HTTP status code 204 means “no content”. No update. Nothing to tell you.
Which I’m reminded of as I write about progress on our house repairs following the flood that swept through our home on Friday 13 February… 204 days ago. Because that’s how the summer’s repairs have felt: No updates. Nothing to say.
It was already pretty jarring to return from an epic holiday and get back into work-mode. But it was doubly-regrettable to discover that
the various tradespeople who’d been given access to our house in our absence had done… pretty-much nothing.
No work done. And also: no update messages. Everything had just… stopped.
I tell a lie: the restoration of the kitchen floor – a one-day task that didn’t block any of the other next-tasks on the list – happened at the start of August.
So we gathered the builders and the loss adjuster and demanded an update. Sometimes you just have to step up and say “hey, what the fuck guys, are we ever gonna get to move back into
our house?”
It turns out there’d been a few blockers. The contractor who’d been sourced to lay the new underfloor screed in the living room and library had not turned up. The new tiles that would
replace the flooring across the ground floor were still being quarried. The electrical work had complexities that had caused it to overrun be split into two visits, separated by the
electricians’ other contracts.
When I visited this week the living room’s condition was identical to how it had looked six weeks prior. Sigh.
Which is frustrating, of course, but it was definitely exacerbated by the lack of communication.
Anyway: our meeting with the various parties led to a new timeline, and it optimistically proposes that we might be able to move back into our home as soon as November… so, F-Day plus
262 through 291, I guess? Here’s hoping. (Obviously any update will make it into my now long-running series of posts about our experience of getting
flooded-out.)
We’re really keen to be back home by Christmas. The Chicory House is okay as temporary accommodation but there are plenty of things I dislike about it, and I’m ready to move back into our actual house now, thanks.
The first time I saw Michelangelo’s David in person, I wept. Never in my life have I witnessed a more beautiful piece of content.
I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Museum patrons all around me were looking up from their phones to admire David as well. Despite it being legacy content,
David was so scrollstoppingly captivating that it generated stronger engagement than TikTok and Instagram combined, despite those platforms offering fresher, more
personally relevant content.
My awe only grew when I noticed the museum gift shop converting 60% of its traffic, numbers that would make any content creator salivate.
…
In case it wasn’t obvious that Michael was being facetious (oh god, please let it be obvious), he says as much right after this introduction.
The point is: ‘content‘ have become a catch-all term so broad as to be meaningless. A tweet is content. A Netflix series is content. Everything in-between
that is passively or mostly-passsively consumed is content, whether it’s AI-slop music or template-driven memes. And content exists to
trigger engagement and drive traffic and oh shit now we’re down a rabbithole of meaningless SEO jargon.
Like Michael, I don’t like it. These different media are fundamentally different, and we should embrace that. A blogger is not (necessarily) a documentarian, nor are they
a comic book artist or an exhibition curator or a podcaster. They can be all of those things, but they’re different things! When we treat them all as interchangeable kinds
of “content” for a generic “audience”, we lose something about what’s beautiful and unique about each of them… and we lose the opportunity to find and name new art forms at the
intersections between them.
You can call things “content” if you like, but the vocabulary available to us is richer than that, and the things we create – in whatever form they take – can be too, when we use it.
In 2014 we bought a car1, registered in my name. It’s a little long in the tooth now and we’re
thinking about what might replace it, but for the time being it’s a useful workhorse and especially valuable when we need to move the entire family and still have space for luggage.
This large car was super helpful for a trip to France via the Channel Tunnel earlier this summer… at least, once I’d hacked Le Shuttle’s
API to work around their inability to cope with us bringing home different adults than we took on the outbound leg!
This week, I renewed my driving license2. While doing so, I was invited to connect the records of the
vehicles I own. This would allow, for example, email notifications when my Vehicle Excise Duty is due on them.
How to register a car “wrong”
The newer of our two cars was easy to add: I provided the number plate; the website did some kind of lookup; and it was done. But when I tried to add the older car, I got an error
message:
I’d have probably just treated this as “just one of those things” and ignored it, were it not for the fact that our other car was added without any difficulty! Why the
disparity?
The website claimed that the details on my V5C – the vehicle registration certificate or “logbook” – didn’t match my personal information. So I pulled out
the papers for both cars… and discovered that the personal information sections were identical. The front of a V5C has a section that
shows your name and address, and on both my certificates looked the same: my name, followed by my address. So why was one failing to work?
I sat in a queue for their webchat service, and – after a lot of back-and-forth – the operator and I came to a conclusion about what was wrong: for this car only, my name
had been entered into the “company name” field in their database, rather than the “name” field.
It’s impossible to tell conclusively from a paper certificate whether the first line represents a person or a company: they’re both displayed identically.
From the looks of things, this is what happened in 2014:
The dealership filled the V55/4 form to register the car to me.
The DVLA saw my unusual name3,
figured “that can’t be a person’s name; it must be a company name”4,
and put it into the “company name” field.
The DVLA database differentiates between company name and person name, but the paper version just prints whichever one is present at the top of the address: information is
lost in the translation to paper.
So: the database was wrong, but the paper copy didn’t show that it was wrong.
Getting the problem fixed
Apparently if I send my V5C to them with the details “corrected”, with an accompanying letter explaining the the correction is to which field they should be storing the
data in, then they’ll correct it within a month or so
And then they’ll issue me with a new paper copy. Which will, naturally, look identical to this one. The only change will be in their database.
What can we learn from this?
I wonder if there’s anything that could have been different to prevent this confusion? A simple change would be to improve the layout of the third page of a V5C certificate.
This is the part of the form I need to “change” by entering a first and surname, representing no actual change to the paper version but a significant difference to
DVLA’s database.
Perhaps instead of re-listing the name and address in the same format as on the front page, this page could list each field separately, perhaps with each alongside the
corresponding field for changing it. This wouldn’t need much space, less than would be saved by consolidating submission instructions (which are repeated at least five times in some
form or another, across the form).
There are other ambiguities and redundancies that could be cleared-up at the same time. For example, the company name field does double-duty as the title field, which is an unnecessary
complication that I’m sure must make data entry harder. And the registration number and document reference number are duplicated many times on this page, even though the instructions
prohibit separating the parts.
Maybe there’s something to be learned from this for all of us who work with databases and forms. Do you have any fields that serve double-duty? Do you produce output by
concatenating fields in such a way that might result in ambiguous provenience? Do you have a process to validate that data has been entered into the right column? Are you unable to make
changes without re-generating secondary resources (like paper hard copies), the the secondary resources are functionally unchanged?
But for now, I probably ought to get this form sent back to the DVLA. So they can change their database and send me back a near-identical form. Such bureaucracy!
Footnotes
1 This car is a Seat, and – because we name all of our cars – he’s call Arthur. Yes, for
the pun.
2 The driving license renewal was super easy, by the way. Half a dozen clicks on a gov.uk
page and it was done.
4 As far as I can tell, there’s never been a company called “Dan Q”. There was a “Danq”, once, and a “Dan QB” long after, and it makes you wonder why corporate registration of a vehicle doesn’t require
as a minimum a cursory lookup on Companies House by the registering officer, but what do I know?
Quick check while I was passing, as nobody’s logged this cache during our stupidly-hot July or August (and I don’t blame them: it’s been horrible outdoors!). Anyway: the cache is fine
and healthy and looking forward to its next visitor!
I descaled the coffee machine yesterday. We live in an exceptionally hard-water area and this maintenance was long overdue.
This morning I turned the machine on and something felt unfamiliar and wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on what, until I realised…
…I’d gotten so-used to seeing the “descaling needed” light illuminated that I’d subconsciously forgotten that it wasn’t supposed to be always-lit! Turns out that a warning left long
enough becomes not just invisible but normalised!
(Next, maybe I should do something about the ‘check engine’ light in the car. It’s been on for a while too…)
