Clarity
You’d better not dim o gwbl!
Posted 25 May 2008
Over the weekend, I was transferring some old photos as part of a back-up. In so doing, I can across a photo of a sign I saw a couple of years ago.
When I first stumbled across this sign, I was on my way home from a pub in Hay-on-Wye, having knocked a few back. This sign confused the heck out of me that night: What does ‘dim o gwbl’ mean? Was it an acronym? Was I dimming o gwbl in a no dim-o-gwbl zone? How would I know? Would the police arrest me?
It was only the following morning, when I looked at the photo I had taken of the sign, did I realise that it was a no parking sign! In the UK, the red circle and sash, over the blue background is the symbol for no parking. The ‘dim o gwbl’ is Welsh for ‘at any time.’ Realising that Hay-on-Wye is on the Wales-England border, the sign made much more sense than I originally realised. No need to worry about the police posting wanted posters for me, with a picture my face captured on some CCTV camera, warning the public of a dangerous dim-o-gwbler on the loose in Herefordshire.
A rare occasion
Posted 23 May 2008
Daily Life, The Little Things | Leave a Comment
Yesterday was an interesting day to say the very least. I knew it was going to be a long one as I needed to head into London on First Great Western trains – probably the worst train company in England. After the usual train and Tube delays, it started going really pear-shaped when I left my mobile phone on the Underground at Whitechapel. It got worse when a woman in front of me in the queue at the coffee-shop at Barking Station fainted as soon as I stepped up next to her. The day continued in this downward spiral when I rocked up to my 1.00 o’clock meeting at 12.55pm, only to find out I was at the wrong location — and that I was facing a 30 minute bus ride or a 15 cab ride to get where I needed to go. (Yes, it was definitely one of THOSE days. Blimey!)
Where’s the Elevator Call Button?
Posted 20 May 2008
Daily Life, Design, The Little Things | Leave a Comment
When you approach a bank of elevators, where do you look for the button to call the elevator? Near the middle of the elevator bank of course. Usually, if there is more than one elevator, you’ll find the button towards the middle of the set. Some large elevator banks have several call buttons, but still they are dispersed between elevators.
If you can approach the elevator bank from either direction, placing the call buttons in the center seems to make sense, but if the elevators are accessible from only one direction as you come down the hall, why not put the button at the end closest to the entry?
Compare this to walking into a dark room; you go to turn the lights on, so you expect the switch to located immediately next to the door. Would it make any sense to have to walk halfway into the room before you got to the switch? Now, if you were equally likely to enter the room from either of two different sides, and the room only had one switch, then the middle might make sense. Still, most often, more than one switch is possible, so you’d still want the one switch to be located one near each door.
Holy cheesey episodes, Batman!
Posted 18 May 2008
The Little Things | 2 Comments
Recently, I was watching an episode of the old Batman television series. You know the one – with Adam West as Batman and Burt Ward as Robin. And whilst I do appreciate that the series ran in the late 60s, it just seems soooooo low budget. Cheap, ill-fitting costumes, horrendous scripts and terrible quality of acting. Did it seem so bad when it first aired? I know that I used to love watch the show when I was boy, but somehow even those fond memories couldn’t carry me through an entire episode. I switched the channel to find something else.
An awful crunch
Posted 16 May 2008
Daily Life, The Little Things | Leave a Comment
It rains in England. Often. Perhaps not as much as is commonly believed, but regularly enough. Where I live, any time it rains, snails come out from wherever they hide and try to cross any stretch of concrete, paving stone or black top that they can find. Stepping outside on the morning after an overnight rain, I always see a handful of snails slowly making their way across the patio outside my kitchen doorway.
This happy little snail blends quite well into its surroundings, set against the leaf-covered payment. This is not the unfortunate snail that features later in the post.
Snails are not fast. In fact, they are quite the opposite. They are very slow. So slow that I’ve never actually seen them move. In one minute they are here, I look away for a bit, perhaps distracted with the morning’s activities and when I look back, the snail has relocated several inches further along. (They’re sort of like construction workers in that respect; we drive by a road-construction site and all the men in orange seem to be standing around. But, sure enough, 6 to 8 weeks later a new road has been laid. Amazing!)
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