Ah, Northern Snail. Your trains are slow, noisy and usually filthy. This morning, I was jammed into one of your three-carriage rush-hour trains, in a corner of the doorway (no seats to be had), making Uncomfortable Proximity Friends with the Yeti Beard Guy (ever seen that Friends episode? Yeah, he was like that).

I happened to be reading your brand new magazine, Northern. It makes your company look glossy and friendly, when in fact all I have experienced is grumpy staff, dirty trains and grumpy customers (due to the previous two).

Yeti neighbour from Friends

I don’t want to have to wait for the Transpennine Express trains just to get a train that is clean, comfortable, well-insulated from noise and fresh-smelling. There’s always a diesel smell on your trains and the engine noise is normally coupled with disturbing rattles and bumps as they make their journeys – slowly, judging by the way other companies’ trains whip past (making the windows rattle and the doors suck outwards). It’s not the best way to start my morning.

And then there’s the bus company. You’ve decided to withdraw the Sunday service completely through my (not tiny) village. And you’ve put the prices up despite making the Mon-Sat service every half hour instead of every twenty minutes.

At least I’m sitting on a nice clean seat as I endure the company of screeching teenage girls, or try to fend off the legendary “Six ‘o’ Clock Nutters Club”, who, as their name suggests, begin appearing on the buses from 6pm onwards. For some reason, these people always want to talk to me. No, I am not interested in your grandson being locked up for drug dealing. He might be a nice boy to you, but to me he’s probably a potential mugger.

All of the above means I am usually in a foul mood by the time I reach Armpit City. When I am trying to continue a course which is getting steadily less friendly with my love of food and sleep, being told that more and more of the work will be group-based is not good news.

Hey, universities: some of your students commute and cannot simply hop out of bed to meet people and practice working with equipment. When I’m paying you so much, how about a little consideration for the fact that my commute works out to about 40 minutes and costs a fortune?

In the meantime, all I want for Yuletide is a comfortable, affordable public transport service. Which I can sit down on. Please?

{/rant}

[image credit: Northern Rail Class 142 Pacer, by Ian Britton, via FreeFoto.com.]

Technorati Tags: buses, public-transport, student-life, trains

The word ‘nomophobia‘ was coined back in 2008 to describe the feeling of panic that comes from being without your phone. I now understand that feeling.

All those 12 year olds out there who haven’t got phones while all their friends have? I now have such sympathy for them. Never before have I been struck by such an urge to text somebody. I worried that the two or three important phone calls I was waiting for would happen while I was out. I even lost the ability to tell the time – I am one of those people who checks the time on their phone and doesn’t wear a watch.

Most strangely, I started to really notice other people’s phones. More than I usually do, I mean.

Now, I’m in the market for a new phone due to fact that the 3, 6 and 9 keys on my previously-trusty old Samsung D600 have started playing up. On my list of contenders: the iPhone (obviously, considering I’m a total geek) and the Samsung Tocco/Lite.

Both of these phones have apparently taken over my university campus, resulting in lots of worried students noticing my sudden stalkerish tendencies. How does the screen scroll on the Tocco? How’s the reception on the iPhone? I observed from afar and probably freaked a lot of people out.

Those important phone calls? As my bad luck would have it, one of them came when my phone was languishing on the sideboard. The person concerned said they would call me back the following day, except…

The day after, to add insult to injury, my mobile phone suddenly stopped receiving any signal. Orange, Orange, I love your 2 for 1 cinema tickets and 300 free text messages which mean I only need to top up £10 every other month (I’m more a texter than a talker)… but I want service, damnit!

Here’s hoping that when Orange and T-Mobile complete their merger, they will end up with a heavenly combination of T-Mobile’s price plans and customer service and Orange’s freebies.

Especially since they are soon to carry both the Samsung Tocco and the iPhone. Shame I’m a Libra… making choices is not my strong point!

[image credit Cell in grass by Guido_capi via stock.xchng]

Technorati Tags: cellphones, mobile-phone, nomophobia

Classes started this week at Armpit City University, and it didn’t take me long to realise that university is not set up for commuters. These kids carry practically nothing with them! How on earth do they manage? Oh, right, they’ve all got iPhones to check their email and can drop in to the dorms to pick up and unload stuff. I’ve got to carry everything with me. Learning to downsize my bag is one of the biggest lessons I’ve had to learn this week. No, Aeryn, you really don’t need to bring your netbook every day. You’ve got public access computers all over the place. Suck it up and use them, preferably without doing an Adrian Monk and wiping down the mouse.

My first proper lecture went pretty smoothly, and the other people in my classes seem really nice. I even made a contribution. Where did this sudden fear of public speaking come from? Me, the tiny five year old girl singing and dancing to entertain the other customers in the hairdressers’, and then going on to join the local youth theatre? During the five hour(!) gap between my two classes, I even typed up my notes and submitted a piece of homework well before the deadline. How very studious of me.

It has occurred to me that university is a lot like a flat-pack piece of furniture. Imagine receiving a furniture catalogue through your front door and spotting the perfect piece that will finish your whole living space for good. The holy grail of furniture. It’s expensive – so much so that you are going to have to take out a large loan to cover the cost, but you decide that the benefits this furniture will bring to your life are worth it.

So you send off the form and a few weeks later, a van pulls up outside your home. Delighted, you rush out to meet the delivery guys, only to have them hand you a flat box. You have to put this furniture together yourself.

“OK,” you think, your trepidation growing. You paid all that money, and you don’t want to waste it, so you tell yourself that learning to put the thing together will be doable.

But upon opening the box, you find a piece of paper from the manufacturers.

“Please note that the following piece of furniture is incomplete. These instructions will only help you so far, and not all of the pieces are included in the box. Please proceed immediately to your preferred DIY outlet and purchase the following: 1 Philips head screwdriver; 1 monkey wrench; 1 Allen key, 30 20mm screws…”

I can’t imagine you would be too pleased. Then, reading further down the note, you see that you will also be expected to obtain a large piece of wood and use a jigsaw to cut out the shape for that wonderful frontpiece you fell in love with in the catalogue. Followed by a tiny, almost unreadable diagram.

Well, a degree is a lot like that. You pay a lot of money for it, only to be told that you still need to buy all your textbooks (the screwdrivers, screws, etc) and that your lecture notes won’t be of any help to you at all when it comes to the assignments. You’ve got to teach yourself (carving out the frontpiece yourself). Sort of makes you wonder why they call it a “tuition” fee, if the stuff they teach you in lectures isn’t enough to, you know, actually teach you what you need to pass this degree you’re paying them so much for.

And that is why university education is like flat-pack furniture from Hell.

This week also brought with it the unwelcome and yet inevitable news that the bus fares have gone up again. I can’t wait until I can (finally!) drive. Driving might not be eco-friendly, but it is certainly cheaper per mile. Hey, Government – if you want people to get out of their cars and onto public transport, stop letting them put the fares up! £1.45 to go around 2 miles one way is not on…

[image credit: Doodled desks by igoghost via stock.xchng]

Countless trees have been felled and turned into probably non-recyclable glossy leaflets, which are thrust under your nose at every turn. Those irritating people with clipboards should take lessons from some of these kids. They stand right outside the main entrances to the buildings, move in, shout something (“Free alcohol!”, “2 for 1 drinks at the union bar!”), throw a leaflet at you and turn to their next target.

Many of the leaflets just end up in the bin. Many more end up littering the floor, spoiling ‘your’ city. The urge to throttle each and every one of the purveyors of this face-to-face spam rises.

One company – you don’t bother finding out which – has employed a girl to hand out stickers declaring “I Love Breasts!” You wonder if it would be worth moving within stickering distance to ask if she really feels good about objectifying not just herself, but her entire gender. You are ‘given’ a leaflet for one of those School Disco dress-up events; the creepiness of the sexy schoolgirl uniform hit you a long time ago when the pervs used to hang around the school railings.

Around 20% of students’ loans and grants have disappeared into the electronic ether. None of your modules of study are showing up on your student profile, and as everyone in the same boat tries to solve the problem, the computer system responsible crashes.

Half the class hasn’t even been able to make it through online enrolment. Your seminar groups will be “up on the board” by the end of the week – they hope. Until then, you don’t know where you’re going to have to be and when. You’re looking at another expensive train fare to check said board for ten minutes. And you end up with your head in your hands, weeping in despair.

One talk starts with someone from the student health team saying that you are probably going to catch swine flu. Or meningitis, which you will mistake for swine flu, then die… and it kind of goes downhill from there.

The kids don’t seem too bothered by any of it. They dress like they’ve stepped off the catwalk and jump at every chance of free alcohol (“Where’s the free lemonade for people who don’t drink alcohol?” you think irritably). For them, it’s just an extension of the system they’ve only recently left. You worry about the workload and its potential impact on your stress levels. Your back seizes up and your feet hurt.

The most important thing to remember, you tell yourself, is to work through it all one step at a time. You read every GTD article you can get your browser on. Most of it goes over your head, but the bits you manage to understand actually turn out to be kind of helpful. Your Remember the Milk list explodes with tasks. Check this, fill out this…

Then, just as soon as it all started, it’s over. You’re still missing two of your class times, and keep hitting the Refresh button on your email. There is no calm after this storm.

Welcome to university.

Technorati Tags: college, student-life, university

My Notebooks

Awwww!

I have four notebooks: Personal, Work, Study and one called Snippets, which is where I store random web clips such as cute bunny pictures.

(Sadly, I have no credit information for this pic, but I want to know!)

My first step was to look at my existing tags and figure out which sub-notebooks I would have used for each main notebook.

A lot of scribbling later, and I had a rough draft.

For my Personal notebook I created main tags called: HOUSEHOLD (for recipes, plumbers’ business card, etc), LISTS and OUT-N-ABOUT (for details of restaurants, etc).

WORK was its own main tag, plus sub-tags for guiding-scouting, webdesign and writing.

My STUDY main tag held tags for courses, research and spiritual.

Evernote "Folders" in action

Note the use of capital letters for the main tags. This makes it much easier to spot main tags in the list, and therefore it is easier to collapse them when looking at other notebooks (e.g, I collapse the STUDY and WORK tag-folders when I am working exclusively with PERSONAL stuff).

I was also missing a way to “star” important notes – again solved using a main tag ^STARRED (the ^ keeps it at the top of the list). Now, anything I want to keep an eye on gets dragged to this tag.

As you can see from the screenshot, when the Personal notebook is selected, the STUDY and WORK main tags are greyed out. Only the main tags associated with the Personal notebook are in black.

This system is constantly refining itself, but hopefully it will provide a jumping-off point for anyone looking to replicate some sort of sub-notebook functionality into Evernote!

Is the problem really table-hogging, or something else?
The video seems to be saying that it is customers staying a long time (and using the internet) that is causing independent coffee shops to lose money. How about the cost of bandwidth and electricity? Is that a factor? And if not…

What about people who are reading books, writing novels without a laptop or talking endlessly to their friends?
Table-hogging causes lost business. I know this from experience working in a coffee shop – people see the place is full, turn around and leave. They want a sit-down more than they want your particular style of coffee. But…

You don’t need to have a laptop to be a table-hog. What about those people with broadsheet newspapers who spread them across a table meant for three or four people? Or the noisy groups of kids who order one drink between them and sit around for hours, screaming and taking photos (with the bloody flash on)?

My local Starbucks kicks them out after a couple of hours, thankfully, but that side of table-hogging is not explored in the video. Instead, it is those Naughty Internet Users who are causing all of the problems.

Doing the (sort-of) maths, the people mentioned in the video are actually courteous customers who should be loved.
On average, they seem to stay for three hours and have three drinks each – that’s more than most people will buy in a conversation with their friends. And really, if they’re buying a drink, shouldn’t that reset their table useage as if they were a new customer? Or do you want them to walk around the block and come in again?

Starbucks is mentioned specifically as a problem due to its free wi-fi program pilfering all the customers.** Why hasn’t Starbucks lost money if it is just a case of table-hogging?
Like you, Mr Coffee Shop Owner, Starbucks has a limited number of seats. It has to pay its electricity and internet bills, food and drink costs, rent, etc. This cost may be spread out among its stores (I don’t know how they do that sort of thing), but a simple law of physics states that two customers cannot sit in the same chair at the same time (at least not without being told off for causing a hazard).

And finally… if all the laptop users are moving to Starbucks, aren’t you glad to get rid of them? Isn’t that what you were trying to do? Geez, make your mind up!

I am beginning to think this is simply a case of “We can’t pay our enormous bandwidth bill” dressed up as yet another story filed under OMG: The Internet is DESTROYING SOCIETY!!!11!!

[image credit: Working late by ljleavell via stock.xchng]

♦ ♦ ♦ The Footnotes ♦ ♦ ♦

* And another thing: The BBC had to send someone to New York to cover this story? Are there no coffee shops in the UK with this problem? Apparently not. Mr Coffee Shop Owner, your prayers have been answered. Move to the UK, and set up business here.

**Shhh… I’ve recently spotted promotional materials in Starbucks that hint at a similar free wi-fi program rolling out in the UK soon, following its switch to BT Openzone.*** Apparently, it’s been in the works for a while. Yay!

*** In partnership with iPhone carrier 02, who used to be called BT Cellnet, so it isn’t suprising that the two companies are still slightly attracted to each other.

Technorati Tags: bbc, culture, nyc, starbucks, usa, wi-fi

Over at Pear Analytics, they’ve been analysing Twitter traffic to categorise exactly what it is people are tweeting about.

….We took 2,000 tweets from the public timeline (in English and in the US) over a 2-week period from 11:00a to 5:00p (CST) and captured tweets in half-hour increments. Then we categorized them into 6 buckets:

News, Spam, Self-Promotion, Pointless Babble, Conversational and Pass-Along Value.

Pointless Babble won with a 40% share. “Pointless babble”; i.e. something that wasn’t talking to anyone specific, wasn’t a retweet, didn’t contain a news item and wasn’t spam. Things like “I’m chilling out, watching TV”, for example.

Which makes me wonder. These tweets are about our basic, everyday lives, and those lives are being branded pointless. Lately it seems like unless you are a cog in the machine 24/7, you are… well… pointless. Twitter about your job (as long as it is positive and vaguely schmoozy), network with potential clients or talk about lofty current events, you lazy schlub!

Those tweets tend to be the funny ones. And they seem to be the only things tweeted by celebs… or is it self-promotion for them? The boundaries are a little blurrier than that, I think.

And what about those tweets that cross the categorisation boundaries? Amanda Bonnen made a “Pointless Babble” tweet that later became News. There’s probably a lot more of that on the horizon (so beware if you have a complaint about something!).

I must admit, I was rather surprised – and pleased – at the lack of spam reported by the study! Guess they’ve not had to deal with those darn pr0n ’stars’.

[via Mashable and various other internet sources.]
[image credit - A Little Bird Told Me by mattknow via HongKiat.com]

Technorati Tags: statistics, study, twitter

Being somewhat on the spectrum myself – it is hard for an adult to get a diagnosis, especially an adult female – I thought I should go and check it out. I found the only local cinema showing it, and joined the enormous Orange Wednesdays queue. Despite queuing round the side of the building, there were maybe 10 other people in the room.

Many critics have condemned the film as dull, one or two (who shall remain credit-less) comparing it unfavourably to Rainman due to the protagonist’s lack of savant powers (see Autistic Impressions here for more on the savant focus in movies and its influence). Or they set the film up as: “Look at how weird these people are. Look at how abnormal they are – they must suffer sooooo much! Isn’t it no surprise they can’t have proper relationships?”

Adam is ultimately a film about love and humanity, and while Adam shows a great knowledge in the area of space and engineering, he is clearly not a savant. Just a regular Aspie. To me, that’s what makes the film so charming, even if the script feels as disconnected as its main character.

Without giving the plot away, I will say this: there are some great lines. My particular favourites being “I’m not Forrest Gump, you know!” and a very amusing discussion about the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Adam is not a robot – he feels and does so intensely, and I am glad of this portrayal. Hugh Dancy did a remarkable job of conveying Adam’s complex emotions and the misinterpretations and literal thinking that surrounds daily life for people on the autistic spectrum. When Adam faces challenging situations, he either lashes out or locks up – both of which are real and often scary parts of being an Aspie, both for the Aspie themselves and those around them.

Thankfully, the film also points out that the fear is rooted in misinterpretation: Beth thinks Adam is going to hit her; Adam says (for the second time) that he is incapable of hitting anyone. He is accused of not thinking of anyone but himself, yet so many of his actions show that is the opposite of the truth.

The relationship between Adam and Beth (Rose Byrne) is sweet, if a little short on chemistry, although I recoiled a bit at the implication that Beth’s relationship with Adam would always have been too parental: (“I need you to help me work out how to get to work… to help me figure it out when people say crazy things…” says Adam).

Adam and Beth look at the stars

For a primary teacher, Beth (who at times displays signs of Asperger’s herself) seems to know very little about AS, and the headmistress she speaks with talks about Aspies as if we are not quite human. “They can be quite brilliant,” she says, at which I nearly threw something at the screen.

The word “childlike” is thrown around a lot; in fact the event that prompts Adam to form a relationship with Beth is the death of his father, who he has lived with up to the age of 29. He doesn’t seem to be able to drive, and it was his father who found him his job (which he loses as soon as his father isn’t around to defend him). It is a rather abrupt jump from the offspring living at home situation to forcefully pushing the point that people with Asperger’s can live independent lives.

The subplot involving Beth’s father and his trial for fraud feels rather pointless and disconnected from the main story threads, so if you’re going to nip to the loo, the trial scenes are ideal.

My favourite scene? Armed with a stack of timetables, Adam wraps himself up in arctic exploration gear and leaves the city for the first time. Anyone who has known me for years can tell you about my utter confusion when faced with the public transport system!

The ending is where things go slightly awry – considering the rest of the movie is about a relationship doomed by societal expectations, it feels a bit too glossy and rushed (and there’s a rather amusing piece of badly-done green screen!). On the way home, I posited to Bloke that it would have been more interesting had it had a twist – a female Aspie love interest at the end would have been nice, as there is so much focus on males on the spectrum.

Overall, though, I’ll probably still buy the DVD when it comes out. Excellent watching-while-sick fare! It would be wonderful to see more movies of this type – and on a wider release. Come on, directors. The bar hasn’t been set too high…

3/5

P.S. This isn’t at all related to the movie, but the American pronunciation of Asperger seems completely different to the UK pronunciation. We say it: ass-purr-gers, rather than asp-ber-gers (which sounds a little too close to ass-burgers for my liking). The wonders of accents, huh?

Technorati Tags: adam, aspergers, autism, film, movie

This site fell into my browser window while I was looking for one-bag travel tips – I wanted to see how to get the most wear out of as few items as possible.

“OK,” I thought. “There’s an idea here. But…”

She’s pledged to wear one dress for a year for sustainability reasons. Except she’s not wearing one dress. She’s wearing seven copies of the same dress. Why not just buy seven different dresses at the same price point?

The proper way to do it would have been to buy just one of the dress. Let us know how it holds up to all that washing. What to wear on laundry day?

Have I missed the point?

Technorati Tags: sustainability

How can someone figure out which money-making path is right for them? There are a number of tracks available, and from where I’m sitting, it looks like most people believe it’s a trade-off between earning lots of money and not having to answer when Work shows up on your Caller ID at all hours of the day and night. I refuse to believe this, with all the young-person stubbornness I can muster.

I’ll let you all in on a little secret. Up until the age of around 16, the only career path I’d had in mind was to be an actress. Nothing else called to me like the stage and screen. Of course, living in the Armpit (as I lovingly refer to my hometown), with a scornful family, I couldn’t go to auditions, and so my dream died, to be replaced by “well, guess it’s writing for me!”

That was how I decided I wanted to be a writer. It was something I was good at, something I enjoyed and something I thought I could do at my own pace. Of course, now I’m actually trying to write one of the many children’s books I’ve had in my head for the last decade, I’m finding it much harder. The words just don’t want to come out. Yes, folks, this is why I have returned to blogging. Clumsily putting my fingers back to keyboard, and I’m so rusty at it that I practically creak. I will get better at it, I promise. Just got to find my rhythm.

Finding Your Own North Star: Cover

One career book I have been given and actually liked was Finding Your Own North Star by Martha N. Beck. You can find it on Amazon here, and rest assured that there is no Affiliates link lurking there. I’ve not signed up yet.

“Do you feel that your life has taken a wrong turn and you don’t know how to get back on track? This book provides a step-by-step programme to put you on course again. Aimed at everyone, it shows you how to recognise your deepest desires, examines why they have been forgotten and then gives practical advice on how to fulfil them. Helps you identify your dreams and goals. Lets you repair unconscious beliefs and emotional wounds that may be blocking your progress. Provides a map to guide you through your life changes. Takes you through every stage from recognising your dream to planning its implementation. Motivates you throughout with thoroughly tested case studies, questionnaires, and exercise. Written with inspiration, wit and wisdom, Finding Your Own North Star is a trusted companion for your new life journey.” – From Amazon.co.uk.

The exercises in the book are great. Here’s a taster based loosely on a task from the book: Write down your Worst Work Scenario. Think about the time of day you hate the most, the hours you find really draining to work, think about doing your most detested task, think about being surrounded by the people you really can’t stand. You know the ones. Write their names.

Now imagine that situation is the one you will be stuck in for the rest of your working life. Imagine it strongly. Now imagine those hated people expect you to actually just be grateful you’re getting a paycheck at all in these trying economic times. Feel that tightening? That’s how to recognise the job you just won’t fit in.

Now do the opposite. Think of your ideal work scenario. For me, it’s a bright, airy office with plants and even cushions. Think about your ideal colleagues – easygoing, willing to help… and the same for your boss. Imagine the people you love smiling at you, being happy that you’re happy. Imagine loving your work.

Pay attention to those sensations, mental and physical. That’s how to spot a job you’ll love.

I’m still a long way off finding anything resembling my dream job. I’ve got university to go through yet, and for the next three years will probably be sleepless and teary. But I’ve got my list and I know what I’m heading for.

Because I figure… when you’re doing something that makes your world go round… money is just a nice bonus.

Technorati Tags: Books, career, review