BLOG by zaiss

So I was surfing the internet today, learning all the intricacies of Windows Movie Maker (don’t ask), when I came across a particularly disturbing ad:

First thought: Eww, gross. Second thought: Wait a second. Haven’t I been asked that question before? Sure enough, almost two years ago, I was horrified at the same ad, only that time the culprit was Yahoo.

There must be billions of possible search queries out there… are we really hurting for original ideas so much that we need to reuse them? And even if we are… do we have to use spiders as the ad to copy? Why can’t we use a less scary query… like “Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,” or “Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?”

In the meantime, my conclusion remains the same – only now, I’m avoiding two search engines for fear of spiders popping up out of nowhere.

What a good time it was to see the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie in the theaters. Now that the DVD has been released, Facebook has an ad encouraging me to buy it, which says the following:

I’ve heard of alternate endings, but alternate movies? Isn’t that just an additional feature film? Or could this be the next wave of DVD releases?

Autumn pointed out to me that the Acropolis Meet the Team video has been posted to Channel 9. For those who don’t know, Acropolis is the team inside Visual Studio that I work with every day - and I even make an appearance in the video!

Scroll ahead to to 7:30 to see that section. You also get to see my office mate Kathy, who is the videographer’s guide for the segment.

Unfortunately, the video is really large, and even if you take time to download it, playing it on a Mac isn’t straight forward, even with Windows Media Player. You’ll just have to take my word for it that, for a brief moment, I was a star.

A handy bit of feedback on the back of a letter I sent in a while back - if you put it in the envelope wrong, you get a nice message through the window:

But I wonder: Will people check for the presence of text (and call it good), or will they read “Wrong Way” and fix the error?

I like to play Sudoku at work I’m aware of a sidebar gadget on Vista that lets you play Sudoku. (Gotta be careful, my manager reads this. :)) One day when experimenting with this gadget (I was testing it, really…), I discovered a potential solution that, while technically correct, was counted as incorrect:

You see the incorrect values in red. You can go through the row / column / square checking or you can take my word for it – that solution is correct. However, the sidebar gadget seemed to think that this alternative, similar solution was the right one:

In fact, they’re both correct. Which brings up an interesting question to ponder: Under what circumstances are Sudoku solutions unique? When can multiple solutions exist?

Continuing on the train of deep Sudoku thinking, I noticed that the Sudoku games in this gadget don’t start off symmetrically (if you look at Sudoku puzzles in the books or newspaper, the starting values are symmetric along the diagonal). Is there something important about this symmetry? Is the symmetry at all correlated with unique solutions?

I call on some really smart math whiz (Eric) to solve this problem immediately.

Windows Vista has a new feature. While it’s always been possible to remove your Recycle Bin from the desktop, Vista saw fit to bubble up the command into the context menu, shown here:

I circled a couple commands in that shot, because they consistently confound me (even though I’ve been using Vista for well over 8 months now). One removes items from the Recycle Bin, and the other removes the Recycle Bin itself.

I know what you’re thinking – the commands are pretty straight forward semantically. No confusion there. But take a look at the dialogs that follow each command. If you say “Empty Recycle Bin” with one item inside, here’s the confirmation:

And with multiple items:

Did you notice the title of both of those dialogs? “Delete File” and “Delete Multiple Items.” So is it any wonder that my mental model associates the word “Delete” with the process of emptying my recycle bin?

It doesn’t help matters that the dialog for removing the recycle bin looks somewhat similar to one of the empty dialogs:

Take a second to associate the context menu commands with the dialog titles. You’ll learn that you Empty Recycle Bin to Delete and Delete to Remove Recycle Bin. Not straight forward anymore, is it?

So it should come as no surprise that I blazed through that last dialog one day and suddenly found my desktop to be without Recycle Bin. The only way I could figure out how to restore it – ask my office mate to delete hers so I could read the dialog that told me how to restore it.

Her response? “No way! I like my Recycle Bin.”

I know that a lot of people dislike math, but are we in such a sad state that something like this is really necessary?

Is this a case of having too much space to say something and not knowing what to say? Or do they really think that the majority of their audience will get confused in interpreting the difference between single, double, and triple?

I feel that most fast food restaurants have conditioned us well enough to know the difference by now. However, if we were talking about “quadruple,” the explanation might be warranted. Burger King, for example, had to shorten it to “quad” for their Stacker promotion.

Clearly, quintuple is right out.

My favorite part of that image, though, is the decision to include communication back to the company as part of the overall message. Is this in case the Roll Size Guide confuses us to the point of feeling helpless? I think everyone should call 1-800-553-3639 to communicate their confusion and frustration.

What? What do you mean, not me?! Just cuz I tend to blog in waves, and had a bit of downtime earlier… gosh, you’re all so picky… Look on the bright side. I’m back blogging again, which means at least another 2 weeks of posts. Or… not. We’ll see what happens.

Actually, the correct answer to the question is Flickr. In what must be a new marketing move, I noticed a new, subtle message in the latest Flickr logo:

Flickr and its users, sitting in a tree…

Seriously, though, this is an interesting marketing tactic. Sure you could post your pictures online with Picasa, or Shutterfly, or Zoto, or Zoomr (though Zoomr is confusing - the big link says Discover but the logo says MasterCard). But do any of these sites love you?

Flickr loves you. And that should count for something. And I believe it counts for… being out of beta?