The least legible, but clearly the best, ½ fraction of the decade.

Four phases of the side destination sign on an Orion VII.

The bus tells you where it’s going only a quarter of the time. The front sign breaks the same information into three phases, telling you where the bus is going only a third of the time (updated example below).

I’ve seen this before (with signs alternating destination with I’M A NEW BUS or, inexplicably, THE FUTURE IS HERE), but the cost in information content is too high. Tell me where the bus is going, please. (Did you know there is actual research on how to use these “variable-message” signs properly?)

What exactly is a “SEN/STU,” and isn’t there a ¢ symbol?

A couple of weeks ago, the fire academy (not its full name) held its annual open house. I am now old enough to say I go to this event every year. As the academy is located on the outskirts of the Free City of Leslieville, I actually ride past it some 200 times a year, and I often stand by the sidelines watching and photographing their training runs, which are somewhat old hat now, actually. (I was also riding by when the sitting prime minister visited one day. Even a casual observer like me could tell they hadn’t really secured the area.)

Knowing that the show always closes well before the stated ending time, I got there nice and early and found I was pretty much the only single unaccompanied adult on the grounds; everybody else were parents and kids. And I was like: What are you waiting for, a singing telegram? It’s wall-to-wall firemens and you can crawl all over the equipment!

Here I am of course using the obscure Blaine and Antoine–ism firemens, pronounced with an ultra-long final vowel: “firemehhhnz.” And as I do every year, I asked the most senior guy I could find (it’s always guys) if X was still the only openly gay fireman on the force. This guy had never heard of him, but figured they had the same proportion of homosexualists as any other sphere of society. Yeah, and they’re all lesbians! I said. In retrospect, I’m not sure that X is still a fireman, and he certainly has been out of the public eye recently (not-riding-atop-a-fire-engine-in-the-Pride-parade kind of thing), so I will act as though he’s a civilian now and redact his name. But, you know, if you need a tall blond fireman in perfect shape, he’s your man. Or his husband’s.

I made sure to be given a tour of every single apparatus available, except the old yellow (hence North York) pumper they use for training. I took pictures. I toured the hazmat truck (fascinating, though everything was in hermetically sealed bags), a new $1.2 million ærial truck and a slightly less new one, and a few engines and ladder trucks.

There was exactly one wymmynz present. And you’re the only female firefighter here today, I told her as she sat in the ærial platform. Well, yes, she said. A colony only ever has one queen.

Most of the firemens were somewhat dishevelled and not-exactly-low-bodyfat guys in middle age. Except this fella. Funny, you don’t look Irish, I told him. No, I am definitely not Irish, he said.

He totally knew what was up, by the way. [continue with: Hot firemens action, 2007 →]

Presented here for easier linking.

Clark’s Law states that the more expensive an online system is, the worse its output is.

Canonical example: Vignette.

Instead of doing something that pays, I attended the TTC meeting today (the first in months – a previous meeting was cancelled after the budget crunch). I learned some interesting facts.

• The internal budget allocation for the new Web site (per se) is $375,000, an order of magnitude that matches the estimate I had given several potential bidders (“Bid the true cost up to $300,000”). (Yes, I advised several. Some of that advice consisted of “You guys suck, so don’t waste everybody’s time putting in a bid.”)

• However, that is almost the smallest item in the agenda of online improvements. The full list:

  • Building their own geographic information system (using GPS and suchlike): $1,500,000 and worth every penny
  • Next-train arrival information: $330,000
  • Next-bus arrival: $5,200,000 (!)
  • Internet trip planning: $2,300,000
  • Notification of disrupted service (to announce what – a wildcat strike?): $1,100,000 (!)
  • E-commerce (buy your Metropass onliné, then get it lost in the mail): $1,200,000
  • Wheel-Trans trip booking (much more important than they think it is): $550,000

  The total cost is $12,555,000. Unlike my esteemed colleague Steve Munro, I don’t think any of that is wasted money.

• I am not clear why trip planning is sextuple the cost of the Web redesign. I offer the same warning all over again: The trip-planning application will be put together by outside-vendor assholes using tables for layout and JavaScript that only works in IE6.

  TTC’s documents keep insisting (inexplicably, in grey Arial type): “Use a proven/established product!” – but all the examples they show are awful and wouldn’t pass the first five checkpoints of WCAG. (One item from the TTC erroneously claims a new Web site will be “WCAG3”-compliant. There is no such site in existence and there still won’t be.)

  Trip planning is the tail that threatens to wag the dog. Clark’s Law states that the more expensive an online system is, the worse its output is. They’ll buy a two-million-dollar system, get smoke blown up their arses by the vendor, then, when the thing completely borks, they’ll deploy it anyway, and it’ll have to be presented as an iframe in the new standards-compliant Web site, thereby destroying its standards compliance.

  In essence, there will be several kinds of TTC Web site – the normal one, the trip planner for noncripples, and the Wheel-Trans trip planner.

  If I’m called to any meeting, here is advance notice of some of the questions I will pose to any and all trip-planner vendors:

  • How well does it work in Opera? You know the answer because you tested it, right?
  • I only use iCab. It understands HTML, CSS, and ECMAscript, but you’ve never heard of it. What can’t I do in your application using iCab?
  • Prove to me I can do everything I want in your application using Safari, a Braille display, no speakers or headphones, and no monitor.
  • Unplug the mouse and do a demo of a planned trip from here to my house.

• This business of disruption notification will apparently use the tiny bottom line of the OneStop display screens that nobody likes. (It should take over the whole screen.) Oh, and the TTC’s simulation can’t even get the font right. (What incorrect font do you think they use?)

• One of the illustrated examples of existing next-bus-arrival systems is Danish (the øs give it away). A mockup of a TTC “bus terminal” display appears to have been typed out using Arial, the spacebar, and the hyphen key.

• Whenever Adam Giambrone claims wall tiles are “expensive,” remind him they have a $1.5 million budget set aside for ’08 just for “system cleanliness/appearance,” explicitly including tile replacement. (Is it more expensive to replace tiles than to replace “artificial stone”? Can you prove that?)

• This was another meeting filled with phenomenally awful PowerPoints and printed slides. How many presentation sins do these people commit? All of them.

  I am possibly the only critic of Tufte, but by God is he ever needed here. Were it permissible to present to staff copies of The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, I would. I am merely a good presenter, but my shit is gangbusters compared to theirs, and they’ve got a billion bucks behind them. Inexcusable – but not incomprehensible, given the primitive, user-hostile tools they use (two words: “Windows NT”) and their visual illiteracy left unremediated by training.

• There were two items concerning signage in the correspondence file, following up, without stating as much, from the TTC Type & Tile Tour. That’s apart from the two items from me, of course. And I have now filed a complaint about John Martz’s getting a cease-and-desist letter for doing something an advertiser later paid to do.

Today I schlepped down to the Reference Library for the inaugural Literary Café. Katherine Barber, editrix of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary (q.v.), and prolific Canadiana documenter John Robert Colombo gave short presentations. There followed Q&A from host Tina Srebotnjak and the audience, where I was the second-youngest person in attendance.

Barber was sounding as mediævalist as ever and looked very much more so in a red gown of the sort I would associate with Christmas choral performances, which may be another place she wears it.

I didn’t take many notes of what the erudite and garrulous, though initially nervous, Colombo actually said; not a lot of it was about Canadian English, one of my things. [continue with: Barber–Colombo →]

After complaining that every issue of Monocle is replete with copy errors that should never be found in a quality magazine and also complaining that I have better things to do than correct them, I thought I would limit my review of the October issue to nothing but the copy errors. Tkae thta Tlyer Brüle!

Pleasingly enough, yesterday’s second TTC Type & Tile Tour went as well as the first one. We had a 50% dropoff in attendance (then again, so did Nonfiction), but that was no problem, since it left us with 26 people. We started at the ugliest station in the system – Lawrence West, straddling the Allen Expressway – and proceeded to the nicest, Dupont. Ultimately we schlepped all the way to the Sheppard line (the first visit there for many) and toured pretty much every square centimetre of Bayview.

It was amusing standing inside at ground level – possibly the farthest north many people had ever been in Toronto – and blanking on the term for the kind of brick used in this decorative wall.

So I did what they do on the game shows and called my “lifeline.” “[Esteemed colleague], what do you call a stone with a rough surface? Not ‘reticulated’ but—” “Rusticated.” “Rusticated! Thank you, [esteemed colleague].”

A short time later, while photographing the isometric trompe-l’œil artworks at the other exit, K-Hug hurried over and told me the collectrix in the booth was pounding her hands on the window and (impotently) hollering “No pictures!” Noncommercial photography is allowed without a permit. And if she were that unhappy, maybe she should have left the booth.

We calmly walked downstairs, took the next train, finished our tour at Eglinton, and took over the back half of a Suction Cup for coffee.

Nice.

Somebody suggested I do a tour just for TTC staff, an idea that’s got legs.

Some lore from various guests on the Tours:

• There’s an oddball sign on the eastbound platform at Vic Park because there used to be a fare booth at the respective end of the westbound platform.
• They’re fixing the platform edge at Rosedale.
• The jail cell at Museum station – so unloved by the former chair of the TTC – was put there years ago to prevent people from using that space. Why? Wymmynz from UofT had complained of fear of assaults, and that area was out of camera range. Gee, why not install a new camera? Or only wait where there is one?

You can follow the coverage:

• “On the Facebook”
• Flickr pool
• Articles in the Tubby and its blog, and at Spacing and Torontoist (first, second)

There will be a write-in campaign that I need you to help me with. If you went on the tour, contact me.