A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

A colleague from my past had a bike accident yesterday and went to hospital. He got roughed up real bad and needed surgery, so that happened today, and he's now improving rapidly. I know this through frequent updates that his wife's been making to a carepages.com page.

And I appreciate this, even though I have discovered that Carepages is to emailed or blogged health updates as Evite is to emailed invitations. Except even worse than that, times ten. First, you have to register before you can even see your friend's page, and much is the grumbling wtf-ery. Once you do this, you start to receive emailed notifications whenever the person's page gets updated, but the email contains no details about the update. When you click the link read the update you have to log in again, because there's no option to keep a session cookie with the website!

When a significant percentage of your users are worried-sick friends and family who hold their breath with dread every time there's news, what you don't do is announce this news with a content-free email and a link that makes them fumble around for their password when they're too stressed out to type straight, every goddamn time. That is fucking wrong.

It's kind of tacky to get mad about bad UI in this situation, but I'm relieved that he's gonna be OK, and so I think I have the right to vent that this shit just crosses the line. I just emailed my friend to wish him the best. Oh, RFC 821: you are much maligned, but you're there when we just need simplicity.

doctor_atomic links to an hilarious SNL ad that illustrates the utterly lame approach that mainstream game publishers take when they try to market universally fun things to girls specifically.

jadelennox discusses a recent XKCD which is, as always, spot-on. (And makes me feel bad that I am invariably too lazy to bother reading the alt text. I'd suggest that the cartoonist needs to do something else with that message, but shoving it in alt text undeniably fits so fell with the strip's general attitude and audience.)

Adium is a great Mac application for all things IM, but one misfeature it's had for years is an overbusy dock icon that looks and acts like it was designed by The Penguin. Unlike some of my friends, I'm not bothered by the fact that it's a cartoon duck, but I have always been tweaked that by default it announces new messages by making a quacking sound, bouncing, flapping its wings, and continuously flashing the username of the entity who sent you the message.

This carries on until you click it to shut it up, and since I use Growl to pop up new IMs in temporary and unobtrusive little bubbles while I work on other things, the duck's insistence that I click it so it can show me chat messages that I've already read has grown tiresome.

In past versions of Adium I haven't been able to shut the duck up completely, but with its newest release (1.0.5), I have achieved the optimum level of ducky politeness.

1. In the "Events" tab of the preferences window, change the overall sound set to "iChat" (for much less aggravating noises) and set the reaction to the "Message received (Background chat)" event to "Display a Growl notification" only, removing the username dock display.


2. Change "Message received" to "Play the sound 'Received Message'" only, removing the dock-bounce effect.


3. Under the same window's "Advanced" tab, uncheck the "Animated dock icon" box, leaving "Display a message count badge" checked, because that's fine.

I consider this setup ideal. I am much happier with this now.

"Don't watch this video! Here watch one of these instead!" On every single video. I mean, literally on it. Nice.

Edit, one day later: the stuff I was complaining about seems to be gone now.

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?

I am using Excel at work for the first time, for a task more involved than opening and reading other people's files, in a project that needs to be finished by this afternoon.

... ohhhh mah gad ...

Please tell me that there is a way to make the little Bonzi-Buddy-style dancing-toastermac thing go away and stay away. I am so, so, so not in the mood to have my work interrupted from time to time because it is time to watch dancing clowns. Tofutti break!!

(In a loud, clear voice: "MICROSOFT...")