great deal to make non-extreme hiking bearable to mortal (lazy) humans as myself. Do spend a couple of hundred quids on gear and you’re good and dry (ish) for a day or two. While England actually doesn’t usually get a lot more rain than many continental countries, the actual format of it differs: instead of major summer storms, it’s just drizzling/pissing down constantly. Now England is a pretty flat place in all fairness, with the exception of a few peaks. It’s also kind of warmish for most of the year, but if you’ve seen New Zealand, or even Mordor…hehh, that’s something different, believe me!

Now back to the hobbit thing. If you’ve read or seen the Tolkien works, there are a few things to note about hobbits:

• they are extremely unlikely to get out of their village,
• are poorly equipped for walking (Sam and the kitchen cupboard packed up…),
• and not the least they are short, meaning short strides,
• they nonetheless seem to happily walk for hundreds of miles, through rain and blistering cold, or swampy heat.

This is just to say, that I think Tolkien lied! (sarcasm) Hobbits couldn’t have simply walked into Mordor after all, because 1) they would have died by the time of getting there of hygiene-related issues, or over-exhaustion, and 2) their kit was improper for the task. Gandalf should have conjured them some Gore-Text bootses…

The thing about personal computers (demise and all…)

If you’re following the news, there have been a few comments in the past days from PC manufacturers regarding the allegedly poor sales of the new Win8. Furthermore, if you read some of the typical new year’s predictions articles regarding gadget usage for 2013, it’s a common thing to find that experts are predicting the continuing falling sales of PCs, and perhaps the sales of a few manufacturing organisations/departments (ie. companies quitting the market).

What many writers ignore to notice (I’m not saying they fail to, after all it should be their area of expertise…) is that people don’t need personal computers. Not even if HP would love to make them personal again. For the time being, I’m talking about households, not companies, that’s a different business, and I’m pretty sure that Dell and some of the others are doing okay in their corporate sectors. But there are two (three, four?) aspects to consider when looking at home PC usage:

1. the why,
2. the performance,
3. and for some people also mobility
4. and interconnectivity (not just in terms of cables.).

So why then? Most people aren’t working professionally in their homes on their computers, and even if so, they aren’t doing hardcore, CPU-heavy stuff. I’ll discount gaming from here for the time being. I’m sure I could get some statistics for this, but it’s in the morning and I’m sleepy, yet, out of my 700 so-called friends on Facebook, only about 10-20 of them are coders/designers/music people that do stuff on their home machine. Most of them have Macs, though they don’t tend to live in the USA. The other 680-odd people need their device for basic tasks, such as browsing, typing up stuff, occasionally watching videos (not everyone), and so on. Especially with the dawning of free internet file and media storage (dropbox, flickr, picasa, yt etc), there is now limited need for devices with a lot of HDD space. Devices can and do upload stuff directly to the internet, without intermediaries.

As much as I personally don’t fancy the Chromebook because I do have a tendency to store 1TB of HD films and 115G of my own photos on my PC, the average user could actually well do with a Chromebook-style device. Tiny SSD to boot the OS quickly, and do everything online. No massive storage in the computer. For now, the platform isn’t there yet, given the lack of free wifi and black spots on the 3G coverage in parts of countries, but it will be there soon. Gamers are a bit of a different cup of tea, but face it, there have been strong pushes from Microsoft and Sony to convert gamers to the console market, with decent success.

Performance: for tasks like those above, nobody really needs an Ultrabook with an i7-3xxx. Intel is very keen to replicate the success of the Macbook/Pros but it will not happen as long as Apple products are chic to have, rather than being looked at as ridiculously expensive devices that restrict the user into a specific software environment and provide performance that the majority of people don’t even comprehend. Hands up, how many Mac users know the difference between an i5 and an i7? 2nd and 3rd-gen differences? Whoa. What’s a CPU? I’m not saying this is bad, from a marketing point of view, certainly for Apple, this is epic great.

The bottleneck in performance for years now have been the HDD in any decent personal computer. Strictly speaking of HDDs, their average read/write speeds are about 10-20 megs/sec because rather than really queuing those commands, HDDs are doing everything at the same time, slowing down to a grinding halt. Nobody cares if a SATA2-compatible device’s max speed is hundreds of megs per sec if that never happens. As long as computer manufacturers keep charging extortion-like amounts for SSDs that can otherwise be bought off eBay for less than half that much, and users aren’t educated about why say a Samsung 830 series device is actually good for them, they will only see that it takes a minute to launch the OS + Word on their PC and it takes 3 seconds to wake the tablet and open some word processor.

Tablets and higher-priced phones (SGS2/3, Note 1/2 and equivalents) are very good at providing the sort of performance that users really need. This, coupled up with fast internet services (provision) are likely to cover the needs of most typical PC user.

Mobility: desktop computers aren’t massively mobile, that’s probably not new news to anyone. Laptops are somewhat better, and the dawn of tablets had a good push on battery life for laptops too. There is now a need for devices that can play films while you’re flying from London to LA. Most ordinary computers fail at this, but many tablets don’t. Again, for someone who needs to render 3D, they will most likely need a solution that is less mobile and more workstation-like, so they are a different lot.

Interconnectivity: not just in terms of cables. Yes it’s very important for many people that they can hook up their cameras to their iPads (assuming they still use cameras), which is something that tablets aren’t really good at. This is due to marketing and is something I do hate, but then I don’t have a tablet. What these devices are good at on the other hand is synchronizing data between locations. Dropbox app, this-app, that-app. Needless to say. Many now offer offline/delayed data sync features, and the user can have their stuff backed up or distributed easily in minutes. Mums don’t need a lot more than that when it comes to gadgets.

+1: price: Kudos to Google on this one but now that decent tablets are in the <$200 range, there is really a limited reason why people would want a PC. Even for those who like big monitors and keyboards, there are solutions that cost a lot less than a computer. The problem with Microsoft’s new Win RT series is that they are ludicrously expensive, and again feature hardware that most people don’t need. Worst of all, it’s Windows, and it’s not compatible with most of the old Windows software. Kapisch?

In other words: It’s not an end, it’s an evolution. Personal computers served a need for a long time and since most users didn’t build their own devices, they were bound to what they were given, without neither understanding the underlying hardware issues, nor caring about them, nor having a solution to them. (sticking to the HDD/SSD issue as an example). PCs are a bit like many other things used by mankind in the past. Yes we had horse-drawn carriages that changed humanity (transport, logistics), yes we had film cameras, and yes we have PCs. There are a few film cameras and traditional means of transportation still in existence, just as PCs won’t die out completely, but home usage is shifting. The corporate lot is a different story entirely.

Murder mystery party (NYE P) Photography and Socialising

In my latest endeavour (dammit it’s difficult to spell that word!) to spice up my life a little, I’ve signed up to be the photographer (occasionally) with a meetup group that organises slightly more intellectual events. For those unaware as to what a meetup is, it’s both a socialising website that encourages random people to meet (usually not for dating purposes) and the events themselves are called meetups. It’s a bit of a sandbox opportunity for ‘forever alone’ type people, yet there’s a real opportunity to make friends or at least develop some sort of superficial connections with other human beings.