digitalBush

Money can't buy intelligence, that's for damn sure.  I'm driving along tonight and I notice this BMW driving along with a VERY low tire.  Being the good natured person that I am, I roll up beside of the car and motion for him to roll his window down.  Little did I know, the universal cranking motion that one uses to notify another person to roll his or her window down also translates to "let's race".  At least it must if you are a dumb kid driving an expensive car that mommy and daddy bought you.  Oh well, I tried to help.  The jokes on him, that car had low profile tires and was basically on it's rim.  I guess it won't kill his parents to buy a replacement wheel for the car once that one gets a taste of the asphalt. 

I would love to meet the geniuses that produce this stuff.  The other night I assembled a desk my wife had picked out.  I should point out early on in this post that I consider myself extremely handy.  Anyway, let me describe how this furniture is put together in the most convoluted fashion.  Seriously, what are the engineers thinking? 

The desk had me assemble the bottom 2 "legs" which is really a filing cabinet and a set of shelves.  Next I assembled the hutch.  Here's where it gets stupid:  Next I attached the the damn desktop to the hutch upside down.  Now I have this massively heavy hutch/desktop assembly which is 6 ft wide by 3 ft tall by 3 ft deep (desktop) that I must now flip over and place onto the "legs".  Oh yes, did I mention that in order to place this awkwardness onto the "legs" I must line up about 10 holes with their respective metal dowels?  Excellent design!  I would have attached the desktop to the legs first, but that would have covered up the holes needed to attach the hutch.  Lesson 1: Have a person handy to help you pick up maneuver things.

For those of you who have never been blessed to construct one of these monstrosities, let me elaborate.  Department stores sell this furniture which looks like it might be real wood, but it's really just laminated particle board.  The fine people who design this stuff came up with an ingenious method of attaching 2 pieces of wood perpendicular to each other.  On one piece a metal dowel is screwed into a pre-drilled hole.  One the other is a cam which is inserted into another predrilled hole with a perpendicular hole drilled to it.  The dowel slides through the perpendicular hole and into the cam which is turned to lock the 2 piece of wood together.  It sounds great in theory, but unfortunately the threaded dowel only has 1/4" of thread and is extremely easy to rip out of the particle board.  Lesson 2:  Be careful when picking up the furniture.

The piece I assembled was very well labeled, but I've done some that were not.  Regardless make sure you are aware of where the finished edges are in relation to each other.  You'd feel pretty silly if you spent a couple of hours assembling something only to realize that you put something on upside down at step 2 or 57.  I didn't make this mistake, but it could easily be done.

Sometimes you just get what you pay for.

Let me preface this bash by saying that I use my computer to work. As such, I expect it to respond when I ask it to do so. If I click a button, I want an instant response.

We live in an interesting time in computing. We're finally getting to the point where we have excess CPU cycles to spare and gobs of memory. What is a developer to do? Well, any good developer would make sure to use the equipment to it's fullest potential. Instead of just showing a window, let's take 500ms to animate that window flying across the screen. Let's take 700ms to fade this object in instead of making it just appear. Of course the last couple of statements were intended as sarcasm and the numbers were made up. Still, there's a point to be made, and I promise I'm getting there.

Why in the world would we create hardware that's faster only to slow down the user experience? I'm sick of animations that make me wait for them to finish before I can do something. If I click a link to your web page, please don't fade the damn thing in. I clicked a link and traditionally the view port blanks out and new content appears. I'm already incurring overhead by requesting your web server to do something, please don't make me wait any longer because you think something looks cool. To me, to be cool is to give me what I want as quickly as possible. If I click on an item in the task bar, I'd rather not watch an effect while my window comes up and into the foreground (I'm looking at you Vista). It's just plain counter-productive.

I'm not totally against animations; they do have their place. I think animations are appropriate when the UI does something that's not expected. The digg website is a prime example. When you click the login link at the top, a login bar appears above the header bar. This isn't normal, and if it didn't fade in the user might miss the fact that the bar just appeared. In that instance, the login bar needs to draw attention to itself.

There are plenty of examples both good and bad here. I just want to point out that we as developers needs to be mindful of our users. Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should.

Who else is sick of the commercialism surrounding Christmas?  Retail stores are shoving it down our throats before Halloween even starts.  I have a problem with the exploitation of Christmas and then not even calling it by it's proper name. 

I'm a Christian and I celebrate Christmas.  Therefore whenever I see someone I'm going to tell them "Merry Christmas" and they better not be offended by it.  I certainly wasn't offended when a Buddhist co-worker wished me a happy Chinese New Year.  I won't be offended if I'm wished a Happy Hanukkah either and here's why.  Whoever gives me a greeting (regardless of religion) is feeling in good spirits because of a special time that they celebrate. They are extending that cheer to me in the form of a greeting.  How can I refuse that? 

I would like to expand on that thought a little.  I certainly wouldn't call a menorah a holiday candle stick, that would be silly!  Now, why do you have to go and ruin my Christmas tree and call it a holiday tree?  I do realize I'm griping about events that transpired last year for the most part.  I also realize that several companies have retracted last year's "goofs" and are calling it Christmas again.  There are a few (cough, cough Best Buy) that are continuing to try and be too politically correct. 

 What bothers me is the fact that they are saying "Happy Holidays" and yet are still using Christmas imagery in their ads.  I'm not seeing other religious symbols to justify their use of "holidays".  Nope, it's all Christmas symbols I'm seeing. Excuse me, but you're trying to take advantage of the Christmas season by selling me stuff so that I can give out on Christmas.  You are taking advantage of the spirit of the season in order to bring your books into the black, but you aren't going to call it Christmas? No thanks, I have and will continue to take my business elsewhere.  You can't have your cake and eat it too.  This is about good will towards men, not selling 1,000,000 more units.

Merry Christmas!

I drive 32 miles to work one way which takes me approximately 45m - 1h 15m depending on road conditions, construction, etc.  Now I know that people drive longer distances or have commutes that take longer.  To those that do, I must say that you are insane. 

At first I didn't really mind the drive.  It gave me time.  I had time to explore the deep innards of who I really am.  It gave me time to cool off when I was upset and time to think intricate problems through.  It gave me approximately 2 hours per day of time.  That's 10 hours per week or 480 hours per year (discounting holidays,vacation, etc).  For those of your that care, that's 20 freaking days out of the year I spend sitting my ass in the car.  After driving this same route for 2.5 years, I'm out of things to think about. 

With all of this seat time, I get to witness strange things.  I've also grown to loathe certain attributes of some of my fellow commuters.  So, consider this my introduction to a series of posts I'd like to title "Rules of the Road".