ThisMyShiznat

I came across this page today.  A list of ‘47’ liquids that we purchase, and the average cost per gallon.  Gasoline, Kool-aid, windex…  the list goes on.  The page is dated June 2006, but I would imagine the prices are still accurate enough to consider it relevant.  Relevant to what?  I dunno…

$38 million dollars seems like a great deal for a gallon of scorpion venom.  We can raise the money and call it a “stimulus package”.  Congress hasn’t put an ounce of thought into the financial troubles of the poor little scorpions.

Moving on…

The thing about this page that made it worthy of blogging, is the advertisement that shows up on the left hand side, right around the middle of (my/your?) screen.  In a teal background is an advertisement for a credit card application site.  The funny thing to me is that this is clearly the cheapest internet advertising attempt I have ever seen.

There is no graphic, no color (other than the background) and the best part, there is no link!  The website name is in the advertisement, but  you have to manually type it into your web browser to get there!

Classic.

An interesting concept here…  I ignored all of the Madoff stuff..  What was interesting to me was the idea that living in buildings that are standardized for convenience and aesthetics will degrade the overall activity of the mind.

It seems like something worth contemplating (but not implementing).  In this 21^st century world, our senses are constantly bombarded with stimulus and convenience through new technology.  The current ‘era of technology’ has appeared within just a few decades.  It makes me wonder how quickly can humans adapt to keep up with the processing power of technology.

A while back I was starting a new job.  As part of my hiring/training/joining the team thing, I received a mouse-pad with the company logo on it.  The mouse-pad seemed like it was good quality, the printing looked professional, and it was even kind of shiny.  Once I started using the shiny mouse-pad, I noticed that the cursor would jump a little bit on the screen sometimes.  Often enough for me to think it was odd.  The problem is that optical mice don’t work well on shiny surfaces.

These little optical mices are better than the mouses that use a rubber ball on the bottom. They don’t gum up, are very precise, and the mouse-pad is entirely optional.  You might want a mouse-pad to protect the desk from the “wear and tear” of sliding the mouse, but only if it’s a real nice desk, and if it’s a real nice desk, it’s probably shiny anyways.

I was recently on a job that had me moving from computer to computer every 20 minutes or so.  In the long run, I touched a fairly high number of PC’s.  As I moved from office to office I noticed that many of the workstations had these custom made shiny mouse-pads, and they were for the most part using optical mice.  Now being an IT consultant, who often makes changes to computers.  I figure that it probably is, in fact, best not to have the cursor randomly jump around on me.  Particularly if it will do that when I am clicking a button, or a checkbox.

Somewhere, there are companies making these useless mouse-pads.  Companies are probably paying $10 to $15 a piece to have their name and logo on these nice looking shiny mouse-pads.  The people ordering them don’t know the the mouse-pads actually decrease productivity and cause errors.  They are a horrible product.  The employees who end up using the mouse-pads, most of them don’t even realize the mouse-pad is making the mouse jump.

I wonder how many optical mice are replaced each year because of a shiny mouse pads.  Those poor little guys.  Perfectly good mice tossed into that pile of wires in the back of the IT department.

I was working at a popular retail chain auto parts store back in 1998.  I was a smoker at the time, and would go out on regular smoke brakes every couple of hours.

One day I went out for a smoke and I walked around the corner of the building like usual.  What happened after that was slightly more unusual.  A car pulls up and four guys  hop out carrying screwdrivers and license plates.  Without even noticing me, two went to the front of the car, and two went to the back.  I saw the guys at the front of the car swap out the front license plate.  I assume the guys at the back of the car did the same.  Now, working for an auto parts store, people did small repairs to their car in the parking lot all the time, but these guys just swapped out both license plates in less than 30 seconds.  Clearly not your average grease monkey.

The two guys at the front of the car notice me standing there in my distinctive uniform (Red shirt and shiny black pants.  Very flashy for an auto parts store).  One guy mumbles something to the effect of “Shit, he saw us”.  I didn’t realize right away that they were planning on robbing the store, but I new something was up.  I said “All I see is you guys working on your car.  It happens all the time.  Just don’t spill any oil”, pointing at the stains all over the parking lot.

They guys jumped back into the car and drove off.  I went back inside, and into the office behind the counter.  Since I had one of those bosses who would tell me the sky was green if I said it was blue, when I told him my story, he chastised me for being outside smoking and it seemed like he genuinely believed that I just cost him the biggest sale of the day.  I think the fact that he almost got robbed and I prevented it, was lost on him.

I found an article about Windows 7 that explains a little bit about what went wrong with Windows Vista, and what Micro$oft doing differently with Windows 7, while trying to maximize their damage control.

To me, there were three big mistakes with Vista :

1.  To many versions with mix and match features

Looking at the comparison chart for the different flavors of Vista reminds me of a chinese food menu.  Fortunate for Micro$oft, and unfortunate for me, when Vista first came out, I looked at the charts real quick and said to myself, “Great, so Ultimate has everything?  Yeah, I’ll get that”.  I’m sure that many techies did the exact same thing, to the tune of $400.  Not to mention we also had to pay more for the full install version, because no techie wants to deal with the hassels of installing with the upgrade version.

2.  When it  finally did come out, it was a steamy pile of crap

Once Vista came out, it was immideatly clear why we waited so long for it to come out.  It’s because it wasn’t a finished product.  It was painfully slow, buggy, and it looked different.  Personally, I see nothing wrong with updating the UI’s appearance, but I hate it when the UI changes so drastically.  From looking at Office 2007, and Windows 7 beta, it doesn’t look like Micro$oft has learned that lesson yet.  If casual users need to learn a new User Interface, think about this now, what is stopping them from swapping over to a Mac.  After the Vista fiasco Apple has more credibility, and an image that is much more ‘2009′ than Micro$ofts.  Regardless of whether they buy a Mac of a PC, User Interface is isn’t going to be any more or less “Completely Different” to them.

3.  Release date delays and overcompensating with hype

The concept worked well for Micro$oft with the Xbox, and for Apple with the Iphone.  Over hype the product and limit its availiability.  It seems that the trategy only works if the manufacturer does it intentionally, and when the product doesn’t suck.  Each time that Micro$oft pushed back the the launch by a few months, they were forced to compensate by injecting more hype into the media, rinse and repeate.  By the time it came out, even these guys had heard about it.  From what I hear, they are still running Windows 2000 because they too are afraid to upgrade.

On the lighter side, I was particularly moved by this excerpt from the aforementioned article.

By studying Vista, Microsoft learned that often when a program wouldn’t install in Vista, it was because the application’s designers had hard-coded the program to work with only a certain version of the operating system. That’s why Microsoft decided to make Windows 7 officially version 6.1 rather than 7.0.

To me, what I am reading here tells me that one of the BIGGEST failures of Windows Vista…. get this…  wasn’t completely Micro$ofts fault.  Now, granted Vista was a major revision of the opperating system, but it is still built on roughly the same NT Architecture as XP.  Application developers inserted code in their programs to prevent it from being installed on versions of Windows other than XP.  This isn’t a huge problem, but unfortunatly the developers wrote this code in such a way that there is no way to release a patch, or any other quick fix.  Bottom line is that the software needs to be modified by the developer, even though it will probably run just fine if you can get it to install by tricking it into thinking the machine is version 5.1.

Granted this story doesn’t account for all of the problems, and by no means is Micro$oft off the hook, but variables are called variables because thats what they do.  They vary.