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!
Jess told me the other day she had never made any food that needed to rise. So I figured it was high time when said she wanted to make pretzels.
She found a recipe online which originally came from King Arthur Flour, and I think there’s a very good chance it was the same recipe we used in 7th grade Home Ec. (except our school didn’t call it “Home Ec” it was “Life Management” or something).
Anyway, it’s an incredibly simple recipe: water, a bunch of flour, a little salt, a little sugar, and some rapid-rise yeast. We threw it all in the KitchenAid mixer and waited for it to do its thing. Then we put it in a bag to rise. After rising, Jess separated the dough into 8 pieces and let it rest for a few minutes. Then we rolled them out and pretzeled them up.
The first batch came out a little overdone, but the second batch was just about perfect.
That one in the bottom right was the last to be made; I decided to experiment with my knotting and dubbed it the “WonderKnot.” It was the best of the entire bunch. Perfectly crisp on the outside with a soft, chewy center.
They were really quite good. And now Jess has made something that has to rise.
For Valentine’s Day, Kyle got me a potted rose bush.
This was folly. I can’t keep plants alive. I’ve told him this, but he’s never seen it in action. But here’s a good example of my previous work:
So yeah, I was worried about this rose bush. And was not at all surprised to see its steady decline over the following months. We’ve kept it outside, on the balcony, where it gets the most sunshine it possibly can. We water it. But once those rose buds it came with died (they didn’t fully bloom, they just sort of fell off), it never bloomed again. It did get bigger, though, so we moved it to a larger pot. And then things got really bad. And now it looks like death. Parts of it are completely brown, and the best-looking parts are spotted. BUT it has a rose on it!
It makes no sense at all. And, like I said, the rest of the bush looks truly horrible. The good news is that we think the spiders all over it are eating the other bugs (?). I honestly don’t know how this thing is still alive, let alone flowering. But we wanted to share this little miracle with you.
We were sitting on the couch reading this evening when there was a knock at the door.
I got up to answer it to find a representative from the Democratic Party. Having taken my name from the list of registered voters (upon which I’m registered as an independent, not to be confused with the American Independent party), which apparently, in California is recorded as “decline to state”. It would seem the assumption in California is that everyone is really part of a party, but some people just don’t like to say so publicly, so you get registered as “decline to state”.
Anyway, this representative from the Democratic Party just wanted to see if he could change my registration to be a Democrat if I didn’t mind. I don’t really see why this matters much, but after declining his offer to change my party he proceeded to tell me about the Republican candidate for governor, Meg Whitman, who was apparently not going to be good but not for any specific reason.
After rambling on for a bit I interrupted to again state I wasn’t interested in changing my party affiliation.
The funny part is, he left and I still know nothing about the Democratic candidate or any reason why I should vote for him or her, but I do know that the Republican candidate is Meg Whitman. I have a tip for the Democrats, that’s not great marketing. You had someone at my door talking to me and didn’t give me a single reason to vote for your candidate or even drop the name of your candidate. Instead you gave some vague generalities about how the other candidate was going to be bad but didn’t actually give any reasons why she’d be bad.
Not effective campaigning, at least to me. If anything you made me annoyed that your platform is apparently “the other candidate is bad.”