Nixta Sinks

Why oh why are telephones so unutterably ugly, and uniformly grotesque? In particular, I'd like to know who does the market research for, or is involved in the design of cordless phones. They are revolting. Utterly utterly revolting. And so are the phones.

I bought a horrific old Panasonic a couple of years ago, and it's already got keys that don't work, so I'm in the market to replace it, and I'd be grateful to anyone who can show me a model that's worth looking at for more than 10 seconds or that you could have on a shelf without vomiting every time you walk past it. Here's what I think the standard design criteria are:

• Use Silver or Black.
• If you must use Silver AND Black, make sure they conspire to befuddle, and that the boundary between the two bears no sign of deliberate effort to please the eye.
• Use only the cheapest plastic available, and make sure that Walmart would be proud to display it next to their discount DVD cage and pre-school underpant combination display.
• Use retro Lucozade-Orange for backlighting of the display and buttons if Horsepiss-Yellow is unavailable.
• Ensure that sound quality is crap. If not possible, add the Hissmaster Clicktronic chipset from Naftel.
  
• Try to avoid convenient features such as phone-book sharing between handsets.
• Ensure that connectivity is crap.
• Make the phone as large as humanly possible. Throw in an antenna (be sure not to waste wires connecting it internally, but do not waste money making it removable).
  
• Ensure remaining battery time is never represented accurately.
• Never, ever, on pain of death and expulsion from the cordless phone community, put a decent or configurable ringtone on the unit.

Note that this is something that may be peculiar to the US market. In the UK I did find one or two phones that violated some of the above rules, but they weren't for sale to Chavs and Pikeys (that is, they were a tad delicate and only available in decent shops - not Debenhams). I truly believe that the cordless phone market may be entirely comprised of the Fatfuck Chavchump demographic - i.e. blind and lobotomised clothed lungfish from Oxford Street.

Please, if you know of a decent design of cordless phones, preferably available in the US, let me know. I shall be eternally grateful and may even use it to call you sometime.

Update: DMC points out this example of a not-entirely-shabby phone, which she found in this month's Lucky magazine (whaa?). Although it still combines Lucozade and horse-piss, silver and black, it does have some redeeming features (e.g. shared phone-book) and isn't as dumpy and hideous as those other soap-bar Fisher-Price offerings.

Queen Mary bigger in New York than Lisbon

I've noticed, since I look at maps a lot and do map type things for a living, that observant people have spotted two Queen Marys on Google Earth's imagery. One is in New York, the other in Lisbon . In comparing them and noticing how the deckchairs have been carefully rearranged between visits to port, I realised that one of them is about 10% larger than the other. I'm sure that this cannot be covered by tidal discrepancy (no, I haven't done the maths, but we'd be talking at least hundreds, if not thousands of feet of tide to get that kind of difference, but of course when they talk of "Satellite" visualisation, it's probably a combination of satellite and low-level aircraft). So does this mean that Google or their data providers have done a shoddy job with orthorectifying their aerial photography? It's not a major concern, but hoi polloi might be getting quite comfortable with the resolution and accuracy of this imagery, perhaps even contemplating building applications based off it, and we'd hate them to crash their breeder-prams into the sea because of such careless imaging.

Interestingly, looking at the New York image in more detail, the imagery is tiled and blended, and apparently in a way that takes note of the displayed features rather than just a compass-based orthographic grid. In fact, it would appear that the Lisbon-sized Queen Mary might just have fitted correctly without having to be tucked under the harbour road there.

Bearded Partridge

I see that my job has been posted online. The fact that the internal name for the component we're working on has been listed in the description (no-one other than a handful of people, most of whom are working on the project, will know what GIToolkit means) is a bit of a giveaway.

And this after I've got them an access card photo that looks more like me (the Nixta Sinks one at the top of this page has worked well for 2 years, but apparently I've changed my appearance now and no longer wear glasses).

Update: Now they're looking for three of me!

Like something out of Father Ted, old Bish got so pissed he couldn't remember what happened, lost his phone and briefcase, and fell on his head. He was so embarassed by the whole thing he couldn't wear his Mitre the next day. A problem for all of us after a huge session on the old overflowing cup.

Still, it's nice to see that the police are delicately referring to it as a case of lost property now, rather than publically slapping him about and suing him for wasting police time. This is old school. This is nostalgia at its best.

Labels: bishop, drunk, nostalgia

• The suspicious untimely unnecessary loss of a friend from long ago (see John & Pat's comment on Dec 8th).
  
• December 1st summer storm in Manhattan - since when does that happen?
• The violent death of a friendship (not poor MB).
• The sharp-tongue that sleeps on the couch.
• The demise of two foundations - it always gets to me when local businesses are forced out of operation. It happened to the fishmonger on the corner of 14th & B. At first I thought the breakfast shop had been Pretted out of existence, but then I noticed the newsagent nextdoor run by the odd little man with limp had also gone. And 10 yards down the street a proud poster describing the investment in retail going on along the totally inaccessible north side of Euston Road.
• A tornado, two tornadoes, ponies flying.
• Fire and brimstone by solar activity on Newsnight (abhorrers of weather reports).
  
• Frantic lunatics on the street (and, not unrelated to the above, in their hotel rooms).
• December 7th lightning storm in London.
  
• Vomit based alarm call (it's always a worry when you wake yourself up like that, particularly if you hadn't been drinking).

Could these all be related? What's next? War Rocket Ajax?

Labels: Nixtadump

Some recent paintings my mother has done.

One of them, a gift to me for my birthday, inspired by Skankmeister's wedding to KTO in Ravello.

The others, for sale, should anyone be rich enough to afford them.

Two Figures

Lemon Grove in Ravello

Katcha