Pure Walt, from Concentrated Thought
Just general stuff that’s going on.
I didn’t know there was a server that made socks.
This morning I noticed the sock drawer was empty, as my wife handed me a pair of some very low-cut socks.
“I know you don’t like these for work, but they’ll have to do. I need to get your socks back online.”
“Back online?”
“Sorry, I meant I have to do laundry. Guess, you’re rubbing off on me.”
Be VERY careful when using the Mac App Store — here’s how it purchased an app without my permission, along with THREE simple things Apple could have done to fix the problem.
Admittedly, I had my skepticism about how an App Store was going to fair servicing applications to the desktop.
The majority of Mac users seem to quickly grasp dragging an icon to a folder or double clicking the installer; the “hard” part is unzipping a file or opening a disk image file. But perhaps there is a target audience that still has a hard time of installing apps and keeping them up to date.
The downsides I expected were the less obvious things: Apple wanting a chunk of each sale resulting in trickle down inflated prices (though for the moment quite the opposite seems to have happened), certain established apps getting marketing preference due to historic purchases rather than innovative replacements getting visibility, the fear of embedded application ads becoming mainstream in the Mac culture, etc.
I saw up sides too, with copy protection and serial number issues going away. This of course had other down sides, such as apps having to check in with the Internet. I figured this meant a lot more problems for the publishers than the end consumers.
Seems I was wrong about that. I just got bit by the App Store.
I made my first Mac App Store purchase today, and in order to do so I had to authenticate. And, I’m happy to report, the purchase process works exactly as described — the application was downloaded and installed seamlessly. Go Apple!
I then decided to see if there was an update to Aperture, which I had commercially bought. Sure enough, when I went to its page, it said it was already Installed. Clever. Well done, Apple.
This is where things start to get weird. Non-Apple applications, like Coda, which I had externally bought and purchased a while back correctly showed up as Installed as well. This was nice.
But, then I noticed that a packaged I had already purchased, had a license and receipt for, and was already installed, OmniGraphSketcher, was in the App Store, too. It did not show itself as installed. And, wanting to see if it was a newer version, I clicked on it — and next thing I know, the App store begins to purchase it.
Fundamentally the problem seems to be that the purchase button behaves differently whether or not you’re authenticated. Plus, you’re two pixels away from Copy Link / Tell a Friend from an actual purchase.
For me, it was an unexpected $30.00 hit to the wallet simply because the buttons didn’t behave the same way they had a moment ago. That’s just not right, especially not from Apple who studies user interfaces with the same passion you or I crave oxygen.
While I’m screaming, “No, no, no, NO, NO!!!” at my machine, which doesn’t help by the way, I was taken aback that there was NO CONFIRMATION process, nor was there a CANCEL option, nor was there a RETURN UNOPENED option.
Bad Apple, bad.
Because I had previously authenticated for a prior application, it blindly assumed I authorized this purchase. That’d be like buying one item in a store, and after the cashier touched your credit card, anything else you picked up in the store would get bought too.
I’ve just written to Apple at http://www.apple.com/support/mac/app-store/, and we’ll see where that goes.
UPDATE: Got a very kind email from Apple who credited me the correct amount, but for the wrong line item. I sent them a follow up because I want the right developer to be paid.
If this is an indication of how Apple will deal with application purchases in the future, we can all breath a happy sigh of relief. My own hesitations about exploring the App Store have been lightened. Plus I know never-ever-ever touch anything that looks like a price tag button, instead click the icon which doesn’t look clickable.
And they say you can’t herd cats.
This morning I got up to go to the bathroom, but it was occupied by my wife. Making matters worse, I had to stand in line.
As with most things, it’s the little details that matter, and for my most recent vacation, everything about staying at Holiday Inn got on my last nerve, so much so that we checked out a day early on a pre-paid room and were glad to do so. This blog is simply a note to myself, reminding me to avoid that chain when booking hotels in the future.
So I won’t forget the why: in my opinion, the first sign something wasn’t right was literally a sign indicating they would put a hold on accounts that may result in overdraft fees that wouldn’t then be their fault; nice welcome. There was no in-room refrigerator so we couldn’t store food or drinks over night. There were no tissues. The toilet always took three attempts to flush. The toilet paper was on the opposite wall of the toilet, better than an arm’s reach away (brilliant). The tub felt like the was grit on the bottom of it. The toilet was crammed between the sink and the tub, just enough to bang one’s elbows. Same with the soap dishes in the tub, at elbow height. It was a horrible room design, where just slightly too much space was squeezed out. For instance, if you sat in a chair, you hit your head on the lamp. There was no exhaust fan in the bathroom. The wireless was horribly slow and kept requiring an annoying re-authentication process at random. Our room keys spontaneously and simultaneously stopped working, and when we went to the front desk to get them fixes, we were blamed for having them near a cell phone, that we know for a fact that wasn’t the case. I could go on, but I just wanted enough keywords so I could later find that place I didn’t ever want to stay at again.
Admittedly, some of this could have been the room, that hotel, its staff, or that chain. I feel little inclination to explore the matter further, I’m annoyed that much that I’m just done. I don’t expect perfection, but I also don’t want to loath returning to have to deal with the next surprise; certainly not on vacation.
But further related insult, though now not too surprising in retrospect, came when we were walking around Broadway at the Beach and noticed a number of signs at ticket areas that said Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament‎, 2 adults for $20. It was a deal that sounded too good to be true, and was. There was no branding or other information on the sign, but when one went to purchase the tickets, you couldn’t; what you got was a rep whipping out an appointment calendar for a timeshare tour. If you would go take their off-site multi-hour tour and listen to a sales pitch, they’d “give” you the tickets for “free.” But if you wanted to buy what they advertised, they’d never sell them to you. It was very bait and switch. Turns out, it was… Holiday Inn. When asked how come it didn’t say Holiday Inn or indicate there was a sales pitch, we were flat out told that people wouldn’t come in if they had put up the truth. This just solidified my vision of the corporate image.
Your own experiences may vary, but having stayed at other places in the same price range, I’m avoiding this chain.
Walt gives Holiday Inn one thumb down.
Mahalo Cove’s manager impressed me with an exceptional customer service move.
The other night I had a shining example of impressive customer service by a manager at Mahalo Cove that’s worth sharing.
While my friend and I were eating dinner, we ran into a slight problem. We need to leave immediately go pick up his child, but our waitress had disappeared.
Rather than waiting for her to return, I simply got up and walked over to the manager to explain that we needed to head out to pick up a child. What I expected was for him to simply track down the waitress or print our bill and bring it over.
Nope. He went that extra-step, entering the realm of incredible customer service. He looked at me and said, “Go on ahead get the child, come back and pay when you can. It’ll be alright.”
I was floored. He didn’t know me from Adam, and was willing to put the cost of the meal at flight risk in order to do the right thing. That impressed me as a customer-first mentality, and that makes it worth sharing. I’ll certainly be going back, and bringing friends as well.
The story doesn’t quite end as you expect, either. I explained that we were happy to pay now, if they could just locate the meal ticket. He scrolled through each order, found ours, reassigned a waitress standing there to process us, instructing her that we needed to leave to pick up a child, and she processed us about as fast as we could put down a card.
And yes, a nice tip for all was left.
In reading the reviews on Google, I’d have to concur with the assessments there. The indoor smoke can be unbearable, the food is average, and the service and atmosphere is simply great.
Walt gives Mahalo Cove a thumbs up!
Apparently I managed to cause some problems for a telemarketer by pressing MUTE at the right time.
Stumbled upon this by accident, but it may prove useful in the future.
I know two people who’ve done telemarketing, and they report that their objective is to place as many calls as possible and sell as much as possible in that duration. So, not placing calls, or overly long calls, seems to be a serious negative.
Additionally, the system used appears to be an pre-emptive autodialer that looks for a human response and if found quickly connects with an operator. Should not be available, it hangs up, which explains why people report calls from mystery numbers that disconnect after being answered.
The operators sit there listening to silence until someone says “hello” and then they start. They have a button to dump the call, and the system goes on to the next.
Today I received a pre-emptive call and the moment I heard it transferring me to an operator, I pressed MUTE.
The unexpected happened.
I was greeted by just the sounds breathing and keyboard clicking. Within a moment it was possible to deduce from the background conversations that it was Yahoo trying to sell advertising to businesses.
Leaving mute on, I could hear the telemarketer cursing under his breath, as his line remained silent, but his co-workers were all yammering away. While I would have expected a call duration counter to have been the dead give away, it took him about 10-15 minutes to realize something was seriously wrong before he got assistance and it sounded like a reboot was about to be attempted before I got disconnected.
I’m guessing they run Windows.
I just had an interesting thing happen: I saw in black and white. That’s what my brian actually saw with the unaided eye. Here’s the cool part, I tell you how I reproduced it. It was like nothing I’d experienced before. It was beautiful.
A few moments ago, I just had a very interesting and unique experience. I saw in black’n’white. I’d never had this happen before in my life. First I’ll describe the experience, then how I did it, which, curiously enough was repeatable.
The effect lasted about 7-10 seconds in duration before the color faded back in, almost as if the saturation was being brought up from near nothing to normal.
To convey the effect, this is much like the image I saw:
When I moved my eyes to look at other parts of the scene, the effect diminished, but if I kept focusing on one spot, like a child’s staring contest, the effect would hold longer. This was very much the inverse of the behavior of an after-image, where if you stay still it fades, but if you rapidly blink, it returns.
The black and white effect composed of the entire field of view. And as it gently faded back to normal, it affected more of the center of the field of view first:
It only took 2-3 seconds for normal color to return. There was no pain or any form of discomfort before, during, or after. I’m in very good health.
It was as if the signals from the cones were being ignored by the brain, but the signals from the rods were fine. I remember that the detail was astounding, and that the tone of the grass was very similar to the sky, though I’ve been unable to represent that as closely as I’d like in my photographic simulation.
I’m certain you’ve personally woken up in the morning and upon your eyes adjusting to the light have seen the image fade in, not focus, but as your brian assembles bits of the information into meaningful images, like it’s adapting to light after not being exposed to it for a long while.
Being inside for the better part of the morning, I figured I’d go outside an lay in the sun for a few minutes. So, I lay down on my back on our driveway which has a slight incline. It was about thirty minutes past noon, and the sun was slightly overhead just off center to my right, enough that it was still bright enough that just closing my eyes was uncomfortable, so I criss-crossed my arms over them to put them in shadow, though I could still tell it was very bright out with my eyes closed. The weather was 89°F, I was in direct light, and there were few clouds in the sky.
I rested this way for about 10 minutes, and I did so just to the point where my eyes were fully relaxed and no longer concerned about the brightness of the light though my eyelids. Also, I wasn’t quite drifting off, but relaxed as you might be just taking in warmth of a nice day at the beach.
What led to the discovery was that I heard a car drive by and so I sat up quickly, opening my eyes. Two things stood out. One, this gave me a slight head-rush, though I’d describe it weak at best. Two, my eyes had not adjusted to the light fully. And, although while bright, it wasn’t uncomfortable, there was no blinding whitewash, no pain, and no caused for squinting required — I was looking away from direct light.
That’s when I noticed the scene seemed extremely washed out and monochromatic; it looked like a black and white photograph.
Thinking my mind or eyes were playing tricks on me, I moved my eyes, but the effect lasted longer than a second, though faded as I looked at more “new” material in my field of attention.
The reds came rushing back in first, with greens right after. It wasn’t one color than another, it was overlapped. I became visually more aware of reds, as that happened, greens started replacing the grey tones as well, and by the time greens were normal, the other colors like purples and blues from the nearby flowers in our garden were already present.
This part will be hard to describe because there’s no English equivalent for it, but it wasn’t like I was seeing in black and white, but rather the absence of color.
I know that sounds identical from a logic standpoint, but the perception was an absence of something, not the presence of something. Intellectually, I knew there had to be color, I just wasn’t seeing it.
It was a greyscale world that I physically saw, like a black and white movie, but a zillion times sharper, far more dynamic range, and in 3D.
It was clearly not imagination, nor dream, it was very real and perceptible.
First, I waited about 5 minutes and looked at the area, taking in all the things I should be expecting to see. The area was already in normal color after the effect had faded long ago, but I wanted to be sure.
So, I laid back down with the intention of trying to get the head rush. I shielded my eyes in shadow, and waited for them to relax and get comfortable, and then waiting a moment, quickly sat up and stared at the area I knew had colorful flowers, a bright red car, and tons of green grass. I made sure I would focus only in one area, trying to stare out to infinity, much as you’d do for those 3D posters, though I was more trying to keep my eyes in a relaxed state because I wanted them in focus.
The preparation this time around took merely a minute or two. The head-rush was again weak from sitting up quickly. I turned in the direction I had planned and opened my eyes.
It’d worked.
The effect returned just as before, but lasted this time about 20 seconds and the effect was just as strong until I couldn’t help myself and look at the astounding detail in scene around me, which caused the effect to fade.
Since I had more time to study the scene, this is when I actually noticed the reds within the black’n’white image in my head. The B/W effect seemed more pronounced when I didn’t move my eyes, relaxing them.
When I turned to look at other things, color would seep in, and if I held my eyes relaxed in the same spot, the color would fade back out partly, much the same way as you can make objects in your blind spot vanish by holding your vision still long enough. That same kind of fading away was what I saw, but with color.
I suspect the effect is caused less by the head rush and more by the eyes being exposed and conditioned to bright light (even with the eyes closed, or maybe the red light through the eyelids saturates the cones like a red filter, though I did not see a green after image). When the eyes are opened, there’s a whole rush of visual information, and I suspect the brain is compensating for the overload by taking in shapes, detail, and tone and then overlaying color after the signal settles. I wasn’t aware that visual processing of color was an independent process.
This led me to two very interesting side thoughts.
One, I’ve always wondered if while under hypnosis people really saw things but said they didn’t, or whether their honestly perceived it. I now know it’s possible to perceive things differently than the visual input as actually providing.
Two, the black and white image was astonishingly detailed in greyscale, much like an Ansel Adams image. Being able to produce this effect on demand to view how a scene might be photographed in black and white is a fantastic tool to have in one’s photographic arsenal.
I hope science doesn’t declare this is bad for you, because I’m going to do it again!
[UPDATE: I can’t get it to happen inside, seems bright sunlight is required.]
It’s not often you get to walk away with a thousand dollar charge for ordering a small pizza.
The largest pizza bill I ever covered was $300 at Pizza Hutt when I decided to throw a party for a number of friends in high school. Since then, I learned you always go Dutch, even with folks that have the best of intensions, and you always order more plain cheese than anything else, because people like to mix toppings, but hardly do people consume what they create. Toppings are expensive.
But my all-time record almost got blown the other day, when I went to order a small cheese pizza and was charged over $1,000 for it.
The cashier fumbled the entry trying to enter a one dollar coupon and a fifty cent topping, only to miss the add button and pressing seven instead.
I caught the mistake, and we all had a good laugh. The date on the receipt was mere coincidence.
The story doesn’t end, as I kept this little token of amusement in my wallet for some future use.
While visiting Potbelly’s I happened to order a drink, cookie, and pickle, but no sandwich. This greatly confused the cashier who questioned me about why I didn’t order a meal.
The truth was I had just eaten and was meeting a friend, but I couldn’t help myself.
“Normally, I would, but I’m broke.” I pulled out the receipt and handed it to her. “See? I was charged a thousand dollars for a pizza topping.”
The girl looked at the real receipt with total amazement and shock on her face. “What topping did you order?” And before I could answer, she offered, “Was it mushrooms?”
So, I kindly fed into her misguided fantasy. “Yea. Those suckers are expensive,” shaking my head in sad disbelief that if only I’d known….
I now wish I could be the fly on the wall the next time someone tries to order a pizza with mushrooms with her. You know she’s going to intervene. Or, at least, go Dutch.
Here’s a case where mini-ads just killed the experience for me, and as a result became a deterrent from visiting a once popular site for me.
I used to be a pretty big fan of wimp.com, a site that collected links to all kinds of interesting videos. Not having much time on my hands, this was the perfect aggregation of interesting content.
Now, when I go visit a link, an ad usually pops up. I have to close it. Then the video starts. And, again, another ad slides up from the bottom, and I have to that add. Then all the while the video is playing, I have a little “AD” box overlaid hoping I’ll press it.
As such, wimp.com, you’ve just gone from being one of my favorite sites to one of my least visited sites (which means no ad clicks, no ad views, by the way).
The simple solution would have been placing an ad elsewhere on the page, even under the video.
Want to know where the ads should have gone? To the right of the directory listing of links. That’s the page I’m always coming back to.
Another great part of the internet just died for me.
UPDATE 12-Mar-2009: While showing this horrible predicament to a friend the site acted differently; it played the video with no ugly overlays or pre-ads, but displayed an advertisement when done. That is perfectly acceptable! Fantastic compromise guys!
UPDATE 18-Mar-2009: Ugh, now it’s worse — ads pop up while you’re watching, even after you’ve dismissed them.
Never, ever hand a small child with a crush on you a hose.
Elizabeth and I go way back, in fact, so far back, that in current day as a teen she has little recollection of events that took place between us, although for me, they seem like they just happened yesterday.
When Elizabeth was a little girl, I worked with her mom and like all happy co-workers, we’d socialize after hours on occasion. Quite often Elizabeth got to tag along. Her mom educated her with an impressive vocabulary and incredible set of social manners; thus it was very much a treat to see her. Although, as I’ll reveal now, even back then as a little girl she was still quite the flirt.
One summer day her mom came over with Elizabeth just as my wife had asked me if I could water the yard. Elizabeth wanted to help in order to spend time with me, so I pulled out the hose and we sat on my front steps talking while I sprayed the lawn. It wasn’t long before she asked if it was her turn, so I let go of the squeeze nozzle, shutting off the water, and handed it to her. In retrospect, that was the key mistake.
I recall Elizabeth was about 5 or 6 at the time. But, she engaged the conversation as all women do: with an entrapment.
“Walt?”
“Yes, Elizabeth?”
“Whenever I come over, Tamara is always here.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“Does she live here?”
“Yes, she does.”
It was evident that she was not fond of this answer, as she put her little fists on her hips.
“And why is that? Are you married to her?” Her little eyebrow went up.
“Yes, she’s my wife.”
At that point, Elizabeth scolds me, “You Never Told Me That!!!” and she points the hose right in my face and unleashes gallons of cold water all over me in an instant. And doesn’t let up.
Apparently, Elizabeth’s mom caught a flurry of activity through the storm door and came running, “ELIZABETH!”
Elizabeth shut off the hose, and looked at me expectingly, “Tell her what you just told me.”
And so, I had to apologize to Elizabeth, and her mom, for my big secret.