How an augmented reality tourist guide tried to break my balls Tech-enhanced tourism can be tough on your testicles. An hour ago I was striding along hallowed corridors once paced by 14th century popes. Now I am hobbling across the halls like a medieval court chimpanzee. And it's all because a tourist guide decided to get a little too interactive with my nuts. More on that later. This …
Or simply adjust it with the little sliding adjuster you can clearly see in the picture of Dabsy wearing the lanyard. The reason why he chose not to adjust it rather than let it wobble against his gonads is best left to someone else's imagination. I wonder if that was why Mrs D looked and snorted at him. Perhaps it was a knowing snort.
Or simply adjust it with the little sliding adjuster you can clearly see in the picture of Dabsy wearing the lanyard.
Maybe that was actually experience. The sliding adjuster is the one thing that will fail when you least expect it, thus adding a dose of gravity to the tablet while it speeds once again towards your crotch. Been there, but thankfully not with my cojones at risk.
In my experience, weight simply does not mix well with simple lanyards. Anything more than a badge needs a better strap.
Or a downwards trajectory that doesn't cross anything sensitive or vital :)
"I grappled with that fucking thing until my fingernails tore off. It wouldn’t budge."
As an avid reader I "should" believe you there, but it does remind me suspiciously of this incident with your phone you wrote about on 26February 2016
"My trouser pocket is the scene of an on-going Western gunfight between the smooth rose-gold and prickly rose-pink: that town isn’t big enough for the both of them"
Mrs D snorting is well aware of your previous form! ;-)
Me too. Dealing with SNCF/TER ‘apps’ = ‘give up. Go to automatic ticket machine. Select English option. Get tickets. Forget to validate tickets. Listen to lecture from supercilious conductor explaining how stupid English must remember to validate their tickets’
The joy of Les Vacances.
I'm going to take issue with this, good sir - these are designed by middle aged managers who want to appeal to millennials. Any millennial worth their salt would take one look at this and recognise it for the pointless gimmick that it is.
Then the millennial would get their phone out and look at everything through the camera app.
I found myself asking that question when I went to view Stephenson's Rocket at the Almost-imperceptible Exhibition of the North. Clearly concerned that visitors might not be sufficiently impressed by the skeletal remains of a piece of engineering history, long since cannibalised for its reusable parts, organisers had provided a "Virtual Reality Experience" that promised the opportunity to:
Travel back to 1829 via virtual reality to experience the sight and sound of the early steam age as Stephenson’s Rocket is digitally brought back to life.
What is actually consisted of was a first-person view of a simulated trip down a seemingly American railroad line, while a modern city sprang up on each side of the track. With a silhouette of the Rocket pasted across the front as if it were being observed by a disembodied head welded to the top of the boiler.
When I pointed that out to the attendants, their response was that, although they'd watched it on several occasions, they'd never noticed the complete absence of the 19th Century or the UK and its tradition of trains travelling on the left, like the cars.
Conclusion: people expect crap, so just give it to them. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be the policy of the Discovery Museum to thwack 'em in the balls if they complain, though I would be unsurprised if the hardware has the capability: I'm sure more clients will be demanding it.
I hope you fully appreciate that all images from the tablets are uploaded in real time to the papal cloud server, so that the powers that be can use the latest adaptive AI to carefully analyse exactly what the tourists are looking at in close detail in order to enhance the customer expereince....
"Normally, Mme Le Dabbs and I turn down the offer of audio guides at tourist sites because they always go wonky on us – crackle, cut out, play the wrong track, lose battery power, expire completely and so on."
Always, always, always. If there is any tech worse than IoT crap it is this. Ah, well.
My regards to Mme Le D, and have a nice weekend, everybody!
"SNCF's ticket sales team is not on speaking terms with its ticket issuing team. "
They have no monopoly on that.
I had a meeting in Norwich (someone has to). I booked tickets with whatever entity was then running the East Coast line. On the appropriate morning I rolled into the sophisticated of Wakefield Westgate (the point of comparison is Wakefield Kirkgate) to ask for the tickets I'd booked. The train was rolling into the station while the clerk was still hunting for them - and I still had to buy a ticket for the car park, go out and fix it on the car, go back in and get on the train. It wasn't going to happen. I left him, got in the car and drove to Norwich.
As anyone travelling there from the North knows that drive, especially the A17, isn't much removed from interplanetary travel in terms of arduousness yet I still got there only about a quarter of an hour later than the train was scheduled to do.
It took a while to disabuse the company that they weren't entitled to withhold part of the refund of the tickets they hadn't provided.
I once had a meeting in Norwich with some staff from an insurance company which shall be nameless.
Frankly it would have been more interesting and less painful to have spent the time smacking my balls with a tablet, had they been around in the early 2000s.
It seems there are some advantages in living in this lower left corner of Europe. I booked a ticket Faro-Lisbon, paid with my card over PayPal and printed the ticket. Of course my son then told me I should just have emailed the PDF.
I do like pieces of paper when I travel, as I am not dependant on the tantrums and batteries of electronics. Colour me fuddy-duddy.
At least I think I got the right price.
It was good to read of the SNCF experience, if only as an antidote to all those who seem to be hankering for a return to the good old days of British Rail.
Note to millenials: there is no reason, either theoretical or historical, to imagine that a nationalised rail service would be any better.
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SNCF is the reason why I bought my first car while being a student, not to have to depend weekly on these ugly bastards anymore. Any time I have by force to deal with them they find a way to make the experience unpleasant.
Regarding your tablet, Mr Dabbs made a slight mistake: he had to enroll the lanyard three or four times around the neck: It's part of the "Inquisition AR" app. Because nobody expects the Inquisition.
Last year I wanted to take my motorbike to Italy, rather than drive through France I thought 'let's take the autotrain, it's French, it's sophisticated, it's overnight so it'll save on a hotel room'.
So it turns out contrary to what some in this country may claim, state run railways are as s*** as privately run ones. A few days before departure I got a phone call saying due to industrial action my train was cancelled. After some prompting I was given some options, i.e. take a train a few days later, or yes, I could get a refund, if I went into an SNCF station, probably the one in Paris. Of course Paris was massively out of my way if I wasn't catching a train there, but I risked going into the station in Calais on the grounds the worst they could say is no. Actually the worst they could say is, we can refund you this bit of the passenger ticket but you'll have to go via a website that doesn't actually exist to get a refund on the bike part. I paid for the tickets by card over the phone, how f*****g hard is it to refund that? People on ebay selling counterfeit software will give you a credit card refund FFS.
Long story short, if you think things in this country are bad, and I've just used a strike riddled SW trains to go to London, go to France things will be worse and they won't even pretend to give a shit.
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