Disconnection feels good

It all started with the TV. It had enough of my late nights while I indulge myself with a hot tea on the sofa watching late night movies. Now it is only coming up with the scan lines that reminded me of my school Science book chapter on the Electronics.

I tried to contact the TV guy who had looked after it for years. Unfortunately I was told he was killed on a road accident 2 months ago. I felt a great loss, but the person on the other end may be empathised that death of TV is far more damaging and took down my contacts to pass to, you know – to another TV guy.

I looked outside if the Newspaper was chucked on our doorstep. The paper boy, for the 2nd time this week took his time off.

On the next no Newspaper day, suddenly something happened my Internet stopped working. I wanted to register a complaint to the telephone company and picked up the phone. Guess what, that’s dead too.

Great, no TV, no Newspaper and no Internet, I wondered what on earth is happening. I went outside of the house, heard the big roaring noise fearing an apocalypse. I managed to teach myself the art of dancing while wading through the dust soup on my rural road (thanks to the unexpected thunder storm). Apparently they had chosen to lay the new drains just after 20 years of human occupation – one of the earth diggers had cut the cables that connected me to the outside world.

After 2 days of don’t care support from the Govt. run tel. company, forced me to do things that I would rather not do these days In fact I had more time for myself. The pace of life was so good that I almost enjoyed it. I started reading another book, took out the Guitar dusted it (well, I cannot play), learnt new words, cleaned the closet, got some chores done, got some admin done. I became suddenly focused and managed to get through most of the work that was pending for a very long time.

I thought to myself, how much time I have been wasting with my habit of checking emails for every few minutes, watching the news channel every hour, reading every news website. Nothing really mattered now, life is still possible.

Now that am back online and everything is getting back to normal, I feel when again I am going to get those 3 days of no nonsense world. I think being connected is not all that important as we think it is. Try, force your self, disconnect from the world see how good it feels.

I liked it and would retire in that fashion.

I just got a call from the TV guy, he was calling from around the corner and said will come on a dry day as he cannot risk his motor bike in this muddy road. I said "take your time, nothing urgent". I am glad he could not make it.

Sent as an email to me by a friend explaining his current state of mind after being disconnected from this big bad world. I thought of publishing it here with his permission.

Sharing Ownership of UX

Pabini Gabriel-Petit explains how successful multidisciplinary product teams share the ownership of User experience on UX Matters.

For a long time I was trying to figure out how they all the different disciplines work together in a product development environment. I mainly interact with the engineers and I know how they work but I wanted to know the big picture of it. Like how the product management team works. Pabini's article is just that.

He also talks about the barriers to the shared ownership like the dominance of marketing and engineering over UX and the communication break downs that we actually face at work. A great read as I felt good that we are not alone.

Look ma, no seat number

When my friend came back from the UK, one of the things he told me about how things work there was about the movie going experience at the Village Roadshow Cinema. He told me that there is no concept of having seat numbers reserved along with the tickets bought and the idea is quite interesting.

How it works?

It works like the cinemas in my village actually. You buy the tickets and go to the auditorium and pick the seats as per your preference. So in order to catch the best seats we used to go to the cinema well in advance. The only shortcoming of this was that we had to sit in the auditorium for a longer period until all the seats got occupied and the wait was extremely boring.

In the same fashion Village Roadshow makes people come well in advance to catch the best seats and till the movie starts they shows advertisements and movie trailers. This not only makes the audience's waiting time more interesting but also earns revenue to the multiplex. Also the crowd coming in can be better managed as there is no last minute traffic incoming and chaos.

There are no intervals!! Then when can I buy snacks?

People buy snacks as they go into the auditorium so that they have enough food throughout the movie. So while coming in for the movie, you have to que up to buy the tickets and then que up for the food; which is again a pain point which they tackled. If you are not keen on buying food you can directly go to the box office counters or to the kiosks and buy tickets and get in. But if you are interesting in buying food too, you can que up at the food counter and buy both tickets and food and there are enough number of counters so that the crowd is well managed.

Will it work in India?

I don't think so. Coz we Indians are crazy about movies and that's the main entertainment option we have. At a given point of time all the cinema halls are crowded irrespective of whether its a weekday or a weekend. Also there is no much gap between two shows as to show 5 shows per day in a hall. So revenue wise the multiplex is not losing much. However they do find time to show advertisements in that short waiting period.

Most of the time people come in for evening/night shows after late work hours, so advance bookings without seat numbers will be a real inconvenience. Also our movies have longer running time, so we can't do without intervals.

Online movie tickets are a big boon for us that we can book tickets at our own convenience and get to the cinema by the time of the show, even though the online booking process is not something easy to go through.

Row over seats

Carrying on with the cinema hall usability...

Every time we bought movie tickets from E Square multiplex, we used to wonder how near our seats were going to be from the screen. Even though the guy inside the box office showed us the layout and the position of our seats on his computer screen, by the time we came out of the que it was forgotten. Then it was all a guessing game and then a self consolation that E square's first row is kinda far from the screen. The problem with E Square seat numbers were that they had the back row as the 'A' row.

'A' row being the first row is more usable for the movie goers who wants to know how far his seat is from the screen. PVR has 'A' as the front row.

What is the difference?

Say you got a ticket with a seat number I25 at PVR. Now if you know that the the front row is 'A', then its easy for you to figure out that your seat is on the 9th row from the screen which is pretty decent. And if you also know how many seats are there in a row then you kinda find out the exact position too (which is less important of course).

Now consider if 'A' is the back row, like in E Square. Even if you know that you are going to sit at the 9th row from the back, you really don't have a clue that how many rows are there in the auditorium and hence how near are you from the screen.

Any other advantages?

The box office guy doesn't have to show you the auditorium layout to make you know the seat positions. This saves the ticketing time. There can be a note at the counter which says 'A' row is the front row and then you can do your own math to figure out where you will be sitting.

Online Movie Ticket - Are you game?

A friend told me his frustrating experience of booking tickets over the ticket booking website of Chennai's happening Satyam Cinemas ; and it goes like this....

It took a very long time for a lady friend of mine to convince me to watch hours and hours of pain. Worse I do not even understand the language of the proposed movie. Obviously I was reluctant to pay for the tickets but I agreed to her request of getting the tickets. Her reason is that she is not a computer wizard; calling me a geek, while she works for a multi national computing company herself.

The Website

The most wanted websites are always unusuable, deal with it. You don't believe me; try booking a ticket in Satyam Cinema's http://www.thecinema.in/.

Even before you get into the site, you are welcomed with a security warning, which is not a big threat, but not a good impression to make. I have no other choice, ignore the warning and proceed.

I have to be honest, though it is not straight forward, it seems to be the quick way of selecting the show and the tickets you need. Once you are happy with it, then the pain starts.

The 1^st Attempt

I was cheeky and noticed that Oceans 13 was still available. Unbelievably, only 2 tickets were left. I was in a hurry trying to get it before any body else grab it. I logged in; it presented me with a seat selection page which scrolls exactly the opposite way a normal page does.

I was really annoyed at the extra screen as there were only 2 seats left and I am booking them both, what option can I have? Well anyway, I was glad it was next to each other and as far away from the screen. I said OK, OK and then OK to all the other screens that followed which I didn’t care to read.

Finally its pay time… I selected my card type and wanted to type the numbers of my card. But, hey the numbers I type are going no where. I thought it is my love to the firefox browser and so I quickly loaded Internet explorer and went to the website and guess what the movie is gone. The show is houseful, I cannot get a ticket.

This sort of nonsense would never happen if I stand in a queue.

The 2^nd Attempt

Now that the movie I wanted to watch is houseful, I had to tolerate my friend's selection of Indian. After my selection it came up with a message: "Seats are not consecutive" or similar, which in my opinion sounds too technical. Anyway, I didn’t care as my friend only want to watch the movie and I only want to watch the girls and we are not romantically involved to be specific. I let the computer select the seats but there is no way I can book two tickets at one go. So i decide to book the first ticket first and then go through the cycle once again. But there comes a plethora of forms for the Snack selection, signup for some special offer form, etc etc, etc. For which my response was "Don’t want or don't care". Next comes to the payment, this time, I took time to read all the options. It was a long list of cards, master card, visa card, that card, this card, fuel card (their own brand of something, who comes up with these names) and I wondered why did they leave visiting cards, post cards and greeting cards.

Finally I filled in the numbers this time amazingly, it recognized it all. While am at it, a surprise stopper, the thing said "time out". Apparently I have to finish it all within 120 seconds. All this time, I was not even aware that I was racing time too, apart from others booking online.

I ran out of patience and next time I probably get it from the counter direct. Now I realise why you have to be a geek to get the tickets online. I am glad am not.

Windows Media Player has got amnesia

Can't Windows Media Player (WMP) remember the way I sort my library? I always sort my WMP library by 'album' but whenever I go away from the library or say close the application and open again the library is sorted by 'Contributing Artist'. Why is that? Either WMP11 has a special liking towards the artists or it has partial amnesia or something? Is there anyway I can set my sorting preferences so that it wont get reset the next time I come back? I'm fed up.

When you email photos to your parents...

My parents live in a village in Kerala and broadband internet hasn’t yet found its way there and I’m sure it also hasn’t reached many suburban and rural areas in India where most of our parents live. We the city slickers go on taking pictures using our latest digital cameras showing off the ever growing mega pixels. And when it comes to sending them to our parents there comes a roadblock; it’s nothing but the huge size of the picture files which can’t be downloaded by our parents with their slow dial up connections. And then we complain about the incompetent infrastructure Indian villages have. But what we don’t understand is that sending a picture shot with a 7 mega pixel camera as it is by email not only abuses the bandwidth but also makes no sense to our parents as they are not going to print them onto billboards. My father has complained to me numerous times that the photos he receive from his friends not only took an hour to download but also shows up big on his screen that he has scroll up and down to see the faces properly. To help them what I do is to download those photos myself, resize them to a decent size which fits on their computer screen when viewed in full size and resend to them to make them happy. Let’s not forget that the objective of you sending your pics to your folks would be for them to view and enjoy them and not to guess them by scrolling up and down the humongous bill board size picture.

I use Google’s Picasa to manage my pictures saved in my computer. It not only allows me to sort the pictures date wise, gives me a nice display of them, ability to do stylish slideshows and also to create quick collages. I normally use Adobe Photoshop for editing the pictures but Picasa also has features to quickly edit your pictures or give effects to them. But the best and the most over looked feature of Picasa is its excellent emailing capabilities of your pictures. It not only resizes your huge pictures to optimal sizes but also integrates with Outlook or your Gmail account to send them with ease. You can set the size to which Picasa should resize the pictures when sending emails ; there are a set of email safe sizes from which you can select one; and then put in your Outlook/Gmail/Hello account info and save them. Once done that you have to just select the pictures which have to be emailed and then click on the Email icon, Picasa will then send the pictures which are resized to parents’ friendly sizes.

What are you waiting for? Download Picasa, even if your parents have got broadband connection, it’s a fantastic photo management tool in itself; put in those extra captions, mark your favorite pictures, do some picture editing, give your pictures some effects, show them off to your friends using the an elegant slideshow and of course email them to your folks.

PS: Even though the Email icon on the Picasa screen is prominent enough for us to not miss it, it would have been better to add the Email option to the right click menu on the pictures.

Also featured on Susheel's Photography Tip

Google Gears and Me

I installed Google Gears on to my home computer so that I can use Google reader offline reading stuff. It makes great sense to me coz i use a dial up connection and its not a good idea to be online till i finish reading. I have tried using Google reader offline earlier too, and it used to work. The idea was to open a folder of items, let it load fully and then go offline to open the items one by one which showed up from the cache. The only catch was that the images associated with the posts didn't load and also the posts which I marked read/favourite didn't really work. I was excited to know about the offline feature but I have been trying to synchronize my online/offline feeds for the past two days and its simply not working. It goes up to 5% and stops working. May be it needs more bandwidth, say a broadband connection. But if I had a broadband connection I wouldn't think of going offline to read them. In that case how would the Google reader offline feature makes sense? Oh may be for the people who travel a lot.... (Sigh)

I don't want the last 2000 items to be brought offline coz I have already read them. Why don't they start off with the current unread ones and then aggregate from there onwards?