Was looking up RosettaStone, that Rolls Royce of computer-based language teaching tools. They have a nice web site with demo videos and all – very handy. And they had a video there promoting their system, and as it zipped past something seemed wrong. I rewinded a bit and there it was: my native Hebrew language, in a pattern that made no sense at all. It took a second to resolve: they had the hebrew word for Succeed – written backwards, left to right.
Of course it’s not uncommon to see a Windows program mess up the text direction of Hebrew (and, I suppose, other RTL languages) – after all, Redmond is not in Israel – but you’d expect a Languages school to catch this blooper…
Every child knows that postage stamps are affixed to the top right corner of the envelope. You lick the stamp, and you press it to the envelope at that corner. And it stays there. Or does it?…
I was sending greeting cards recently, putting them in the envelopes they came with. Some of them sported envelopes made of some shiny gold-colored paper. I licked the stamp, put it on the paper… and in a few minutes, as soon as it had dried, the stamp would pop up, curl, and drop off. The envelope was golden, but it could not hold a stamp. You’d think the card manufacturer would pay attention to such a detail?!
We all know the paper towel dispensers that you crank to get the required length out. The more sophisticated ones dispense with the crank action and use an electric motor actuated by a proximity detector: wave your hand in the air in front of the machine and out comes the preset length of paper with a satisfying whirring sound. Hygienic, neat, and foolproof.
But even with this foolproof concept there are different designs. The device at the left in the photo tells you to wave your hand to the right of the paper outlet slot. The one at the right has the sensor centered above the slot’s middle. Why does this matter? because the average person will reach out for where the paper is expected; with the second unit this will trigger the sensor, whereas with the first, it will not. Then you have to start groping and try to figure it out, and maybe notice the frantic effort the vendor made to guide you: the picture of a hand titled “sensor”, the big blue arrow pointing to it, and the text captions that try to make it all clear.
All nice and good, but a towel dispenser is not a literary work, and should not rely on texts and explanations. Had they put the sensor in the middle all this would’ve been unnecessary…
We saw that Newark Liberty International airport has some serious problems keeping its electronic signs straight… here, and here. Well, here’s a third and (for now) last installment.
This is the baggage claim area at the Continental domestic terminal where I landed coming in from San Francisco.
See the nice colorful sign identifying this baggage carousel, number 8, as the one where luggage from flight CO449 is about to appear.
See the nice empty belt on carousel 8.
See the nice people thronging carousel 7 further back.
They’re retrieving their luggage, newly arrived from flight CO 449 from San Francisco.
How nice…
We’ve discussed Engrish before… it’s always hilarious, but this one beats them all. Read it through!
This is from a very nice flannel shirt imported by Azouri Clothing Ltd, and manufactured in China.
The amazing part is that in addition to mangling the spelling and grammar, as in “You can’t using bleash”, which is fairly normal, these folks invented some linguistic innovations that – at first glance – seem to reflect some serious erudition, like “hydrograph”, “wield”, “fumigator” and “micro therm smoothing” (“ironing” to the rest of us). It sounds like the output of an English professor who was locked in a dungeon for decades until he went mad…
And if you can decipher “powder of in dusion bleach”, do share!
We saw how the electronic boards at Newark Liberty airport made the ridiculous omission of adjusting for the Daylight Savings move. Evidently this is not an exception: something is very wrong with that airport’s electronic signage.
These guys have an “Airtrain”, an internal elevated light rail system for moving between terminals. The train has two parallel tracks, and there are electronic signs at the stations to indicate which is which. Thus, the sign in the photo indicates that the train on the left goes to terminals A,B, and Parking areas 1 through 3; the other train goes to P4 and to the train link to NYC.
Except that they also had a backup system. They placed a uniformed woman with a loud voice that announced repeatedly: if you want to go to terminals A, B, and P1-P3 you must take the train on the right. The signs, so convenient and visible, were displaying the wrong information.
You’d think the lady, who was no doubt equipped with a cellular phone, could set the error straight in a jiffy by calling some control room; but that didn’t occur to anyone. And after all, who are you gonna trust: a computerized board, or a well-meaning person of your own species?
Had to take a flight out of Newark airport on the morning after the move from daylight saving to winter time. The preceding evening I took good care to set my alarm clock and wristwatch back the required hour, and took off to the airport in the morning. And when I got there, I was amused to see the many and wonderful electronic displays that are all over the place all showing an hour late.
Now, these boards and clocks are all computer controlled, and you’d think they’d let the computers handle the time shift; my own Notebook and Smartphone both did without human intervention. But even if they installed systems based on human clock-setters, like they did with the big clocks of earlier eras, surely they could’ve done the job right – and, if not, corrected the mess when it became all too visible in the morning?…
One gripe I have with the help systems in many consumer software applications: they’re written with the assumption that we users are all clueless newbies.
Take the Microsoft Office tools: they have many advanced and powerful capabilities; it is both interesting and useful to know what exactly they do. But the Help system only gives you the step-by-step “How To”. Say you want to try the Auto-Summarize feature of MS Word, and are curious what exactly it does (I mean, beyond automatically creating a summary). How does the feature work? What algorithm is involved? How does it identify the important parts of the document? Knowing this is not only interesting; it can let us users know what to expect, and how to use the feature better. But all we are served is a sequence of steps like
- On the Tools menu, click AutoSummarize.
- Select the type of summary you want.
And so on. Necessary and useful for the computer-naive types, but not sufficient for the technical or curious.
I sometimes imagine the day when I’ll run into a button (perhaps in Word 2015?) that says “Stop world hunger”, and when I check it up in Help it will only say
-
To stop world hunger, click the button Stop world hunger.
C’mon, folks, you develop awesome code – let us know what is going on behind the scenes. At least give us a link to this information after the stuff the noobs use is listed…
My relatives returned from a trip to wonderful Firenze, and shared some terrible experiences trying to get their rental car back to the rental office in that ancient city’s dense traffic. Which brought to mind my own experience in the matter some years back.
I was trying to steer a course through all the one-way streets back to the car drop off location in downtown Florence, and no matter how hard I tried to navigate the narrow streets with my map, I always kept finding myself forced back to the same spot by the one-way street signs. The only way to the rental office seemed to be through a street blocked with a “no entry either way” sign.
It was only after the second or third try that I noticed a tiny text sign under the round no entry sign.
It said “except for car rental returns”.
In pure Italian...
Photo courtesy echiner1, shared on flickr under CC license.
Recently Elite, a major manufacturer of chocolate, candy and coffee in Israel, launched a campaign to prepare us all for “the same beloved familiar taste in a new packaging”. Every instant coffee can had a sticker heralding the change, then the new cans came out with stickers extolling it.
Now actually, the change is minimal and mostly unimportant, as you can see in the photo of the old can (at left) and the new. They have a slightly modified graphic design, but it’s the same good ol’ coffee we’re all addicted to. But there is one change that caught my eye: the new can is noticeably taller. Since both contain 200g of the same powder, you’d think it was also thinner; and in a sense it is, but not at the base; in fact the bottom and top are of identical diameter. The new can, however, has a “waist” in the middle.
So what? So, canned goods have to be stored, transported, and stocked. They therefore need to be packed close together; ideally you’d want them hexagonal, as the bees had discovered long ago. But even with round cans, you need to try and minimize wasted space. In the home this means minimizing shelf footprint, or base area; you want to be able to put as many of these on a shelf as possible. For shipping and storehouse space you also care about height, of course. But what you really don’t want is to have this sexy curvaceous can that maintains the same footprint but adds height by wasting unusable empty space in the middle.
Oh well, at least they have a new font in their logo.
Honeycomb photo source: Richard Bartz, via Wikimedia commons.
