A Warning to Restaurants: I Can’t Taste You

There’s been more than a couple times I’ve ordered something to drink or eat out with family and the order gets mixed up and we don’t realize it until I’ve already eaten not my order.

Turns out, unless the food’s flavors are obvious, loud, and complex, I don’t notice them.

This so clearly explains why I can’t tell the difference between a pineapple or a banana milkshake and the difference between a roast beef or an italian sandwich at Potbelly’s.

Sure puts my restaurant reviews in a different light.

  1. Oh, how do you know if you should apply for special parking as well:
    Dump a packet of Sweet-n-Low into a high ball of water.
  2. Stir
  3. If you taste overwhelming sweet, welcome to the club. If you taste crazy bitter, you’re probably not crazy about vegetables.

We’ll Get Better Security When it Makes Business Sense

“Before the photo ID requirement, these tickets were regularly advertised in classified pages: “Round trip, New York to Los Angeles, 11/21-30, male, $100.” Since the airlines never checked IDs, anyone of the correct gender could use the ticket. Airlines hated that, and tried repeatedly to shut that market down. In 1996, the airlines were finally able to solve that problem and blame it on the FAA and terrorism.” – Bruce Schneier

When Not To Do a Holiday Logo for Your Software

Earlier this week, graphic designers everywhere swapped out regular logos for Halloween-themed ones. Google, MacUpdate are just two I bumped into within my browser.

Outside of my browser – TextMate – also changed it’s normally non-descript logo earlier this week to a glowing jack-o-lantern.

The difference is huge.

Each day, I ignore Google’s logo microseconds at a time. It’s out of the way and I’ve been trained to use their page layout and CSS to identify ‘Google’. Same, but to a much lesser degree, goes for MacUpate. Web services can mummify their logos, because they’re like name tags at a conference. Nice to have, but after a while – completely useless.

Changing the logo on my paid-for, always-on, desktop software impacts my productivity. It actually slows me down by requiring me to think longer about what I’m doing rather than just do it.

Questions I’ve asked since TextMate changed their logo:

  1. Is TextMate open?
  2. Where is TextMate?
  3. What’s this pumpkin application?
  4. Where is TextMate?
  5. When will the icon revert?
  6. Why hasn’t the icon reverted yet?
  7. Man, this is annoying.
  8. What was I doing?

All of these questions take attention from what I’m doing, and put it on TextMate. I’m on the Mac to eliminate applications begging for my attention. Speaking of Apple, if you’ll recall, iTunes has tweaked their icons nearly with each new version – the extent of this change: a different color musical note.

Update 2 Nov 2006: [REVISION 1324] made it all better. Thanks TextMate.

I Thought Europe Was Already a Museum ;)

“In that scenario Europe survives as an Asian and American theme park, with the manual labor done by Muslims. The French and German lifestyle will continue, but with smaller numbers and as a kind of museum piece.” – Tyler Cowen

The rallying cry for change:

Europe is too rich, too lazy and lacks a dream, a focus. And I am not quite sure if Europe values its liberties and its civilisation enough to fight for it, now that it is being challenged. Europe needs a wake up call. – Marcel Bullinga

Back over at Marginal Revolution:

“…when I think carefully about what delights me [about Europe] I find that it is less anything developed since World War II and more the remnants of the Europe that existed before the First World War.” – Andrew Smith

Later:

“A report by Eurochambers, the Brussels-based business lobby, published on Monday (5 March) argues that the US reached the current EU rate of GDP per capita in 1985 and its levels in employment and research investment almost 30 years ago.” – Lucia Kubosova, EU Observer

“If all of Europe looked like its postwar construction, Americans would be less likely to admire European policies and political institutions.” – Tyler Cowen

Genealogy Namespace for OPML?

In my effort to organize the collection of family tree data I’ve acquired in the past week, I’ve tried out a number of proprietary software applications – some worse than others.

Currently all my data is in a free application that imports and exports the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ GEDCOM format. The application isn’t the easiest to use nor is the format itself.

OPML is pretty good at describing relationships and their associated attributes. Maybe all this family data is just an OPML namespace.

Hmmmm.