Sunday, March 14, 2004
A simple life is a happy life, I always say. My instinct is to rid myself of unnecessary complications, and I have always believed that a car was one such burden. Of course this attitude can only come from a City upbringing, and being so far away from the city the burden of a car is one I must temporarily bear. That burden has been particularly heavy this weekend.
After leaving the light on in my car I needed a boost. Saturday morning I called triple-A and got my boost. Now in order to charge up the battery, I drove about 15 miles to Barnes and Nobles, where I would replenish my supply of reading materials. I pulled off the parkway and into their parking lot. I was hoping that my car had enough juice to start again. Crossing my fingers I turned the vehicle off. Then I tried to restart it, but no go. Well instead of freaking out, I started my shopping. I even got a badly needed hair cut. After all someone in the parking lot would give me a boost.
With my hair still wet, I walked back to my car just as a women pulled up in the next spot. I asked her if she would help, and responded quite absurdly that her car didn’t have a battery. I was temped to be rude, and tell the women how silly she sounded. But instead I just walked over to a man a few cars down and asked him. He was happy to help. We hooked up the cables, and started charging my battery.
After a few minutes I got into my car and tried to start it, but its still needs a bit more juice. I get out of the car, and unthinkingly lock the door, my key still in the ignition. This is really not my day, I thought. My good Samaritan was amused.
So I use my cell phone to call AAA once again. This time they can’t find my name in their database. It seems that since the morning they deleted me. It seemed storm clouds were about to form over my head, until I noticed that the rear drivers-side window was open just enough to get my pinky in. With little effort I was able to get into my car. By now it had been charging for quite some time, and it started right away.
Alls well that ends well, right? Not so fast, my friends. The story doesn’t end yet. I drive around for 45 minutes and finely come to the supermarket to do some shopping, still no problems. I get home, park and unload my groceries. It seems fine the day is over. But wait I left my glasses case in the car.
It’s in the front seat, on the passenger’s side. I open the door and retrieve it. I close the door, but the light inside the car is still on, I wait thirty seconds, and still it’s on. I open the door again and close it. Now I am looking at the latch mechanism on the door to see if anything looks wrong. I move the latch with my finger. Now its stuck it won’t move back, the door is in the looked position, and it can’t close. I get a screwdriver from the trunk, but I can’t fix it What can I do, I can’t just leave my car with the door open, someone could steal it, and the battery will die.
In my trunk I have a rope. I decided to tie the door closed so no one can get in. I string the rope diagonally from the front passenger door to the rear driver-side door. They are tied together so neither can open. This is where the story ends. My car sits in the lot, with the battery once again dead, and the doors tied shut. GET ME A FUCKING SUBWAY!
Monday, March 01, 2004
If there were a computer program and we found that 30% of experienced users continually got certain things wrong, we might conclude that the design of the program were flawed. If we treated written language to a bit of user-centered design, we would try to rid it of inconsistencies. To be inconsistent makes users less able to form a model of expected behavior. This decreases one's ability to learn how a given system works.
Now certain languages are known as harder to read and write than others. While all spoken languages can be learned equally well by children during our hardwired magic language learning phase(See Chompsky, and Pinker). Reading and writing some languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean can be particularly difficult. It takes their kids much longer to learn to read than ours. The reason is our alphabet is a simpler representation of the same set of sounds. What if we could simplify it even more. What if we could change the spelling of all the words in our language to be written phonetically correct, so they are spelled exactly the way they sound. We could make all homonyms identical, completely get rid of any ambiguity. This should make learning to read and write even easier. Spelling bees would seem archaic, as there would only be one possible way to spell any given group of sounds. Imagine any 3rd grader able to easily read a medical textbook without problems.
My point really is about system behavior being predictable. As the world gets more complex we generate more information. We are required to learn more and more to navigate our complex modern lives. Where complexity offers no advantage, we should simplify. Other languages are doing this, Chinese has been modernized, so why not English?
Obviously this impractical and transition costs would be too high, but its already happing on IM. U think so 2? Either way I am probably just bitter at being such a horrible speller.
