Monthly Archives: February 2016

I Solved the Problem!

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Lots of people believe that all they have to do is shout and they solve the problem.

Bernie Sanders hectors us on falling family income and wealth inequality and sticking it to Wall Street.

Donald Trump blusters about politicians and immigration policy and making America great again.

Oddly, this column is not about politics. I don’t care if Mr. Sanders has a higher net worth than 85% of his fellow countrymen nor what country Mr. Trump was born in.

The AARP has a great series of “Take A Stand” ads that I simply had to plug. See, their braying, trumpeting characters take us to a larger truth.

Real people point us down the same road.

“I had my say,” my friend Ashley Proctor says, satisfied. Having had her say, she can go on about her day with the warm feeling that she solved whatever problem that angered her.

Ms. Proctor thunders on regularly about how I don’t want people to get health care and the evils of non-traditional marriage and even how long it takes to defrost a turkey (longer, she thinks, in the frig than in a cooler).

Do you suppose that yelling at me about any of those will change my mind or change her life?

My friend Dean “Dino” Russell regularly rants on Facebook about ethanol in gas and solar deniers and illegal aliens. He mostly uses ALL CAPS.

I’m absolutely sure Dino knows that the people who agree with him just nod and click “Next” and those who don’t agree with him just shake their heads knowingly and click “Next,” too.

And yet we still have ethanol in our gas (and the price of corn has quintupled) and the entertainment industry still thinks E.T. should be able to vote.

I worry that soooooo many of my friends think that bombast is all it takes to change the world.

So what’s the problem? Pissing in the wind is a good thing, right?

 

Backhoe Boy(s)

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Under ConstructionThe roads and streets here in the Keys are often “under improvement.” North Roosevelt Boulevard in Key Weird has been torn up for 86 years, we think. We all know about the $330 million 18 mile boondoggle that had that part of U.S.1 all discombobulated for almost as long. (It’s “finished” now, which means we have new paint on the pig and a single accident can still close the road for hours.) Marathon dug up Overseas Highway to put a sewer pipe down the middle which guarantees more digging to fix the sewer pipe down the middle. And here in South Puffin, we’re cutting through driveways to install storm drains.

And those are just the purposeful slowdowns.

Construction season lasts decade-round here in the Keys and there are always Tonka toys to play with. Great big Tonka toys.

Today’s stories start about when we arrived in South Puffin, back when Whitehead Street in Key Weird was dug up to replace storm drains. As with all Keys roadwork, Whitehead was a shambles for months. The Green Parrot tells the story:

“Toppino would leave their heavy equipment outside the bar over the weekend and one of our regulars, ‘Caveman Dave,’ a heavy-equipment operator himself, decided that rather than walk or take a cab, he would simply borrow one of Charley Toppino’s backhoes to continue his bar-hopping. The police caught up with Dave as he pulled up to The Bull and Whistle and the best part of this story is that the Key West Police, wanting to return the backhoe to where it belonged and realizing that none of them knew how to operate it, made Dave drive the backhoe to The Parrot before arresting him for DUI in full view of a Parrot crowd that was simultaneously overjoyed at Dave’s seemingly successful circuit, with police escort no less, and outraged at his subsequent incarceration.”

It goes without saying, the Parrot said, that Dave was “good people.”

Caveman Dave’s spiritual nephew was up in Marathon the other night.


A homeless guy took a hoe on joyride and ran afoul of several deputies. He started out by borrowing the backhoe from near the Marathon Community Park about four-five miles from the bridge. Sewer work is still ongoing there along U.S. 1 and the keys were in the ignition. He dumped boulders at this end of the bridge to build a chicane at around mile marker 47. He then headed south, topping out at at least 13 mph, and nearly made it to the other end at mile marker 40 before spinning it around on its axis to come back the other way.

His apparent reason for the adventure: Traffic moves too fast, man. He wanted to slow the other motorists down.

The storied Seven Mile BridgesThe deputies reported “He wasn’t really too coherent.”

Florida Department of Transportation says “Backhoe Boy” caused only about $30,000 in damage to the Seven Mile Bridge.

Backhoe Boy bunged up (and probably broke out) hundreds of the reflective pavement markers and did “minor damage to the bridge concrete deck.” Betcha that’s not what the report in the DOT budget says. The repair work should be completed in a couple of days.

Charges filed against Backhoe Boy include driving on a suspended license, driving an unregistered vehicle and not having proper lights for night driving. They also dinged him for vehicle theft, reckless driving, fleeing from law officers, aggravated assault, littering and damaging U.S. 1.

Of course, it will be a $7 million, two-year project at the other end.

As far as I know, the backhoe was left on the bridge for some time after the incident.

 

Human Interface Design: A Tale of Two Phones

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Professionally, officially, I’ve never had much reason to consider how humans interact with the machinery I’ve designed. In fact, since my specialty is material handling equipment, I’ve had lots of reason to consider how to keep humans from interacting with the machinery I’ve designed. Belts and gears and pushers and pullers and blades and fingers should be kept mutually exclusive.

All that changed when I designed a boat.

A Tale of Two Panasonic PhonesI like how stuff feels in my hand, whether a boat hull or a nice shirt or a cordless phone.

Apple’s former “Human Interface Evangelist,” Tog Tognazzini, told Science Friday that Apple doesn’t deserve its reputation for good design anymore. (Be warned that SciFri’s SoundCloud will make you sign in just to listen to the file.)

Apple has a well earned reputation for perfect, intuitive gadgets.

Back in the old days of the 80s, manufacturers printed a long book (translated through Sanskrit from the original Chinese) of instructions and illustrations for most anything you bought. Tech writers ruled. You’d either “RTM” or spend the rest of the machine’s potentially very short life fiddling with it to learn how to use it. We techies bemoaned the day manufacturers stopped supplying that long, printed manual.

Apple fixed that.

Steve Jobs changed your life and mine.

“iOS raises the bar for excellence in user interface design and offers great opportunities for you to deliver engaging and unique user experiences. Consider these common design concepts before you start coding to enhance the usability and appeal of your apps.”

Apple made it not just possible but necessary that anything you hold in your hand be hand friendly. Or not.

Wikipedia tells us, “The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine from the human end, whilst the machine simultaneously feeds back information that aids the operators’ decision making process. Examples of this broad concept of user interfaces include the interactive aspects of computer operating systems, hand tools, heavy machinery operator controls, and process controls. The design considerations applicable when creating user interfaces are related to or involve such disciplines as ergonomics and psychology.”

The industrial design field of human-machine interaction also has concepts that work across interpersonal relationships as well.

My friend gekko held forth on the latest modern management style: “The latest flavor of The End All Solution To Managing Employees and Co-Workers fades quickly and no others rise to replace it,” she wrote over here.

Exactly. Most of these management fads are pretty much designed by aliens who have never actually probed a human. The closer in me would like it if the “Human Resources” folks inventing this stuff had at least rotated through an actual Human Interface design department. And taken the flack that should come when they get it wrong.

Hey H.R.? There are more people doing the work than in your “sample.”

H.R. gets it wrong more often than not because they forget to test their latest fad on real employees.

Mr. Tognazzini makes the point that Apple did that, too, with their new, gray, “flat” iconography and text interface. If you’re over 50, you can’t see their new, gray, “flat” iconography and text interface.

Good DesignHey Apple? There are more people over 50 than under 25 in your test market!

Apple gets it wrong more often than not because they forget to test the design on their actual users.

I’ve written before about the Panasonic cordless phones I like so much. The phones have always fit my hand and my pocket nicely. They have a headphone jack and work excellently with my headset. They have plenty of memory in the phonebook and multiple ringtones that can be assigned to various numbers. They have built in call blocking.

I had to buy a new one. You can see the old black one and the new white ones in these photos.

Bad Design Sadly, Panasonic changed the cordless phone face. Just a little bit. “We’ll make the buttons bigger so our older users have a better experience!”

Except the bigger buttons now let you butt dial or table dial or hang up the phone when every you use it. The bigger buttons ride up on the sleek, curved, front face and stick out farther than the body. I saw that the first time the phone butt dialed my neighbor. You’d think the Panasonic design department would have noticed.

Panasonic got it wrong because they forgot to test the design in the real world.

There’s a moral in there.