The Audio Fool : Humans

The ADD Stove

RyanBemrose — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 18:32:00 GMT

As you well know, people with peculiar quirks can have special equipment needs. There are plenty of examples such as ramps for those with wheelchairs, closed caption for the hard of hearing, and reality TV for the thinking impaired. Those of us with the Attention Deficit trait have the ADD Stove.

The ADD Stove comes with several front burners in large and small sizes. The stove lights up very quickly, and the burners come to full heat in seconds. Likewise, they cool down quickly, returning to room temperature within seconds of being turned off. The ADD Stove has some disadvantages. It can be difficult to keep the ADD Stove lit, as it has a tendency to go out partway through a meal. The stove can be slippery, and sometimes you have to pay extra attention to keep pots and pans from sliding off of the burners. Still, the stove is extremely efficient if you can keep it on task, and many users are very happy with their appliance.

User studies have found that the biggest disadvantage to the ADD Stove is so prevalent as to be considered an obvious design defect. The ADD Stove has no back burners. Instead, there is a large gap between the stove and the wall that pots and pans can easily fall into. Experts have speculated that this oversight is due to design compromises in putting so much functionality and attention into the front burners. Due to this defect, pots and pans which are pushed to the back burner will fall off the back of the stove where you can no longer find them.

Users of the ADD Stove are therefore cautioned never to push anything onto a back burner, lest they lose sight of it completely.

How to drive on Snow and Ice

RyanBemrose — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 05:04:58 GMT

Ah, the winter storms are upon us once again. And once again, a disproportionate number of my extended neighbors are demonstrating their incompetence behind the wheel. It seems that no matter how many times the Puget Sound region gets snowed upon, people never learn how to drive in it. To that end, I've put together a set of helpful guidelines to help people understand how to drive on snow and ice.

Don't.

If you don't absolutely, positively HAVE to be on the road in these conditions, then stay inside next to a nice warm fire with your car safely parked. I'm sure you can come up with any number of reasons why you think you have to drive in this crap, but remember that nearly all of the problems that you can have driving on snow and ice (accidents, getting stuck, freezing to death, etc) are a direct result of breaking rule 1.

You can change direction, or you can change speed, but you can't change them both at the same time.

You only get so much friction with which to control your vehicle. You can use it to speed up, to slow down, or to turn. You don't have enough friction to do more than one of these things at a time. Remember, the fastest way to spin out is to turn the wheel and apply the brake at the same time. Maybe that's what you wanted to do, but unless you're 16 and in your dad's car in a deserted parking lot, I doubt it.

Slow Down.

In a low-friction environment, inertia is king. For the next few moments, you will continue to go the same speed and direction that you're going now, whether you want to or not. The faster you're going when you decide that you don't want to go that direction anymore (such as, say, an object at rest in that direction), the less fun you'll have in the next few moments. Note there is one exception to the inertia rule, and that is that an object in motion will stop anyway if it encounters a larger object at rest. At this point, you do not want to be the erstwhile object in motion.

Get off my bumper, you tailgating imbecile.

See discussion above.

Don't you wish you lived somewhere warmer?

Did you know that there's a whole hemisphere of the Earth which is in summer right now? I bet it's not icy there.

Just stay home.

The observant reader will realize that this is really just a restatement of rule 1, but it really is important enough to repeat. Stay safe, stay warm, and we'll all make it through to springtime. I'll race you there.

If you assume your users are criminals, they will be.

RyanBemrose — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 07:32:00 GMT

A friend recently purchased for me a copy of a game, let's call it "Society III", that he knew I'd like. I had been an avid player of Society and Society II, and Amazon was having a $9.95 special. The game arrived in a standard manufacturer box, with a stamped official-looking CD. It's a legit copy.

Because the game is about two years old by now, there have been a couple of patches. Such is the way of the software lifecycle in the internet age. After installing the game and playing around for a short while, I dutifully went to the publisher's website and downloaded the latest patch. After installing the patch, however, I was no longer able to play the game. Upon launching, I would get a dialog which asked me to "Please insert the Society III CD into drive C:".

Huh?

Somehow, after the patch, the game has become confused about which drive is the CD-ROM. Obviously, I can't put the disc into drive C:. So I start poking around the config files. Maybe there's a .ini that got corrupted or a registry entry. I do find a line in society3.ini which lists the install drive, but changing that has no effect. I am unable to convince the game to let me play without inserting a CD into my C: drive.

Now, it turns out, as with most games, that the only reason for the CD at all is to verify that you actually have the original game. No other reason. For performance, the whole game has been copied to the hard drive. As with most games out there, once the game finishes the CD check, the drive goes silent, and I can even safely pop the disc out without affecting game play. So my next course of action is where things get a bit underhanded. I head out to my friendly neighborhood warez website (with my browser security set to maximum, of course), and find a crack for the game which removes the CD check entirely. Just drop in the new, patched .exe, and what do you know, I can play from my hard disk without ever inserting the CD.

So what did we learn from this exercise? Well, first of all, that copy protection software can have bugs too. But unlike innocent glitches, when your software's self-destruct button malfunctions, your UX suffers and users get alienated. My copy of Society III is legitimate, but to use my legitimate copy, I had to resort to shady methods which probably violate the EULA. This game's copy protection software starts from the implicit assumption that the user is a criminal and must be stopped. In this case, thanks to a bug in the software, it turned the user into one.

I don't think it means what you think it means

RyanBemrose — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 02:44:44 GMT

Raymond Chen, noble defender of language, pointed out today that fellow Microsofties have now taken to inventing adjectives, in addition to nouns and verbs. Though Raymond's example is pretty benign, it does bring out the usual champions for language purity and for language malleability to re-enact the age-old argument.

I don't really consider myself a language purist. I have been known to twist words until they cry uncle, and create connotations and juxtapositions that will leave you groaning. (Ask my co-workers sometime about their reaction when I would casually mention in scrum how a bug was caused by another module molesting my class variables). You also don't see me running around spouting "thou" and "wherefore" when I mean "you" and "why" (though you don't see language purists spouting that either, which gives lie to a straw-man argument). In this case, though, I'm going to have to go with Raymond's side.

Language is meant for communication. Communication is only fostered when both the sender and the recipient can rely on a common vocabulary to make certain that meaning is preserved. When you make up a word, the common vocabulary is broken, meaning is lost, and communication doesn't work. Even with words like "planful", where a smart recipient can usually puzzle it out, there is still a break in conversation as the recipient puzzles it out, and they still might get it wrong (Is it something which has too much plan? Perhaps a clever play on 'painful'?)

Yes, it is true that language evolves. But just as with biological evolution, it changes over the course of generations, and not individuals. Language evolves primarily in two ways. New words are created for concepts that had none, and new people learn the language with a slightly different vocabulary from their predecessors. If you use a new buzzword because last week's word for the same thing doesn't have the right punch, then you're not evolving language. You're making stuff up, and muddling your message because of it.

To quote Humpty Dumpty (Lewis Carroll -- "Through the Looking Glass"):

When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

However, to paraphrase what a much wiser orator once said to me in response to the above line:

That's total bull. When I hear the word, it means what I think it means, because I'm the one being spoken to, and you're the one spouting nonsense.

I couldn't have phrased it better.

The Audio Fool : Humans

The ADD Stove

More posts eventually!

How to drive on Snow and Ice

If you assume your users are criminals, they will be.

I don't think it means what you think it means