Heading for the Halfpipe Canyon

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If there’s one thing the Japanese take very seriously, it’s fun.  Amusement arcades seem to be part of everyday life and culture, and I got the distinct impression that dropping by for a quick game of Gundam: Senjou no Kizuna (that’ll be giant flying robots with guns to the rest of us) on the way home was quite socially acceptable.

That said, with the short amount of time I had in the city I took a hint from one of the my wife’s Japanese colleagues and headed over to Odaiba to the Sega Joypolis; a very much weather-proof ‘indoor theme park’.  Even better, being a weekday evening there wasn’t a queue to be seen and there’s even a discount rate of 2,500 yen for coming in at that time of day.

I’d gone in with some reasonably tepid expectations of arcade machines, maybe a few more interactive things along the lines of the content at the old SegaWorld in London’s Trocadero, but what I didn’t expect was this:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/2672016[/vimeo]

Basically, it’s a life-size snowboarding half-pipe simulator, and it’s the single greatest thing I’ve ever seen in gaming.   Yeah, gaming – it’s interactive. As you’ll see in the video, after a few initial ups and downs you get to tap the board with your feet to intiate a spin. Hit the board right on the bottom of the halfpipe and you’ll score three points, otherwise it’s just the one. The winner at the end gets a bit of self satisfaction and enthusiastic clapping from the Sega staff.

I don’t think I can adequately describe it better than my scrappy video capture.  The one thing that mightn’t come across is that it goes way higher than you think, and despite any suggestions that it’s nausea-inducing you’ll want to try it at least twice to double check that it really was that much fun.

My year in cities, 2008

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I’ve been meaning to get round to this for a little while now, but inspired by Jason Kottke – and helped a lot by referring to my Dopplr journal – here’s my own year in cities:

Same rules as Kottke – one or more nights were spent in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days. Click through the links to see some Flickr photo sets for the cities.

It’s rather scary now I see it there in black and white…

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2008-12-28

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  • Watching Iron Man with glorious Dolby TrueHD sound might just strain neighbourly relations tonight. #
  • I sense a mysterious outbreak of “working from home” will hit our London office tomorrow. At least amongst the 10 of us still here. #
  • Time for an emergency fry up to get through the morning after the night before. #
  • For someone who used to work for Korn and Rage Against The Machine, I sure do listen to “Pet Sounds” a lot. #
  • “Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut #
  • Christmas Eve powered by cloudberry liqueur. http://twitpic.com/vzxb #
  • Bit of retro pop culture round the in-law’s. When’s the last time you saw a mug like this: http://twitpic.com/x3jl #

Have a very microwave Christmas

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Although watching Soho based design agencies spunking money up the wall on self-promoting ‘art’ tends to grate with me quite badly most of the time, there’s a certain undeniable charm to this little viral Christmas card from AKQA.

[youtube]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=FgBUqJzgvBo[/youtube]

Stick with it – it doesn’t seem to go anywhere for a while, but the pay-off at the end is cute and well worth the wait.

How to cancel your Virgin Media cable contract

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If you’ve been a long time user of cable and you’re getting thoroughly fed up of Virgin Media and their not-so-clever traffic shaping methods, here’s how I got myself liberated – it should work for you too, provided you’re outside of your initial 12-month contract.

First, call 0845 454 11 11. Once you get through, you’ll need to choose Option 4 for Moving Home, then Option 2 for disconnections, followed by Option 1 again in order to confirm.

Hopefully within a matter of a couple of minutes you’ll be connected to a real live operator. Once you confirm your address, payment method and what have you, you’ll get to the fun part.

After a brief bit of struggle and dispute about why you’re leaving – and at least in my case, explaining that my new Be* ADSL2+ installation is working beautifully at a rock-solid 12Mbps, you’ll be informed that “Sir, I’m on a BT website now, I can clearly see you can only get up to 1Mbps at your location…”.

You’ll get to fight this fight for a few minutes, and if you can resist the urge to scream “But obviously, you’re wrong. I’m in my house now, I should know.”, they will – finally – give up and accept that you’ve given them 30 days notice and give you confirmation of your disconnection date.

Oh, did I mention how marvellous Be* is, on both price and performance? Sure, you’ll never get the 24Mbps unless you’re living next door to the exchange, but it’s better than paying a premium price for 20Mbps and getting a realistic average of 5Mbps.

A catastrophic error message

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Now, I’ve seen some error dialogs in my time.  Some are informative, some are incomphrensible and some – like this gem that Sony Ericsson have put together - are just plain scary

What had actually happened (I think) was that it was busy querying my K800i when the signal dropped – I was on a train after all.  So I’d rather it have just suggested something along those lines rather than proposing that the world was about to end.

Who’d have thought that a simple “Mobile Networking Wizard” was fraught with such danger?

Christmas shopping still sucks

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It’s the one time of the year when I spend more than the normal amount of time on online shopping sites. And the same as every other year, it seems like major online retailers have learnt little about user’s shopping habits.

One of the common horrors on sites such as debenhams.com is that that the designers seem to believe that people think in terms of brands, rather than categories of items – for example, I’ve visited the site thinking I’d like to buy a gift for an aunt – maybe something like bubble bath. Easy enough, right?

  1. Step one, visit the site.
  2. Step two, go to the beauty section.
  3. Step three, find the “Bath & Body” range.
  4. Step four… Select a brand. Huh?

Debenhams.com brand selection options

The flaw here is that I can’t just browse all the items in the “Bath & Body” section – I have to pick a brand to continue. So now, I need to select a brand and browse through those items; if I don’t like what I see, I have to go back, choose another and keep going. Often in these cases I don’t even know the brands or have any suggestion of what sort of items that that brand covers – forcing me to navigate continually into areas that I probably don’t care about.

Unfortunately for the end user, product managers think in brands whereas most consumers – with perhaps the exception of some high fashion items – tend not to, particularly if they’re just trying browse and virtually “window shop” for ideas.