I'm Dreaming Of A Wide Christmas

I'm one of those people who hates the coming of Christmas music. No, I don't have anything against Christmas or its music; it's the ubiquitousness of it. Yes, I know, I've mentioned this before. Having it going constantly, everywhere, for a month is a bit much.

But today I realized there is a potential positive: in trying to fill the airwaves with songs on a single topic, music programmers have to reach outside of their normal confines of time and genre. Just in the past few minutes waiting in a drug store, I've heard fifties, soul, and the Beach Boys.

A lot of people would consider that to be another negative, but I consider it a positive. I'd actually like a radio station that would play anything. Maybe it was being raised on the necessarily eclectic tastes of one music video channel that tried to be all things to all people.

So that's a good thing about Christmas, forcing us to break out of our normally strict music formats.  And it's all thanks to the limited number of Christmas songs.  So all you ignored genres, this is your ticket to greater exposure.  Polka, blues, free jazz: get recording.

Dyson's Fear

There's a classic book on making things usable called, The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman. It's a useful book for understanding how to make the devices around us easier to use.

One thing Norman rails against is arbitrarily changing standardized designs. There are a lot of things that aren't obvious, but don't cause problems because there are accepted layouts. You don't need instruction on how to drive a new car, because the controls are standard. This in spite of the fact that the standard steering wheel and pedals is not exactly obvious in its use.

Because of this principle, Norman doesn’t like faucets that have the one control that you turn to change the temperature and pull or push to control the amount of water. He figures the standard of two controls with the hot on the left is well known world-wide and should be maintained. I have to disagree with him here; the one-control kind is easier to use, since the two qualities of the water (temperature and volume) can easily be adjusted independently of one another. And that type of control has become popular enough that it is now a well-known standard of its own.

But there’s something we can all agree on: The new Dyson Tap design sucks. It is a sensor-driven, no-touch tap like many in today’s public washrooms, but being a Dyson product, it has to involve moving air. Sure enough, it has a built-in hand drier, so you can do all your hand-washing business without moving.

The trouble is, it’s far from obvious how it should be used. It looks like handlebars, so I assumed you have to do something with the bits sticking out the side. But no, you just hold your hands under them. More or less - the sensors seemed to be misaligned on the one I used. There are instructions etched on the tap itself, but the vague pictures of hands and arrows didn’t explain much.

I could have taken a picture of it, but you can just look that up at the link. Instead, I’ll include a picture of the instructions they had to print out to explain the new taps.

But there's one more problem.  I couldn't find the soap.  There were no soap containers in the washroom where I found these taps, and soap is not mentioned at the Dyson site, or any of the news stories I found about the tap.  So credit to Britain's Daily Mail, the only people who noticed the lack of soap.  This makes me wonder if people have really been washing their hands all these years.  Forgive me if I don't shake your hand.

And It Was All Yellow

I tried to Tweet this earlier, but it didn't work, so I'll just mention it here.  I was having trouble expressing it in 140 characters anyway.

Say you're approaching a traffic light, and it turns yellow. It's at just that time when you're not sure whether you should go through or not.  You make the snap decision to go for it, and get across the intersection just as it's turning red.  You're embarrassed, because it was closer than you'd imagined it, and you're glad your driving instructor isn't here to see it.

I've discovered that it's an unvarying truth: in this circumstance of pushing my luck at the lights, the person behind me will go through the intersection too.  I know I'm not that careful a driver, But these people are apparently even riskier than me.  Who are these people and why are they following me around?

Dave In Cincinnati

You young'uns won't know this, but when the Fox Network first started up in the eighties, it used the name FBC, or Fox Broadcasting Corporation. Not many people remember this because it was before American Idol, X-Files, Married With Children or The Simpsons. (Yes, even I have difficulty believing there was a time before The Simpsons.) This was when their only show was Joan Rivers's short-lived late night talk show. It's easy to understand why: all the other networks went by initials, even the few cable channels used initials (HBO, ESPN).

Of course, now times have changed, cable channels mostly have names. Radio stations have increasingly ridiculous names that they use in place of their call-letters that they only mention when they legally have to. I feel sorry for the stations that went to the trouble of coming up with a clever call-letter name like CHUM or CHYM. The hundred bucks they paid to a PR firm in the seventies must seem like a waste now. If they had PR firms in the seventies.

But the reason I'm thinking about the good old days of meaningless initials in broadcasting is the onslaught of silly names given to on-demand TV services trying to compete with Netflix. We're getting ads for "Crave," which is Bell/CTV's entry in the market. Because who wouldn't want to download programming using something named after a cat food. But even worse is their competitor "shomi" (sounds like "show me," geddit?)

Once again, living in the future is great and all, I just wish everything didn't have such dumb names. The need for unique domain names on the Internet forced some odd names, but at least they were mostly just non-sequiturs (Amazon) or bad spellings (tumblr.) But now things are getting silly names in juvenile competition. Somebody should edit old science fiction to add this detail: "Sha-zzzing me up, Scotty!"

My Word

It's that time of year again.  Time for dictionaries to get free publicity by declaring a word of the year, or a selection of words that will be added to their books.  I was going to rant about these choices, but it seems I've done that before.  More than once.  But the fact is, sometimes these words aren't really deserving of their accolades; I'm still waiting to hear anyone use the word "infosnacking" after it was declared 2005 word of the year by Webster's New World College Dictionary.

So I have a proposition.  This is for any dictionaries or linguistic societies out there that have put off finding a word of the year for 2014, and are now scrambling to find a new word they can use to get those cheap mentions from the world's news providers. A few weeks ago, I used the word "Googlespace" to describe the proportion of relevant results a word or phrase gets.  For instance, if I Google "jaguar", most of the results are for the car company, rather than the cat or the football team.  So the company occupies more "Googlespace" than the other uses of the word.
You'll note that I used the word without explanation, as though I'm assuming that my hip, fashionable readers on the bleeding-edge of technology would already know what it means, so you can reasonably claim that the word is already used and about to hit the mainstream.

I assure you that my royalty demands will be reasonable.  But if you don't want to use my word, you can always make up a word for a manufactured news item used to get free publicity.

Doc, I'm Coming Down With A Gerund

I previously mentioned the oddness of special waiting room copies of magazines. Well I found another today, this time it's a bit more understandable.

But I have to feel like there could be ulterior motives here.  Isn't that a great way to keep your practice busy, encourage patients to read about things that could be wrong with them? What's next, the special waiting room copy of hypochondriacs illustrated?

Also, you'll notice that gluten is now such a big deal, it's become a verb. At least This magazine is talking about people with actual allergies, rather than those who are just jumping on the bandwagon. I read through the article, and they kept talking about people getting glutened, without explanation, as though it were a widely understood word. Apparently it means “to be served food containing gluten, in spite of your best efforts to avoid it.”

I also learned a couple more things:

• Fewer people in the US have allergies than Canada: 2.5 million Canadians to 15 million Americans. The magazine claimed that was about the same proportion of the population, in which case they might want to look up the respective populations. It’s about 7% of Canadians and 4.7% of Americans.
• Children who grow up on farms have long been known to have fewer allergies than their urban counterparts. And new research shows that this is particularly true for dairy farms. Kids growing up on dairy farms have one-tenth the chances of developing allergies as kids in other rural areas. So if you want your child to avoid allergies, by a cow.

The Virtual Suspects

This month's Call Of Duty game is out. And the ads have all the usual war game ad tropes:

• Lots of cut-scene footage, but no shots of actual game play.
• Music that the target audience wouldn't normally listen to.
• People doing macho but strategically-unwise things that would get them killed in a real game.

But then out of all these clichés appears Kevin Spacey, crawling out of the Uncanny Valley by sheer force of will. He - or at least an avatar of him - seems to be playing the same character he plays in House Of Cards.

If you think about it, there's also the question of why he looks like Kevin Spacey. If you're going to have computer-generated actors, you could make them look like whatever you want. But of course, it's the same reason he's playing the same character: recognition. That's kind of sad that we have this ability to depict almost anything we want on screen, but all we're doing with it is having a talented actor play a recycled version of himself. Perhaps in the future actors will choose an appearance that they will take with them through all their roles.

But aside from showing how technology changes, this is also a demonstration of the changing fortunes of actors. Careers not only go up and down, but also slide from one style to another. Imagine this conversation taking place just a few years ago:

"We've done it! We have the technology to place photorealistic actors into a game, and it'll be ready for the next Call Of Duty. Who shall we use?"
"Kevin Spacey!"

But looking back through his career, I think there could have been several opportunities to have him reprise a role for a game. After all, The Sims came out the year after American Beauty.  There seems to be plenty of cross-promotion potential there.