I think we missed all the camera club meetings in September, but we made it yesterday. I submitted two images. This one placed 1st of 6 in Projected Pictorial – Basic:
(And yes, the car is on the wrong side of the road. I flipped the image because I felt it looked better with the car on the right than on the left. We’ll just pretend it’s in Japan.)
I was taking some trash out and saw this guy sitting on the wall. So I tossed the trash, and zipped back inside to grab the camera.
There wasn’t a lot of light and I didn’t know how long it would stay put so I used a large smattering of settings hoping that one would come out well enough. That’s the best shot. Most of the others are too grainy from using too high of a sensitivity.
Anyone know what kind of bug that is? Mom, I’m looking your way.
I read The Design of Everyday Things awhile ago. Since then I’ve noticed basic design principles that are either good enough or bad enough to draw notice. Sometimes it’s only in contrast with a better (or worse) design that you realize how bad (or good) a design is.
I came across a particularly illustrative example of this while we were rearranging our books after having purchased another bookcase. Occasionally when you buy a set of books they’ll come in a thin cardboard box. This is the cardboard box that a set of J.R.R. Tolkien books was packaged in:
Notice how it’s built like many simple boxes with a flap that tucks in. You don’t think anything of it until the moment you attempt to slide a book in on that side. The cover hits the flap and you risk damaging the cover if you try to force it.
This is the design of the box that all of the 3-packs of books from the Wheel of Time series came in:
Specifically designed to have no flaps that might interfere with sliding a book back into place!
Since a lot of my work involves user interface design I try to pay attention to functional designs and pick out what is good or bad about them.
It turns out that it’s really hard to create good interfaces, which is why I try to appreciate them when I find them. It can be painful to watch users interact with some of the interfaces we put together at work. As a team we bend over backwards to make things as simple as possible—then you watch someone still completely fail to interact with the system successfully without coaching. It’s hard, but we’re really figuring things out and have been getting a lot of praise for our most recent designs.
If you’re in the application development world and you’ve never really watched an “average” person use a computer, you need to do it. You’ll have your mind blown by how kooky their actions are. It never occurred to me that some people will always drag-and-drop to copy/paste text. They do it because it’s faster than right-clicking and selecting copy and then right-clicking and selecting paste. But they’ve never learned that ctrl-c / ctrl-v is far more convenient. We made some people really happy when we made sure to account for this drag-and-drop behavior in our application. It wasn’t hard to do, we just never imagined it would be useful!
We’re on our way to Utah. I get to recruit at BYU again and with the addition of a plane ticket for Jess we get to have a brief partial vacation for very little cost to us.
At the moment we’re sitting in the airport. Today I had the privilege of refusing to go through the back-scatter machine and instead receive an unceremonious pat down. What a waste of time and money. I wish everyone would refuse to use the back-scatter machines so that they would be forced to get rid of them (or make them mandatory, which is probably more likely I suppose).
The pat down was as much of a joke for security as any other process currently in place. As far as I can tell it’s simply designed to be more awkward than the back-scatter machines so that people will just put up with the machines. It’s a normal pat down (actually I’m fairly certain I’ve received more thorough pat downs going in to concerts) with the addition of touching the bottoms of your feet and swabbing your hands with chemical detector swabs.
It certainly wouldn’t be remotely difficult to conceal something past the pat down I received. When will sanity and cost-benefit studies again be used to guide our decisions as a country?
I did a search a moment ago and was surprised to discover that real-time searching is enabled for my account. This is apparently Google’s big announcement today. It’s kind of neat; no more hitting “Enter” or clicking “Search”.
It doesn’t seem to be active for everyone yet. I pulled up a different browser without logging in to my Google account and there was no real-time searching there.
The name they’re using is “Instant Search” there’s an option next to the search box to turn off instant search:
