Fuckin' Ikea.

First let's talk about their layout.  It is designed to make you walk past everything they have.  They claim that there are shortcuts but they are not readily apparent or signed well.  This is fucking deliberate and evil.  If there is ever a fire, lots of people are going to die and it will be their fault.

When the zombie apocalypse happens Ikea stores will be a good tool for dealing with them.  Once they're inside they will never find their way out.

I only went there for a replacement transformer for a lamp I had because they made it unfixable.  Opening it was difficult enough. the plastic case was sealed with a solvent.  What really sucks is that half the components were under a black blob, so that even if I bothered to figure out which one was at fault, I wouldn't be able to replace it.

Of course I couldn't just buy a new transformer.  That would hurt lamp sales.  Being impatient I decided to just be a sucker and buy the lamp.  Of course they don't have a lamp section in the showroom, so I had to work out what type of room they expected that type of lamp to be used in before I could buy one.

I finally found it.  It works but probably won't last long.

What happened to the middle market, something between Ikea and Herman Miller?  Whenever I want something of good quality without a bunch of bullshit prestige branding I have to scour the thrift stores and garage sales for something from the '60's or earlier.

Some things I've learned from moving.

1) Get rid of your crap. - I've lived in the same place for 20+ years.  The amount of crap you can accumulate in that period is unbelievable.

2) Know where your stuff is. - I've managed to acquire multiple instances things no one will ever need more than one of; 3 offset screwdrivers, 4 sets of jeweler's files, 2 popcorn popers and I don't know how many nut drivers of various sizes.  I wound up in this situation by needing an item and not knowing where it was and simply buying a new one.

3)Live out of boxes. - Rounding up the boxes and putting my shit in them has been one of the more difficult parts of this move.

I don't know how this is going to turn out financially, selling my crap versus the expense of having it hauled may end up costing me money or leaving some extra in my pocket.  I guess I'll find out.

American Money.

I'm not going to talk about the shortcomings of fiat money, U.S. monetary policy or why Keynes was an assbag.  Plenty of others have done that far better than I could.

I am going to go on about the design flaws in physical U.S. currency.  This will all be old news to any foreigner who has traveled here, so you guys might as well just read an older post.

As any foreigner traveling in the U.S. can tell you, our money is confusing.  The notes are all the same color and size and the physical dimensions and apparent materials of the coins tell you nothing of their value.  The reasons for this all make sense historically but who wants to learn the history of a foreign countries money when traveling.  We just want to pay for our stuff and get on.

Let's take a look at the coins arranged by size.

This is not the correct denominational order.  So, lets show the color.  The world has a history of the values of metals being copper<silver< gold, so lots of countries use alloys resembling those metals to denote their coins.

 

But not the U.S.  The above is still not correct. 

Now let's look at them in the correct order.

We have .01, .05, .1, .25, .5 and 1.  They are labeled, stupidly, in prose, and sometimes in terms only an American or maybe, a Canadian would understand, for a couple of them. "one cent", "five cents", "fifty cents" and "one dollar" are as bad as it gets.  But, some time in the past some jackass at the bureaucracy of money designing decided to use colloquial terms on the coins.  No one should expect a foreigner to understand "one dime" and "quarter dollar".

Now to the notes.  In most of the world the notes are different colors and sizes.  Most tourist have stated that they prefer it this way.  I agree with them about the color, but I still prefer a uniform size, to make it easier to arrange things in my wallet.

You don't need multiple sizes to accommodate the blind.  You can just clip corners.

$100, Two diagonal corners clipped.
$50, two corners adjacent on the long side clipped.
$20 two corners adjacent on the short size clipped.
$10 three corners clipped.
$5 all corners clipped.
$1 stop making them and go to a coin like every dollar denominated country in the world.

This even leaves room for them to inflate and reissue $500 and $1,000 notes again.

What really sucks is that they have recently redesigned the currency and didn't fix any of these problem.  Whoever made those decisions deserves to get eaten by zombies.

PC Powersupplies.

Will someone explain to me why the ATX power supply doesn't have switched AC like the old AT ones.

Yes, I know that monitors and printers go into sleep mode when not receiving any data, but they're still drawing some power, which is a total waste when the computer is off.

Electricity is part of my rent so I'm not that motivated to find out how much power is being consumed by such devices in my life, but I do wonder is how much power is consumed by standby peripherals versus wall warts when not in use.

It's also important to remember that speaker amplifiers don't have any kind of sleep mode.

So, PC power supply makers, give us back the switched AC on the back of our power supplies.

As an aside, why doesn't anyone make a speaker amplifier that you can put in to the PC case and power it with the 12 volts and just run the audio lines to the speakers?

The Problem with Touchscreens.

Engineers and designers frequently get too excited about the new.  Touch screens seem to be the latest iteration of this.  Apple decided that since they were going to have one on their iphone that there was no reason to have a physical keyboard, and simply used software to put a keyboard on the screen.  Great for them.  Physical keyboards cost money.  Not having one leaves more money is Steve Jobs's pocket.

They work for anyone who doesn't have adult sized fingers or doesn't want to enter anything longer than a twitter message.  Just try to do a significant amount of text entry.

Secondly they chose to use the capacitive type that doesn't require a stylus.  I can sees some reason behind this.  Losing styluses sucks.  But how hard is it to place it back in the holder when you are done.  I've never lost one.  And who but a nine year old girl has fingers small enough to use those on screen keyboards?

But what sucks about the no stylus approach is that with screens as small as those on a phone, selecting an area that is only a few pixels is pretty much impossible.  Have you tried to move the cursor between two specific letters.  It takes several tries. 

To make matters worse,  Google, in all their designy brilliance decided to not include full bluetooth functionality, so you can't use an HID bluetooth keyboard with the Droid.  Fucking geniuses.

On the Dangers of Self Publishing

Enough Said.

"Swag" not "Schwag"

I just went to my last Comic Con, the reasons for which I won't be addressing here.  One reason I won't miss it is that I will hear fewer people referring to the swag as "schwag".  I had hoped that this was just the latest incarnation of 133t speak or whatever they call the insane contractions people use in SMS messages.

Sadly, it turns out that it isn't.  Far too many people think that it is the historic term.  They need a fucking dictionary.

Here is a brief and abridged history of the word leading to it's current usage.  It was originally referred to a bulgy bag, later to miscellaneous belongings and still later, in the late eighteenth century, to stolen goods and finally, it's current usage,  to promotional shit.  Check the OED if you doubt me.

The trendoids "schwag" only goes back to 1995.

Yes, there is fun to be had with humorous mispronunciations, but be aware when you are doing it.  Fucking hipsters