Archive for April, 2008

Responsible Cerberus Ownership

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

If you plan to bring a Cerberus into your home, there are some things you should realize:

  • Each head can have its own personality, complicating and lengthening the training and disciplinary process.  You may often find yourself in a position where you must discipline one head and not the others.
  • You must spay or neuter your Cerberus.  Aggression and scent marking will be the least of your worries if you do not.
  • A Cerberus may instinctively guard entryways, making them great guard dogs, but this can be awkward as guests arrive for your dinner party.  Re-purposing this energy into something productive can be difficut but rewarding.  Food aggression is a common symptom as you make progress.
  • Do not be tempted to saddle your Cerberus.  They are large enough to ride, but neither you nor they would like the experience, and it will ruin the trust you have built up to that point.

If you follow my guide, you can have a great and rewarding relationship with your Cerberus, lasting the full eternity that they live.

Posted in Humor | No Comments »

Fuel Costs Merely Rising With Inflation?

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

I read an article today that makes an unintuitive claim that gasoline prices are not, in fact, out of control, and are less than the expected cost that inflation would predict.  Leaving aside for a moment that I bought gas at the Flying J in Ohio for $0.69/gallon circa 1998, and even inflation doesn’t account for that much of a price increase over 10 years, the author seems to assume that gasoline prices are somehow a victim of inflation, as if inflation is some external force of nature to which gasoline is subject.  If gasoline vendors increase their price, doesn’t this increase cause inflation by increasing the cost of 99.9% of everything?  If so, is it valid to claim that gasoline prices are influenced by inflation?

Posted in Economy | 2 Comments »

UI Lies

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

I have a RAZR v3 which features a 3-level battery charge indicator on the UI.  Sometimes, the phone indicates a 3/3 charge, but when I plug it in, it shows a 1/3 when it begins to charge back up to full.  It’s as if the phone is putting on a brave face while it’s starving, and when you finally feed it, it admits that it was really in bad shape and would have passed out from hunger had you not intervened.

The inconsistency of the indicator between the plugged and unplugged states must be a UI design decision, though the only reason I can fathom for it is that they wanted to give the appearance of long battery life at the expense of an accurate battery charge indicator.  If you leave your phone on for a day and it still shows a 3/3 charge, you may extrapolate that you could get at least 3 days of use on a single charge.  Uninformed users may compare that pleasant lie with the harsh truth of another phone’s battery indicator and falsely conclude that the lying phone lasts longer.

A reference eludes me at the moment, but IIRC, there was a bit of a kerfluffle over gas gauge indicators when Honda first started selling cars in the US.  Honda’s decision was to provide an accurate gas gauge, where empty meant empty, whereas the unspoken rule in US car design was that empty meant “nearly” empty, where “nearly” could sometimes mean 50%.  Much hilarity ensued when Americans learned that the gas gauges were “broken” and would no longer lie to them.  The unspoken standard may have changed over time, since all the cars I’ve driven recently will activate a Blinkenlight(tm) when the gas is down to 2-4 gallons, depending on the car.

I’m curious to learn what lies you’ve all been told by various UIs that you use.

Posted in Design, Technology | No Comments »