You have probably seen my other postings about “The Strange Game” – a musical project my friend Ellis and I have been working on for over a year now (wow!).
We decided to do something for Christmas, and came up with this goofy song:
Extreme Home Makeover – what is it with Cops & Firefighters?
Actually, it’s not just Extreme home makeover – it seems everybody does it; glorify the noble walk-on-water people who put out fires and keep our streets safe. Now don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that they chose that profession. But the key is they chose that profession. Nobody held a gun to their head and made them do it. They aren’t doing it for free because they are wonderful human beings. Sorry to inject a note of reality, but it’s a JOB folks, just like the job you have. Do you feel that you are any less of a person or any less valuable because you didn’t choose to be a firefighter or a cop? I hope not!
I think these shows should diversify and maybe do an episode on some deep-sea oil rig welder who died and left his family in a broken down old house. Ok, they don’t have the sexy uniform, and aren’t as high profile, but still it’s a high risk profession. How about bringing it closer to home for the white collar bunch: An episode about a CPA who had a paper cut which got infected and had to have his hand amputated and can’t work anymore. Of course, this CPA also volunteers to do taxes for a local orphanage (gotta have the human interest angle).
Am I too cynical? Perhaps – many have said that. But let’s stop with the choir of angels every time some particular high risk profession is mentioned though.
Invasion of personal privacy – Big Brother becomes Little Brother
People like to complain about the specter of Big Brother – our government watching our every move, “protecting” us, regulating us, and generally sticking their bureaucratic nose where it doesn’t belong. With technological advancements, this sort of thing becomes easier to do and more monitoring becomes possible. The scary part is this is now expanding to little brother: Parents.
I have talked to parents who delight in these newfound abilities to spy on their kids. Cell-phone GPS tracking can now track your kid (or anyone you have influence over) without their knowledge. Alerts can be sent to you if they stray outside certain “zones” you can define (such as school, work, etc). Time-sensitive alerts can be sent if the drone (your kid) is not where they are supposed to be at 10:00 at night for example. There is now a device you can get from your insurance carrier (currently in beta test) which plugs into the car’s diagnostic port and provides a real-time tracking feed. You can track speed (is Johnny driving too fast?), you can track all kinds of telemetry data, all of which is subpoena-able in the event of an accident (possibly not in your best interest).
There are other surveillance techniques and technologies like these which enable you to do some very detailed monitoring of your offspring. So, it’s clear that we can do this and more now!
The burning question is (or should be)… should we do this? Just because the individual being monitored is your son or daughter, it doesn’t make any difference. This is a serious invasion of privacy. I can’t wait for the first lawsuit where some kid sues their parents over this.
One of the key things we need to learn when growing up is responsibility and trust. This is a two way street. You learn to trust people, or not, and you learn to be responsible or suffer the consequences. You also learn about respect. Respect is not something that you get at birth, it’s something you earn, and must constantly maintain – sort of like a good credit rating. If we don’t trust our kids, they won’t trust us. If we don’t respect our kids, they won’t respect us. If we spy on our kids, perhaps our kids will spy on us. Do we want to encourage that?
I know if I were a kid growing up today and I found out my parents were doing this to me, they would lose all my respect and trust in a heartbeat, and those are MUCH easier to lose than regain.
Inane mouseover bad UI design – Google Voice
Here’s another installment in mouseover poorly-thought-out design. This time, we’ll visit Google Voice (a great service BTW, do yourself a favor and check it out).
On their page, they have this as a left-hand menu:
Ok, looks innocuous enough, but if you want to click on “contacts” and you make the bad mistake of approaching that with your mouse from above, you glide over “More” which instead of a clickable drop-down, it is a mouseover drop-down. So look what happens:
Oh dear, now I can’t click on “contacts”, can I? Even WORSE… if you move the mouse over there and click on “contacts” quickly, the stupid popup whips out under your mouse and grabs your click!! Now you get “recorded calls” or “Placed calls” and have to dismiss that in order to get what you really wanted.
This is irritating UI design and is poorly thought out. Users shouldn’t be surprised by getting something they didn’t intend, and they shouldn’t have to creep up on menu options from the right direction in order to use them. C’mon, Google, get a clue.
Conformation!
Saw this in an email today: “I will be sending out a conformation email…“
Now, given that conformation generally means a “structural arrangement” I can only assume that this much anticipated email will contain details on how we’re going to get together. LOL!
Same lip smudge? Cheezy makeup
I can’t believe nobody caught that. Must have been the same makeup artist enamored with the lip smudge.
Recycle Bin – take your propaganda elsewhere
We used to have a trash can on both the Mac and Windows. This was a neat idea; a place for discarded items to go before they are really deleted so you can get them back if you have to.
Then, Microsoft decided to “go green” and renamed it to “Recycle Bin”. Since this was a system object, you couldn’t rename it back to “Trash”. Fortunately, in windows 7, they have lifted this restriction, so my desktop is no longer polluted by Microsoft propaganda – I have a trash can again. Of course, all the dialogs related to discard confirmations and such still reference “Recycle Bin”. They should get the verbiage from the object they are relating to, as if you rename the object, there is now room for confusion as the dialogs and the object do not match. But I digress…
Why does this irritate me? Or perhaps you didn’t even ask because the weirdest things irritate me and now you’re used to it. It’s quite simple: Other than aluminum cans, recycling does not work. Sorry to burst your bubble, if you happen to think it’s really groovy. Recycling is a “feel good” waste of time and money which we do because it seems like it ought to be a good thing do do, but we ignore that for the most part it pollutes more than not recycling.
“Save a tree” is pointless. Paper comes from trees planted in farms by paper producers. Nobody is carving up the rainforests for this. If we buy and use less paper, they’ll plant less trees. It’s simple supply and demand. Trees are a GOOD thing, we want to encourage people to plant more of them.
Plastic recycling: The recycling process itself introduces more toxic products into our environment than making new plastic does.
Did you ever wonder why nobody will pay you for used paper and so forth, but they will pay you for aluminum cans? That’s because recycling aluminum actually makes sense and is a good idea. Most other recycling is government subsidized wasting of time, money, and in many cases is harmful to the environment.
So, the bottom line? Count me out. I’m not playing the game. Companies like Microsoft pushing their sociological agenda via my desktop (or any means, actually) is unwanted and annoying.
Are you sure? Really sure? Recycle Bin paranoia
Why yes, I AM sure, that’s why I selected “delete” in the first place. Now don’t get me wrong, I think it’s good to confirm things which may be questionable, such as “Are you sure you want to launch the ICBM?”. However, deleting a file doesn’t really delete it. It just puts it into the “Recycle Bin”. If you really didn’t mean to do that, or have pangs of regret a few minutes later, you can get it back. So why do we need to be pestered for confirmation of an undoable event? Answer: We don’t, it’s just inane.
Here’s an excerpt from Tim’s UI Guidelines (coming soon to a theater near you):
Don’t pester the user. Confirm actions that cannot be reversed, but otherwise allow the user to do what they want, when they want.
Microsoft? Are you listening?
Webcam gadget for windows sidebar – TWIV (Timed Web Image Viewer)
For the last few years, I have been doing my annual pilgrimage to the gadgets gallery looking for a gadget that will take a URL of a webcam generated image, and will display it on my desktop, refreshing it on some schedule. You wouldn’t think this would be a difficult thing, would you? Every single one of these I have downloaded and tested seems to work, after a fashion, but has issues.
My goal is this: As you know, I live in the mountains. In the winter, this means snow. So, I want to keep a couple of the local road condition webcams in little windows on my desk so I can watch conditions, and if they are deteriorating fast then maybe I’d leave work early before things get bad and congested.
Finally, I found one that seems decent! Click here
This is called “Twiv” (Timed Web Image Viewer). You give it the URL for an image out on the web, and it displays it for you in a 320×240 window – a good size. You can set the refresh time in seconds, and that’s it. Very simple, no goofy features, and who knows, maybe this one will actually run without causing horrible system performance problems like the others I have tried. I now have 3 webcams on my desktop, which is ideal. I set them to refresh every 5 minutes which should keep my system load at a minimal level, and that’s more than frequent enough for road conditions.
Update: Cyber-D has released a new version so now you can have multiple webcams and they will persist through a reboot – Thanks, Dario!
Winter will soon be here. Time to think about snow!
Well ok, not everybody in sunny Southern CA needs to think about snow. I happen to live in the mountains, and so it is a factor for me. I thought I’d share my recent thoughts & discoveries in this area as ski season approaches. Every year, we get “flatlanders” who drive up the hill woefully unprepared to deal with snow. They drive rear-wheel cars with low clearance, and don’t bring chains or anything! Needless to say, the roads are a mess with people stuck and blocking the road for no good reason other than their own lack of preparedness.
My primary vehicle is a Toyota Prius. This is a great car, but not well suited for snow. The biggest problem with it is low ground clearance. I can put chains on it and it does well, but since it’s so low, the front spoiler/bumper gets torn up plowing the snow in between the wheel ruts. My solution was to buy a cheap 4WD vehicle and put snow tires on it. That’s really nice because 99% of the time you aren’t required (and don’t need) chains, you just drive on through the checkpoints and don’t have to sweat it. Still, I keep chains in the Prius just in case I end up needing them.
When we first moved up the hill, I wanted chains I could very quickly put on and take off, as I’d be doing that twice daily. After some research, I found Spikes Spiders. These are really great:
You install “hub rings” on your wheels. When you want to put the chains on, you shove the plastic thing (above) over the tire, and the black disc with the red handle in the center locks them in place with a twist. I can install these on both wheels, without moving the car or laying out chains, get back in and drive off in literally less than a minute. Other folks with chains and cables are still untangling them and laying them out – it’s quite amusing to see their faces. Removal is just as quick. Unlock the hub, pull them off the wheels, then back the car up a couple of feet and they fall off.
The big drawback with these is price. They are expensive (for the sport model I need, about $550 per set – ouch). Traction isn’t as good as chains, admittedly, but it’s good enough for my needs. I never had traction problems with these installed. They’ve been through several seasons and the links are wearing very thin, so I was thinking about what to do about that. Their website offers parts, but these parts aren’t cheap either. So, that makes me look around to see what else is out there.
I came across two products which seem easy and fast to install and remove, and also have the additional feature that you can use them on multiple cars with different tire sizes!
Jeko, an Italian company has some neat products. Their “Put & Go” tire straps look really easy to use. Also, on the same website, they have a really neat RV leveling device.
I also like their claims of low vibration. Spikes Spiders rattle the car (and your teeth) a LOT when you are driving on anything but deep snow.
This appears to be an Italian company also, and they don’t have distribution in the US, but they are willing to ship. They quoted me € 180,00 per set, and € 95,00 FedEx shipping to the USA. (roughly $374 – dirt cheap compared to a new set of Spiders)
Inane World 