I’d be very grateful if, after playing with the site for a bit, you could perhaps send feedback to me using the contact form which you’ll find on the site itself.

One thing which has yet to be addressed on the new site are the feeds: they will be added very soon for you to test!

All that changed for me last week. On Friday I was due to fly from Heathrow back to Geneva after the short university Easter holiday. I would be flying from Terminal 5, the day after it had opened to the public. At 11.19 p.m. on Thursday BA sent me a text message and an email saying that my flight had been cancelled. At that point I hadn’t heard about the chaos which had unfolded that day at the new terminal. Fortunately I was under no particular pressure to get back to Geneva on Friday, and so I was reasonably happy to rebook my flight for Sunday afternoon, assuming that two more days would allow BAA and BA to resolve those first-day problems.

My parents were still due to leave for Sydney on Friday evening from Terminal 4, so since I was still in England, I accompanied them to the airport to see them off. It was my experience that evening, and my subsequent experience at the new terminal on Sunday, which really opened my eyes to how much of a mess Heathrow is in.

BAA, you’ve successfully turned Terminal 4 into a backwater

For the last year or so the outside of Terminal 4 has been a maze of building-work as the car parks are reconstructed. There are sections of car park and road outside the terminal building which are completely boarded-off, which makes getting around the outside of the terminal increasingly difficult. A round-trip from a car parked by the curb to get a trolley for luggage has in many places been lengthened exponentially (depending where you are able to park, of course) as you try to navigate the construction-work hoardings.

Inside the terminal there was a certain degree of chaos precipitated by BA’s recent large-scale departure (although BA had moved most of its operations to Terminal 5 the day before, there are still some BA flights from Terminal 4; meanwhile the other airlines were expanding to fill the now-available space). We got past this and my parents were able to check in. The whole terminal is decidedly battered, but in a (to me) friendly, ‘lived-in’, kind of way.

Looking for the buses

The fun really began when I tried to get the coach back to Oxford. As far as I could see, there were no signs in any of the places I had been which gave details about how to catch buses from the terminal. I got outside and spoke to a BA employee standing on the curb; she said that buses leave from the bottom level (the departures are at the top). I negotiated the building works to get down to the bottom.

Outside the terminal at that level there were only signs to numbered bus stops, but no information about which buses leave from which stops. I went in to the terminal building, and eventually found (in spite of the lack of proper signs) something called ‘Bus information’ where there was a handwritten note saying that since the day before (when Terminal 5 had opened) buses only left from the central bus station which serves Terminals 1, 2, and 3. In order to get there, the sign said, you would have to take the (free) Heathrow Connect inter-terminal railway service from Terminal 4 to Heathrow Central. From the other end of the terminal building. Of course. Now, it would have been more helpful if the person I’d spoken to had told me that so I could have gone straight to the train, but perhaps she herself didn’t know that Terminal 4 is the new end of the universe from which the only way out is via Heathrow Central.

The ‘express’ train which isn’t really

The Heathrow Express is the much-vaunted express railway service from Heathrow to Paddington. I vaguely remember once hearing it described as ‘the most expensive railway in the world’ based on distance travelled vs. ticket cost. It used to be that you could get on the HEX at Terminal 4 and be in Paddington within twenty minutes. That is no longer the case—BAA, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that the HEX no longer needs to run to Terminal 4. Instead, the new(ish) Heathrow Connect service, which is a ‘slow train’ (in the common usage of the term) runs from Terminal 4 to Paddington (via Hayes, Southall, Hanwell, West Ealing, and Ealing Broadway).

In order now to get the really express service to Paddington from Terminal 4, you have to change trains at Heathrow Central. If I were someone arriving at Heathrow for the first time, having just stepped off a long and tiring flight, perhaps not being too comfortable with English, I wouldn’t be best pleased to be told to change trains in order to get the quickest service to Paddington. Terminal 4 is now officially a backwater.

On my way down to the railway station at Terminal 4, I was stopped by a Japanese girl looking for the Piccadilly line. I looked around for an obvious sign to the Underground, and since there’s nothing obvious in the vicinity, I assumed that like the Heathrow Express and the buses, the Underground no longer deigns to go to Terminal 4. When it became painfully clear that this girl’s English was so limited that she couldn’t understand my suggestion to take the train for free and change at the first station, I said that I would take her to the Heathrow Central Underground station.

When we arrived at Heathrow Central station (for the HEX and Heathrow Connect), there were no signs anywhere of how to get to the Underground station. Because I was familiar with the basic layout of the place, I was able to follow my nose to the Underground station. We walked for about ten minutes, and it was only when we were within 100 yards of the Underground station that we saw a sign indicating its presence and both heaved a sigh of relief.

I then had some difficulty finding the Heathrow Central bus station, once again due to a lack of proper signs. When I eventually got there I was relieved to see that there was an Oxford bus sitting in its stop taking on passengers.

Terminal 5 tries to be too clever by half

I was quite looking forward to my time in Terminal 5, even more so following the problems of the terminal’s opening. (Yes, I revel in that sort of thing.) The building itself is as impressive as everyone seems to be saying—there are huge amounts of natural light streaming in to the building (at least on the departures level, and compared to the dark Terminals 1, 2, 3, and 4) and the structure itself is quite ingenious. Of course, it remains to be seen whether a pile of concrete, steel, and glass will still be considered good design in ten, twenty, or fifty years’ time. Terminals 2 and 3 in particular are very much architectural victims of their own ages.

Ultimately I didn’t have too bad an experience at Terminal 5, but the place was pretty empty, presumably as a result of the number of cancelled flights. My impression, though, is that there are a number of things which can go wrong, and which (sooner rather than later) will go wrong. There’s a large amount of innovative technology throughout the terminal, which I fear hasn’t been thought through properly.

My brother-in-law Toby kindly drove me to the airport. In the car park we found that there are green lights which appear over empty spaces, thus allowing you quickly to identify an empty space from a distance. However, I noticed a few lights over occupied spaces flickering on and off as we drove past.

I had checked in online the day before; I now simply needed to drop off my two bags. The woman at the desk I went to told me immediately that it was her first day—not only in the new terminal, it seemed, but this was her first time doing the job anywhere. There was an unnecessarily complicated series of buttons she had to press in order to get the belt to move my bags in to the hidden void beyond.

Then, when I got to security, I found that the system there is almost totally automated—you move a tray onto the moving rollers so that it automatically goes through the X-ray machine; then it’s supposed to stop automatically for you on the other side (I’m not quite sure how that’s supposed to work). You then go through the attendant rigmarole of emptying the tray: returning your coins, keys, and phones to your pocket; desisting from holding up your trousers long enough to put your belt back on; returning watch to wrist; and replacing your shoes. Once all that has been effected, the now-empty tray is supposed to take up its journey once more, and move to the end of the track where there is a unit which automatically drops the tray onto a lower-level track which moves in the opposite direction, ready for someone at the beginning of the process to take the tray and put it onto the top-level track replete with his own belongings.

Sounds frightfully clever, doesn’t it? I only had to watch for about thirty seconds to see that the system is inherently flawed. I watched one man grapple with the machine which had stolen his laptop from him: the tray had started moving again before he had taken his computer out, and had moved into the unit which drops the tray on to the lower track. It was only with the combined struggle of this hapless passenger and one of the security staff that the laptop was rescued from the inner workings of the machine. Then I watched as another tray couldn’t get into the transfer unit because it wasn’t precisely straight on the track (it had been skewed slightly by the person removing his belongings from it)—it got stuck at the entrance to the transfer unit, while the following trays began to crash into it. I can see that system getting old very quickly for staff and passengers alike.

Finally, when I got on the plane, and after everyone was seated, it was announced that the baggage hadn’t yet been loaded on to the flight. We were told this like it was the most normal thing in the world, and the Captain said that it would only take fifteen minutes or so. After an hour we were finally ready to depart. It’s been widely reported that the problems with Terminal 5 stem principally from the baggage-delivery system. If that system is as dunderheadedly ‘innovative’ as the track at the X-ray machine, it’s easy to imagine why the whole thing fell over on the first day.

I can conclude with little else than to say that BAA desperately needs to sort out Heathrow, and fast. But I think that they know that already.

Much of this article was written while listening to a live audio feed of communications with Air Traffic Control for the final approach to JFK airport in New York, which helped to keep me in the right frame of mind. John happened to send me the link on Skype while I was sitting here writing!

I am living in a flat in Geneva, going to classes in the university. However, I had to wade through an awful lot of red tape to get here. I’m not going to go into details of the process of applying to the university, which was further complicated by the fact that both Issy and I were initially rejected to come and study here for a year. Nor will I bore you with the details of my seemingly interminable flat-hunt, since that wasn’t hindered by layers of bureaucracy so much as a very constricted accommodation market for Geneva with very little advertised on the Web. No, what follows is an account of the lengths to which I have been forced to go to establish myself as a resident in Geneva.

Swiss Consulate, London

The first thing to do was to find out what would be required of me as an Australian passport-holder going to study in Switzerland for a year. The website of the Swiss consulate in London provided absolutely no information for people wanting to travel to the country; it merely gave a few details for Swiss citizens living in the UK. So I sent an email to the consulate asking what I should do. A reply came back to me on the fifth day after I’d sent my original request, saying that I would need to fill in the attached form in triplicate (of course), provide photocopies of my passport ‘including valid visa and previous Swiss visas’ (it didn’t define the ambiguous phrase ‘valid visa’), a curriculum vitae with ‘explanation of the intentions of the applicant in Switzerland’, ‘Written confirmation that the applicant will leave Switzerland after the permitted period’ (that one made me laugh), examination certificates, an ‘attestation’ (little did I know that I would become pretty intimate with this word) from the university in Switzerland that I had a place, proof that I’d paid my university fees, and evidence of financial resources to support me during my time in the country. Phew, what a lot of paper: I knew that they just wanted to make sure that I was bona fide, so I set about gathering everything together and filling in the forms.

The only thing I lacked was the formal acceptance letter from the University of Geneva. When eventually that came, I made arrangements to travel to London to present my application at the consulate (sorry, ‘Embassy of Switzerland’) near Baker Street the following Monday. They would only receive visitors between 9am and midday, so I took the 7.30 a.m. train from Oxford to Paddington. I arrived at the consulate at 8.58, and joined the short queue of people already there waiting for the doors to be flung wide. Well, when I say ‘flung wide’, I mean we were let in one by one by a man who sought to examine our passports and establish that we were there for a productive purpose, gave us a numbered ticket, and invited us to sit down in front of the two windows established for serving non-Swiss nationals. Of course, only one of the windows was occupied. I was fifth in line.

Eventually my number was called and I went to the window, which was manned by a German-speaking woman. Perhaps I should say that it was staffed by a German-speaking woman? I said that I was applying for a student visa, and presented the requisite pile of documents (about half an inch thick!), at the top of which was a covering letter I’d written, giving precise details of each of the documents which formed my dossier.

If I had to sum up my experience in the consulate in just one word, I would say exasperating. The woman kept asking me where this or that document was, and I had to keep drawing her attention to the numbered list on my covering letter which she had glanced over but had evidently not taken in properly. Even though I had only been told that I would have to provide three copies of the application form, when I said that there was only one copy of all the other documents, I was greeted with a sharp intake of breath being sucked through teeth, as if to say, ‘What’s all this, then?’.

I had provided photocopies of all my exam certificates—GCSE, AS-level, A-level, the one AEA I did at school, and the type-written summary of the results of my first-year Oxford exams (the Preliminary Examination). These copies had been certified by my College’s secretary, since that had been demanded when I made the application to the university. Apparently that wasn’t good enough.

‘How do I know that your exam certificates are not forgeries?’ I assured her that they were, of course, not, since I was not in the business of forging examination certificates.

‘Well, people will try anything to get a visa.’ I couldn’t think of any appropriate response, and so let that comment hang there between us. I had no reason to disbelieve her: I’m sure people will try anything to get a visa.

Then she got annoyed with me because I didn’t know exactly what date the term here would begin, or when I would need to be here for language examinations. ‘You have to make things easy for me. I have to write a letter on your behalf to the authorities in Switzerland.’ Again, all I could do was apologize. ‘Where have you written that you will need to sit an exam before the beginning of term?’ I had written it nowhere. So she went away and came back with a blank piece of paper for me to write that fact on before giving her paper back.

Then came the next blow—the Australian bank statement I had provided as evidence of appropriate financial resources was ‘too old’ (since I get my statements quarterly, this one had been printed two months previous). She asked if I could arrange for the bank to send me an up-to-the-minute statement. I said that I could, but knowing that would be a hassle, I suggested that I could equally just make a print-out from my Internet banking records. Oh yes, she said, that would be fine. Oh no, you can’t use this computer (I would have been surprised if I could, to be honest); you’ll have to go to an Internet café near Baker Street station. Brilliant.

She then asked me what language the teaching would be in. When I said that it would be in French she went away again to get a form which had evidently been photocopied many times, which had rows for German, French, Italian, and English, and columns for different levels of linguistic competence, ranging from ‘Keine’ to fluent. She muttered under her breath, ‘English, obviously fluent’, and asked me if I spoke any German or Italian. I apologetically shook my head no to both questions. She then started talking to me in French, asking me to define my competence in the language—a question which I evaded just by carrying on talking, saying that I didn’t really know, but that I was a student of French at Oxford and had been taught well, such that I could hardly be described as ‘fluent’ (and of course I forgot the word for ‘fluent’–how appropriate!) but I could hold my own. Evidently this seemed to satisfy her since she ticked some box or other (I don’t remember where it was on the matrix) and added that form to the now-bigger pile of papers.

But the linguistic assessment wasn’t over, oh no! She went away again to get another blank piece of paper, and came back, and said to me—in French—that I would need to write something. But what should I write?, I asked. It doesn’t matter, she said, just as long as I did it all on my own. She sent me away to a table stacked with promotional literature while she set about dealing with my papers. She called me back after a brief moment to ask (still in French) what I would be studying, since the attestation from the university simply said ‘Faculté des Lettres’. She asked if that meant that I ‘speak’ Latin, and I said no, ‘But you’re good at it?’, and I conceded the point. I returned to my writing and she started dealing with the next person. I sat and wrote a hundred words or so, hammering home the point that I was just going to go to Geneva for a year, just to speak some French, like just about every other third-year Modern Languages undergraduate in the country.

I really didn’t mind this linguistic assessment. What I found utterly ridiculous, however, was that absolutely no mention of any such test was made in any of the extensive documentation I’d seen about applying for a visa. In fact, it felt like the woman behind the glass was just trying to find more things to throw at me in the hope that something would trip me up! After I‘d finished my oeuvre I waited for her to finish with that person, and then dashed up to the window to hand it in, slightly confusing the person who was in fact next in line.

I then went to the Internet café to print out my banking records. Having got back to the consulate, I was able to do my trick of dashing up to the window after one person left and before the next got there. When I handed it in, the woman seemed to be pathetically grateful that I’d actually come back. It would take six to eight weeks for my application to be approved by the appropriate authorities in Switzerland, after which time I would have to come back to the consulate to have the visa inserted into my passport.

While in Australia during July and August I got a voicemail saying that my application had been approved (that was a relief!). I go to London when I get back to the UK to hand in my passport. Of course, the visa couldn’t be stuck in there and then: it would take twenty-four hours. When I return the following day to pick up the passport, it is accompanied by a very confusing document, or rather a fragment of a document written in French which seemed to imply that the visa in my passport wasn’t really a visa. The document also said that I would need to go to the ‘relevant Cantonal authorities’ within eight days of my arrival in Switzerland. I already knew this latter fact, but decided that that was their purpose in leaving me this document, rather than that stuff about ‘this visa isn’t really a visa’. It turns out that I didn’t need to have worried about whether or not I would get turned away upon arrival, because when I handed my passport over to the immigration official at Geneva airport open at the non-visa visa page, he said in surprise, ‘Un visa? Dans un passeport australien?!’

In search of a residence permit

I knew that I would have to go to the Office Cantonal de la Population within eight days of my arrival in Switzerland: it had said as much on that strange part-document I’d got when I’d retrieved my passport from the Swiss consulate, and on the back of my original acceptance letter from the university.

The thing is, though I had heard many different accounts of what documents I would need to take to the OCP: one school of thought said that I would only need my passport, university acceptance letter, passport photos, and 130 CHF to settle the relevant fees; while Issy—who had arrived earlier than me and had already had a frustrating experience at the OCP—suggested that I would need everything which I had already taken to the consulate in London.

I decided to play it safe, and took everything. Fortunately I was able to find two passport photos in my wallet (a couple of years old now, but I don’t look that different!) because otherwise I knew there would be unpleasantness and I would be turned away.

By all accounts, the office would get very busy indeed, and so having worked out the best bus to take (thanks to information from Issy), I arrived there at about 8.50 a.m. Although the office was due to open at 9, there were already people—members of the public—milling around inside. So I push my way in.

The first stage was to queue up at the outer reception desk in order to inquire exactly what I would need to fill in and what documents I needed to present in order to get my residence permit. The man behind the desk—we speak in French, even though he had been dealing with the previous enquirer in curt English—kindly gives me a certain form for non-EU citizens and tells me to take a numbered ticket. My first of very many numbered tickets over the coming days.

I go in to the main room, which has a large waiting area and about ten windows on one side where the appropriate business is taking place. In spite of the fact that it is still before 9 a.m., the room was chock full of people. According to the number display showing who was currently being served, I was about one-hundred-and-tenth in line. I sit down to look at the form and fill it in as best I can: it was in fact largely the same as the form I’d already filled in for the consulate in London, which included requests for details that just didn’t apply to my situation as a student-resident, such as who my employer in Geneva is.

The numbers are being called forward very slowly. Evidently this is going to be a long, long wait. After about fifteen minutes, however, a woman breezes through asking that anyone who has come to study at the Université de Genève wait in line behind desk K. Hooray, the opportunity to queue-jump! I was fourth in line in that queue. It turned out that there were about thirty students doing the same thing as me on that day, which wasn’t too surprising since it was exactly a week before the term was due to begin and it was the first day that the university was open for the registration of new students.

When I got to the front of the queue, I handed over my form. The woman sent a minion scuttling away who brought back a thick file, which contained all of the documents I’d originally submitted in London. It was something of a strange experience to see them all again—I’d come to get used to the idea that once you submit a form, you don’t see it again! Evidently this is a country which hasn’t embraced the possibility of scanning documents and dealing with digital versions (which take up far less space)…

While this was all going on I began to wonder why exactly I was required to hand over two passport photos. One would have sufficed for them to stick on to my residence permit, and I had already submitted passport photos attached to each of the three application forms I’d handed over in London, and which, as far as I could tell, were all sitting on that desk in front of me.

Things were moving fairly quickly. Once I’d paid the fee (nothing in officialdom here can happen without the payment of the appropriate fee, I’ve now discovered), the woman gave me a receipt, and returned my letter of attestation from the university, complete with the all-important stamp saying that I’d shown up at the OCP. She then told me that they would need me to post them something which I would receive from the university, but I was distinctly unsure what document she meant. I decided I would surely be told at the university itself. And so, after she’d told me that it would take three–four weeks for me to receive my residence permit, I went on my merry way, rejoicing that thanks to the special (and completely ad-hoc) students’ queue, my time at the dreaded Office Cantonal de la Population had been short. Little did I know that I would be returning for an extended stint…

Registering at the university

The university had informed us that we would need to register there during the week before term began, after going to the Office Cantonal de la Population, taking the letter of attestation stamped by the OCP as proof that that was indeed the case. I had originally planned to go to the university on the Tuesday, but that was because I’d been counting on having to spend an extended period at the OCP. When I got out of the OCP before 10 a.m., blinking in the sunlight, I decided that I seemed to be on a roll and so should go and register at the university that day.

I ended up spending four hours at the university. When I finally got out of there, I looked back on what I’d in fact achieved, and realized quite how inefficient the whole process had been. This is what needed to happen during my registration:

1. Have my photograph taken;
2. Show the originals of all my examination certificates—the same examination certificates of which I had sent certified copies with my university application;
3. Give information about my address in Geneva, and fill in a questionnaire about the information available to me while I was applying to the university (I had fun with that one!);
4. Pick up my student card, the invoice for the first semester’s fees, and a few leaflets for new students at the university.

Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? Well, it should have been. But this is how it worked:

1. Go in to the building to be greeted by a friendly student helper who looks at my university attestation stamped by the OCP and hands me a stack of documents which include the forms I need to fill in, together with the all-important numbered ticket; he directs me to the second floor where all the fun’s happening.
2. Arrive at the second floor to find hundreds of people sitting around on the few chairs and on the floor leaning against the wall. There are a few student helpers standing around. I go up to one, and show her my numbered ticket; she says that I will probably have to wait about thirty–forty minutes, but that I could go and have my photograph taken now at the booths next to her. So I have my photograph taken. To this day, I’m not sure what purpose that photograph served since there is a photo pasted into my student card which is just one of the passport photos I submitted with my university application.
3. I sit on the floor and wait. And wait. Fortunately I had a book with me to pass the time. Thirty–forty minutes’ wait? Er, try more like ninety.
4. Eventually a block of numbers which includes that on my ticket is called forward: I follow the crowd. We then have to wait in a queue for about ten minutes more before being let into a medium-sized lecture theatre at the front of which a woman is standing taking people’s forms and tickets. I hand mine over, and am told to sit down (it really wasn’t clear what was going on), and my name would be called once she’d pulled out my dossier. After waiting another ten minutes or so, she starts calling out people’s names and we go to pick up our dossiers, after which we queue at the back of the room. I leaf through my dossier, to find absolutely everything I’d originally sent to the university: all my application forms, my covering letter, my passport photos, even the FedEx air waybill which had accompanied the packet of documents I’d sent!
5. I stand and queue for another half-hour. A girl a little way behind me is having an argument with one of the members of staff: she is a returning student, and wants to know what she should be doing; he says that registration this week is only for new students and so she shouldn’t be there; she says that she received a letter telling her to come this week; he assures her that no such letter was sent; she says that even if it wasn’t sent, she got it; he storms off. Good times.
6. Eventually I get to the front of that queue and am invited to a desk with a bearded man sitting behind it. He asks to see my dossier, and my original exam certificates. He establishes that I’m just there for two semesters. He pulls my student card out of the dossier (I’d already seen it, of course), folds it, and hands it over to me. He holds on to the dossier, and directs me to the desk next to the exit.
7. I go to the desk next to the exit, hand over the questionnaire I’d had to fill in, and in return receive the bill for my fees. What an exchange!
8. Finally I am able to leave. No one has told me anything about the document which I need to send to the OCP, so evidently I’m going to have to do some more investigation.

What seems so ridiculous about this chain of events was where I had to go through the rigmarole of picking up my dossier (hand in form and ticket to woman, sit down, wait for name to be called, receive dossier which includes the form I’ve just handed in) only to hand it to the bearded man! It was like a very slow relay race, where instead of a baton, there’s a stack of documents in a yellow file; instead of a high-speed sprint, there’s a lot of standing in queues. What a waste of time! Surely it would have been far more efficient to have made the bearded man my first point of contact? He could have then fetched my dossier for himself! Or, indeed, even more efficient would have been for him to have pulled up all my records on the computer system (I know that they had been entered in a database, since there was a print-out of my record in the dossier), and used the information there to speed things along? I know, crazy stuff.

Inside a Swiss bank

I needed to open a bank account (yes, a Swiss bank account, heh) as soon as possible, since I needed to pay for things like rent and my university fees, as well as to settle the deposit on my rented flat. And so, after leaving the university following my experience of the process of immatriculation (to use the French word), I had some lunch and took myself to the branch of a bank I’d previously identified as suitable for my needs.

Inside the bank, everything was plush and quiet. I went to the reception desk and said that I wanted to open a basic current account. They asked for a proof of identity, and I handed over my passport. But didn’t I have my residence permit?, they asked. No, I didn’t, I explained: I’d been to the OCP that morning and wouldn’t receive any such permit for another month or so. But didn’t I have an attestation to that effect? There’s that word again—attestation.

The only attestation I had thitherto come across was the attestation that I had a place at the university—the same one which had been stamped that morning at the OCP and then subsequently re-examined at the university. I brought this out as proof of my bureaucratic experience until that moment.

They looked at the university attestation and said no, that wouldn’t do. What someone in my situation needed, apparently, was a specific attestation from the OCP that although I didn’t yet have my residence permit, they were aware of my presence and would in due course deign to send me one. Once I came back with that particular document, they said, I’d be able to make an appointment to open an account.

So, that was that. I had to go away to go to the Office Cantonal de la Population to get the document to allow me to have an appointment to open a bank account. Not in the least bit convoluted.

By that time I was pretty tired and called it a day. Anyway, the OCP was closed by then: they close at 3.30 p.m. ’Nuff said on that matter.

Back to the OCP for the attestation

The following morning I decided to ring up the OCP to find out how I should go about getting the attestation required by the bank. I dreaded to think how long before my call would be answered, but in fact it was answered within one or two minutes. The woman at the other end of the line asked me for my name and date of birth so that she could find me on the computer system (see, they do use computers!). Yes, she said, I could get the attestation that day by coming to the office and filling in the appropriate form. But I should come quickly because it was already pretty full. Big surprise there.

So I return to the OCP, now familiar with the bus route. I go to the first reception desk, explain that I merely want an attestation that I would be receiving a residence permit (permis de séjour) and they say that that’s pretty simple. For a fleeting moment the vision of the man just producing the attestation there and then flashed before my eyes. I should be so lucky. He handed me the appropriate form, and I took a numbered ticket and entered the main room.

If I thought there had been a lot of people there the day before, I would need to reassess my interpretation of ‘a lot of people’ today. According to the electronic number display, I was one-hundred-and-eightieth in line. I was in for a long wait. I filled in the form as best I could—once again it didn’t quite apply to my situation, since it implied that they would be posting the attestation to me. I wasn’t going to queue for an extended period—five hours, as it turned out—just to be told that they’d post me a slip of paper.

I sat and waited. And waited. And read. And waited. And got restless. And went to the loo. And came back. And boy, was it mind-numbing.

Eventually my number was called. I pinched myself to see if I was dreaming, and then hurried to the designated window before they had the opportunity to think that I’d done a runner and call the next person. I explained what I wanted, and handed over the form. The woman tapped away at her computer. She then proceeded to write out the document, and print it. She asked me to read it, to make sure it said what I wanted it to say (oh, how kind!); when I said that it seemed fine, she stamped it and asked for the fee. They print the receipt onto the document itself, to prove that it‘s a fully paid-up official document. Then the area where the receipt has been printed (by a dot-matrix printer) has to be stamped and initialled to prove that the receipt is valid. So, the attestation (the document I was after) needed to have an attestation that it had been paid for (the over-printing of the receipt), which in turn had to have its validity attested (by means of the stamp and initials). Why stop there?

As I was leaving the window I asked the woman in passing what the university document was that I would have to post to them—she said that it was the bill for the fees which I’d been given yesterday, and held up a copy of someone else’s as an example. I said that I had it with me—would she be able to take a copy of it and save me the trouble of posting it in? Yes, she would. I was worried that she would charge me for the copying, and then go through the rigmarole of printing the receipt on the copy and doing all that further attestation stuff, but happily it wasn’t to be. Evidently I had discovered a very slight degree of flexibility within the very rigid system.

I was particularly glad to get out of that building and back into the sunlight. I returned to the bank that afternoon to be told that I wouldn’t be able to make an appointment to open an account until late on the following Thursday afternoon. But at least I had my attestation.

I think that’s probably enough of that. Don’t even get me started on the rigmarole involved in getting the phone line connected…

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror—
The wide brown land for me!

—from ‘My Country’ (1890/1911),
by Dorothea Mackellar (1885–1968)

When it comes to the Outback, Dorothea Mackellar had it right: it’s a place of stark contrasts. The tourism phrase ‘Red Centre’, which has now entered common parlance, doesn’t quite do the Central Australian terrain justice—I came expecting a land of endless red rock but instead found greens, greys, browns, and yellows to complement the reds. Then there are all the different shades of red—only to be expected, perhaps—such that some are far more accurately described as ‘grey’ or ‘brown’ than truly ‘red’.

One example of the multiple shades of red has become something of a travellers’ cliché: the stone of Ayers’ Rock changes colour as the sun sets; however it’s only a cliché because it’s patently true. Similarly, the rock-face at Rainbow Valley suddenly comes alive with colour (thus justifying the location’s name) as it catches the light of the setting sun. I’m sure that the same phenomenon occurs at most, if not all, of the remarkable geological formations dotted around Central Australia. That a single location should offer so much brightly-hued opportunity is the colour photographer’s fantasy, and a good reward for making the effort to trek into the Outback.

Another contrast I quickly noticed during our tour of the Central Australian Outback was how some places are enormously touristed, while others are not. After spending a night at Rainbow Valley with a few other travellers dotted around the camp-ground (the tents and camper-vans were all quietly disassembled in the morning as everyone drove off), it was something of a shock to the system to arrive the following evening at Yulara, the purpose-built ‘tourist village’ which is the sole accommodation for those visiting Uluru–Kata Tjuta National Park. Photographing the Rock at sunset—from the confines of the strictly-controlled ‘sunset viewing area’, naturally—we were surrounded by people glad to have ‘made it’ to the best-advertised feature of the Australian Outback. Voices in every language piped up all around us as people talked not only to one another but to friends and family on the other end of their mobile phones—after a trip along the rural highways, the phones’ owners were overjoyed to discover that the cellular network companies had thoughtfully installed service in and around the National Park.

After the relative hubbub of Yulara, it was a shock again to spend the following night at a former cattle station—Old Angas Downs—which has been deserted probably since the 1970s, where we were the only people for miles around. Some might say that our time at Old Angas Downs is an experience of the ‘true’ Outback, but that point of view seems to deny that there be some reason for the fact that tourists flock to the well known places like Ayers’ Rock or King’s Canyon: these places are particularly remarkable natural wonders which stand out in a world which increasingly venerates a parade of the man-made.

Central Australia is justifiably described as ‘arid’, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not a drop of water to be seen. On our final night we stayed at Boggy Hole in the Finke Gorge National Park, which is a permanent water-hole in the Outback. Up until then during our tour we had seen nothing like the tall reeds, green trees, and soft grass which result from the ever-present water supply. Of course, when the Finke River floods, it tends to do so with gusto, and the waters leave in their trail a scattered collection of uprooted trees and broken branches.

We were particularly fortunate with the weather during the trip. I’d chosen to go to Central Australia in the middle of winter principally because that was when I could afford the time; however, I would have thought twice (if not more) if I’d only been available in the summer. The first night was quite cold, but apart from that we enjoyed fairly mild nights (no need for the hat, scarf, and gloves I’d dutifully brought with me!) and days which the sun warmed to a comfortable 68°F/20°C or so. We also had the luck of dappled cloud-cover during much of the trip, which not only served to alter the quality of the light, but also to add interest to what might otherwise be some familiar photographs of the well-worn tourist spots: the clouds were of course thanks to the presence on the trip of Helen-the-cloud-bringer.

On the night at Boggy Hole, however, no cloud could be seen, and I took the opportunity to capture the movement of the stars overhead over the course of two hours. Star-trail photography is something I had never previously considered, let alone tried, but we had been discussing the techniques involved on and off for the whole tour. It was quite satisfying, therefore, to give the effect a go!

I got home from the trip exhausted but invigorated, and found that a layer of red dust had somehow permeated my shoes, bag, and clothes. I’m still shaking the dust out of one pair of shoes three months later! I also had more than a thousand photos to process on the computer. After doing all that, though, I’ve been left with an impressive collection of images which I hope go some way to giving a sense of the awesome wonder of the Outback.

I took part in a ‘Vivid Red Centre’ tour with Vivid Adventures, from 27th July to 1st August 2007. You can see my album of photos from the Outback photo tour here. You can also see photos taken on the tour by Helen Osler elsewhere on the Web.

The principles of subscribing to a feed

When you want to subscribe to a site, there are three steps you have to take. Keep these in mind and you’ve won half the battle:

1. Find out if the site / section you’re interested in has a feed of some kind;
2. Find out the address of that feed;
3. Give that address to your feed reader to add it to your subscriptions list.

Setting up NetNewsWire Lite

The software I recommend for starting with feeds on the Mac is NetNewsWire Lite from Newsgator. The free ‘Lite’ version will do everything you need. In order to find the free version (and not the trial of the paid-for version), you have to scroll down the middle of that page, looking carefully for the heading ‘Lite Version’. I personally use the paid-for version (NetNewsWire) to take advantage of the opportunity to sync my subscriptions list between multiple computers. NetNewsWire (both the Lite and full versions) is often said to be the best standalone feed reader currently available for the Mac. I have no complaints about it.

Downloading and installing NetNewsWire Lite

Like much Mac software, you download a compressed disk image. Uncompress it by double-clicking on the file you download, which produces a .dmg file (’NetNewsWireLite2.1.1.dmg’ in this case, for the version available at the time of writing). Double-click on that file, which opens the disk image. If you’re using Safari as your Web browser, all this will probably happen automatically.Drag the icon for NetNewsWire Lite from the disk image window in the Finder, and put it in the Applications folder on your hard disk. That’s it: the application’s installed. You can now open it by going to the Applications folder and double-clicking on its icon. You can eject the disk image from the sidebar of the Finder. You can also now delete the .zip and .dmg files you’ve just been using to install your new application.

Running NetNewsWire Lite for the first time

When you first open NetNewsWire Lite (I’ll just call it NNWL from now on), you’ll probably be asked at least two questions: yes, you do want it to be the default reader for feeds, and no, you probably don’t want to set up syncing just yet. You should then be presented with a window which looks something like this picture:

On the left-hand side, below the toolbar, you can see a list of feeds to which NNWL subscribes the first time you run it. Apart from the BBC News site, they’re all fairly techie feeds (with a heavy pro-Mac bias, see!). Each of the feeds’ names is in bold because there are ‘unread’ items contained in that feed: the number in brackets next to each feed’s name shows how many unread items there are. In this instance, we’ve selected to look at the feed for ‘A List Apart’. You can see that there are two unread items, whose titles (headlines) appear on the right-hand side of the screen. By clicking on each of those titles, we can read the articles themselves—from within NNWL—in the panel below the list of headlines. You don’t have to keep the built-in subscriptions! Go ahead and delete them all (or just the ones you don’t want to keep) by clicking on the feed name at the top of the list (in this case, ‘A List Apart’) and shift-clicking on the feed name at the bottom of the list (’Wired News’), and then pressing the delete (backspace) key on your keyboard. You’re asked whether you’re sure you want to unsubscribe from all these feeds—go ahead and click ‘Unsubscribe’, and you’ll be left with an empty feed list. Now you need to fill it up with subscriptions to sites you are really interested in.

Subscribing to feeds from within NetNewsWire Lite

If you know the address of a feed you want to subscribe to (the feed’s specific address, not the site’s address), then you can click on the ‘Subscribe’ button on the toolbar and enter the feed’s address, either by typing it in or by copying-and-pasting. That’s fine if you already know the URL, but what if you don’t? Read on to discover how to find these feeds’ addresses on the Web.

Finding feeds’ addresses on the Web

Imagine this: you’re browsing the Web, and you find a site whose content interests you. How do you know if they’ve got a feed to which you can subscribe? How do you find that feed’s address to give it to NNWL? Well, the answers to those questions differ slightly depending on whether you’re using Safari (the default Web browser on OS X), or Firefox (a popular alternative Web browser). If you’re using another Web browser (there are many available for OS X), then look at the methods used in Safari and Firefox and see if you can work out something comparable in your own browser.

Safari

In Safari, the easiest way to see if the site you’re browsing has an RSS feed is to look at the address bar at the top of the window. If there’s a feed, a blue badge declaring ‘RSS’ appears at the right-hand end of that bar:

If you click on the blue ‘RSS’ badge, Safari will probably think for a moment before switching to NNWL with the feed’s address already filled-in in the ‘Subscribe’ panel. Just click ‘Subscribe’ and the feed will be added to your subscriptions in NNWL. The reason Safari knows to open NNWL is because when you first ran NNWL you clicked ‘Yes’ when it asked you whether it should establish itself as the default reader for feeds. If, however, you didn’t say yes, or for some other reason Safari doesn’t switch to NNWL when you click on the blue ‘RSS’ badge, the situation can be rectified fairly easily. In Safari, go to the Safari application menu (at the top-left of the screen), and select ‘Preferences…’; then choose the ‘RSS’ tab. Under ‘Default RSS Reader’, if NNWL isn’t already listed, choose ‘Select…’ at the bottom of the menu and browse to where NNWL is in your Applications folder. Click ‘Select’, close the Safari Preferences, and you’re good to go.Sometimes when browsing the Web you will find a link to an RSS feed, perhaps without the blue badge appearing in the address bar. If this ever happens, you can just click the link and Safari will switch over to NNWL in the same way with the feed’s address already filled in.

Firefox

Firefox behaves pretty similarly to Safari when it comes to finding feeds’ addresses on the Web, but in order to save yourself hassle later, you have to tell Firefox of NNWL’s existence (and your preference to use NNWL for feeds) beforehand.Go to the Firefox application menu (at the top-left of the screen), and select ‘Preferences…’; then choose the ‘Feeds’ tab. Choose the option to ‘Subscribe to the feed using:’ and then click on the ‘Choose Application…’ button if NNWL isn’t already selected. Browse to where NNWL is in your Applications folder. Click ‘Open’, and close the Firefox Preferences.

When you’re on the hunt for feeds to subscribe to, the first thing to check is the address bar at the top of the window; if it has the special RSS logo (concentric quarter-circles), then the site you’re looking at has an RSS feed associated with it:

Just click on that RSS icon, and Firefox will switch to NNWL, with the feed’s address already filled-in in the ‘Subscribe’ panel. Just click ‘Subscribe’ and the feed will be added to your subscriptions in NNWL. Occasionally a site will offer more than one RSS feed (as my site does), in which case when you click on the RSS icon in the address bar in Firefox, a menu will appear with each of the available feeds—they should have fairly descriptive names, so that you can choose the one you want. If you’re confused about which feed to subscribe to, just give any of them a go to see what comes up in NNWL; you can easily unsubscribe from the one you tried and try one of the others.Sometimes when browsing the Web you will find a link to an RSS feed, perhaps without the RSS icon appearing in the address bar. If this ever happens, you can just click the link and Firefox will switch over to NNWL in the same way with the feed’s address already filled in.

Go forth and subscribe

That’s all for now; I hope that this has been a useful and instructive tutorial. Subscribe to the sites you’re interested in. Why not go and find some sites now you want to subscribe to so that your subscriptions list in NNWL doesn’t look too empty? Why not subscribe to one of the RSS feeds available on this site?Your normal MO from now on would probably be to leave NNWL open whenever you’re connected to the Internet (you can close the window of the application without quitting the application). In NNWL you can adjust how often the application automatically checks the feeds you’ve subscribed to for updated content: just go to the NetNewsWire Lite application menu (at the top-left of the screen), select ‘Preferences…’, and then choose the ‘Downloading’ tab. Choose a suitable interval for the application to check your feeds under the ‘Refresh all subscriptions:’ menu; I vary the setting between one and four hours depending on how I’m feeling.

Whenever NNWL has found new content in your feeds, it will display the number of new items as a badge over its icon in the Dock: if you see any number over the NNWL icon (the globe with the satellite flying overhead), you know there’s new content which might interest you.Fiddle around with the application’s menus to get it working in a way that makes sense to you. I use the ‘Latest News’ service (go to the View menu and tick ‘Show Latest News Subscription’) when browsing through new content; that way, all the unread items are gathered together at once for me to quickly go through. If you want to open a news-item in your Web browser, you can double click on its headline in the list, or if you’re using the keyboard, just press the right arrow.Have fun, and I hope that you find this all a productive and useful way to keep up with your favourite sites. Confused about anything I’ve written here? Write a comment below and I’ll try to help you out.

The Mac Business Unit has apparently taken notice:

On the serious side, one of the themes I found could be summarized as “more transparency, more data”. That is the goal of this blog and we are working towards that. While we can’t answer every question in real time, we are listening and we are using that feedback to inform our decisions—and we really appreciate the dialog.

[…]

The overwhelming request was “EXCHANGE!” We hear you, and we know this is super important to a lot of folks, and it is important to us too—like the rest of Microsoft, we use Exchange here in MacBU.

The next step is of course for them to come up with some solid information about the way in which Exchange servers will be handled in Mac Office 2008…

So, I thought it might be helpful briefly to sum up in this article why RSS and feeds are useful, and then (in the second article in this series, soon forthcoming) to give some—I hope—clear instructions for you to play along at home, without going into unnecessary technical detail (no one needs to worry about different ‘flavours of XML’, however much some of us might love discussing these things).

Just quickly: ‘RSS’ is an abbreviation said either to be for ‘Rich Site Summary’, or for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. To be honest, it doesn’t matter which one of these expansions you remember, or indeed if you choose to remember either one of these. The abbreviation ‘RSS’ is all that really needs to be remembered. One other thing: you may also occasionally see reference to another kind of feeed (other than RSS), called ‘Atom’. ‘Atom’ feeds are different at a technical level, but we don’t need to worry about that: you can make use of Atom feeds in exactly the same way as RSS feeds.

So, what’s all this ‘feed’ stuff about, anyway?

By using feeds, you can be told when a website (with appropriate feed) is updated. That’s it in a nutshell.

Say, for example, you find a site which you like, such as, perhaps, this one. I don’t update it that often, so you know that it’s not worth your while checking it every day to see when there’s something new. You might bookmark it, but then never come back because—let’s face it—you’re far too busy to think about checking here every few months or so (or less). So you miss out on all the goodness.

But, being a savvy Web user, you see that the site has an RSS feed (in fact, it has several for you to choose from, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here) and so you decide to ’subscribe’ to the feed. This means that you get the exact address (URL) of the feed, and give that address to your ‘feed reader’ (don’t worry, we’ll get back to what that is).

Your ‘feed reader’ is set up to check all of the feeds to which you subscribe every so often (say, every hour). Every time my site is updated, the feed is updated to match, and so if your feed reader becomes aware that the feed has changed since the last time it checked, it is able to alert you to the fact: nothing intrusive, necessarily, but it might be like when you get a new email. (The email analogy is going to come in very useful in a minute, because much of the way you interact with your feeds is similar to the way in which you interact with your email. Hold tight!)

Now, that’s rather boring if you’ve only subscribed to one feed: you might as well just check the website yourself. Why this whole thing is useful, however, is because you can subscribe to many feeds for many different websites: since your feed reader is checking regularly to see if those sites are being updated, you don’t need to think about it. You just check your feed reader every so often and it will tell you if the sites you’re interested in have got new content for you to read/look at. Then you read/look at it. No faffing around, right?

So, in addition to this site’s feed, you might subscribe to the feed of a newspaper, or to the feed for some blogger’s musings, or to someone’s Flickr photostream (so you’re alerted when he/she uploads photos by thumbnails and titles of said photos), or to the comments section of an article you read on the Web which has sparked a discussion which you want to follow for a few days (after which you can easily unsubscribe), or to anything. If it interests you, if it’s got a feed, then you can subscribe to it and stay up-to-date. It’s perfectly easy to unsubscribe from the feed.

The word ‘subscribe’ when used of feeds is perhaps a little misleading. Normally we use the word to imply that you are engaging in a transactional relationship (sorry) with someone else—e.g. you have to give someone your address and a subscription fee to ‘subscribe’ to a magazine. There is no such two-way relationship taking place when you subscribe to a feed: you just find the address of the feed, and give that to your feed reader. There’s no process of ‘approval’ by the feed’s site-owner, and when you want to unsubscribe you just delete the address from your feed reader, and that’s that.

Does this make sense so far? I hope so. The next article in this series will outline practical approaches to setting up a feed reader and starting to subscribe to feeds, with examples of software for both Mac OS X and Windows. But if you’re confused for the minute, sound off in the comments below.

This is the first article in a short series about the practical use of RSS and feeds by ordinary (non-‘geek’) Web users. The next article will be published within the next week, so check back soon if you’re interested in step-by-step instructions for setting up your own RSS reader and subscribing to feeds.

In the April 2007 edition of Wired magazine, there was a feature about corporate ‘transparency’, especially in tech companies. In this instance, ‘transparency’ means opening your company up to the world, warts and all, so that the general public—all of whom are potential customers—can see what’s going on on the inside.

The idea which promotes corporate ‘transparency’ is that by talking about what you’re doing day-to-day, you increase general interest in your company, brand, and products. Of course this ‘transparency’ is most commonly effected in the form of blogs and other new-media online content produced by named individuals within the company.

In order to achieve full transparency, the individual should be able to write or say what he likes without worrying about censorship by executives or press offices. As soon as something is censored, it becomes just another example of corporate bumpf, and loses all pulling-power for the reader attracted by the possibility of some internal dirt.

One article by Fred Vogelstein within the extended feature in last month’s Wired was about Microsoft. Microsoft is a huge, conservative company where the staff were tightly controlled about what they could and couldn’t say to people outside the company—outside their own divisions, indeed—under pain of dismissal.

Then, along came Channel 9, which is a site where video is posted from inside the Redmond campus of uncensored interviews with engineers, software architects, and managers. The Wired article waxes lyrical about how Channel 9 provides exactly the sort of inside information about Microsoft that techies are keen on hearing. The other method by which Microsoft bares its workings to the world is a collection of different blogs written by individuals and teams working on their many software products where the developers get to tell the Web surfers what they’ve been working on.

Channel 9 may be a breath of fresh air when it comes to corporate transparency for all I know—I must confess that I’ve never been attracted by the disparate variety of videos available there. However, I do occasionally read the blog of the team which makes Microsoft software for the Mac, variously called the ‘Mac Business Unit’ and ‘The Office for Mac Team’. The most recent post on that blog—published on 19th April, nearly a month ago—seems to contradict the suggestion that these blogs really give the users/product purchasers any more information about forthcoming products than they would have had previously.

The post, entitled ‘A love letter to Entourage’ did nothing but frustrate me and everyone else who commented on it. For those who don’t know, Entourage is Microsoft’s Mac application equivalent to Outlook on Windows: it handles email, contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes.

Except the major problem is that while Entourage provides some support for working with a Microsoft Exchange Server, there are some things that it can’t handle: syncing tasks and notes with the server, or server-side rules for sorting mail, or scheduling appointments with other people on the same server, to name but three.

These shortcomings of Entourage when it comes to Exchange server access are a fairly big deal, not only because they limit the extent to which individuals or departments can switch to using Macs within a company already heavily tied to the Exchange system. A cynic might say that this is all a ploy by Microsoft to discourage big corporations from switching wholesale to the Mac, which would result in a loss of revenue from a reduction in the number of Windows licences being sold. There might even be some truth in the suggestion that the Mac Business Unit can’t persuade the Exchange team at Microsoft to help them with the development of Entourage’s Exchange support, which leaves them all on their own trying to work out how to get everything syncing properly with the Exchange server.

The slightly injudicious entry on Mac Mojo (the Microsoft Mac Business Unit’s blog)—I mean, how corny does it seem to write a ‘love letter’ to the four-year-old product you developed when everyone is just waiting for the new version?—says nothing that wasn’t already known. However, nearly all the comments on the entry (including my own) were about the poverty of the Exchange support in the existing version, and turned into desperate requests for information about the Exchange support expected in Entourage 2008.

Some of the Microsoft developers were responding to the comments. However, absolutely no information was forthcoming about the Exchange matter. Indeed, the point I raised about problems with the existing Entourage-Palm handheld sync conduit was addressed by Nadyne Mielke, one of the developers. It’s not like they can’t see the clamour about Exchange. They’re just remaining very tight-lipped.

Hardly transparent, eh?

I don’t mind these companies not in fact baring everything: they don’t want to pre-announce features that they can’t deliver on, thus disappointing the customers. What I do mind, however, is the pretence of transparency being upheld by the existence of the blog, and being promoted by the Wired article.

Let’s take another software developer as a point of comparison. The Omni Group produces software titles for the Mac which aren’t necessarily aimed at the main stream. The most popular is probably OmniOutliner, the basic version of which is included for free with every new Mac.

The Omni Group also has a blog, called The Omni Mouth. From about July 2006 they began to reveal that they were working on a new productivity application, to fit into the GTD system. This would replace the free set of scripts, kGTD, which bolted on to OmniOutliner Pro to achieve something similar, albeit in quite a frustrating way. At the end of September 2006 they gave it a name, OmniFocus.

Over the subsequent months, a little more information began to trickle out about the new application. Not a huge amount, mind: The Omni Group were very reluctant to be pinned down about, well, anything precise about the new application. But, they were keeping the company’s devotees—or at least those who were also devotees of the GTD system—interested.

At this point, of course, The Omni Group hadn’t behaved any different to Microsoft when it comes to transparency. Their message was ‘We’ve got a new GTD application. You’ll probably like it. We can’t say anything more at the moment, it’s kinda buggy. Don’t push us for info, or for a shipping date.’ Microsoft’s message in the blog post I linked to above was, ‘Entourage is great at the moment, I can’t live without it. The new version is going to be pretty slick too. End of story.’

John Gruber, professional Mac-platform blogger, linked to the announcement of OmniFocus’ name with the title ‘Just a Little Reminder to Let Us Know That OmniFocus is Still Vaporware’. He followed that up a couple of days later with the article ‘OmniVapor’, drawing attention to quite how little we knew about the application at the time, thus suggesting that this was all the merest hot air, or ‘Vaporware’ (sic).

That all changed last month, however. First The Omni Group posted a screenshot of the application—still in its development stages—together with a fairly full list of features expected to be in the application, as well as information about what still needed to change before ship-date. Nothing publicly available to test just yet, but the information was so popular that the server hosting the company’s blog crashed from all the attempts to look at the screenshot.

Ten days later, they published a video ’screencast’ of the pre-release application with a commentary talking us through the features and workflow. Perhaps more to the point, though, is the fact that hundreds of comments were being left on each blog post, and the software developers were responding effectively to the questions that were being asked about the new application.

My problem is not that the Mac Business Unit isn’t telling us anything about the new version of Entourage, even though it would be nice to know a little more than we do. My complaint, rather, is that they pretend to be ‘transparent’ when in fact they are nothing of the sort. The Omni Group, on the other hand, didn’t say much about their new product for many months. What they did say, however, was, ‘We can’t say anything definite because we don’t know ourselves. We’ll tell you about it when we’ve firmed up the development process.’ And, sure enough, with the recent entries on their blog they’ve come good on that promise; not only are they providing scripted information, but they’re answering people’s questions. That’s rather more transparent. Of course, the next thing is for them to release the beta of OmniFocus to those who have signed up for the beta programme (including me), but we know that’s coming.

In fact, I’ve given up on Entourage. I don’t know if Exchange support is going to be improved in the new version (and if you didn’t know that I don’t know that, then you haven’t been reading this very closely!), but the Mac Business Unit’s determined lack of information on the matter seems to suggest that it won’t be. For the moment I’m using the Mac OS X built-in Mail application, which does a pretty good job of dealing with Exchange servers for email once you’ve got it set up right. Contacts, calendar, and tasks are all now handled using the OS X applications: they don’t sync with the Exchange server, but do sync with Apple’s .Mac service so I can access them from any computer.

Update, 12th July 2007: The Mac Business Unit has apparently sat up and taken notice to people complaining about the lack of ‘transparency’ when it comes to their Exchange support in Mac Office 2008. See my follow-up post here.

Hope you’re well. I haven’t heard from you for a while: I’ve been getting a bit worried. I sure do hope you weren’t too offended by all that Quentin’s-sold-out-and-betrayed-his-indie-roots stuff. We were just messin’ with you. Anyway, I went to the theatre a couple of weeks ago and had an awesome idea for your next project. This thing’s pretty much written for you. That’s right. I’m suggesting you produce Hamlet.

Remember what Romeo + Juliet did for Baz Luhrmann? Well, that shows there’s a market for this Shakespeare stuff done right, right? The audience is there, and ripe for the picking in the usual T-man style.

I know you like to mix things up a bit chronology-wise. That’s where you and the Bard differ slightly: he was more of a start-at-the-beginning-and-move-forward-to-the-end kind of guy. Nevertheless, it’s entirely possible for you to unravel the play and fiddle with the narrative order. See, at the end, Hamlet tells Horatio,

O God, Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, I leave behind me!
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.

So, you’ve got your narrator right there: according to Shakespeare himself, Horatio was ‘ordained’ narrator by the protagonist! Horatio is present for so many of the play’s events that he is precisely in a fine position to ‘tell my story’. Poor guy, he just has to stand there ‘observing’ much of the time when the play’s performed on stage. You can fix that in your version—make it perfectly clear that the whole film is being told from the point of view of this Horatio guy. It’d probably just be too twee—and definitely not your style—to have him literally narrate in voiceover, but you can work something cool out to handle the details. You always do.

Anyway, my suggestion is that you start at the end of the play, i.e. the fight scene, where everyone who isn’t dead already finally dies (except our man Horatio, of course). You can really up the gore, perhaps by killing off unimportant extra characters introduced solely for the purpose of adding to the bloodbath who just ‘unfortunately’ get in the cross-fire between Hamlet and Laertes. I’m thinking something along the lines of the Bride’s triumph in Japan in the middle of Kill Bill vol. 1, where she comes out with that classic speech—in Japanese (inspired!)—

Those of you lucky enough to still have your lives, take them with you. But leave the limbs you’ve lost: they belong to me now.

Now, I’m not going to tell you how to do your job so I leave it to you to work out how to rearrange the play for your film into the different ‘acts’. Perhaps it’d be cool in each of the acts to focus on a different character, where each of the acts ends in that character’s death. So, let’s see, in no particular order, we have:

1. Hamlet
2. Ophelia
3. Gertrude
4. Polonius
5. Claudius
6. Laertes

Hmm, that’s quite a lot of acts. Perhaps the studio would want you to chop this one in two ‘volumes’, too: three deaths per film would make sense. Let’s not forget that there’s also Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: they die off-stage in the play, but you could develop a whole plot for them on their way back to England. That’d be pretty cool. I don’t think anyone’s ever done much to develop them.

You’d probably want to leave Hamlet’s act/death till last? Or perhaps not, since that’s what everyone would be expecting. Kind of like the way Vincent Vega gets killed in the middle of Pulp Fiction but then appears, right as rain, in the following act. I know, I know, it’s with stuff like that that the audience just totally gets owned by you. Yeah, that’s right, you da man.

Casting. This needn’t be too difficult. The only problem is Hamlet himself. You’re gonna need someone really iconic. Or rather, someone who is going to become iconic because of his rôle in your film. Or should I say our film?

You definitely want to get Uma back, I know. You guys seem to be pretty tight. She’d be awesome as a slightly drippy but ultimately powerful Ophelia. You’ll definitely want to be concentrating on her feet. It just wouldn’t be a Q.T. movie without Uma’s feet. We had her as Mia Wallace walking barefoot across the floor (with appropriate closeup) in Pulp Fiction, and then you really made a thing out of the Bride very gradually regaining feeling in her legs—starting with the tips of her toes, natch—as she escaped from Hospital in Kill Bill vol. 1.

I dunno if you’re still in touch with Samuel L. I think he’d be good in this movie, and would definitely pull in the crowds. Perhaps he’d be good as the traitor-king Claudius—you could probably modify a line or two to allow him to say to Gertrude, ‘I want your mother-f***ing son out of this mother-f***ing palace’ or something like that.

I’ve been trying to think of a cameo for you to play. Maybe Rosencrantz and/or Guildenstern? Or Laertes? But how about this… You play Horatio! Remember what I was saying about how the film can be framed as being seen through Horatio’s eyes? Well how would it be if the director himself was playing Horatio? That’d just be so meta. You know it.

I know you like the extended, slightly irrelevant (from the point of view of the film’s plot) conversations, especially conducted in vulgar slang. So, you gave us the conversation about tipping restaurant staff at the beginning of Reservoir Dogs, and the ‘Quarter Pounder with Cheese’ conversation in Pulp Fiction. Shakespeare’s got you covered here, man. I mean, the gravedigger scene could have been written by you:

First Clown: What, art a heathen? How dost thou understand the Scripture? The Scripture says Adam digged. Could he dig without arms? I’ll put another question to thee. If thou answerest me not to the purpose, confess thyself—

Second Clown: Go to.

First Clown: What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?

Second Clown: The gallows-maker; for that frame outlives a thousand tenants.

And so forth.

Anyway, Quentin, it’s just a thought I had. I think we’d do well with this. Let me know what you think. Next stop Cannes, right?!

Richard

Inspired by a recent student production of Hamlet performed at the Old Fire Station in Oxford. My seat had a limited view and was somewhat uncomfortable, so my mind wandered just a little. I couldn’t work in a reference to Jackie Brown—if you can think of one, then put it in a comment below…

It’d take me a long time to explain what Facebook is and what it does if you don’t already know. In order to give you some basic idea, though, here is the blurb from the site’s home page:

Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you.

Facebook is made up of many networks, each based around a company, region, high school or college.

You can use Facebook to:

• Share information with people you know.
• See what’s going on with your friends.
• Look up people around you.

What that means, in practice, is that when you set up an account on Facebook, you fill in information for your profile page. You then declare yourself to be a ‘Friend’ of other Facebook users (they have to approve you: they agree that you should be classed a ‘Friend’), and a record of that fact is then also kept on your profile.

So, I took myself off Facebook in July 2006, having joined in May 2005, back when it was still called ‘thefacebook’. During that time I collected about forty Friends.

For months, then, I’ve been meaning to write this article; to verbalize the cognitive process which led to me removing myself from the site. (That’s a junky-jargon sentence for you.) I’ve been trying to come up with a soundly-reasoned set of points for getting off Facebook, which would in turn become a matter of discussion.

But I can’t really do it. I’ve come to realize that my reason is basically a little silly, and that it probably says more about me than it does about Facebook.

I just didn’t like it.

I’m relieved to say, however, that I have got fairly sensible (to me) reasons for not liking it.

First and foremost, I just cannot see the point. I am already able to stay in touch with my friends throughout the University and at other universities, using email, instant messaging, and—golly—the phone. These are all easy methods of communication. Many people argue that using Facebook allows them to stay in contact with friends with whom they would otherwise lose touch—and I’m sure that’s true—but for me, I can’t help but think, why would I stay in touch with these people using this site if I’d been so lazy (or calculating) that we don’t already communicate using the media already available to us?

Indeed, being the anti-social little weirdo that I am, during my membership of the site I only added one Friend; the others all invited me to be their friends (great!, you say). However, after these people had added me as their Friend, they never once got in touch with me. Fine for the people that I was seeing here, but there were people adding me as a Friend whom I hadn’t seen in years, had encountered in some previous existence, and perhaps with whom I had never been particularly chummy. Bye bye the it-lets-you-stay-in-touch-with-people-with-whom-you’ve-otherwise-lost-contact argument.

Furthermore, I had a problem with the use of the word ‘Friend’. Note that I use an initial capital to refer to a Facebook ‘Friend’ and lowercase for a real friend. Because there is very much a distinction: to me, the word ‘friend’ conjures up a real sense of mutual affection. My Friends weren’t actually factually friends (I did it!), and so it troubled me to publicize the description of Friends as friends. ‘People I know’, sure. But ‘Friends’? Nuh-uh.

Like very many other people, I was quite disturbed by the implications that Facebook has for individual users’ privacy. Now, this very site is a testament to the fact that I haven’t got a huge problem with posting information about myself online. On my own site, I have absolute control over everything that is published. On Facebook, however, all of this information about a huge number of people is collected together on one site, ripe for the harvest. Someone else could post something about you in their own profile—however potentially harmful—and you’d be powerless to do anything about it. One thing that bothered me from the beginning is the way in which people, when uploading photos, can tag each image with information about who is in the photo. Very commendable. But then users can click a link on your profile page to view all photos on the site which have been tagged with your name. It suddenly got very easy for someone to see any photo ever taken of you in whatever compromising situation—whether you like it or not. You can individually ‘detag’ photos so that they no longer disclose that it’s you in the frame, but this is a tiresome opt-out process, rather than allowing your name to be attached to individual photographs.

I felt very much that I didn’t really fit in with what was expected of me with regard to the profile page. Everything seemed to have the implication of being very dating-oriented, without overtly saying so. You have only to look at the various ‘virtual gifts’ just introduced for Facebook users to give one another (each gift, which is merely an image sent from one user to another, costs $1 USD, which this month is being given to charity, but afterwards will be retained by the site), and the implication of each of these images, to see that nearly all of them are ‘dating’-oriented. Thanks, but no thanks. Some people have tried to suggest to me that all human interaction is ‘dating’-oriented, but even I am not that cynical. I find the implication here too tasteless for words.

Finally, I freely admit to being a fogey. And as a fogey, I dislike participating too much in fads. And I’m convinced that Facebook is a fad, because—returning to my first argument against the site—I Just Can’t See The Point. (See what I did there? You might call it Ring Composition. But I wouldn’t.)

When I bit the bullet