Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Keeping Kindergarten
February 18, 2011

Riley’s been concerned lately with our too-easy dismissal of his creative works from school. Every day, he comes home with one or two, sometimes more, creations that he has constructed in kindergarten. Granted, they’re not all masterpieces - some are just assignments that are colored in with blanks filled out using the right letters of numbers. Others, though, are nice works of art for a 6-year-old. A recent project that included a double rainbow, a unicorn, a castle, and a dragon is certainly the stuff of keepsake.

But how much of this should we keep? I think this is a similar question to the one skippy presents about keepsake books. I’m not sure that Riley’s formative scribblings are going to be something he’s going to want to show to his kids, but is still begs the question, how do we decide which of the things are going to turn out to be important to him when he grows up?

The Straight Razor
February 15, 2011

For Christmas this year, Pat got me a pair of straight razor handles for disposable razor blades. When I opened the gift, everyone’s reaction was a parody of those in A Christmas Story, “You’ll cut your face off!” But it’s something I’ve been wanting and had asked to receive for quite some time, and I’ve been using it for the past few months.

Since I started working at home, I don’t shave as regularly as I did when I was working in an office. Why would I? It’s kind of a pain to do it. Even when I was working in an office, I didn’t shave every day, even though my face hair would grow in fast enough to warrant it. It simply hurt my skin too much to do it, even with the safety razor.

Valentines Packaging
February 14, 2011

There is only one redeeming feature of those little chalk-like heart candies (of which we bought way, way too many for the purposes of photographing for our latest beer label): They have sort-of custom text on them.

What’s amusing about the hearts is that the packaging presents them as pristine. The text is clear and centered, and there are variations of text there that I’ve not seen in all of the photographing I’ve done of them. In reality, the chalky treats have text that is blurry, broken, printed outside the bounds of the candy, or printed too lightly or too heavily, and is in most cases unreadable. I wonder at what point quality control became a non-issue with these candies; when they stopped caring that you could actually read them. Or perhaps the printing was always crap.

Design Insufficiency
February 11, 2011

I read an article yesterday about how we need to get rid of window chrome - that stuff used to decorate application interfaces to make them look like real-world, tactile controls, even though they’re just displayed on a screen. For example, some applications - particularly the ones that edit video and audio - include a lot of knobs in their interfaces. The knobs simulate real knobs, but they replace a control, the spinbox, that would work equally well, probably better if you’re not used to the real world editing tools that use knobs. And now that it’s more likely you’re doing editing on a computer rather than some kind of studio rack, there’s really no excuse to continue simulating what you might never have seen and used in person.

Have you noticed the same thing I have with the evolution of cell phones that each new iteration is still missing things that consumers might demand? There are a couple of easy answers for why companies don’t make the ultimate phone. One is that they think it would be prohibitive in expense for people to buy it. Another is that they’re purposefully mixing all of the features up to keep consumers confused and sell new phones. I think paranoia has me believing this latter option.

An Ode to Oatmeal
February 09, 2011

I really hate it when blogs devolve into “what I ate for breakfast today”, even the ones with photos, so I know I’m treading into dangerous “Unsubscribe!” territory here, but I wanted to say a few words about something that is a large part of my life these days: Oatmeal.

When I was younger I was always a fan of instant Cream of Wheat. It was easy to make, and warm, and satisfying. But it was only a now-and-then thing. I was addicted to Frosted Flakes for a while there, and that’s all I would eat, barring the occasional bowl of cream of wheat.