Crappy brochure

I had this pearl saved since I was on vacation in Gran Canaria. It’s a perfect example of a shoddy piece of work when you do things quick & dirty, without wanting to spend money or time to do things properly. I obviously don’t know the circumstances of the company that made this, or its employees, but I can imagine.

A bit of context: I was in a very touristic part of the island, and some person handed me a brochure (in English) with information about excursions around different parts of Gran Canaria. I thought it would be a good idea to keep it around, to get ideas about which parts we could see in the next days. However, when we arrived at the hotel and started reading it, we realised how horrible it was. So horrible that we spent some time reading through it, half laughing, half outraged, and I kept it to write about it ;-)

First impression: crappy design and font faces; lots of information stuffed together without order or harmony; horrible wording (bad high-school student level); different writing style in each text; typos, Spanish-like expression, almost complete lack of accents in the Spanish names. Obviously English is not my mother tongue, and I don’t claim to not make mistakes, but the general quality of this is really bad. Some highlights:

• From the first excursion, “Grand Tour”: “We drive now along de (sic) west-coast up to Agaete, do you know what Dedo de Dios means?? The gide (sic) will explain you everything about it. In Agaete we have some time for a small lunch, today we go for fish (meat is possibel (sic))” and “This is a verry (sic) nice trip with lots of magistic (sic) views of al (sic) types of rockformations (sic)”.

• The second excursion, “Undiscover Gran Canaria” (emphasis mine), ends with: “At the end of the day, the couch (sic) will take you back to your hotel”.

• From the third one, “Las Palmas ‘HighLights’”: “[…] the Museum ‘Casa Colon’ (christof.columbus)”. WTF is that, his GMail address? Apart from the fact that that’s not the English spelling for Christopher Columbus.

• The fourth one is about a municipality called “Teror”. For some reason, they decided to always uppercase it, which leads to this expression jumping and screaming for attention: “Market of TEROR” (also bold in the original), so easy to misread as “Market of TERROR”, which sounds… weird.

• The fifth one, “The Cavehouses (sic) of Guayadaque”, also has interesting stuff: “Our last stop will be in the old town of Agüimes, […]. Now we turn back, direction Aguimes (sic) […]”, “[…] where we have the posibility (sic) for a nice lunch in a typical canarian (sic) restaurant ( entrance musem opcional (sic))” and “Its (sic) now time to go back, the beautiful ravain (sic???) of tirajana (sic), with a stop in the old village Fataga, enjoy the amazing views, and please…don’t forget your camara (sic)”.

• The sixth has some minor issues, but the seventh (“Ferry/market Mogan (sic) 2 in 1 excursion”) is short and just great so here it goes: “From Playa del Inglés we travel too (sic) the port of Arguineguin (sic) where we take the ferry too (sic) the port of Mogan (sic), better known as little vinice (sic), here you will visit an authentic tradicional (sic) street market”.

• Fast-forward to the eleventh (“Sioux City”), which starts strong: “It is time to go back to your childhood and play cowboys and Indians! Yes I am talking about the famous Sioux City”. Gotta love the lack of commas. Then it goes: “You will witness a bank robbery in the wild wild west, with horses, guns, knifes (sic) whips and of course those dancing gids (sic??? wtf?). Whilst feasting on a western buffet and drinking free all night. It’s a night for all the family… So go on ride em Cowboy”. I love the super fancy “whilst” mixed with the lack of commas.

• Twelveth sets a new standard, and writes everything IN CAPS… and of course almost without commas: “COME AND ENJOY WITH US A GREAT DAY, KNOWING THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACES OF OUR ISLAND […]” (“KNOWING” for “getting to know” of “discovering”), “ENJOY THIS ADVENTURE AND WE WILL TELL YOU ALL ABOUT THE HISTORY AND CULTURE AND AT THE SAME TIME YOU WILL BE ABLE TO ADMIRE THE WONDERFUL COUNTRY” (“COUNTRY” for “countryside”, I think) and “DO NOT FORGET YOUR SWIMSUIT FOR OUR REFRESHING SWIM IN ONE OF OUR LAKES”. I’m not completely sure about the English terms, but I think in Gran Canaria we only have dams, not lakes.

There is more crap, but I’m tired of writing and you got the idea already. I think the world needs more QA ;-)

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One Year!

Today I have been one year working in Oslo! Yay! So far the experience has been quite good, so I’m staying here for some more time still.

I’ve also slowly becoming kind of active again in Debian (especially helping dhelp), although I admit not being very active in any other software project (Haberdasher feels kind of abandoned, because I don’t have any urge for new features). Hopefully that will change…

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The Big Picture

Lately I have been thinking a lot, not to say “obsessed”, with the big picture. I can’t but wonder if that is a general IT industry problem, that big picture. I mean missing it.

My current theory is that computer work is just too hard (or tools not advanced enough?), and there is too much pressure and too hard time constraints to allow people to step back and think about the big picture from time to time, to make sure everything makes sense.

And perhaps that’s why you hire and have QA people, perhaps that is the real purpose of QA. At least I feel that now. I mean, what’s the use of something that has a high “technical quality”, if it just doesn’t make sense? That is actually a big part of the quality, “making sense”. Because of that I’m starting to feel like my job is being a developer that does important things that “nobody has time to do”, because they’re too busy fighting with details. Not in the sense of a “manager”, but in the sense of some “responsible” developer. It’s a really strange job position I think :-)

It’s really hard to measure the impact of good QA in a software project, but I’m sure that is high, probably higher than people use to think. For me, thinking about software projects without QA is a bit like thinking about programming without a Version Control System: I wonder how I had done it in the past, and feel really unconfident without it. How many projects have failed (both from the resources and goals point of view, and from the business point of view) for not having good QA? How many projects have been delayed, or even cancelled, because they lacked someone caring about the Big Picture?

EDIT (2008-5-18): I have disabled comments in this post due to insane amount of spam. If you want to comment, please comment in some other entry :-/

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