Most of the questions that I was asked were simple to answer: my name, address, date of birth, marital status, driving history, yada-yada.

But there’s one question that nowadays I struggle with: occupation. In the past, it was slightly more straightforward. As an employee, I could usually pigeon-hole myself into one of a couple of the entries presented to me. And I picked the one that I felt most closely matched my employment at the time. (Often the occupations on offer were somewhat bizarre and irrelevant, but I could generally find one that had something to do with what I did.)

But more recently, I lead many lives. I am a proofreader, a company director, a business analyst, a project manager and a spreadsheet modeller. And I expect that many of my friends will struggle similarly to select from the Occupation dropdown. Particularly among my consulting friends, I struggle to think of one that exclusively fulfils a single role.

In these austere times, is it time to rethink the Occupation dropdown? Is it still valid for everyone? I expect that more people than ever are working two jobs to make ends meet, turning to secondary skillsets to pay the bills.

So how should they respond to such a question? Should it become a multiple choice question? Or does it need to become something altogether less discrete?

He bought the domain from Mr. Site a couple of years ago. However instead of them notifying him when his domain was about to expire, they chose not to. Instead, they took over the domain themselves. And while the title of the website stayed the same, its content was replaced with pseudo-medical content, with links off to medicines promising men the ability to satisfy women in the bedroom more than and for longer than they ever dreamed would be possible.

The reason for this is that Mr. Site are a bunch of cunts. (Apologies for the language, but I feel it’s justified.) Yes they provided a service at the outset. But they were more interested in fleecing my mate and whoring his brand.

Their activities were completely above board legally as I understand things. But their actions were wholly morally reprehensible.

He is now in email correspondence with the company to see whether there’s anything that he can do to retrieve his domain without paying a small fortune for the privilege. I expect this will come to nothing, and that his domain – part of which is his name – will evermore be filled with the shit that gives the internet a bad reputation.

Packages and products have been bolted together under a single login, and the administrative interfaces have been bolted together in a similar fashion. Separately, they probably made some sense. Together, they most certainly don’t.

Below is a list of the dashboards and administrative homepages that I’m aware of, how each is accessed and a brief description of what I *think* you can do from each:

• Account settings: This is accessed from the various product interfaces. Click on your username and hit Account Settings. It allows you to change your password and see the products that you’ve registered with
• Mail settings: This is accessed from the cog at the top of Google Mail. It allows you to configure your Google Mail experience. There are similar pages for some of the other product offerings, such as Google Calendar.
• Manage this domain: This is accessed from the Manage this domain link in the header bar of some of the Google products, such as Google Mail. It’s vast in its complexity, with settings pages for each of the products. It should be noted, however, that these settings pages are in no way related to the settings pages in bullet 2 above.

I kind of get it. I think the Manage this domain feature comes with me being, as it were, the master of my domain. I own osirra.com, so I am responsible for its master settings: what you can and can’t do in it, how Mail should be configured for each and every one of my three users (one of whom is four years old), how names and dates should be displayed, what logo to display (it took me an age to find that the other day), yada-yada.

Mail settings, along with its sibling settings pages, operates a level below this, allowing users within the domain to tinker with the lower-level features of that product: filters, look and feel, labels, forwarding and the like.

And account settings are specific to the user account, allowing you to change your password and access the products.

But the hierarchy is far from clear. And the navigational tools to drive you to the various admin. pages don’t do a good job in informing you what to expect, or whether you should be going there in the first place.

It took several weeks for me to uninstall Rapportive, a Google add-on furnishing me with additional information about people with whom I interact. I simply couldn’t remember where I’d added the feature, and couldn’t for the life in me remember where to deactivate it. I eventually managed to find it, but don’t ask me where—that information is long gone.

Maybe the cumbersome user experience is exacerbated by my very flat (and narrow) organisational structure. I am account owner, product user and domain administrator in my little world. But I can’t help but thinking that it would be similarly bad in a larger organisation.

Google needs to sort this out. I can’t go on like this.

But while connection to the LinkSys was strong and reliable, it seems that the onward wireless link was unstable. In short, I think that relying on two wireless hops was asking too much.

I was directed by Steve (megastar) to use a power-based connection. The idea is that the copper wires that support your house’s electricity are used to transmit data. I’m not sure that this is what Edison had in mind when he discovered electricity, but by golly it’s a fabulous idea.

I went ahead and bout the Devolo dLAN 200 AV Wireless-N Starter Kit from Amazon fr £89.99. It arrived on Wednesday and I installed it on Saturday.

The device consists of what look like two regular electric plugs, each with a small transformer-sized pack on it. An Ethernet cable, an Ikea-esque word-free instruction page and a redundant CD complete the box’s contents.

It’s sublime. You plug in one of the plugs near your router and connect it using the Ethernet cable. You plug in the other plug in the troublesome area of the house. The second device emits a wireless signal, the password for which is on the back of the device. You connect to this wireless network and the electricity’s copper wiring connects that device to the other one, which connects on to the internet via the aforementioned Ethernet cable.

So far so good. The only issue that had me worried for a while was that the 16-character password didn’t seem to work for Apple devices—iPhone and iPad specifically. It turns out that the hyphens separating each quartet of numbers that were not required by Windows were required by iOS. Odd UX fail by Apple there.

avast’s blog post of yesterday indicated that this was a result of a false positive issue with one of their virus definitions updates. By the time I’d read this, I’d already downloaded AVG’s free offering just to get me up and running again. avast’s mistake here was not to advertise the issue clearly on their website, particularly given its crippling impact. (I’ve just watched a Guy Kawasaki video in which one of his messages is: Deliver Bad News Early.)

As a paying avast customer, I will go back to them. Not *because* I’m a paying customer, but because the product is all kinds of awesome.

I’ve been burnt by horrendous anti-virus software in the past. Namely: Norton. Norton is a horrendous application, a virus in and of itself. It sucks the life out of users. It announces and advertises its presence at every opportunity. And it makes you want to throw your laptop through the next available window.

avast is the opposite of Norton. Its spinning disc sits innocently in the tray at the bottom of the screen, there purely to inspire confidence. On occasions, it tells me that the virus definitions have been updated. But beyond that, I know not of its existence.

I’ve been an avast customer since 31 May 2006. And I will continue to be their customer long after our fifth anniversary.

My client was lacklustre about the concept of an electronic reading device. She claimed she liked the feel of a book, and didn’t see the appeal of reading it on a screen. In fact, she was mildly repulsed at the thought.

So I showed her. She immediately warmed to it. She liked that it was the size of a book, and that the contents of the screen looked just like a book, as opposed to being backlit in an iPad-esque kind of way. She liked that it could hold 3,000+ books, and that its battery would last for weeks. She was particularly interested in being able to take lots of books on holiday without having to pack them all. The upfront cost didn’t bother her too much either.

She asked whether all titles were available. So I asked what she would be interested in. We did a quick search for the book that she was currently reading. On Amazon UK, Martina Cole’s The Family was priced as follows:

• Paperback: £5.27
• Hard cover: £5.99
• Kindle edition: £9.99.

She will never buy a Kindle.

This needs to be sorted. I’m not sure why the Kindle book costs more than both the paperback and the hard cover. Is the publisher charging more for making their author’s work available electronically? Or is Amazon strapping on a significant margin for Kindle editions?

Whatever the reason, the electronic version of a book should *never* be more expensive than its physical equivalent. Same price, possibly; cheaper, almost always. As well as not turning people like my client off immediately, such a cost model is important to reflect the true cost of delivering the work to the buyer. Kindle editions are cheaper to create in the first instance, and the incremental delivery cost is so much lower than that of physical editions.

So Amazon, sort out your cost model. And don’t shame yourself in front of prospective customers again. OK?

Don’t get me wrong—I read before. But over time, my reading has become more bitty. I now read blogs, tweets, news articles, seldom delving into books any more.

Enter Kindle stage left. I’ve started reading books again. First up was Peter Taylor’s The Lazy Project Manager. And now I’m reading Professor Brian Cox’s Why does E=MC². And each morning, my daughter chooses whether Winnie the Pooh or Alice in Wonderland will delight us aboard the bus to school.

I’m not reading swathes—I’ve never been that sort of reader. But when I board a bus or Tube, I automatically reach for the Kindle. And that, I love.

I have but two gripes thus far.

First, it seems that books launched to the Kindle are not proofread as well as their offline equivalents. (“Andmass…” at the beginning of a sentence, instead of “And mass…” in Why does E=MC², for example.) Where the book is available both physically and on the Kindle, I’m surprised at the Kindle typos, and doubt that they’ve made their way into the offline versions. Yet I would be equally surprised if the books had been re-typed for electronic delivery. So I’m flummoxed.

Second, there’s a user interface gripe to which I have no answer. It seems that standard text formatting is justified, meaning that the edge of the text lines up beautifully down the left and right of the page. But because of the Kindle’s relatively narrow reading pane, fewer words appear on a single line under the standard portrait view than is the case in a paperback. The result: on occasions, where a particularly long word appears at the start of a line, the Kindle is unable to successfully kern the previous line, resulting in a ragged right line in the middle of an otherwise justified paragraph. It grates.

Overall though, utter joy.

I still hate it. On 19 July (a birthday post, it seems), I wrote a considered yet damning post articulating my views. Nine days later, upon reflection, my opinions hadn’t changed.

And six months later, I’m in the same boat. I use the News homepage as a means of accessing directly some of the lead stories. But I rarely touch the rest of the site. On the previous version, I regularly accessed many of the main sections on what was the left-hand nav.—Technology, Science/Nature (as it was), Politics, Sport etc. Now, I access my bookmarked Sport page, but rarely think to go to the other section homes.

I feel that the BBC are depriving me of news I was once eager to access. Yes, it’s partly down to my laziness. But in the main, I feel that it’s down to some site changes that didn’t focus sufficiently on the user—me.

The bundle of joy (iPad) was bought on the Apple store.  Apple chose to use United Parcel Service (UPS) to deliver said good.

They tried on three consecutive weekdays, and their door-knocks went unanswered.  I was at work trying to earn enough to pay for the device.

I called them up at an extortionate rate and arranged a re-delivery on a day I knew I’d be home.  The lovely man from UPS turned up as promised.  He delivered package two of two—a SIM card.  He informed me that he was the driver that attempted the prior deliveries, and was fully aware of the other parcel, but told me that it wasn’t on his van.  Shit.

Once again, I called the 0870 number, again paying for the privilege of waiting for someone to answer the phone.  I asked for package one of two to be delivered to my work address the following Tuesday.

It wasn’t.

I called the 0870 number (hold, etc.) and was told that the reason it wasn’t delivered to my work address was that to do so would have needed authorisation from Apple.  I had not given this authorisation.

So I asked for a delivery at home, on another day I knew I’d be home.  It didn’t show.  I called (yada-yada) and received an apology (backlog) and was promised a home delivery the following day (Christmas Eve).  When I looked online at 11pm that evening, I received confirmation that it had been delivered that morning.  To my work address.  Despite no such authorisation having been given to Apple.

So on Christmas Day, I spent £30 on taxi fares to and from work (open, fortunately) to collect the iPad.

The Apple user experience thus far has been dreadful.  I’m hoping that it will improve herein.

Here’s my attempt at a response.

Apple: its USP is its user experience, or UX to coin a slightly wanky abbreviation. Its products are beautiful to use—simple as that.

Google: its USP is its deep understanding of the relationship between users and web content. Whether this is search and results or targeted advertising, Google is able to connect the two better than anyone else.

Microsoft: its USP is fulfilling vital, generic functions better than anyone else. Word, Excel and PowerPoint merely represent replacements for lined paper, gridded paper and blank paper respectively, but the functions therein are so rich and deep-rooted that they will continue to dominate this space for some time to come.

I’d be interested in other people’s perspectives on this, as indeed would Charles, I expect.