Category Archives: Favorites

Some of my favorite posts, both on topic and way off.

Deadliest Catch

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I’m about to admit that I am a HUGE geek… my favorite channel is the Discovery Channel.  There, I said it.

One of my favorite shows on there is “Deadliest Catch” which, for any of you that don’t know, follows several crab boat crews in the Bering Sea during the King and Opillio seasons. The guys are dealing with almost hurricane-force winds, ice, thirty hour work days and the ever-present danger of falling overboard where you’ll be dead in less than two minutes.

It REALLY makes me appreciate my nice, warm, safe desk job.

Couple of things have always bothered me though…

  1. Why don’t they use some sort of “fish finder” sonar? They just chug up to a site, say “I guess they’ll be here” and start dumping traps (called “pots”). Half the time, when they reel them up 24-48 hours later they are “blanks”, meaning empty. According to the show, crabs move in what is basically an underwater herd called a “bio-mass”,  There has to be some sort of radar or sonar that can see this massive clump of crab on the floor. Hell, how about an underwater camera? This entire “pot and pray” technique such seems so 19th century.
  2. The number one enemy of the boats is ice. It gets so cold that sea spray immediately sticks to the boats and freezes solid. Within a couple of hours you have an extra couple of hundred TONS of ice on the ship and the crews have to go out with sledge hammers and shovels to spend 8 hours knocking the ice off the boat before it becomes too heavy and rolls over. Every time I see this I think “There must be some way of keeping ice off the boat.” Maybe coating the metal in Teflon so it doesn’t stick. Maybe some sort of electrical current that the captain can flip a switch and send a jolt of current down the rails. There HAS to be something that can be done.

Anyway… I’m a geek and I spend too much time thinking “How could you do that better?”

– Jay

Just ordered new glasses.

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I got my prescription from the optometrist and decided to give http://www.coastal.com a shot since I had a super-secret coupon code that got me what amounts to 90% off your first pair.

By the way… the code is “HIP2SAVEFREE”… but don’t tell them that I told you. It’s a secret.

So I’m going through and I pick out a pair that will make me look like George Clooney on a good day… aww hell, who am I kidding… I’m hoping for Bruce Willis on a bad day. Anyway, I pick out a pair and I see that they have this “Try On View” function:

Now, as you can see you can select the face that they appear on. Fortunately for me, I’m an older white male, so I found the distinguished looking gent pictured. However, my first thought was “Well, thank God only white people have crappy eyesight.”. You can choose the gamut between a young blonde cheerleader type, a slightly darker young lady, a young Studdly McStud college guy and… me. If you are Black, Hispanic, Asian or any other shade but Volvo-driving white guy, too bad.

To be fair, they do offer an “Upload Image” function where you can stick in your own photo which is kind of cool… but come on… couldn’t they offer at least some diversity in the stock images?

I’ll let you know how the glasses are when I get them.

LESSON LEARNED: A little diversity goes a long way.

– Jay

What lies behind the Red Door?

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First, apologies for not updating this space before now. Having a pinched nerve in your arm and keyboarding are not things that go together very well.

To make up for my absence, I decided to finally do the “door post” I’ve been promising since Day 1.

This is the entrance to the location near my home of a nationwide chain of toy stores. I’ve been going to this store for literally years and something has always bothered me about the entrance. In fact, it was this entrance that sparked the idea to create this blog in the first place.
Notice that the entire facade of the store is a bright yellow, practically visible from space. Very friendly and inviting. At the very bottom corner of this mass of yellow there is one red spot.
That “red spot” is actually the ENTRANCE to the store:
 
The exit is the one highlighted by that massive yellow field….
WHY did they make the entrance to their store the ONLY red on the entire building?
Red is recognized around the globe as meaning “danger”, “stay out”, “warning”. If I’m in a foreign country and don’t speak the language but see a red sign, I know that I should not go past it. Despite this, the owners of this business made the entrance to their business this “DO NOT CROSS” color.
This fact was made very clear to me when I visited the store recently and saw a little old lady standing in front of the store. Clearly, English was not her primarily language. In fact, I doubt if she even spoke it. This little grandma was standing at the YELLOW doors, trying to pry them open. The fact that RED = STAY OUT was so engrained in her that she refused to think that the other set of doors could possibly be the entrance to this store for children. I had to physically take her by the arm and lead her to the red doors.
The entire architectural design of the front of this building is designed to draw your attention to the EXIT. They could very easily change the signs around, move around a few displays and the design would be perfect- a huge yellow expanse calling out to customers and one spot of red warning them of where NOT to go.
 
LESSON LEARNED: Colors matter. They are not just for “artistic beauty”. Ignore them at your peril.

Just let me log in!

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I know that I said this post would involve a door, but I haven’t had time to go snap the photos for that entry.

Instead, let’s look at how a website can make you go through needless pain for the privilege of sending them money.

Last night, I wanted to order with a national pizza chain. So I went to their website and was presented with their homepage.

There is an “Order Online” button with a big, inviting button. The assumption is that you click the button and would be taken to the log-in screen. Since I have a log-in with them, I click the button. Instead of a log-in screen I get this screen:

Why is the site asking for my location? Shouldn’t I log in and the system would know where my store is?

So, I enter my zip code and am rewarded with this screen:

Now, please note the “Order Online” link… the same link that I clicked two pages ago. Why am I being asked for this yet again? And why is it so small?

Click the link and you get:

FINALLY, an honest-to-goodness log-in screen.

Now I can enter my email and password and start ordering my delicious pizza.

Now, let’s talk about how this should have worked.

When I clicked the “Order Online” button on the home page it should have given me the opportunity to log in. On the order page I would enter the delivery address. The system would then verify that this address is serviced by my stored location. If not, it would advise me that there is a closer location and my pizza would be delivered from that location instead.

LESSON LEARNED: When a user wants to log into your system, don’t make them leap through hoops. Get them into your system first and then take it from there.