Edinburgh Council have a “Citizen’s Account” area on their website. I registered so that I could view and pay my council tax bills online. The process had been surprisingly painless until I came to add my council tax account number. I was presented with this stellar piece of form design:

Ignoring the incredibly sloppy layout bugs, it doesn’t look so bad, until you actually read the text:

Your account number is an 8 digit number which forms part of the 11 digit number to be found in the top right hand corner of your Council Tax demand. Please ignore the first digit and the last two digits of the 11 digit number. For example, if the number shown on your Council Tax demand is 91234567807, please enter 12345678.

(my emphasis)

Why, why, why are they making the user jump through hoops when entering a simple number? Why isn’t all this stupid number truncating done by the server? Entering an 11 digit account number (only once I notice) can be difficult enough without having to do a number puzzle on the data first. Council, you must try harder.

Very interesting interview with book jacket designer extraordinarire Mr Chip Kidd. My good buddies Ian and (the awesome) Jed bought me Chip Kidd’s gorgeous Book One last Christmas, it is supremely shiny.

I keep catching bits of Californication on TV and it always seems great. Last nights episode was called “LOL” and had Hank (Duchovny) bitching about the decline of decent spoken english, very topical. It also featured this great exchange:

Hank: “B” to the “I” to the double “L”. What’s up, my nig nog?
Bill: I need to talk to you.
Hank: Well, you should have called. I wouldn’t have answered, but you could’ve left a message, which I would have quickly erased.

OK, maybe it was funnier in context. You’ve just got to imagine the half-awake, hungover, dead-pan of Duchovy’s delivery.

My good buddy Ian (dude, fix your website) recently put me onto the incredibly fast-paced “zero punctuation” video reviews done by a fellow Brit living in Australia. With his dead-pan voice over and accompanying stick figure animation he manages to brilliant summarise some of the latest games, as well as get in plenty of sight gags and pithy commentary. Here is his review of Valve’s Orange Box:

Wifi SD card. How can this not have been implemented already?

Brilliant Bioshock Halloween outfit video – with both Father and Daughter