February 2003 Archives

"dry Indian humor is a precious commodity sadly underpriced in the world market"

"those of you who know the state my room is in currently may not be surprised at this (lets just say FEMA (Federal Emergency Managment Agency) has been out here a couple of times, and the government is going to be dispersing aid soon)"

The passion of one man facing the world. The Awesome Indian Roommate. The Other Justin. If you still haven't discovered the brilliance that is Nathan's blog, not to mention the drama unfolding in his comments, you're really missing out. In particular, I point you to the comments from Wednesday, February 26.

Sushi is God's gift to people who like raw fish.

How deep.

Actually, it's pretty darn good. Went to my favorite all-you-can-eat sushi buffet today with my brother. It was his first time. My all-time record for stacked sushi plates is around sixteen; I usually eat ten for pleasure, then one or two more for pride if I'm competing with someone. Today I could barely manage seven. My brother beat me.

Went home and just crashed. Sushi's like a knockout drug.

I just realized the Linkathon doesn't show up on some computers. Working on a fix.

Cross Movement's song Cry No More stuck in my head. Nice track.

For you non-web design types, please bear with me as I embark on a mini-rant.

In my ongoing efforts to stay on the up and up, I decided to check out MovieLink, a movie industry site that lets users legally download major motion pictures. I didn't stay very long though, because of major usability flaws in the site design.

First of all, let's look at the illegal alternative, namely, movies available on peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa and Morpheus. Besides the fact that they feature a far greater selection, they are extremely usable. A prominent search button lets you immediately type in what you're looking for, and Kazaa lets you filter your search for just video files (I don't use Morpheus, but I figure it's much the same). After doing a search, you can even cross reference with other titles in the same genre, or by the same artist. In sum, P2P offers a usability that most novices can figure out, but with enough advanced features to satisfy power users.

MovieLink, on the other hand, suffers from extremely poor usability. Most evident is the lack of search capabilities—you're instead directed to search by genre. That can be bothersome if you know exactly what you're looking for, which I did (Top Gun—I STILL haven't seen it). Search funtionality is basically a given on all e-commerce sites, and its omission is glaring. I was willing to tolerate that missing feature, crucial as it was, since it's pretty clear that Top Gun falls under the Action genre.

Thankfully, the Action page titles are sorted alphabetically. But here I ran into another problem: Top Gun would be toward the end of the alphabetical list, but there's no way to skip directly to a page. Instead, I had to click the 'Next' button to get to the T's, which were on the very last page—I clicked through a total of nine pages. Even on DSL they took a significant amount of time to load (by web standards, anyways), so by this point my (forgive the lingo) user experience was poor. And here's the clincher: they don't have Top Gun available. As a customer, I want to know that right away, but instead I had to click through nine pages to find out. Grmph.

Needless to say, I was peeved as a web designer and a potential customer. In an effort to offer some constructive criticism, I scanned the page I was on for some sort of feedback link for the web design team. None was evident. In fact, I couldn't find ANY contact information whatsoever. I checked the help section to look for contact information. Nothing. I tried the FAQ. Again, nothing. In frustration, I left the site. Not only do they have poor usability, there's no way to tell them. I did finally find a contact link after returning to the site as a reference while writing up this entry. It's on the main page only, and I'd missed it because a cursory glance dismisses it as an ad, while the color helps it to fade into the background.

The concept of MovieLink is excellent, and the prices are reasonable. Unfortunately, when compared to the P2P networks that it is designed to deter, MovieLink lags far behind in usability. Ironically, the poor user interface reflects the inflexible distribution methods that sends users to P2P in the first place. If the film industry really wants a feasible alternative, they should pay more attention to basic usability principles.

Some things on the Internet inspire you. Some things on the Internet revile you. And some things on the Internet cause you to sit in stunned silence, your mouth hanging half-open in stupified and incredulous disbelief.

Day off means mucho studying. I've got a couple projects in the works, mostly motion stuff, using Blender and Flash. If you ever wanna see what I'm messing around with, check out my Misc. directory, where I usually post samples for feedback.

I got stood up again at work today.

My fifth grade student and his younger sister are habitually late, and today was no exception. It irks me and his sister's tutor, and the fact that we were getting paid for doing nothing was little consolation. But today I wasn't irritated. I could sense that something was different. After waiting 15 minutes, I gave their mom a call to see what was up.

She'd completely forgotten. Her mind was occupied with other things, and I knew why almost before I picked up the phone. The children's father is a doctor, as well as a medic in the Army National Guard.

His unit was included in the deployment announced yesterday.

I don't know if this means he's going to the Persian Gulf, but in these troubled times, chances are he is. The mother thought that, with everything that was going on, it would be best to discontinue tutoring. In fact, she'd been intent on bringing the kids today to say goodbye to myself and the other tutor. I told her not to worry about it, and my student said goodbye over the phone. He was cheerful, and even broke into a spontaneous nonsensical song. It was odd: he's still naive and doesn't understand the full implications of his father's deployment. It was surreal.

So the war hasn't even started, and it's already hit home.

I've created a minor addition to my site: a notables section for some sites that I think should get some extra loving from all of you. Why? Typically, they'll be sites that just blew me away the first time I saw them, or they're journals/blogs that have been on a run of pretty good entries lately. By hovering your mouse over a link, you'll see an explanation for why I picked it as a notable.

Now, just because you aren't a notable doesn't mean I don't love you. I've limited myself to only three picks so that things won't get out of hand. Sites will rotate in and out on a (hopefully) frequent basis...to this end, I'm hoping about building a nice, PHP-based content management system. Also, if you think your site is worthy of this (dubious) honor, drop me a line.

Now I better get back to my Shakespeare reading...fat essay due Wednesday.

I just got a bounce-back message from AOL for an e-mail I never sent.

For the third time that I can remember (and track down), some spammer has used my Hotmail address for a reply-to. Particularly nasty spam, too.

I had all sorts of wonderful metaphors to describe my reaction, but they all seem to revolve around "deepest pits of Hell" or other similar locations that I hoped the spammer would visit for an eternal vacation. But I guess that's pretty mean, so I took it back.

And as long as I'm up early on Friday (desperately trying to finish my ECS 122A homework), here's the Friday Five.

1. What did you have for breakfast this morning? If you didn't have breakfast, why not? I didn't have breakfast, since it's been this morning for less than two hours.

2. What's your favorite cereal? Granola. With whipped cream. Mmmm.

3. How often do you eat out? Do you want that to change? Too often: I'd guess about once every two weeks, maybe more. I definitely want to be packing a lunch more often...the amount of money I spend on food is ridiculous.

4. What do you plan on having for dinner tonight? Got a recipe for that?I wanna make Honey Walnut Prawns, if I have time. And yes, I do have a recipe (finally!).

5. What's your favorite restaurant? Why? Oh gosh. I'm well-versed (too well-versed, probably) in a lot of the restaurants in Davis. Is this a bang-for-your-buck question? A sheer-culinary-delight question? Or a conducive-to-good-conversation question? I'd have to say it's a tie between Raja's (sentimental value), Ding How (best single dish: those prawns...), Fuji's (for value...all-you-can-eat sushi, anyone?) and Café Mediteranée (for across-the-board goodness and tasteful decor).

Well, I've officially joined the ranks of geekdom (as if I haven't already). Just got my very own, limited edition Australian in Front ghetto black-on-black T-shirt. First time I've ever bought a T-shirt about a website. I'm not even Australian. Heck, I don't even visit Australian In Front more than once a month, if that. But the T-shirt does look cool.

As some of you may know, I made UCD's varsity team for College Bowl, a sort of team Jeopardy. As part of the varsity squad, I was on UCD's 'B' squad at the Cardinal Classic, a Quiz Bowl invitational (The 'A' squad was represented by UCD's All-Star squad, who'll represent the school at College Bowl regionals).

First time I'd ever been to Stanford, or Palo Alto, for that matter. Palo Alto is apparently the third-most expensive place to live in the United States, and I definitely believe. The campus was gorgeous. It was somewhat surreal having the whole Columbia tragedy as a sort of somber backdrop to the whole event.

The other schools present were Berkeley, Cal Tech, UCLA, USC, Pomona, Fresno State and, believe it or not, Texas A&M. Oddly enough, Stanford wasn't competing in the tournament. Berkeley fielded 4 teams (all of which were in the top five), and Pomona hosted two. Funniest thing: almost everyone else seemed nerdier than we were, and we're about the nerdiest UCD has to offer. I have never seen so many smart-looking people together in one place in my life. Many of the seemed like they'd smart at the touch of sunlight.

So it's maybe not surprising that we received a complete and utter beat down, nerd-style. Both of our victories came against Pomona's team. Worst thrashing we were on the wrong end of: 500-20. Yup.

During lunch break, we briefly swung by Stanford's gorgeous chapel. Here's a detail of part of the front (Note: 127Kb, but worth it). Unfortunately, I accidentally saved over my only picture of the entire front of the cathedral a few minutes ago. We ate at a burger joint in downtown Palo Alto. Ridiculous prices: I shelled out $8.74 for a cheeseburger and a milkshake. Here's my teammate Ruwan gawking at his receipt. The meal was good, but those were definitely not $5 burgers.

After returning to Stanford for yet another lesson in humility, we headed back to Davis. The 'B' team was 2-10. The 'A' team was 4-8, but won a prize for being the best team without any graduate students on the roster.

Note to self:
Things I need to learn for next year's tournament

1. Everything

The car that I was in ended up dropping off a team member at the house of a close friend of his, a former sound engineer who is now a Coptic priest. We were treated to a delicious Mediterranean dinner, followed by a demonstration of his awesome home entertainment system at full blast.

All in all, a varied and interesting day.