I heard yesterday via Twitter that there is to be a free Horrible Histories Prom at the Royal Albert Hall. What a great thing to take the kids to my wife and I thought.

The Royal Albert Hall Prom 20 page said:

FREE TICKETS for this Prom will be available from Friday 8 July at 9am. Please note that there is a maximum of 10 tickets per customer for this event.

So this morning around 7:30 am I signed up, logged in, and went to the Horrible Histories Prom 20 booking page. I also made a note of their box office phone number which, incidentally, isn't on their event booking pages – you have to go hunting for it in their contact page where it's buried in paragraph text.

Around 8:50 am I refreshed the Horrible Histories Prom page and got a message like this:

This screenshot is from a second time in the queue after my first round of disappointment. I was higher up at the start.

The queue number was auto refreshing and creeping down. Just before 9 am, and for quite a while after, I began ringing and speed dialing the Box Office number – it was constantly engaged of course.

So I resigned myself to taking my turn in the online queue. With the Hall having a capacity of just over 5,000 (I think) and me at about 1,300 in the queue I figured I was in with a chance. I got on with work while keeping an eye on my queue position on another screen.

And then, 40 minutes later, I reached the front of the queue, the page refreshed, and…

I got given the same page I had begun with.

Exactly the same page. With the same 'free tickets for this Prom' statement as above.

No directions on where to go to book.

No message saying “Sorry we've sold out”.

WTF! Wild? I was livid. Not that I didn't have tickets, that was disappointment. It was that crap feeling you get when a web experience fails and you're not sure if the failure is the web site's, or yours because you missed something important.

Lessons for the Royal Albert Hall

I didn't expect to get tickets. I knew there would be high demand, but…

1. If booking starts at 9 am, why start a queuing system well before then and not tell people that you are going to do that?
2. Why make it unnecessarily difficult to find the Box Office phone number and then make it virtually impossible for anyone choosing the offline method to book?
3. Why build expectation and squander people's time with a queuing system that doesn't deliver useful messages at the end of it?
4. And why is it the case that, as I write, the Prom 20 page is still exactly the same and yet if you go in from the top of the site, and view events for July 30, there is an easily missed message saying, “This event has no seats available” (see image below).

What a Horrible (user) experience. Yet more proof (as if it were needed) that good web design is not about a ‘good looking’ site – the Royal Albert Hall site does look good – it's about whether your site works for your users and treats them like people.

Altogether now…

Land of hope and washouts
MotherF’ers of the Free event

Flickr image from Kerim

Today my kids asked me why teeth feel so much bigger than they look when they come out. I’m no biologist so I may have this wrong but the explanation I was drawn to is powerfully visualised by the sensory homunculus.

I sought out the picture above and realised it looks quite a lot like me. Like him, I’m good with my hands and a bit mouthy. I have better dress sense though.

I’m a motorist (too often) and a cyclist and pedestrian (not often enough).

This morning on BBC Breakfast there was an item on the growing trend of cyclists using head cams to capture incidents where motorists threaten their safety. Good on ‘em.

The item included footage of a car pulling out at a mini roundabout and bumping a cyclist (who had right of way) over the bonnet, and a clip that Ben Porter had recorded when a van driver cut him up and then abused him for taking umbrage.

I can relate to this. As a cyclist in London for many years I regularly experienced such incidents and thankfully lived to tell the tale – by moving at the same speed as the traffic (or faster) and by assuming that everyone was out to get me. By thinking that anyone might cut me up or drive like I wasn’t there, that every car door was going to be opened on me, when the worst did actually happen, I was alert and reacted quickly enough to stay out of hospital, or worse.

But what fascinated me most about the report this morning was the show hosts later relating that there had been very little support from viewers for cyclists who suffer this kind of stuff. They read out some responses. The general sentiment was something akin to:

Bloody cyclists deserve all they get.

A perfect example of the disrespect and loss of perspective that pervades our transport culture, and the tyranny of the motorist in particular.

There are plenty of crappy cyclists, of course. In my 20s I was a red light jumping, pavement hopping bonehead for a few years, until I got some smarts and a dose of decency. But don’t lump all cyclists in this bracket, please.

And there is a crucial difference. The damage a really intransigent cyclist can do to others is constrained by the machine they are riding – no, that doesn’t make it right and, yes, people can still get killed (but it’s way less likely). But the carnage that just a moderately inattentive or foolhardy motorist can inflict is huge and the probability much greater.

That thing you are driving, it’s a death machine. So, if you're a motorist who's had an empathectomy, get some perspective and a dose of decency.

Last night I watched BBC’s What is Reality? episode of Horizon. I thought I might write something about it later so I Googled it. Above is what I got this morning when I searched on BBC horizon reality.

Altogether now:

Money makes the world go around,
The world go around,
The cosmos go around…

Portsmouth City Council are to be commended for their Southsea seafront cycle lane installed last year. I know, I would say that because I'm a cyclist.

But there's no legislating for people who do the kind of thing shown above which I encountered this morning. Maybe the owner is one of the angry motorists characterised in The News last year as thinking that the cycle lane…

Has made the road too narrow for cars to pass safely [...] is too crowded and puts drivers at risk from oncoming traffic and cyclists in danger from car doors being opened. People are also angry that they can no longer park their cars and look out to sea.

Apart from the last point – to which I say, get over it, there’s plenty of seafront where you can still park and look out to sea – the rest of that mindset is bollocks. If you can't drive safely along a straight road with excellent visibility within a lane that is wider than your car, van or lorry, then you shouldn't have a driving licence.

Here's my take on the cycle lane. It has:

• Made cycling along the seafront with young children much safer
• Reduced the number of irresponsible cyclists on the promenade
• Slowed down traffic alongside it so motorists more frequently stick to the speed limit
• Put a stop to cars reversing out into oncoming traffic they can't see

In the next instalment of the Daily Fail, Nadia Saint tweeted this today.

Priceless.

Raised beds in the East End

I learnt at the weekend that an old colleague of mine is part of a group doing great things with community gardening at Abbey Gardens in London’s East End: what an inspiring story (see also whatwilltheharvestbe.com).

Abbey Gardens, Bakers Row, London E15

It reminds me of that Monty Don programme a couple of years back in which he toured some of the Organoponicos in Cuba.

Savoy shuffle

Just down the road from me is the old site of Savoy Buildings on Southsea’s South Parade, now derelict and surrounded by hoardings. The seafront buildings were demolished about 18 months ago after the bottom dropped out of Harry Redknapp's plans to redevelop the site.

Earlier this month the managing director of the Leo Group which controls the site for ’Arry, was quoted as saying:

“Nothing is happening at the moment. The market doesn't help for it to be financially viable. In fact it’s worse now than when we last spoke. It’s still as dead as a dodo.”

Aerial image from Bing, Raphus cucullatus from another time

Green shoots

I guess it’s naive to think that until green shoots in the property market can bring the ‘Dodo’ back to life, the site could be used for the kind of green shoots that might grow in temporary community allotments.

What say you. Harry?

An update, 25th October 2010

It restores one’s faith in humanity and Portsmouth to read that the Ultrasaurus probably wasn’t torched but was instead the unfortunate victim of an ‘electrical fault in the lighting system’ that gave rise to the fire. Since I learnt this, I've thought about removing this post, but have decided to let it stand as a monument to my (occasional) wrong assumptions.

What follows below is as originaly posted at the beginning of October.

Adapted from Steve Cloke’s image found on Flickr

Here’s some context.

To those who torched the Southsea Ultrasaurus

Let's start with some assumptions.

1. That the Southsea dinosaur, Luna Park (AKA Clarence), didn't spontaneously catch light. That out there somewhere in the Portsmouth area is you, the one or more people who torched it.
2. That you’re probably male. That you were fuelled by bravado, maybe a bunch of stimulants, and perhaps goaded on by others.
3. That you do have conscious thought and moments of wonderment, and don't just spend your life stumbling from one impulsive act of nihilism or self-gratification to another.
4. That in such moments you have glimpsed the joy to be had from someone else's creativity, whether that be through music, film, gaming, comedy, or, you guessed it, visual art.
5. But that significant chunks of your life are bollocks. You do have creativity, emotional intelligence and something to contribute to the sum of human happiness, but maybe when you've tried to exercise it, someone else has crapped or pissed on your attempts, or told you it's not cool. Maybe you've repeatedly been told you that you won't amount to anything. Or maybe you've just allowed yourself to be led by others whose lives have that kind of shit going on.

If that's so, that sucks. What you've done sucks, and the things that have led you to that point also suck.

To be sure, it must have taken some balls to do what you did and I bet there was a buzz as you watched the flames consume Luna Park. But then, just like the accelerants that might have been racing round your brain, the fireball died down and all that was left was a wreck.

Yeah, I know, you totally don't give a shit. But even as you brag to your mates and bask in your notoriety, you know it won't last and it's all just bullshit, And then it's on to the next act of random stupidity. And all the while some small voice inside is telling you that you wish your life had a different pattern.

Well, duh, it can.

By now you'll be aware that hordes of people regard you as an imbecile, as some sort of sub-human.

But you're not, are you?

Here's the thing, the kind of balls it took for you to do what you did are not worth having. They won't bring you lasting contentment, they don't inspire you to the good that you are capable of and, as long as you're ruled by them, you're squandering the talents you have.

So here's my suggestion. As Mr T might say…

‘Get some real nuts, fool!’

• Get the balls to be someone better than who you have become.
• Get the balls to mix with a different crowd.
• Get the balls to reconnect yourself with your human brain instead of just your ape one.
• Get the balls to stand for things you believe in or to make a noise about how to make things better.
• Get the cojones to stand up and be counted instead of cowering in semi anonymity -- may be not for this dumb act of yours, but instead for something wonderful, something creative.

And quit ballsing up other people's lives and your own. Are you man enough to do any of those things?

Or are you going to carry on condemning yourself to a life of bollocks?