Seriously, Where’s Our Car?

I left a meeting this afternoon and as I walked through unfamiliar parking garage nothing looked familiar. The number 722 directing the way. After the first lap and not seeing 700s, I realized I didn’t understand how the different levels were laid out. I got back in the elevator and picked a different level. Found spot 722 right away.

Empty. No car.

Huh.

Guess it wasn’t 722. Keep walking, it must be close.

I walked between 3 different levels for 20 minutes, and ran into someone else with the same, ‘where did I park’ look on their face.

Sounded like we parked in the same section – some elusive section now disconnected from our current position. After a couple more increasingly frustrated laps, I worked my way towards the exit.

Found the car half a section from the exit.

Wow, it wasn’t this hard getting into the building.

I pull the sole $5 bill out of my wallet and head to the cashier.

$4/hour and $1 for each 30 minutes after.

“$6 please”, they request.

Nice. Real nice.

Reminder to Self: When I park at the airport, I take a picture of the parking spot and any distinct landmarks with my camera phone. Do the same for shorter parks as well.

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.