Author: Steven Garrity

I don’t need more flashing lights in my life right now

by Steven Garrity

I just came back from a grand tour of all establishments (that I know of) here in Charlottetown that sell car CD players. My sigfinicant other recently bought a used Toyota with a dud CD player. We like the factory default — it’s simple, it has a volume knob, it doesn’t light up live a rave/disco/acid-flashback.

As it turns out, factory default car CD players seem to be the only ones available that aren’t totally X-treme®!

I’m having a similar problem with replacing my cell phone. It seems that color screens on cell phones do two things (and only two things, as far as I can tell): 1) suck up the battery faster, and 2) obscure system icons with crappy photo-realistic but unintelligible icons.

Anyone who has tried to buy sneakers in the last few years knows that unless you are a go-go dancer from Mars, a mountain climber, or some kind of space athelete, there are no shoes for you.

I can understand that “dudes” want to buy wacky stereos for their dude-mobiles. I also understand that flashy lights might help sell products when they are sitting next to a bunch of others on a store shelf. However, is there not a market for simple and elegant user interfaces? I am not asking for much — from the last I’ve seen, Chrysler, Toyota, Honda, Subaru, etc, all have relatively simple factory default stereos. Why can’t we buy these after-market?

Are substance, value, and usability — factors that come into play after the purchase, not during or before — always going to be drowned out by flash and featuritis — which make their impression at the time of purchase, but let you down afterwards? Of course, I dont’t mind that these wacky products are out there — I just wish I could still get something simpler.

I don’t need more flashing lights in my life right now.

(by the way, if anyone knows where you can buy a used factory default toyota CD player in Charlottetown, please let me know)

 

Mammoth: noun, adjective, and beast

by Steven Garrity

I’ve posted here before about how the randomness and lack of context of the headlines on CNN.com often have disturbing/hilarious result. On any given day, the list of “Top Stories” headlines can almost always make me laugh out loud.

Today was no exception. Early today, one of the headlines read:

Mammoth skull found in a gravel pit

A few hours later, during which someone at CNN must have noticed the unindended brilliance of this headline, it was updated to the more accurate, but less hilarious:

Skull of mammoth found in a gravel pit

In case you are actually interested in the mammoth skull, you can check out the story and get a bonus “artists rendition of a mammoth”.

 

Acts of Volition Radio: Session Four

by Steven Garrity

Acts of Volition Radion: Session FourThe fourth session of Acts of Volition Radio is here. This session is based on songs and albums that are particularly well recorded, produced, or engineered.

A collection of particularly well recorded, produced, or engineered tracks. Recorded Wednesday, January 21, 2003 by Steven Garrity. Run time: 49min.

Session Four Playlist:

  1. Sandbox – The Garden Song
  2. The Watchmen – Brighter Hell
  3. David Usher – F-Train
  4. Age of Electric – Enya
  5. Poor Old Lu – Ring True
  6. Hole – Awful
  7. Cush – Heaven Sent

Also, a reminder that Acts of Volition Radio has an RSS feed of it’s own. The next session is going to be all about great guitar songs — I’m looking forward to it.

Acts of Volition Radio
Acts of Volition Radio
Acts of Volition Radio: Session Four
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Shame on MSNBC for their broken web features

by Steven Garrity

I’ve long enjoyed the photos in the MSNBC feature, The Week in Pictures and The Week in Sports Pictures. However, during a recent redesign, the format and display of these features has gotten much worse.

Update: A reader has pointed out that though it is still Flash-based, the MSNBC Week in Pictures feature now works in Firefox. Thanks.

If I go to The Week in Pictures using Mozilla Firebird, my default browser, and a popular standards-compliant browser, I see an error graphic telling me “Sorry. Your browser is not compatible with this interactive feature.”

MSNBC's sloppy error message

Well, it’s not that my browser isn’t compatible with their “interactive feature”, but rather that their “interactive feature“ isn’t compatible with standard web browsers.

The features do work in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. However, I suspect we would be giving them too much credit to assume that MSNBC intentionally cripples features in non-Microsoft web browsers. Rather, I suspect that this is a matter of bad web development. If I’m wrong, though, and it is intentionally, then the behaviour is abhorrent, and given their anti-trust history, I hope illegal.

The Week in Pictures feature is now displayed in Flash. Flash is great for some things — but this isn’t one of them. Thanks to their use of Flash, I can’t, for example link to the individual images. I can’t even link to the entire slideshow due to their sloppy overuse of JavaScript.

What bothers me most about this is that they aren’t using some wacky Microsoft-only technology to display the photos. Mozilla Firebird can handle Flash quite happily. If you view the source HTML code on the page with the error message, you’ll see the URL of the actual Flash file. If you open this URL directly in Firebird, you’ll see that the feature actually does work in Mozilla Firebird.

Interested geeks can take a look at the JavaScript code they are using to incorrectly determine which browsers can access their feature.

Shame on MSNBC — I’d like to view their fine feature content — but I can’t.