The Blog that Noone Reads

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This year, I have everything I want.

My friend made a cover of Fireflies by Owl City. It’s mostly a cappella and fully awesome.

“The best feelings are those that have no words to describe them” – Michelle Hammersley

The only reason I could imagine for justifying this “clever” bit of JavaScript is that the New York Times thinks its readers are idiots. Selecting any word brings up this little question mark bubble. Clicking on that will take you to the definition of the selected term. To me, this means that they think I’m unlikely to know the definitions of the words in their columns and am incapable of looking them up myself. As a Mac user, I know that I can use ⌘⌃D to bring up the system’s dictionary widget without taking me away from my reading. I don’t know if other operating systems provide similar functionality but Google will surely define words for you no matter what platform you use.

It also suggests that I’m going to use this feature so often that it’s worth breaking the text selection features of my operating system and browser. When reading content on noisy web pages like NYT’s, I tend to select the content as I’m reading through it. On every other website, triple-clicking on a word will select the surrounding paragraph. On NYT, it will either a) quickly select everything, then deselect it or b) accidentally trigger the stupid dictionary lookup feature and transport me somewhere else. Neither of these things aids my ability to read the article.

Zamboni is a company that makes electronic ice resurfacers. Calling the machine a zamboni is incorrect. Using a company’s name in place of the name of the product is a very common type of metonymy that may seem like a corporation’s dream, but it can actually cause them problems. In 1965, the Duncan Yo-Yo Company lost it’s trademark on the term “yo-yo” because it had become the common term to describe that sort of toy. This fear of becoming a genericized trademark is why you see companies refer to their products with such silly names as “BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandages.”

Here are a few examples of these. The wikipedia entry lists a few more. Can you think of any others?

• Jacuzzi
• Coke
• Q-Tip
• Scotch Tape
• Google
• Xerox

Evening in SF

Originally uploaded by TunaMan52

It was hot today, but it’s perfect now.

This video is from DefCon a few years ago. A friend showed it to me a few years ago. It’s really clever/awesome.

The most consistently bad category of websites has to be restaurant websites. Too many of them haven’t realized that the rest of the internet moved on from Flash based splash pages in 1997. They’re far to stylized and difficult to navigate. Most damning of all is that many of them don’t work well or at all on mobile devices.

Restauranteurs might have better things to do than become web experts, but someone should stop to consider their audience. I’m not going to visit a new cafe because they have music and a slideshow on their site. More importantly, if I can’t get quickly to the menu and operating hours from my iPhone, I’m going to move on.

Brilliant!