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Recurring Payments

Sunday, December 11th, 2011

One of the common online services that I find very frustrating is the functionality of many utility providers to set up recurring payments. I would understand it if the functionality was complex, difficult to get right, but recurring payments are pretty straightforward. It’s pretty clear what the right thing to do here is.

When I set up a recurring payment, I want to pay the bill — the bill that until now I used to pay manually (unless this is the first time I’m paying the bill) — automatically. So that I don’t have to worry about it. I don’t want to start paying two months from now, and I don’t want to pay the next month’s bill twice. I just want it to work. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.

I never trust the service when I’m doing setting up recurring payments. Many providers don’t make it clear which payments I set up, starting when, and how they may interact with manual payments. The user interface is always complicated, which doesn’t make sense to me because the expected user experience is very simple. And I don’t buy that setting up a recurring payment should take two cycles (seems like an artifact of how things used to be done — when changes made by mail might take a week to reach the processing center, which could cause a race condition; but even then, again, it’s clear that I simply want to ensure I continue paying the bill and never have to pay twice for the same bill).

Thank you to my friend S.C. for inspiration for this.

Posted in The Daily Badness, technology | No Comments »

I’m on Twitter.

Friday, December 9th, 2011

Yes, as of recently, I’m on Twitter. I decided to join not out of need or curiosity or the desire to fit in or seem like I know social media or seem like I’m up to speed on technology, but because I decided to open up to the idea that Twitter may actually be useful in allowing me to communicate effectively — let me share my ideas better, let them reach people better.

Twitter (just as any tool, really, and especially just as any platform) is used improperly all the time. By “improperly” I mean used in ways that it wasn’t meant to be used, or in ways that obscure its truly revolutionary, game-changing, unique purpose. I believe that Twitter is unique in that it allows individuals (and groups) to broadcast their thoughts, opinions, reflections (broadly speaking, information) in a lightweight way, and with support for consuming that information.

In other words, As a subscriber, I don’t want articles. I want headlines. And I want them delivered to my doorstep.

The constraint to keep the broadcast lightweight is crucial precisely because we’re letting people broadcast — if the information is too verbose, its sheer volume will make the platform useless. And support for consuming the information lowers the bar for subscriptions. If the information is hard to get, people won’t bother managing their subscriptions.

So yes, I could just have a blog, but by its virtue it will likely contain longer bits of information; and there is no easy way for people to follow my blog unless they subscribe in some way, which will likely be too heavyweight for the number of subscriptions they will likely be maintaining (many of their friends, figures of authority that they trust, companies that they think of, etc.).

Now, a headline might pique your curiosity and then you may want to read more. Twitter supports URLs, which is great. I can have my cake — allow lots of people to go through my content really quickly (so they can go through others’ content too) — and eat it too — still be able to express myself fully.

This blog has a natural connection to Twitter. Many of my posts are snippets of opinion with added context. I should be able to synthesize most of them into something bite-sized. Twitter will create a contract between me and people who may be interested in what I have to say that gives me a scalable forum, and gives them the peace of mind that the content won’t be too time-consuming to get to. I had better be good at synthesizing my content, but it is a great skill to have anyway. In a way, Twitter makes information delivery more democratic.

Of course, that’s not how Twitter is used to a large extent. I think that’s fine — many platforms are abused in some form or another, and different platforms may tolerate different volume of abuse. Since Twitter has such a clear contract, I am okay tolerating abuse because if I do a good job, people who I care about will easily be able to separate me from noise and so I will be able to maximize who I reach out to.

Posted in changes/cyclical, human nature, principles, technology | No Comments »

Turn Off All Electronic Devices

Sunday, November 27th, 2011

Flying gives me all this new material to file under Daily Badness… this Thanksgiving, I was infuriated by a flight attendant who insisted that I “turn off” my Kindle reader while being totally fine with the person next to me listening to music. There are so many things wrong with this, where should I begin.

For one, e-ink screens only consume power when I turn the pages so for the overwhelming majority of time the device is as good as turned off (with the added twist of irony where “turning off” the device would have to be me simply putting it away). The interference such a device might cause is also likely an order of magnitude greater than any interference that a music player may cause. Finally, it’s very likely that the person listening to music wasn’t listening to it on his casette tape player, and the hidden device he used is likely significantly more complex than the Kindle.

Posted in The Daily Badness, comparisons, technology | No Comments »

Drugs of the Future

Tuesday, November 1st, 2011

I had a vision that in thirty years, people people won’t bother buying drugs from some sketchy guy on the streets and fumbling with these analog devices to administer them. In my vision, people print their own drugs, synthesized from basic compounds. Different drugs would have a different recipe — which would simply be a few lines of code.

Let’s face it, that’s probably the future of drugs. Our children will have access to such equipment (likely, the innovations that some of us come up with will aid in the creation of such equipment) capable of synthesizing any molecule.

There is an interesting enforcement question here — how can such a thing, if possible, be controlled? Would it become illegal to own the source code for the drugs? (is this freedom of expression? or intellectual property?) Would it become illegal to own the synthesizer? (why would it be? It’s not illegal to own the vaporizer.) Would it become illegal to own some specific “source compounds” which happen to be a part of the finished products? (although, if the synthesizer technology is advanced, it will probably be possible to start with really generic compounds, i.e. push the burden of the process onto code).

Posted in clever, products, technology | No Comments »

The “Door Close” button

Wednesday, October 26th, 2011

All elevators feature a “Door Close” button. To my surprise (although it is supposedly well-known), I found out about a year into using them that these buttons do absolutely nothing. Why is it? Perhaps some elevator manufacturer decided that having a button that forces the door to close leads to nothing but injury lawsuits. Perhaps the manufacturer doesn’t trust humans to decide when it is time to close the door. Either way, as a customer, I feel cheated. Either get rid of the button or make it work — otherwise I feel like you don’t trust me or respect me enough.

The fact that it took me a relatively long time to realize this speaks to an interesting phenomenon — apparently as my mind sought the cause-and-effect link between me pressing the button and the doors closing, it tricked me into thinking that there was indeed a strong enough correlation between these two events to raise no obvious suspicions…

While we’re at elevator doors: I noticed that many elevator doors are relatively unforgiving when it comes to my arms triggering the shutting doors to reopen. Just putting your arm in the door’s way is not enough; waving, or even relatively firm pressure on the doors doesn’t help. Of course, as my arm becomes lodged in the space between the door and the edge, the doors promptly reopen, but no sooner (I should figure out how much pressure is actually needed to force them to reopen). This also makes me think that elevator manufacturers don’t have much respect for their indirect customers.

Posted in technology, things everyone should do | No Comments »

Technology in Overdrive

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

It’s easy to get blasé about it, but if you stop to think about it, technology truly is in overdrive.

If you subscribe to technology blogs, you’ll know what I mean — the sense of being bombarded by new technologies, tools, gadgets, advances, and ideas. If you don’t and you buy technology magazines, you’re out of the loop already because these magazines are obsolete the day they come out.

It seems that new generations of computers and phones come out every year (this is certainly true with Apple products). In fact, technology products are now designed to last a very short time — battery that you can’t replace, OS updates that cripple old hardware — as opposed to the years or even decades that old casette players or even first CD players (my dad is a proud owner of one of those) used to serve their owners.

New standards coming out and adopting the philosophy of more rapid change — HTML 5, for example, is now a rolling standard. This will very likely push software and hardware makers to iterate more on their products.

Technology is creating a world where you have to sprint all the time because if you don’t, you’ll get left behind. This is true for the product makers, but also for the customers.

But what has changed, really? Magazines were out of date before, too, but somehow nobody cared. Vendors had their release schedules that were mostly unaffected by the higher level products’ release schedules. It seems that we want to have the information available to us sooner, in some strange kind of arms race, almost like the high frequency trading companies or news corporations.

More rapid iterations may seem to be accelerating progress, which is a good thing, but they may also introduce much more noise to the system. We’ll be so consumed with consuming the latest that we’ll lose sight of where we’re going.

Posted in changes/cyclical, for reflection, retrospective, technology | No Comments »

Elevator music (Part II)

Monday, May 16th, 2011

I think there are lots of ideas that seem good at a time (and perhaps are boosted by plenty of research) that become overimplement and thus abused, causing a reverse reaction. Two examples I was recently reminded of…

Elevator music. What was probably initially intended as a great measure to let the awkward time that total strangere spend in a claustrophobically small elevator pass more quickly, has become something I have a cynical reaction to (or one of disgust, more often). Worse, now not only elevators, but airplanes use it to, I guess, let the time pass better as I await take-off. While there may have been a study that shows that forgettable, mild music with no sharp tones, beats, minor chords or off-key notes is calming, its abuse defeats the purpose because it now becomes part of our collective subconsciousness.

Another example is the “no signal” screen that most projectors use is a pure blue screen. I heard somewhere that blue was chosen because it was relatively calming (curiously, the Windows crash screen is also a blue screen).

Of course, the blue projector screen may have been used for purposes different than psychological ones. Perhaps it was because blue is the primary color with the lowest luminance (a particular intensity of blue is three times less luminous than red, and six times less luminous than green) to ensure the bulb doesn’t burn out too easily. Of course, then my theory wouldn’t work — the abuse of blue screen doesn’t make it any more luminous — but if that was the only reason, I can think of a number of better screen-saving measures (for example, a less intense blue or a checkerboard pattern that would be impossible to mistake for blackness or an actual signal). So in a way, I hope I am right…

By the way — at first I didn’t even remember I already wrote about elevator music. I guess it truly is subconscious, after all.

Posted in The Daily Badness, human nature, products, technology | No Comments »

Maps

Monday, May 9th, 2011

Perhaps I inherited the love of them from my seafaring father. Perhaps my precise, visual, mathematical mind picked up on their usefulness. Perhaps I am OCD. No matter what the reason, I’ve been fascinated with maps every since I was little. I just finished preparing for my trip to Spain and–in what has become an obligatory part of any preparation–I saved the maps for each of the places I’ll be visiting.

I love the fact that reality can be represented in such an intuitive, instantly valuable way. I can look at the map and quickly orient myself, figure out the direction in which I should go. A good map doesn’t need a lot of detail to be informative — all it takes to understand a map is some simple pattern matching, at least one (well, arguably, two) piece of information to match the real life. Maps are, in my view, the original virtual reality.

I have some strong opinions about maps. First, a map should always point in some invariant direction, ideally north. Our minds can pattern match much more easily if they are presented with the same image each time. Maps must not be too cluttered — one of the most painful features in the iPhone 3G version of Google Maps is the Traffic overlay which completely covers all information about the road underneath the overlay. Good maps should be visually pleasing, which is one reason I feel in love with the beautiful Google maps in contrast with the ugly alternative. A good map also uses a number of tricks to present the many dimensions that a map usually has to reflect — colors, labels, symbols and overlays are just some of them.

There is probably also something about how maps easily provide comfort. When I have a map on me, I never feel lost. I feel in control, and in command — after all, I have the territory charted so it cannot surprise me. This is also why having maps on my mobile phone is one of the most valuable aspects of it.

Did you notice how everyone has their favorite map? Either of a real place, or some treasure map they drew when they were little. In fact, having thought about it, it’s not just me: a little bit of map-worship is probably in all of us.

Posted in My Favorite Things, art, comparisons, feeling, reductions, technology, whatilike | No Comments »

Picking the Right Image Format

Monday, May 9th, 2011

I am fairly particular with some things that other people may consider very small. Maybe it’s about a principle, maybe it’s OCD-ness. One thing I absolutely can’t stand is images in an inappropriate file format. Let me explain.

Pretty much all of technology can be characterized by one word: tradeoffs. There is no free lunch, and any decision in technology comes with its pros and cons. Specifically, images can be represented in a number of different formats, each of which has certain properties, and thus pros and cons. In fact, the fact that there are still multiple formats means quite naturally that one format isn’t appropriate for all use cases.

For all intents and purposes, there are four formats you will see images in.

Raw formats — such as BMP — describe the image precisely, pixel by pixel. While this may seem superior, it’s stupid. Images usually have very little entropy and saving them verbatim simply wastes space, especially now where computers and even cell phones are fast enough to render any non-raw format instantaneously
Lossy formats — such as JPEG — are an efficient way to store an image but they are lossy. The images, when loaded are not faithful representations of the original. With JPEGs it’s possible to define the size-quality tradeoff but even with the highest possible setting, JPEGs have certain artifacts that make it unsuitable for images which are logos, patterns, graphs and diagrams, and text. I absolutely cannot stand artifact-laden JPEGs only because somebody did not know enough about computers (or didn’t care enough) to pick a different file format. Please don’t do it ever again.
Lossless compressed formats — such as PNG or GIF — represent the image faithfully but require much less space than a raw image. You should not use these if you’re trying to encode a photograph or highly detailed picture, because it has enough entropy, but for anything Web related, for text, and for most screenshots, you should always, always use these. Specifically, please use PNGs. GIFs are a proprietary and limited format that I hope will get out of fashion very soon (GIFs do not allow a high enough color depth for today’s standards, or good transparency).

Please use the right image format.

Posted in The Daily Badness, art, comparisons, technology, things everyone should do | No Comments »

Using and Harnessing

Sunday, January 30th, 2011

The most impressive strides taken by mankind are intrinsically linked with our increasing ability to take advantage of the various forces in nature. I differentiate between two different kinds of such ability — the ability to use a particular force — something akin to free-riding that requires relatively little setup or knowlege of the force but is also much less rewarding — and the ability to harness it — which often requires us to know precisely how the force comes into being and requires more complex setup but also offers orders of magnitude more energy.

There are many examples of both uses and harnessing of various forces.

As a species, we learned pretty quickly how to use the gravitational force to our advantage — taking advantage of falling down water or pushing boulders on to large, slow prey — as well as the force of the energy-filled elements such as wind or fire. In contrast, after what may seem like a long hiatus, the nineteenth century saw the first truly comprehensive example of mankind harnessing a force — namely, electricity. In the 1940s, we made progress in using the nuclear forces, but we’re far away from harnessing them (through phenomena such as fusion which mankind is hoping to make sustainable within my or your lifetimes).

What’s next? And, specifically, when will we learn to harness the gravitational forces? What will that even look like?

Posted in discovery, origins, technology, whatis | No Comments »