Self-checkout lanes are checking out
It turns out that my avoidance of self-checkout lanes at supermarkets wasn’t just a demonstration of my personal tendency to be a stubborn old curmudgeon: major chains like Albertson’s and Big Y are...
View ArticleUX in PDX
After receiving a tip to check Calagator (calendar + aggregator) for tech-related events in the Portland area, I decided to attend the October meeting of CHIFOO (pronounced “ky – FOO”), the...
View ArticleGettin’ Higgy wit It
Human interface guidelines go far beyond the idea of a simple visual style sheet — “Buttons should have X units of padding” or “Window title bars should be dark gray” — and provide a comprehensive...
View Article10,000 reasons why
The United States Department of Defense budget for 2010 was $680 billion dollars (if you need to see the zeros to put that in perspective, that’s $680,000,000,000). To simplify the following what-if,...
View ArticleBack to the Future
Browsing the web has changed plenty since the debut of the dub-dub-dub in the early 1990s, but the basic design of the graphical web browser is still remarkably similar to the first entries in the...
View ArticleApt to get lost in listings
After spending hours upon hours sifting through many and varied apartment rental listings, it became very apparent to me that having a better way to compare rental listings would be a great benefit to...
View ArticleCHIFOO part deux
Two observations on my second CHIFOO meeting: I’m batting 1000 for striking up random conversations at the preceding CHIFOOd event and then finding out later that the person was the night’s speaker....
View ArticleCCF, WTF
As I looked over some papers I received in the mail regarding my first residential water bill, I thought to myself, “Thank goodness my water usage is measured in CCF. I obviously know what CCF stands...
View ArticleThe High Cost of Free Parking
Free parking is something that everyone wants and almost nobody needs. Yet we’ve come to accept free parking as an inalienable right, fought and died for by our Forefathers. However, free parking is...
View ArticleFrom here to there, part 1
On the whole, Google Maps is a great service. The interface is clean, ads are unobtrusive, performance is generally very good, and its ability to parse abbreviations and incomplete names is top-notch....
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