Was It Something I Said?

The day before Thanksgiving and the first serious rain of the year made for sparsely populated walkways on campus this morning.

Photo by Rosemary West

BookMooch is an online community where people exchange used books. You list the books you want to give away and search for the books you want to receive. You get a point for each book you give, and spend a point for each book you receive. It costs you nothing but the postage to mail your book (normally less than $3.00, sometimes less than $2.00), which is still much less than you’d pay for that same used book on a site like Amazon. So far I’ve given away 26 books and received 19. If you enjoy books and don’t want to spend a lot of money on them, it’s definitely worth a look.

www.bookmooch.com

Photo from Clipart.com

During the past several years, every street in this neighborhood has been resurfaced, except the one where I live. This has been very frustrating to everyone here. This street gets a bit more traffic than most of the others, because it offers a direct route between the neighborhood entrances at the top and bottom of the hills. Uneven, lumpy, pitted and cracked, it had reached the point where it was becoming hazardous. When I called the city to ask for help, they sent a pothole crew the next day, but they repaired only one pothole. Apparently they realized the scope of this job was beyond their resources. Several other neighbors had also called asking for repairs. Finally, we got our wish. Work started on Tuesday. Years ago a job like this would have taken several weeks (the notices we received form the city warned it might take as long as four weeks). But modern equipment (consisting mostly of enormous, specialized machinery on wheels, each vehicle driven by one man who is assisted by others on foot) makes the job go much faster. I was impressed by how much progress they were able to make in just a few hours each day. On Thursday, the first layer of asphalt was laid.

Photo by Rosemary West

Wednesday was a busy day on campus. The “Free Speech Zone”, which usually hosts only the Bible ladies and an occasional salesman or two, was the venue for a political-religious group with huge, provocative posters, handing out flyers to passersby. According to reports in the school paper, some past demonstrations have led to shouting matches, but as far as I could tell, nobody got loud on this day. The campus police were posted a few yards from the edge of the zone, just in case.

Photo by Rosemary West

On Wednesday a group of students positioned themselves on the main walkway, offering hugs to all passersby. I believe this was part of a promotion for one of the campus clubs. During the ten minutes or so that I watched them, only a few people accepted the offer.

Photo by Rosemary West

Between classes I was sitting on a bench, about five or six feet away from this girl. She was doing homework and texting while listening to her music player. Eventually she stopped to watch the birds, but I don’t think she could hear them. Even though she had her earbuds on, I could hear the music. Fortunately, this school has a good American Sign Language program. I expect that many of today’s students will end up needing it.

Photo by Rosemary West

I just used a dangerous tool to open a nearly impenetrable package that was about three times bigger than it needed to be. High-tech devices have some of the worst packages, gigantic displays made of unconscionable quantities of petrochemical products and cardboard. They do not have tabs, zippers, flaps, dotted lines, escape hatches, or any other means by which to open them. Scissors are usually inadequate. Stabbing at them with knives is dangerous, both to the consumer and the product within. I use a small box cutter, something that would get me kicked off an airplane if I tried to transport it in my carry-on. Sometimes the density of the plastic packaging causes the razor blade to bend.

So I was very pleased to learn that Amazon.com is working with manufacturers to put and end to wrap rageby introducing non-frustrating packaging. The plan is to create packaging that is easier to open and that doesn’t produce so much waste, and to eventually use this packaging for everything in the Amazon catalog. Of course, over time, retailers other than Amazon will have these packages, too, as manufacturers are unlikely to operate a two-tiered system in which the same products sometimes appear in friendly, low-waste packaging and sometimes in frustrating, wasteful packaging.

I like this videothat shows one person struggling with the package while the other one is already playing with the toy.

Photo from Clipart.com

Lately it seems that packages of cat food, catnip, cat toys, and cat accessories all have the text translated into French. Here in South California we are used to seeing a lot of things in Spanish, an assortment of Asian languages, as well as languages of the Middle East. And I often get technology products that have the instructions in several languages, usually including French and German. (Why, oh why is Italian ignored? But that’s another topic for another day.) But these cat-related items are described solely in English and French, no Spanish, Korean, Farsi or Tagalog. Do cats speak French? I tried saying “Bonjour” to Bob, but if it meant anything to him, he did a good job of concealing it.

Photo by Rosemary West

Today is my cousin’s birthday, and I wanted to send her an ecard. For some reason I couldn’t find any I liked. I did find a lot of strange cards for occasions I never expected. Bob Marley’s birthday, Groundhog Day, Cervical Health Awareness Month (I’m not making this up), Arbor Day, Flag Day, Pulaski Day (why?), Respect Your Cat Day, Bastille Day, Mother-in-law’s day (like that’s gonna happen), Menopause Awareness (as if we need a card to make us aware of that) and Day of the Dead, to name only a few. I quit when I came to International Pickle Week.

Photo from Clipart.com

Back in the mid-90’s, Vincent Flanders had a popular website called “Web Pages That Suck” based on the idea that we could learn good design by looking at bad design; let others make mistakes so we don’t have to. Flanders wrote a book (published in 1998), and a sequel (published in 2002). He’s still around. Interestingly enough, his current web page is dreadful.

http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/

Why? Oh, so many reasons.

He’s got Google ads right in the middle, where he should have important content. True, having them there probably increases the chance that people will click on them (if only by mistake). So, if his real goal is to get people to navigate away from his page, this will work. Maybe that is his goal. The only thing he is selling, as far as I can tell, is his last book. His link to that is in the most obscure possible place. (If you bother to look for it, let me know how long it took you to find it.)

Which brings me to his website navigation. Rather than use a menu or tab system across the top or down one side (both of which would be familiar to most web surfers), he has placed his navigation “below the fold”. I have to scroll down to see the buttons and links.

There is a lot more that is wrong with this site, but these are the big “first impression” items. BTW, the credits indicate this is a design from Template World. It doesn’t make me want to go there to look for templates!