Today my phone buzzed with an emergency notification. The icon resembled the hurricane symbol used by weather alerts. The text said "shelter in place". I looked out the window at the clear blue sky ( Read more... )

Today I used Uber for the first time (aside from a shared ride a couple months ago that someone else booked). It wasn't mainly because of the better price, though that's nice too. And it wasn't mainly out of objection to the monopolistic protection racket that runs transit in my city, though yeah, that too. It was mainly because of UX ( Read more... )

I was in a post office recently for other reasons, so I asked for a book of stamps. (I do occasionally send physical letters still.) The clerk pointed to a display showing about 20 different custom stamps and asked me which ones I wanted ( Read more... )

It used to be that if you put out a software product, and particularly as you produced new versions of it, people might complain about things that were hard or different (change bad!) or broke their workflow, and you'd decide whether to add some configuration parameters or redesign it again or just tell them to suck it up. There wasn't much they ( Read more... )

Often when (or after :-( ) shoveling snow I notice that, despite my best posture efforts, the shovel's handle is just too darn short. Bending at the waist invites lower-back complaints later, but sometimes I just can't do it all by bending at the knees. Sometimes I can "shovel" by (mostly) pushing snow around, but when I've got to lift and move ( Read more... )

Going to the eye-doctor and having my pupils dilated seems to cause the day to become bright and sunny. But this is Pittsburgh, where sunny days are relatively uncommon. Does this mean that most people in Pittsburgh never have their eyes checked this way, or are we all mysteriously choosing the same few days for this?
I posted the preceding on the ( Read more... )

All I wanted to do was to buy some stamps.
The last time I did this (a couple years ago, I think), I went to the USPS web site, chose my stamps, and supplied a credit card and shipping address. It took about three minutes.
Last night I went through the following process:
1. I dug through product pages; the generic "forever" stamps that almost ( Read more... )

Dear brain trust ( Read more... )

Dear Blogger users,

I would like to be able to comment on your posts at times, but the Blogger captcha (the prove-you're-a-human-and-not-a-spambot image with distorted letters) has been getting harder and harder to read over the last several months, such that it usually takes me 3-4 tries and today I failed after 8. I infer that clicking on the ( Read more... )

A couple weeks ago at work we got our first look at the new version ( Read more... )