Looks like the Disney Vault has a purpose after all – to keep us from realizing how similar our favorite classic Disney movies truly are. According to this video, Disney only ever made one movie, and they’ve been tracing it ever since.

Read these, and go call your congresspeople.

open letter from Etsy.com

Endangered Whimsy
Gallery of soon-to-be illegal toys from Etsy crafters

Fashion Incubator

http://www.handmadetoyalliance.org/:

• A toymaker, for example, who makes wooden cars in his garage in Maine to supplement his income cannot afford the $4,000 fee per toy that testing labs are charging to assure compliance with the CPSIA.
• A work-at-home mom in Minnesota who makes dolls to sell at craft fairs must choose either to violate the law or cease operations.
• A small toy retailer in Vermont who imports wooden toys from Europe, which has long had stringent toy safety standards, must now pay for testing on every toy they import.

I found a nicely decaying Muffler Man outside of Oshkosh. Terrifying, and awesome.

You’ll notice that I took this movie on my Mac through Remote Desktop. I tried the copy/paste maneuvering directly on the Windows (XP) box, with the same results. I also tried it in Internet Explorers 5-6 and it worked just fine.

Geeks Are Sexy posted a registry hack to move the File/Edit/View/Etc. menu back to the top. I did this and it worked, in terms of moving the menu bar back to where it belongs, but it didn’t fix the copy/paste issue. Swell!

*”Reload” and “stop” are in the extra-stupid place of after the address bar, and no, they can’t be rearranged.

Looking through all of these, I had a nasty flashback to usability testing. It’s easy to imagine the four-hour, five+ people meeting that would ensue–mostly entirely a discussion of why the labels should read “push button” instead of “ring bell,” since really, there is no bell present and the user is not directly ringing anything. At the two-hour mark, the group would seem to be in agreement that the labels should read “push button to ring bell” because “push button” would be too ambiguous to the user as to the results of such pushing, and would therefore cause the user discomfort, possibly resulting in the user never pushing the button because they were afraid of what might happen. After four hours, everyone would be in agreement–until, inevitably, someone points out that the bell is neither now nor ever visible to the user, so that “push button to ring bell” would be equally distressing to the user because they would never know exactly what bell they were ringing if they pushed the button. At that point, the web designer rips the bubbler off of the wall, heaves it through the window, and runs. [Scene.]