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This post is just for Google really: introducing Shaun van Oorde-Grainger’s spanking new website, Delusions of Grainger. Get it? He’s not just a pretty face.

The Google Blog has a recent post entitled ‘Overview of our Accessible Services‘. Last time I looked at Google’s search code (which was only last week actually) I remember it being a particularly messy mix of invalid HTML and table soup (but this is Google: who for some reason are exempt from producing structureless mark-up on their main website in the 21st century, unlike almost everyone else on the planet).
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(Alternative title: My-quest-to-watch-Peep Show-as-soon-as possible- as-I-almost-certainly-miss-it-every-Friday).

Channel 4’s 4oD was down last Friday night at 11:30pm. This really isn’t that surprising it was just after the latest episode of Peep Show had aired, and I imagine thousands of people over the UK were wanting to watch it after getting home that evening.

Thankfully it was up again on Saturday morning and I downloaded the new episode without a hitch. Of course until I tried to watch it around 12pm, when quite possibly everyone else burned the night before were attempting to download the episode yet again.

Now this is where DRM (and bad design on the developer’s part) really bugs me: the video file was on my hard drive somewhere in some mystical format and location, but without being able to connect to the 4oD site, I couldn’t watch it. Madness. Surely it’s easy enough to change the service so you can watch downloads offline, but if this was a torrent download (or any regular download) then this offline business wouldn’t even be an issue.

In similar news, the BBC’s iPlayer is coming later this year, apparently.

Looking for hotels tonight on Radisson Hotels website and I quite literally got stuck. Trying to select a date range, the pop up date picker conveniently hides behind the big flashy Flash banner like some shy child cowering behind a parent’s leg.

Manually entering dates is also frustrating as some part of the Javascript intermittently clears the field when changing focus between the fields. Initially I honestly couldn’t get a date in. I’ve since tried again and it worked (barely). Just as well there’s a fairly obvious Reservations link in the top bar.

By the way, anyone know of any good hotels in Calgary?

I’m very excited about the fourth series of Peep Show. I’m also quite excited about being able to watch new Peep Show episodes on demand from Channel 4, something which they’ve been advertising quite heavily (their service being called “4oD“).

So I checked out the on-demand service yesterday after Angela had missed last night’s episode. I remember how easy it was catching up on Extras series two last year: just go to the BBC Two Extras site and click on ‘view latest episode’. Very easy.

Peep Show wasn’t quite that easy.

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Kurt Vonnegut is off to the big Breakfast of Champions in the sky.

Well, perhaps not quite a redux on my previous Live Mail post, more just a recent observation.

However, as I said in the last post, I am still compelled to check Hotmail now and again as I still have a few emails of importance coming in between the far more steady stream of spam. Clearing my inbox today I noticed the Live Mail team have changed the way the inbox interface is laid out. The main difference is that the checkbox for each item now shares its place with the new mail icon:

Basically both icons toggle depending on whether the email is new and/or selected. In practice this is just really bemusing to use. If you want to select messages to delete or move, there is no obvious checkbox. When you work out they’re hiding between mail icons (emphasis on hidden here), the actual task of selecting the check boxes requires a high degree of accuracy: the checkbox is sitting on anchor block linking to the email message, so if you’re slightly off target with the small checkbox you end up opening a message as opposed to selecting it.

And my last gripe is that the checkbox/mail icon column doesn’t line up with the master select checkbox in the top left corner. There is actually room for the checkbox to sit next to the mail icon and be underneath this master selector. Wouldn’t that make far more sense?

I don’t know what the rationale behind the design of this is, but the caveat here is that this is a beta product after all. Although I made that point in my last blog entry as well, after pointing out Live Mail was purely IE6 (now IE7 as well). Windows Live Mail now loads in Firefox 2.0, although load is a pretty abstract concept:

24 errors/504 warnings? Nice.

And for the record, Live Mail is still long way off the simplicity and usability of Gmail.

Alas, I’m on dialup. It’s been so long. I must say, when the modem connection sounds piped out of my laptop, I nearly shed a tear.

Almost.

Broadband come back!!

I got sent a link today from a work colleague to www.vox.com — Six Apart’s latest offering. The email described the site as MySpace for ‘thinking people’, which I couldn’t help be amused by. I visited Vox, and lo and behold, it looks exactly like that: another promising Web 2.0 social networking site, complete with snazzy pastels and rounded corners.

And that’s where the anxiety kicked in. I felt it coming. Then I heard a voice from within my head: “Oh no, not another site to figure out and keep up with”.
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With only a few days before the World Cup kick off, and less than a week before Australia plays Japan, last night we went shirt hunting. We have a slim chance of getting tickets for the Australia Croatia game, but chances are we’re going to be sitting in central Stuttgart with thousands of other not-so-lucky Australian and Croatian fans watching the game on a giant screen, drinking a few Löwenbräus and eating some wurst.
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