Oh oh overdue

Another sign that the world outside my window thinks that I am supposed to be raising children now: the cable guy is over and has put on PBS, which is showing an ersatz "Electric Company"-type show, and there's a skit featuring an armored knight with a teen-slacker voice putting on a low-budget TV show, titled "Gawain's World".

Now there is a "silent e" animation with approx. the same plot as the 1970s one but no Tom Lehrer music, this generic jazzy thing instead. Very strange.

Bloop

My TV is sane again. Apparently the cable box just went bonkers; swapping it out fixed everything. My channel 2 thought that it was the Discovery channel this morning. So even the fake lineup I was getting shuffled itself around more or less daily. What the.

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The thing last night was OK. I got to see Guitar Hero II (which looks very nice; y'all who are waiting for this game will be quite happy with it) and met up with Lee from the show and a couple of his friends. Didn't do any networking of note, for I did not want to. I woulda stayed longer if the Harmonix people there were going to say something, but nobody said nuttin an hour into it so I left once I was done with my beer.

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I am getting hit harder with spam of various kinds lately. I have a record amount in Gmail (though not quite enough for another Grim Milestone yet), and my cell phone is getting daily called by a prerecorded Spanish-language message. I've also picked up two junk livejournal friends-ofs in the last few weeks. Well, one seems to be completely automated, and the other appears to be an actual person who enjoys mass-friending the LJ database occasionally.

No... I... didn't see anything. Nope! Nothing there. What's for dinner?

Random hypothesis:

In general, and over the whole history of the medium, characters in television shows lie far more often than real-life people would in similar situations. This is because lying is an inexpensive way for writers to introduce plot twists and intercharacter stresses.

This from a conversation with dougo about "Lost", which I've been watching on DVD. Midway through the second season I'm getting pretty tired of how the all the characters turn to lying so easily, even to characters that I'm fairly sure are supposed to be people they trust. It's moved past caution into what I'd call childishness. These are supposed to be complex adults, not little kids who think that the best way to handle an encounter with something weird is to never tell anyone ever (or until you blurt it out when sufficiently harassed or otherwise upset).

I think this is related to why characters in modern-setting fiction never call the cops. But at least Lost doesn't have that problem...

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Also the actor(s, probably) playing Claire's baby are several months too old, at least in some shots. Even I can tell the difference.

(T)errible user interface <-- HAHAH!!

I finally used cash to buy a Charlie Card last night, since they're finally converting Porter Square. (In the past, I've just traded tokens for single-use tickets.)

It took a long time before I realized that the ticket machine won't take your cash bills until you press a button located nowhere near the bill feed telling it that you would like to give it some cash.

That's jaw-droppingly bad UI along multiple axes.

(a) The feed serves no purpose other than taking your money. It does not need to be modal. It is safe to assume that a customer will not insert money unless they wish to buy something. Instead of refusing the money, it should graciously accept it and then enter a dialog with the customer about what they would like to buy.

(b) For every bill-accepting vending machine that I've ever seen, the way you initiate a transaction is feeding it some dough. There are decades of UI tradition in play here; it's what people expect. If you, as a machine, act differently, customers will assume you are broken. As did I. Only when I stepped back and looked for other options did I notice the instructions telling me to poke the screen first.

After finally buying a hot new card, I proceeded to try feeding it through the turnstile, where it made a farting noise, and an integral screen lit up with a message telling me to re-insert it. So I did. Fart. OK, turnstile broken! Try next one over. Fart. WTF? Oh, I see, I'm putting the card in upside-down, because the up-side is clearly the plain white one with a large orange arrow on it, and not the colorful one with three small black arrows on it. Folks, I can understand the cost savings of not putting a strip reader on both sides of the slot, but would it have killed you to clearly print which side was up? (And which side was down?)

Ugh... what a disaster.

radiotelescope adds that the turnstiles, if they drain your ticket of the last of its funds, will hand it back to you anyway. Other cities' subways will chew up a newly empty ticket, say THANK YOU and let you through. Our city's subway, on the other hand, is destined to have a floor littered with dead tickets.

I take it back if the machines give you a bonus for recharging a ticket, like (for example) the LAUNDR-O-MAT does with its cash cards. Otherwise, why would anyone want to bother recharging an empty ticket when it's easier to just buy a new one?