A great illustration of how the user experience of getting your movie going is quiet different depending on if you have paid for it – or not.
On the carton of orange juice it reads “low in saturated fat”. Orange juice, fat?? WTF. What are they thinking. How many people ever considered OJ to be fatty? Pretty clear which country you are in when you read this kind of ‘nutrition information’.
Switching machines I realized that I had to re-install webmailer. This wonderful preference plane lets you launch any web based mail program whenever your default mail application would be launched.
I have used it for years. Thousands of times. And it always worked.
And I failed to appreciate that. Going through our lives our attention is where we need to act or avoid. The broken and annoying stuff is what we notice.
All the well working things that surround us go naturally under appreciated. And, since people have piled up allot of technology and culture in the last couple of generations there is actually a huge amount of that.
If a thousand items worked and one does not, that one will be all we think about.
via Eric Alba.
main() {char q=34,n=10,*a="main() {char q=34,n=10,*a=%c%s%c; printf(a,q,a,q,n);}%c"; printf(a,q,a,q,n);}
Lovely find here
So, you think you are super cool, since you ordered a gulfstream private jet?
Well, unfortunately there are still a couple of people that 1-up you. By a long shot.
Boeing builts 747s since the late sixties. What meant to be used for cargo, since all long passenger flight would go super sonic soon anyway, became the largest passenger plane. Until recently: Airbus finally trumped those huge 747 jumbos with their dead ugly A380 a few years ago.
One of those 43 sold A380s will actually be converted into a flying palace.
Boeing revealed their new 747-8i yesterday:
Turns out that 7 out of the 28 ordered 787-8i will be sold to “VIP clients” as well. The super rich certainly got allot richer in the last years.
Usually that kind of wealth can afford to remain invisible. Having the worlds largest passenger jet converted to your liking gives a glimpse how a billionaire rolls in 2011.
A good summary of what happened to Nokia. Point is that engineers can not run the show. But -of course- all the prettiest design in the world can not safe a project / company if the underlying technology is not up to the task.
Ars Technica describes how an IP address gets turned into a name at Comcast and TWC.
I really like email. It works well for me. One thing that I grew accustomed to was the abillity to postpone email. To set up quick reminders easily. I used ‘replylater.com’ for this. Unfortunately last month they stopped working for me.
I decided to just implement the same features myself: Mail Me Later works pretty much like replyater.com.
The ‘problem’ is, that once a tool works for me I completely start to rely on it. Having a topic delegated to a service like ‘mail me later’ means that I will entirely forget about it. Good since it saves hassle, really bad if that service fails.
Having this part of me workflow now in an environment where I can quickly verify its operation makes me very happy.