best.review.ever?

So the idiots at Sprint send Joel Splosky an LG Fusic phone to review, thinking he will promote their service.

Phone companies, as Joel points out, have a history of bad decisions:

And it’s 2006, and I almost can’t believe I’m writing this, because way back in 2000 I wrote almost exactly the same thing about WAP, and how cell phone companies keep failing to insert themselves as toll collectors because they’re so darn clueless about how the Internet works, and about the value of many-to-many networks instead of broadcast networks.

Needless to say, the phone sucks, and Power Vision sucks too. Is Power Vision a 3G service? Why do phone companies have to brand everything in some incomprehensible way? mMode? MEdia Net? Vision? Power Vision? Vcast? Stop, my head hurts.

Now, on to the good part:

the LG Fusic user interface could basically serve as an almost complete textbook for a semester-long course in user interface design, teaching students of usability exactly what NOT to do.

And one more:

A little bit more exploring and I discovered that there’s another entirely separate MP3 player on this device. It’s hard to find. You have to go to Tools, then Memory Card, then to the Music folder, and another MP3 player starts up which you can use to listen to your MP3s. For this player, you don’t have to be on the network, so it works in the subway, but—get this—the minute you close the clamshell, the music stops! I am literally not making this up. There are two bad MP3 players on this device, neither one of which remembers where you’re up to, neither one of which can be used on the subway with the phone folded in my pocket, neither one of which has a fast-forward feature.

Mixing your metaphors

One of my favourite mixed metaphors—which I had somehow internally misattributed to David Johnston—was this one, from University of Waterloo registrar Ken Lavigne:

Admissions is a crap shoot, and this year we won in spades

This week, Peter Lewis of Fortune may have topped it:

Apple is making applesauce out of the old canard that Macs are a lot more expensive than Windows computers.

What kind of applesauce do you get from a canard, anyway?

Lessons from interviewing

As part of my job, I perform technical phone interviews (“phone screens”) for our group and a couple others. The basic phone screen is more about breadth then depth, touching on C, Unix, object-oriented programming and some data structures and algorithms over 30 to 45 minutes.

During this process, I’ve learned a few things, including:

  • Undergraduate computer science students at Brown prove P=NP as part of an assignment.
  • Half of 216 is 28 … or maybe 24. Not sure.
  • Dereferencing a pointer sets it to null, leaking memory.
  • Basic data types in ANSI C include array and string.

Kelley Blue Book used car pricing

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:

Kelley Blue Book trim selection

This screen is a waste.

If there’s only one possible trim, well, just select it for me automatically and save a step. Thanks.

Carbon dioxide worst in 800,000 years

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.