We have a strange culture with crash screens, and i forget how important they are, especially with the right touches. Google Wave has its “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!” firefly references which makes fans of tech and sci-fi melt a little inside. This site doesn’t have one because I am arrogant and lazy.

As Rory Sutherland says about the Eurostar, money would be better spent on people’s enjoyment of the journey rather than the speed. He prescribes that the several million pounds spent on increasing the speed on the journey by half an hour should have been spent on scantily clad supermodels serving drinks. Who would be the more satisfied customer?

It’s a TED talk that I’m a massive fan of.

Twitter’s worked on that, making their graphics cuter over time from altered LOLCats to more carefully crafted home-made images, and a gallery’s sprung up under the name of Tweeterr.

On the other hand Windows don’t really have this down – an angry customer has created a Microsoft equivalent of the Fail Whale gallery with twelve pages of examples.

It’s not just operating systems. Mankind seems to have a strange obsession with taking photos of broken systems. For example, this website, full of photoed fails. I’m not exempt. Everyone seems to have a failwhale photo lurking around on their computer. If laptop screens had a fail whale, they should all look like this.