Eyeglasses Stores are for Suckers: Amen. When I got new glasses this year, it was because my five-year-old frames were getting ugly and boring, not because I couldn’t see. When I got the glasses with the new prescription, everything was so fun-house distorted that I couldn’t wear them even after the “getting used to them” period. Since LensCrafters has a 90-day guarantee, I took them back, someone else wrote me a different scrip, and I waited another two weeks for them to be ready. The new new ones? Still fucked up. Six weeks, four visits, and five hundred dollars later, I had new frames with my five-year-old prescription in them and I can see just fine. They even had the gall to say that when you “get older” you have a lower tolerance for adjusting to new glasses! Now that I’ve got the actual scrip numbers (most places I’ve been to in the past wouldn’t give it to me so that I’d have to return to them for new glasses – even though that’s against the law), when I next need contacts or glasses, I’m hitting the internet.
We’ve been so busy that I haven’t followed the Internet Explorer 7 betas; from what I was seeing, there were enough changes between each even after they said that all of the layout/rendering development was frozen that it wasn’t worth chasing. Now that it’s out, and being pushed to a good share of Windows users, I spent the morning setting up our testing boat anchor laptop (WinXP/SP2) with IE7, the ability to handle multiple versions of Internet Explorer, and older versions of said devil.
While I first thought that running a virtual machine would be the only solution, it’s pretty crazy to have to do that (and pay for a whole other XP license and whatever extra RAM you need) just to test your web sites in crappy old browsers. I have to say HOOOORAY to Yousif Al Saif for putting together Multiple_IE: a bundle of standalone versions of IE that don’t interfere with each other. Installation was fast and it works great.
When the mere presence of the bell is not enough.
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.]
People who have heard me on my soapbox may think that I think that Macs and Firefox are perfect. I never said that! (Even though they’re totally better.) I’ve just spent the afternoon chasing down tab order wierdness in Firefox on the Mac, and dang! that was annoying.
new flatware | 11:33 am | 3 October 2006
I finally bothered finding some silverware that goes better with our dishes than more trad-looking set that I had gotten as a random Christmas present one year. This is Ecko’s “La Joya” along with the Pfalzgraff “Gourmet Green.” I’m also really digging their old “Canoe Muffin” (despite the name) and “Montalo.” Hooray again, eBay!
I was cleaning out an obscure corner of my desk this morning, and came across my little stash of Westin’s perfumed ads that ran earlier this year in The New Yorker and Wired. At first glance at those, I thought they were silly, but they smelled so nice that I hoarded them. Looking at the comments here, I see I’m not the only one — and now that I finally remembered to look, I’m really glad to see that it should be available in stores this month.
Test your sites on a PSP Web Browser Simulator. (Windows only.)
“This isn’t your _[older relative]_’s _[noun]_.”
Oldsmobile wasn’t cool when it ran that campaign, the campaign wasn’t cool, and it went so far as to make Oldsmobile even less cool. So why the fuck is this structure / reference still showing up years later? It’s even pretty nonsensical: there’s lots of stuff that I wish were “my father’s X” — clothing, cars, telephones… all far more durable years ago than the crap that’s available now.
I, um, think I really need these Ultimate 3D Glasses. For the costume box. Yeah.
TupperDiva, a nice collection of all things Tuppery. Lots of gorgeous scans. I recognize some of the products and hadn’t realized they were Tupperware. We didn’t have much of it (expensive!!), but they still make the best (only?) cake carrier on the market. If only I could find the legendary kimchee keeper in the US, that would be nice.
Via Scrubbles
I found this while looking at the credits of Remington Steele (For work! I swear!). Between her great taste in telephony and her nice performance in Gramma’s Boy,* I’ve just gotten over my reflexive dislike of Doris Roberts.
Shirley Jones stole the show, though!
The Milwaukee Admirals got a hideous new logo which, given this article, not a rebranding of the team on their own but merely as a brand extension of the agency and it’s dick-tastic sounding owner and his obsession with skeletons. Great jorb.
Via number-one hockey fan CzelticGirl
Meanwhile, Jen’s friend cooked up this Most Exceelent On-Notice Board Generator. Hours of fun.
I got this Dorothee Becker Uten.Silo for TWO BUCKS. A little elbow-grease and the stickers, sand and paint drops are gone, and it’s perfect. I’m guessing original, too; if it were a re-issue, it would have had a very different price tag.
Actually, I didn’t know what it was either, other than something I’d seen crop up a lot in the backgrounds of gorgeous spaces in the Terence Conran house design books from the 70s.
I can set the measurement units in CICEROS.
I can set the measurement units in DIDOTS.
hours, minutes, seconds, too.
miles!
feet!
kilometers!
BUT NOT FUCKING PIXELS! ! ! ! !
My friend Pete just moved to Hawaii and he swears up and down that EVERYONE has one of these in their house. I think he’s lying, but wouldn’t that be rad? If you don’t live in Hawaii where these apparently come FREE with your rent, you can make a home-made Tiki Fireplace with smoking nose, like this dude did.
A nice Photoshop tutorial on cleaning up a face so it’s pretty / normal-looking. (Mouse over the “final result” image.) This is hardly Photoshop plastic surgery stuff, but it’s what I have to go through pretty much EVERY DAMNED TIME I’m given a person’s photograph for a site or brochure. Please! Look in the mirror. Comb your hair, powder your nose (men, too… and you might want do your shiny head while you’re at it), and do something about those eye bags — the five minutes you take will save a very expensive hour, and god forbid your company doesn’t have the budget for those hours and THEN THE INTERNETS WILL THINK YOU’RE UGLY.
Oh, and if you’re a smoker or drink a pot of coffee every day? Two words: whitening strips. You don’t have to go Ross-Nuclear-White, but it’ll take five years off of you.
Quite a Shiny collection, but they don’t have the spinning CBS Special Presentation that is still my favorite. More here.
Want a less lame looking mySpace profile? Mike Davidson (he of sIFR fame and many fine web sites) shows you how. He also has 57 billion friends.
Quark re-redesigned their logo after the old new one caused a flap. The new new one could be more refined… but, what do I care, since I use InDesign anyway?
This Xtra-pine Cleaning Hunk site is very cute but I was hoping they’d do it up like Subservient Chicken, and you could ask him to polish things in the room. Heh. Polish things.
via Very Big Blog
