Yummy or Crummy?

This past Sunday and Monday, Seattle (and pretty much rest of the northwest) was hit with heavy rain that caused flood in many areas. We’ve been in our house long enough to know we had a leak in the front concrete stoop, but we failed to protect it once again. The water came in from the unfinished area of the basement, and it traveled to the lowest part of the house, which we unfortunately learned is our office.

I was so freaking busy at work this week, so I didn’t have time to do anything about it — which was super frustrating because by Thursday we could smell the mold growing on the carpet. Lucretia had wisely moved some things off the floor by Monday evening, so not much was damaged. But we knew the carpet had to go.

So today, I finally had some time to get down there and rip up the smelly carpet. First I had to move everything to the TV room, which is also in the basement but seems to be safe from flooding because of its slightly higher location.

Here are two photos to compare what the office used to look like, and how it looks now. The concrete floor underneath is looking decent, a small consolation because we didn’t know what kind of nasty mess we would find under the soggy goodness.

There’s still a lot of work left — we have to scrub the floor, rip up the molding, install new molding, and paint the floor. We’ll probably keep it uncarpeted until we figure out the leak situation.

This was a total impulse buy. I came home on Friday, and was feeling really shitty. Lucretia asked what I wanted to do, and I just said, “I want Guitar Hero!” Off we went to Target, and I was a happy man.

I had never played the game in my life — but I’d seen some people play it at work just that day. It looked like fun, and I just couldn’t resist the idea of having a remote-controlled guitar to play for Wii. And boy, the game delivers some good times.

I’m almost through the “easy” level, but I can tell I have a long way to go before I can get through the “medium” level. When you add one more color it’s a world of difference.

The video above is from the first day. I still suck but when this was taken I REALLY sucked. But unlike Elite Beat Agents (which I love), it doesn’t get so difficult so quickly that you are forced to play the same song over and over again until you want to cry. And the game contains like 70 songs!

This game is super yummy!

I called Comcast to remove some items from my cable service tonight. Long story short, I’ve been overpaying for my cable compared to how much I really watch TV.

Anyway I called at 8:30 pm, and upon following the menu to press 4 to REMOVE or CANCEL your services, the automated voice on the other side told me that their office is closed after 8 pm, and that I needed to call back the next day.

Hmm, I wondered. I could have sworn I’ve called them later at night to report the service outage and whatnot. I think I’ve called at 9:55 pm on a Sunday night that Sopranos season permiere was about to air, rushing to add HBO and I somehow managed to talk to a live person.

So I called again, and this time pressed 3 to ADD a service. And voila! Within 2 seconds I was talking to a live person, and he politely took care of my request.

To be fair, whenever I call Comcast, I come away thinking their customer service is one of the best out of any utility companies I’ve had to deal with. So I didn’t want to complain to the guy about the trick they play on the phone — it’s not his fault that his company engages in a deceptive practice to turn away people who call to cancel their service. But it makes me glad that less of my money will be going to support a company like that!

I created a Plaxo account a while ago to try it out for work. Someone recently sent me a request to connect, so I said what the heck, and dug it up to sign on.

But then I saw this really annoying module on my “pulse stream” page. It looked like it should be showing my Flickr photos, but it was showing generic photos instead. Seemed like some connection/authentication issue. So I clicked on “connect.”

That’s when I was asked, “How do you know You?”

Huh? Thought it was dumb, but I figured I can fix it by clicking “connect” after selecting all the different ways I could possibly know me.

Nope — I cannot connect with myself. So the annoying module persists. There’s NO WAY I’ll keep using this thing. Super crummy!

I tried out Wesabe shortly after they launched almost a year ago, I think. I was initially excited, because I thought the using tags was the perfect solution to address the problem of categorizing personal finance details to see the bigger picture.

When I tried the service the first time, I dipped my toes in by only uploading one month of statement. I realize now that was a bad choice on my part, because it really failed to show me the most powerful part of using Wesabe.

This time, I let Wesabe import everything that it could from my bank, going back as far as last year. And I spent about an hour tagging each line item, going back for maybe about a month and a half. As I was tagging, I noticed that more and more items were automatically being tagged, because Wesabe was recognizing similar transactions. This is not a new feature because I knew about it back when I tried it first, but trying it on one month worth of information just didn’t show me the power of this application. The real benefit comes when you can see the info aggregated over a year or so, using one of your tags — and being able to do so without having to tag everything for a year.

So as the image shows above, even though I only tagged few lines with “gas,” because we almost always get our gas at the same gas station, Wesabe was able to quickly compile our gas spending for the last year.

And my hope now is that each time I update my account info, I just need to tag a few additional new items, and then the rest is good to go.

I’m really hoping that this will help Lucretia and me see where our money is going, and where we can trim the fat, so to speak. That’s all I really need to be able to do — I don’t need to balance the checkbook exactly every month; I just want to be able to know where I can optimize. And in order to do that, I simply need to be able to organize each item in my statement. Tags are really the perfect way to do this. I wish my own online bank had similar features, so I don’t have to import the info into a third-party application.

Anyway Wesabe has a social networking aspect of it that lets people share tips related to certain tags and whatnot. I really didn’t care for this the first time around, and I still don’t. But it’s free to use, and so far it’s given me enough good things (like the graph above, that really made me feel good about buying a Hybrid) to make me keep trying it for another few months or so.

I checked out this event for three reasons:

1. I never read Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, but I read/heard it being referenced so much, that I felt that I shouldn’t miss a chance to see someone like that for free.
2. I wanted to take the opportunity to attempt to network and do a little bit of recruiting since we’re currently hiring for an IA.
3. I’ve never been inside Adobe. I was just curious!

Well — mission accomplished, I suppose. #1… To be honest, Krug’s talk that promised to reveal secrets behind creating a “perfect web page” was a bit disappointing, because it turned out to be nothing more than hammering home two of the most basic IA/user-interface design points for an hour. The two pointers — clearly indicate where you are on the site by highlighting a nav item or using a breadcrumb trail, and use a clear and consistent page title on each page — are not revolutionary by any means, and they’re something most UI designers practice without thinking about them. In fact, we do so much more nuanced thinking to solve complex UI problems everyday. To be fair to Krug, it might be true that some designers forget the basics when we get caught up in small details — but I still think he was overstating how many websites really do miss these two mindnumbingly simple steps. And he was truly exaggerating when he implied — although he cleverly never said so — that having those two things will give you a perfect web page.

Then again, I have to remind myself that it was a free event after all, and his job is to educate the ones who may not be as familiar with the basics as others.

I still liked Krug as a speaker. He comes across as a genuine guy, and he reminds us all to always look at things from the user’s point of view. Also, he doesn’t speak with the Nielsen-esque conviction that you must follow all the rules to be successful. He recognizes that there are plenty of gray areas, that we all make mistakes, and that’s why we should frequently test and evaluate our work to catch the problems. For example, he was extremely kind to the site owner when we found that a “home” link on her site that we were viewing live as a group turned out to be a broken link. (At the end of his talk we all looked at URLs — suggested by the audience — to apply his two pointers.) Instead of singling out that site to talk about how important it is to check your site for broken links, Krug simply reminded us that everyone’s sites contain errors like that and more all the time. To him it’s not bad to make mistakes — but it is if you don’t find out by testing with users.

Oh, one more thing. He has not finished his “Site Navigation Identification Chart” — so that was not shared as promised at this time. He did say that his idea is based on plane spotting cards from World War II.

#2 was bit of a disappointment as well. I met a few people, but I didn’t quite get a chance to talk to as many people as I had hoped. If you are looking at this post and are looking for an IA opportunity, please send your resume to careers[at]pop.us.

#3 — I really didn’t see enough of Adobe to make any impression. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I guess it’s no surprise that it looked like any other corporate giant.

(By the way I illustrated his mug since I didn’t have any photo that I could legally use for this post…)

I’m in Minneapolis for the rest of this week. This trip was rather last minute, but I think it’s going to be a good one. I took a walk around downtown, and I like how it feels. Sort of like a smaller Chicago, but things look newer and cleaner. I only walked for maybe 30 minutes, but I got the sense that smart people have planned the city. Maybe it was the light rail tracks and the skybridges that connect the buildings.

The flight I was on yesterday was — well — interesting. Does Northwest Airlines offer particularly attractive discounts for senior citizens? That’s the question that crossed my mind, because I swear, 90% of the passengers looked about twice my age. So bizarre was the sight, I started to look for a buffet line. OK that wasn’t nice — I expected (but didn’t get) this kind of thing with my trip to Sarasota last month, but not for Minnesota!

Anyway, here’s what made the flight a bit more stressful. I assume I’m not the only one to do this — whenever I get on a plane there’s always that faint “is this the plane that’s going to crash?” thought in the back of my mind. So yesterday, I couldn’t help but sweat a little bit more after seeing all my fellow passengers. I’m no mathematician, but as you get older each day, your chance of dying that day is incrementally greater, right? So collectively the same stat for 160 old people must be greater than, say, 160 average-aged group…? Right? Well I’m happy to report that we didn’t crash, and everyone arrived at MSP safely. Good times!

Photo by revgriddler on Flickr

So I didn’t take this photo, but I’m glad I found it on Flickr. It’s confirming that it was in fact a really special sunrise.

I got up this morning and just stood by the window awestruck by the amazing display of colors created by the sun, the clouds, and the mountains. First it was streaks of bright red lines. Then they got more orangey. Then when I left for work they were butterly yellow. Just awesome stuff. Seriously, sunrise and sunset are two of the most amazing things about living in the northwest.

I saw this Doritos package on the shelf back in May. I totally forgot that I took the photo until I ran across it while cleaning out the memory card on the phone. I took the photo because I thought it was another example of somebody trying to leverage what has been the marketing buzz word for the last few years: “the community” (or “user-generated content”). You were supposed to taste it, then tell the company what you think the flavor is. On one hand, the attempt to get on the bandwagon is pretty transparent — these days everyone wants you to submit your own story/photo/video and use it to market their product. But on the other hand, I think it’s pretty ballsy. The package design is dramatically different from their normal lineup, and instead it focuses on the “secret experiment” concept of the campaign. Plus they’re telling consumers to buy something without knowing what the flavor is. It’s like admitting that all their other flavors are just as artificial and lab-tested (which I’m sure most people realize but choose to ignore). I’ve always liked Doritos, and the main reason is probably because they never pretend to be the smart person’s snack. It’s the in-your-face, MSG-filled snack attack that you almost always regret later. With this campaign, it’s almost like they went a step further and were taunting the consumers. The secret flavor the X-13D experiment turned out to be cheeseburger. Brilliant! One heart-attack maker pretending to be another… An American classic wrapped up in a mystery… Correct guessers being celebrated as “winners”… The whole thing is so ironic I think the people who came up with the campaign should get an award!

Should Do This is the latest from Robot Co-Op who brought us 43 Things/Places/People. The “43″ series never stuck with me, but I think I’ll like SDT, because it’s not really about what I want but it’s what I think other people should do. I think most other people also find it easier to criticize others and point out what should be different with the world. Is that a personality flaw? Who cares! I think it’s more fun, too!

I like the nice details like the use of sub-domains so the URL of the list of things Apple should do reads like: http://apple.shoulddothis.com/, and so on. I like that agreeing/disagreeing is not used like a rating system. There is no incentive to agree/disagree just to bring something up higher/lower in ranking (like digg), so hopefully people are more honest.

Obviously there’s more work to come later (like aggregating similar suggestions and a more robust contact system), so it’ll be exciting to watch what they’ll accomplish in the near future. I’ll be checking back often to suggest more things. You should, too!