johnrobe

Dear makers of the predictive text engine on my new phone, the HTC Touch,

"Whatnot" is a word.

It is not a very commonly-used word, I admit. It is one of those words that my Mom uses frequently, like bric-a-brac, flim-flam and conniption.

Because of its relative rarity, I would understand if you decided to save a bit of memory space by having the XT9 predictive engine on your phone not know what the word was.

Clearly, you have done so.

However, when I try to type "whatnot" you helpfully suggest the following "words":

QGATBOT
QGATBOY

Now, I'm no linguist, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that "whatnot" is a more common word than "qgatboy".

Please address this issue soon, so I can seem a little less insane when I message people from my phone and want to use mom lingo.

John Design, Rants

I admire Microsoft’s commitment to putting a progress bar on the screen.

Even if the progress bar doesn’t work, they’re going to put one up, dagnabbit — but at least they’ll be nice about it and tell you that it probably won’t update.

John Design

John Design, Rants

I absolutely love this cool web-based clock, called Flickertime. The entire clock is generated out of pictures from two Flickr tags that you select, and includes a “picture of the moment” that shows up in the corner if you want to take a look at them.

A truly stunning use of Flickr’s tagging capability that leverages the creativity of everyone on the web. Plus, the design of the page and the clock in the background is fantastic. I even love the loading screen (from a design perspective).

John Design, The Weeb

Buying tickets at the Louvre, AKA, another great example of how such a great country can make you want to kill people.

Downstairs under the glass pyramids of the Louvre you buy tickets to get inside the museum proper. There are ticket windows with real people, or if you’re techno-savvy, you can use the automated ticket machines.

Or, if you’re a complete techno moron, you can ALSO use the automated ticket machines, because all the other techo morons certainly are.

Honestly, it took me about 15 seconds to buy our tickets once we got to the front. I admit, I’m probably fast when it comes to automated things like bank machines and ticket machines (I pride myself on effiiciency of accomplishing tasks without human involvement), so I’ll say that the average time it should take someone would be, oh, 30 seconds to a minute.

My estimate as to the amount of time it was taking people to buy their tickets was about 4 minutes each. I don’t even know how that was possible!

The interface was wonderfully designed, easily switching between about 8 different languages. The only thing you had to do was pick your language, say how many tickets you wanted, and insert your card or your cash. All with a simple touch screen with elegant affordance and large, easy to read fonts. These things made your standard bank machine seem like the ENIAC.

They even have a guy there whose sole purpose is to help people use the machines! Although it angers me that they have assistants there to help the techno morons, I admit, that if he wasn’t there, I would still be in line behind them, so I suppose it’s a good thing he’s there.

Just go to the lines where you can buy tickets from the ticket window, people! GAH! Even in France it can’t be slower than the automated ticket machine lines become because of people like you!!! GAAAAAH!!

John Design, Rants

Things that have happened over the past week have made me reflect much more on the people and things that have made me who I am. Obviously, one of the biggest influences was my Mom, who was I think the only person who wasn’t panicking this week.

When I was a boy, my mom used to buy all my clothes. To a lot of my friends, this is sort of a sacreligious thought, but I had no problem with it. As a kid, I hated shopping for clothes, and although that hasn’t carried over with the power that hating to clean my room has carried over, it still remains to this day.

With my mom, the source of almost all the odd expressions I use today, the watchword when it came to how I looked was “sharp”. No greater compliment could be paid to the outfit I was wearing or my appearance than “you look very sharp”. You don’t hear it nearly enough these days in my opinion. Perhaps it’s because we don’t look it nearly enough.

Tonight, Timmi showed me a series of Flickr sets devoted to the Sears Wishbook, and it all came pouring back to me.

We lived in a small town, and there were no real clothing stores nearby, so my mom did most of the clothes shopping in a way you just don’t hear about these days, via mail order Sears catalogue.

Personally, I only cared about the toy section, but to Mom, that wishbook and the other catalogues through the year were her way of clothing my brother and me.

About four times a year, I would come home from school and Mom would say, “I have a few things you need to try on”, and I would groan, internally. Sitting on the kitchen table would be several packages in brown parcel paper wrapping that Mom had received in the mail that day. Unwrapping would reveal one nightmare after the next, at least to today’s eyes.

That’s one of the reasons that I linked to that photoset, I swear, I’ve worn many of these before. My senior public school was called DM Sutherland, and DM’s school colours were green and red. Somewhat garish at the best of times, but not really colours that anyone, much less a boy going to his first day of grade 6 would want to garb himself in, but Mom thought it was important to show I supported my school, so on the first day, when most kids were showing up in their nicest new (and ordinary) jeans and shirts, I was wearing a green leisure suit with a red turtleneck underneath.

This is one of the reasons that Roch Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater (one of the greatest Canadian stories ever written) touches such a soft spot in my heart, because I was the boy in the story, only instead of a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey sweater, with me, it would have been a polyester leisure suit with a print shirt with a butterfly collar.

Sharp.

John Design

It's been a while since a web page made me physically angry, but AOL / Blender 50 Worst Things to Happen to Music has done it. Not because of the content of the list, which was fine, I guess, but because of the design of the pages!

This thing breaks several rules of page layout, all at once. The heart of the problem is their use of a four column layout. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, though personally, I’m a 3 column guy. Here are the biggest problems with the page, many of which come from their use of four columns:

1) The fourth column which is the same width as the rest of the columns, is used for ads, surveys and other assorted crap. Yet with the crazy up and down reading pattern they force you into, every time, you get to the end of the third column, scroll up and prepare to read the last column, only to discover you need to go to the next page instead.

2) The columns are so thin that they can’t fit a reasonably long story in a column without going below the fold of the page. Now, I’m not a “below the fold” nazi generally speaking, but I AM when it means you have to start reading, scroll down at least twice, then go all the way back to the top to read the next column. And no, those lame little upward pointing triangles don’t make up for this poor design, because nobody knows what they are.

3) There are no links to the next section when you need it. After you’ve gone down the first colum, back up to the top, down the second column, back up to the top, down the third column (then probably back up to the top to discover that the fourth column is useless, see above) there is no link to the next page, instead you have to go to another part of the page where the global nav is, which has nothing to mark which section you’re currently in, and make your choice there.

4) They don’t even follow their own column rules. Look at the second page, after their Van Halen items, they have a little section on choosing the next singer of Van Halen which spans two columns. That’s fine when you’re on your way down the second column, but when you’re on your way down the third column, all it does is use up space, leaving you in the middle of the page with no way of getting to the next page (see above).

5) They don’t even follow their own column rules - part two. Suddenly on page 5 they go to a 3 column rule with an extra fat first column because it seems they finally realize their columns aren’t wide enough. Then they go to a two column layout for the final page.

Yes, I know, it’s really dumb to rant about something as stupid and minor as this, but honestly, there’s no reason to lay out a simple article like this so poorly. Somewhere in all the vertical scrolling, as I got lost for the third or fourth time, I snapped.

To make it up to you, I have included the best picture from the list — fake lesbians T.A.T.U. almost kissing. Breow.

John Design, Rants, The Weeb

I think there are three kinds of soap:

1) Manly soap
2) Girly soap
3) Girly soap that isn’t so girly that a man won’t use it

For manly soap, you have your Dial, Irish Spring, Lava, and all cheap-ass bargain soaps (because a woman won’t mess around with super bargain soaps, but a lot of guys don’t really care).

Girly soaps are those that are excessively moisturized and perfumed. Often they smell like fruit, or vegetables (but never meat). I don’t really know the names of any, but I’ve certainly used a few in a pinch (and to be honest generally enjoyed them, I just wouldn’t buy them myself. That’s one of the advantages of being married … your wife can buy soap you would never buy, and you can enjoy it).

Fitting firmly into the category of manly soap is this soap made by a crafty woman to fit into her meat-themed bathroom.

Yes, her meat-themed bathroom.

To see pictures of the bathroom, go to this page of the thread and scroll down a little bit. You not only have to admire her skill, but her single minded devotion to meat. The soap was made with a mold originally used for candles, and lovingly decorated to resemble a little raw steak.

Honestly, tell me you wouldn’t use it.

Update: Apparently there is cooked steak soap too!

John Design, Shameless Consumerism

Timmi loves toast. She loves toast so much that she’ll go out to a restaurant and then just order toast. She was visibly angry when it turned out that Hello Toast didn’t sell toast.

Ironically, we don’t eat a lot of toast at home. It’s not for lack of desire (obviously) it’s more that between the two of us, we don’t eat enough bread (even with all the toast) to go through a loaf before it starts growing penicillin.

For any of you who love toast even a quarter as much as Timmi, you might be interested in this review of toasters, found at Slate.com. For those of you like me, who really only eat toast when the bread is going slightly stale, you might enjoy it for the pure gadgety goodness of some of them.

Update: When Timmi read this article… she got hopping mad. Not that I had exposed her love of toast — but because I had reminded her that Hello Toast didn’t sell toast.

John Design, Shameless Consumerism

As a psychology guy, I've always been very interested in perceptual illusions.

One of the classic perceptual illusions is the Rubin Vase, the foreground/background illusion where you can’t decide if you’re looking at a vase or the profile of two people.

Now thanks to these guys, you can get your own Rubin Vase with a custom profile lathed into it. I think that’s just cool.

And to close, a picture of me trying to recreate the same effect in the Victoria and Albert museum.

Of course in this case, it’s more like you can’t decide if you’re looking at a profile of me, or a statue of some Greek philosopher.

John Design, Shameless Consumerism