When you use the Kelley Blue Book to price your used car, you go through a series of steps: Year, Make, Model, Value Type (Trade-In, Private Party, Retail), Trim and Condition.
It’s pretty straightfoward, but there’s one usability blunder that bugged me:
This screen is a waste.
If there’s only one possible trim, well, just select it for me automatically and save a step. Thanks.
Researchers in Antarctica have analyzed ice cores going back 800,000 years, 150,000 years further than before.
The news isn’t good:
“Ice cores reveal the Earth’s natural climate rhythm over the last 800,000 years. When carbon dioxide changed there was always an accompanying climate change. Over the last 200 years human activity has increased carbon dioxide to well outside the natural range,” explained Dr Wolff.
The “scary thing”, he added, was the rate of change now occurring in CO2 concentrations. In the core, the fastest increase seen was of the order of 30 parts per million (ppm) by volume over a period of roughly 1,000 years.
“The last 30 ppm of increase has occurred in just 17 years. We really are in the situation where we don’t have an analogue in our records,” he said.
When you log in to Friendster, just below the fold is the People section. The first—and default visible—tab is “Local Singles.”
Except it isn’t.
Update: it gets worse:
Apparently MySpace is using the the same algorithm as the Diebold voting machines:
Here are a few Hertz discount codes I have lying around. Most of them aren’t really that special, but I figured writing them down here will benefit someone, and I won’t have to keep a few scraps of paper lying around.
These coupons are expired but may be worth trying:
I’m not sure of the status of these (2007-08-14):
Get one free month of month of Ironweed Films.
I’m sure there are some of these around already, but I have written a script to back up your Mailman mailing lists. It dumps the member roster and list configuration into separate text files, zips them up, emails them to you, and cleans up after itself.
The script is called mailmanBackup.py, and its syntax is pretty straightforward:
Usage: mailmanBackup.py listname <recipient> [<sender>]
If sender is not specified, the recipient is used as the sender. The recipient can also be a comma-separated list of email addresses.
Typical use would be to place a helper script like this /etc/cron.weekly:
#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/mailmanBackup.py listname [email protected]
mailmanBackup.py is available under a CreativeCommons-Attribution license.
Sean Bonner rips into MySpace, calling out its poor usability (far, far too many clicks to do anything). Sean was inspired by Evan Williams’ analysis of how MySpace gets so many page views. Evan was in turn building on Mike Davidson’s analysis. Mike’s characterization of MySpace as an “Unnecessary Click Factory” is spot-on.
Oh, and Mike also shows you how to make a profile that looks anything but shit-ass. Well done!
lyle writes:
I heard and saw a lot of funny things yesterday… One of my favorite moments was when a carnie, upon seeing my camera, yelled to me, ” do you work for National Geographic or The Rolling Stones?” The Rolling Stones. Yes, I am walking around the Indiana State Fair, shooting pictures…because I work for the Rolling Stones.