When you meet up with an an old friend after a decade, you are all the more aware of the changes they have gone through. Similarly, my switchover from Office 2000 to Office 2008 gives me an excellent “delta” comparison.  In this case, Office 2008 is like that high school 2nd string athlete who is now balding, fat, divorced and addicted to some substance or another.

So, without further ado, let’s look at Office 2008 for the Mac (under 10.6) with an eye towards its former self, Office 2000.

Suite-wide Performance

Compared to the current release of Office 2008, the apps of Office 2000 launched faster (with Rosetta) on 10.5 and 10.6 than Office 2008 does “natively”.   I wish I had hard numbers for you, but I’m simply not going to be that thorough here.

POINT:  Office 2000

Look & Feel & Tools

In Office 2008, Microsoft’s attempt at tool palettes is a miserable failure.  Not only do they manage to clutter the screen with a massive amount of junk (like clip art and shapes and a pre-formatted document style pane) they also fail in several other key ways:

1. The tool palettes fail to have the same information and capabilities as the menu system.   This simply makes it a nightmare to find a given feature (could be in the menu, could be buried in a tool palette).
2. The clutter of palettes is completely unwarranted mainly because it is features that nobody but a 3rd grader (book report with clip art) or a CEO (powerpoint with motion and sounds) would think of using.  It’s almost like they dragged users into the feature meeting, pointed out a palette and said “wouldn’t it be cool to have clip art and styles and sound palettes”.  The users said “yeah, I guess”, and the design team took this as a free ticket to put everything in your face.    Sure, one could go through the mess of turning stuff off, but “intelligent defaults” are nowhere to be found here.
3. “Tearing off” a palette is something Photoshop and Illustrator have done “forever”.  Pinning palettes to the top is also a key feature.  Reorganizing palettes to fit your workflow.  Easily adding or removing palettes.   Give it up…..not supported in Office 2008

For simplicity and less clutter,
POINT:  Office 2000

Excel 2008:  Misery

Nothing in the Office 2008 Suite has gotten as drug-addicted as Excel.   We’re talking crack-head functionality here.

First point — I couldn’t give a hoot about VBA support.  This seems to be all that people whine about in the new Excel versions (“No VBA support on the Mac!”).  Whatever, as there are even more mundane problems with this turd of an upgrade.

No text labels in charts, but you can add pictures of ducks instead

Excel 2008 now fails to properly handle and graph large amounts of data.  If you have more than 1000 datapoints, be prepared for long waits as it tries to build your graph.  Be prepared for the beachball.  Be prepared for a crash.   Most of all, be prepared to deal with Excel’s inability to graph things it could crank through in Excel 2000.

POINT:  Office 2000

Oh, and while we are on graphs, you can no longer have a graph on the sheet with data and print just the graph!  Selecting a graph and hitting print may just send 400 pages of data to your printer.  Turns out this is a “known” issue according to Microsoft from 2 years ago! You have to move the graph to another sheet to print it out by itself.   Awesome, eh?

POINT:  Office 2000

You can no longer add arbitrary text boxes to a graph (See example picture).  This was something that was easy to do in Office 2000 (and even in Office 1997). In some graphs in a workbook,  you can add clip art of a dog or a duck or a cute little doggie (who wants their Busy Bee?) but you cannot add additional information other than a title and axis labels.  For some reason, in other graphs I’m unable to even add the same pictures.   So there goes my hopes of encoding additional chart information based on the animal’s species.  WTF???   This loss of text boxes in charts is a backbreaker.    It turns out that Open Office 3.x appears to suffer the same difficulties.

POINT:  Office 2000
POINT:  iWork for Mac, ’cause it is even more functional for graphing!

And finally, formatting a graph is painful at best.   In Office 2008 it is even more difficult to modify the data series data (No, Microsoft, I don’t really want to drag select my data columns when I have more than 1000 rows of data….I’d like to manually enter the series range).  Don’t even bother trying to re-arrange or re-center, as graphs tend to move around on their own.   Seriously, check out how far iWork has surpassed Office 2008 in terms of charting capabilities.  8 years ago there was no “iWork”.   Even the free Open Office matches the features and then some.

POINT:  Office 2000
POINT: iWork for Mac, Open Office 3

Powerpoint 2008: Ho Hum

Powerpoint 2008 is in stasis.   Really, it improved at all in the last 8 years.   For many users, Powerpoint is their primary “draw” package, yet it is no easier to draw pictures and edit photos than it was in Office 2000.

Forget about styling your slides.  An eye Candy pre-formatted puke fest clutters the tool palette instead.   If you want to set up basic font styles based on bullet point depth you’ll have to search and work on it for quite some time.

Auto-layout and layout guides are barely implemented (see Keynote or OmniGraffle for a great example of how to do this).  At least Powerpoint 2008 can hand PNG images!

Regardless, Powerpoint is still the same boring old POS.  It has lots of clip art and other junk at the expense of a clean method for managing and creating professional looking presentations.

This one is a DRAW

Word 2008:  As nimble as a cow

Word continues to be a massively heavyweight cluster-f.  The floating palettes are equally cumbersome and still make changing fonts and adding styles a mess.   Even after 8 years, putting together a Table of Contents is something that befuddles all but the most dedicated users.   Forget about indexing!     Lost in the stone-age, Word fails to do lots of basic text editing tasks and make them easier.   As a document layout tool, it still remains painful.  Images have a habit of moving around and re-sizing themselves (or ignoring your attempt at re-sizing).   Establishing basic things like gutters and orphan control continues to be an option buried deep in the layers of menus.

POINT:  Office 2000
POINT:  TextEdit, TextWrangler, iWork, OpenOffice

Conclusion

On Mac OS 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5 and even 10.6, Office 2000 is a solid upgrade to Office 2008.   In Office 2000 you will find a bevy of useful features and a fairly clean interface and relatively simple-to-use set of tools.

If, like me, you had no reason to upgrade, I strongly recommend you stick with your old copy of Office 2000.  If you must upgrade, consider the free version of Open Office, as it not matches the functionality (and then some) of Office 2000 and even Office 2008.     If you don’t mind breaking out a little bit, I would suggest iWork, as surpasses Office 2000 in terms of functionality and ease of use.

Oh, and at no point is this review being sarcastic…..Office 2008 really is that much of a step backward!

BACKGROUND

I enjoy cooking. There are times I like to wing it, and times I like to pick the most complicated recipe I can find and make it work out. I routinely try out new recipes — for the most part following them rigorously the first time and taking notes so that I can adjust them a second time. I use many different sources for recipes and inspiration — dozens of cookbooks, magazines, clippings, and of course the entire Web.

In fact, this last weekend, I cooked a whole mess of food for several nights in a row. Working with multiple new recipes, I became aware that some were easier to follow than others. Even though I had studied these recipes the night before and had anticipated some problems, the problems came up anyway when I started juggling dish preparation for multiple dishes.

BEGIN RANT

Properly formatting recipes is clearly a challenging endeavor. Challenging, because I figure that >75% of recipes fail to assist the cook due to a lack of intelligent formatting. So, let’s look at a subset of that challenge — the list of ingredients.

First off, there are a few key philosophies that (could/should) guide the list of ingredients:

• Prep Order: While important, I will argue that dish preparation order should not be the only metric used for defining the order of the ingredients list. While ingredient order matching dish prep order is the generally accepted philosophy in 90%+ of the recipes out there, I have still this most basic of recipe-ingredient-order-philosophies violated for no apparent reason.

• mise en place: (link) is a great way to assemble a recipe, and removes the hard link between ingredient order and dish prep order. One could imagine a mise en place ingredient order recipe where similarly prepped ingredients are grouped together (kind of like GTD). Guess what? I have yet to come across a recipe where mise en place guides the list of ingredients. [See the zesting example below] That said, mise en place as seen on cooking shows is not always practical for the home cook. Not all of us have dishwashers or counter space to put out dozens of small prep bowls with a teaspoon here and a tablespoon there. I’m also not fond of leaving out temperature sensitive ingredients for lengths of time.

• Efficient mise en place: Recipes should consider the number of dishes consumed (more dishes = more wasted water in cleanup anyway) and can often do this by a simple re-ordering of ingredients. By placing dry ingredients (that can be mixed) together and wet ingredients in a group, you can significantly cut down on bowl usage.For example, I often take mise en place one step further — to what I call “efficient mise en place“. One can significantly reduce the number of prep-bowls by combining all the chopped veggies into one bowl. I typically do this in “reverse order” of expected use. An example would be a saute — the onions hit long before the mushroooms, so I’ll chop the ’shrooms first and put them at the bottom with the onions at the top. That way I can scoop off “layers” as the dish progresses.A similar trick works really well with herbs that report at the end of the cooking process. Why give each one a separate bowl when all you are going to do is dump them in at once at the very end of the process anyway?

• Sub-Grouping: The most helpful and often overlooked philosophy is creating sub-groups of ingredients. The best recipes take the additional line-space and appropriately break apart groups of ingredients. The worst recipes attempt to save space by putting the marinade right up against the sauce, leaving it up to the cook to figure out whether the sugar reports to the sauce or the marinade. Another terrible idea is when recipes save space by “splitting” ingredients (more on that later).

SPECIFIC EXAMPLES OF RECIPE INGREDIENT ISSUES

Now for some fun….. here are some ways in which recipes really chap my hide.

• Clearly note which ingredients need additional/unusal time to sit/drain/thaw/roast/pickle/etc. This should be listed in the first lines of the recipe or spelled out clearly in the ingredients list. For instance “1 block tofu, drained for 4 hours” would be nice to see in an ingredients list, as an undrained block of tofu behaves quite differently. Likewise, “2 lbs of cucumbers, salted and drained for 30 minutes” is nice to know up front. I recently came across a recipe where the draining process was not stated until halfway through the assembly process, which is a little late to be telling me such things. On a positive example: since home ovens often take 30+ minutes to stabilize at a given temperature, note how just about every single baking recipe has you pre-heat the oven as the very first step in the whole process.

• Always place the zest before the juice. This one because it is so bloody simple, but seems to consistently be trumped by the recipe-order-depicts-ingredient-order instead of using a more common sense mise en place order. Have you ever tried to zest an already juiced lemon or lime? Brutal, huh? Whether you use a microplane, a grater or a zester, you really want to zest before juicing. So, why on earth would you put the zest after the juice? Typically, it is because the zest appears AFTER the juice in the process. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve gone back and zested yet-another lime because the juiced ones are already down the garbage disposal.

• Splitting ingredients to save a line is lazy. You ever see “2 cups plus 3 teaspoons” and wonder what that means? It took me a LOT of cooking to figure that one out. Even worse is when a recipe like that starts with a “Combine the sugar, butter, etc in a bowl….”. So you dump your 2 cups plus 3 teaspoons in a bowl only to find a few paragraphs later “sprinkle remaining 3 teaspoons of sugar over the top….”.Here’s a hint to recipe designers out there, stop splitting ingredient quantities and do 2 separate line items instead. Bread recipes are notorious for this (they tend to start with numerous cups of flour, but you can guarantee the process breaks this ingredient apart along the way). The only reason bread recipes get away with this is that the list of ingredients and instruction set length is typically very short, so the problem is under the pain threshold.Another reason that splitting ingredients is silly: “2 cups plus 3 teaspoons” is a split among entirely different measuring devices.

  For this type of split, you will have to have out your cup measure and your teaspoon measure (or eyeball it). Why not just suck-it-up and have 2 line items in the ingredients list. Heck, if I have to wash an additional kitchen item for your recipe, do me the respect of giving me that additional line item for clarity!

  The only argument (besides laziness and space savings) for splitting ingredients is to provide the cook with a combined total needed for the recipe. However, since most cooks have to create an overall combined total across multiple recipes in order to create a shopping list, rolling up totals for the cook simply creates additional work in the kitchen to save a few seconds in the shopping time. This extra work during prep time is not welcome.

• Do not randomly alternate between solids and liquids. First of all, this makes it difficult to run an efficient mise en place. Second, have you ever tried grabbing 3 tablespoons of flour after chopping some vegetables — that’s right, you have to wash then really really dry your hands. For efficiency, I also prefer to measure out all my dry ingredients first before proceeding to the wet ingredients, and then finally proceeding to the sticky/goopy ingredients. Done in the appropriate order, you can re-use the same cup measure throughout an entire recipe. Done incorrectly, you could require 3 or 4 cup measures (and if you have a kitchen with 3 or 4 cup measures of the same size available to you, you probably are not reading this rant anyway). In the end, inappropriately alternating between wet and dry ingredients simply adds additional prep and cleanup time — both are unwelcome in my kitchen.

• Add demarcation lines or titles between major subsets of ingredients. I cannot stress this one enough! Making a meat dish the other day, the marinade ingredients flowed right into the sauce ingredients. WTF!? I had to go back and forth between the instructions and the ingredients a couple of times to figure out where one part of the recipe stopped and the other began.Taken further, if recipe designers break ingredients into subsets, you can have one simple instruction that says “Combine all the sauce ingredients in a medium saucepan….”. This is far easier to parse on-the-fly than “Combine sugar, water, butter, vanilla extract and dark rum into a medium saucepan.” Reduced workload — definitely welcome in my kitchen.

SUMMARY

Well, that’s about it for now…… I’m sure I will add more. I will probably also start up a little section called “Red’s Recipe Rescue” at some point. My Red’s Recipe Rescue section will take recipes that I have found (that clearly FAIL) and give guidance on how to fix them so that they come out correctly. (Case in point, the Columbian FAIL Creme Brulee, or the Coconut FAIL Cake with Minted Whipped Cream……. both need a little Red’s Recipe Rescue……..somewhere down the road).

You probably didn’t notice us eating less than three feet away from you when you suddenly decided your infant daughter needed her diaper changed immediately, right there. For I’m sure if you had noticed us sitting there, eating, you might not have put your daughter on the floor by our feet and commenced changing her diaper.

You left us perplexed and completely disoriented. You see, your actions made so little sense that for a moment we felt the Earth stop and alter its rotation so that it could revolve entirely around you.

We are not exactly sure what you were thinking in making the decision to change a dirty diaper within a yard of strangers eating. We understand that being a parent is difficult and involves numerous sub-optimal decisions. But a diaper is not an *immediate* safety concern requiring instantaneous action with deleterious consequences.

We are quite positive that you failed to expend even modest effort in finding a more appropriate place to air your daughter’s dirty laundry. In fact, we know for a fact that the bathroom less than 10 yards away is quite spacious, clean, and equipped with a fan for removing certain smells. This same bathroom even has a large counter for enabling diaper changing. Oh yeah, and there is typically not much of a wait for the bathroom either.

Were you so concerned about losing your precious table that you felt compelled to air it all out next to us? Surely, your husband [except that he was too self-absorbed standing in line] could have taken your daughter to the bathroom so that you could retain your sacred seat.

Your decision makes us wonder if you would also throw a dinner party for strangers. Then, in the middle of the dark brown chunky french onion soup, surprise everyone by changing your daughter on the nearby buffet table so that guests could compare/contrast the soup to the diaper contents (in the consistency, color and smell categories).

Surely, changing your daughter’s diaper in the dining room during a dinner party would feel slightly inappropriate to you, right? So, shouldn’t changing it within a yard of strangers eating breakfast also feel inappropriate and somewhat unsanitary? (You didn’t even warn or ask us!)

You probably didn’t even notice how we stopped eating and quickly started scanning for alternate tables — then got up and left. After all, when the Earth rotates about you, how could you see anything else but a inconsequential blur.

First off, I’m going to avoid any racial and gender discussion here. Not only is this not fair, it is also completely counterproductive and unacceptable for numerous other reasons. This rant illustrates that you don’t need racial or gender bases for stereotyping. Second, there is no factual information in this rant, just opinion. Third, this rant (as I had promised earlier) is unlikely to make the world a better place (unless you laugh…in which case I’ve done my job). Fourth……nobody is perfect…we all know that you and I both fit in at least one of these categories at least some of the time–nobody is perfect.

And so….after years and years of driving around, I have come across (and had others point out to me) driver stereotypes that transcend gender/racial/age barriers and fit all comers. Beware, these are stereotypes, and therefore exist only to pidgeon hole people into inappropriately confining holes for pidgeons. Too bad……humility is fun and good for all of us and reminds us all that we are “humile”!

STEREOTYPE #1: REALLY LARGE TRUCK & SUVs

This type of demon suffers from Schmeckel syndrome. They require compensation inversely proportional to their shortcoming. Along with the need to fulfill a lifetime of not-big-enough, comes the absolute supremecy in their knowledge that their big 8MPG monstrosity can stop on a dime. You will find this demon a scant 10 feet behind you with high beams blazing at the gentle speed of 70mph. If not on the highway, they are guaranteed to be found careening too fast down a mountain road and sideswiping a bicyclist. Interesting enough, the current governator of Kaleefourneeya (A.Schwarzenegger) suffers from some deficiency requiring the biggest car on the road (an H1 Hummer). If you ever wanted to get yourself a new ride, simply slam on your breaks in front of this demon…..the check for your difficulties will be in the mail.

STEREOTYPE #2: TASSLED ITEM HANGING FROM REAR VIEW MIRROR

Next time you get cut off, scared, sideswiped or otherwise shocked by the blank stare of idiocy in the car right next to you, check for the tassle. This type of demon is far too distracted by the pretty swinging thing under the rear view mirror to worry about those pesky little lines on the road. Whether it be a stop sign, a red light (typically run), a freeway merge or a half-ass parking job, keep your distance to protect your life. No, you are not going insane, and yes, this demon is allowed to breed, just as they are allowed to carry a drivers license (what used to be a priviledge but is now a “right”) and threaten your very survival.

STEREOTYPE #3: REALLY LARGE HATS

This insecure spirit needs the shelter of a big brim. Wheter it be sun-hats or cowboy hats, the large hat wearers lack peripheral vision and have simply created their own planet underneath their bucket. If you intended to get to your destination in a timely manner, it is best to take an alternate route, as this one’s hat easily occupies two lanes and the wind resistance of the hat keeps them perpetually 10 miles under the surrounding speed of traffic.

STEREOTYPE #4; SOCCER MOM WITH 1 OR MORE KIDS IN BACK SEAT

Soccer moms are busy. Too busy and self important to worry about anything other than themselves (yes, their children are excluded from this worry). They can be seen massively parallel processing their caffeine infusions with changing the DVD for their back-seat progeny, while also leaning behind to wipe a nose or bark an order or scribble down a to-do list on the dashboard of their car. Beware 4-way stops when meeting this type, as they always have right of way.

STEREOTYPE #5: TISSUE PAPER ON REAR SEAT

The tissue-demon driver is a weird one. Half the time they are harmless well-aware drivers that cause no problems. However, beware when the little demonettes are riding along. That tissue paper is simply a warning to keep your distance, for when snot flies at 75mph, this demon will turn completely around (oblivious to the break lights in front) to make sure that the upholstery remains unharmed.

STEREOTYPE #6: THE BMW DRIVER

This one is far too easy…..There’s a reason this stereotype exists and is even acknowledged by the very demon itself. I suppose when you drive “the ultimate driving machine” you simply become and invincible ass. The only defense against this demon is distance. Beware not to get caught up in the vile roadrage spell that is this demon’s signature trademark.

STEREOTYPE #7: REALLY BIG GLASSES

Lots of people have bad eyesight, but this demon flaunts it with massive glasses practically the size of hte windshield itself. Beware anyone with the giant plastic horribly scratched vision impairers.

Well….they car washes in Mountain View aren’t really banned. It seems more like it was a basic, simple, and nonchalant yet remarkably evil cospiracy afoot to keep me from washing my car.

I have been trying to get my car washed for the last 2 weeks. It’s dirty-dusty-muddy and I can hardly see out the windshield. I don’t want to wash it at my house (waste o’ water and lots o’ time) so I have been filling up at gas stations with car washes.

The first car wash I went to was one of those "brushless" pee on your car type jobbies at my local Chevron. It sucked so bad that we can’t even count this as an actual car wash. It was more like a light drizzle. Case in point, dirt remained stuck on windshield. Case in point #2: the spider web on my rearview mirror was still there afterwards.. Regardless, this very same car wash is now closed while they rennovate the gas station (and block access to the functional car wash in the process).

Frustrated, I pulled into my local Valero with a 1/2 tank remaining. Only, I didn’t really pull in, because it turns out this Valero is in the same torn-up state as my local Chevron. Needless to say, the fully functional car wash was blocked off by fences and cones.

So, another 1/4 tank later, I’m determined enough to try a different Shell several miles away. No chance…the gas station was operational but there were 4 cones blocking the freakin’ car wash. No sign (e.g. "Will Return in 1 Week"), no reason, no logical explanation.

So, another 1/4 tank later and this time I attempt yet another Shell. I am starting to suspect a conspiracy at this point. This (different) Shell station’s car wash was also blocked off with cones (no reason, no logic, etc, etc, etc).

And now I’m desperate. I’m so desperate, that I drove to the nearby pay-through-the-nose hand-wash places. You know the place….$20 for a car wash so that some minimum wage dudes drive your car onto the automated conveyer belt while you watch in an air-conditioned building and balance your shakras. UNFORTUNATELY even the yuppy-wash is closed!! Looks like it’s going to get torn down, too.

In fact, there is not a gas station within a 10 mile radius (that I know of) that has an open and working car wash.

Surely there must be a conspiracy. A shadowy consortium determined to prevent me from washing my car. A group of old dudes who smoke in leather chairs while sitting around a mahogany conference table. With their secret surveillance cameras, they rapidly set out cones as I approach car washes.

UPDATE 6/10/2005

Well…finally got my car washed at one of those Valero-type places. Except, this time I have a side rant to get into really quick. Valero now asks for your zip code when you use a credit card (anti-theft measure…fine by me). However, after you finish entering in your 5 digit zip, the embedded code is too stupid to realize you are done, and it will sit there forever awaiting you to press the "enter" key. Dumb. It’s not like zip codes are numbers of arbitrary length…figure it out dumb machine!

Well, now for the rant. Coldstone has gone corporate al la Starcraps. I went in just the other day (healthy diet be damned) and asked for a favorite…[coffee ice cream, irish creme flavoring and marshmellow mix-in]. To my surprise, COLDSTONE NO LONG DOES FLAVORINGS!! What’s the point of Sweet Cream Ice Cream if you can’t add in some bubblegum, raspberry, rootbeer, or other whacky flavoring? How was I to make my irish cream coffee ice cream? WORSE YET, THEY DON’T HAVE MARSHMELLOW FLUFF ANYMORE! What’s up with that? I LOVE marshmellow fluff in my ice cream…..it’s goopy and sweet and downright tasty. Coldstone might as well start pre-mixing the mix-ins and force you to buy their choice of combination. Have it your way be damned.

Yet, someone in the corporate office somewhere decided to “simplify the product offering”. You’ll notice that about 2 years ago the menu on the wall at your local Coldstone got super simplified by some high-falutin graphic designer and instantly became DOWNRIGHT user unfriendly. The brilliant corporate schmucks took away a listing of all your options, and now you have to stand 1 foot in front of a 10 foot long counter and attempt to choose from a reduced variety of poorly labeled mix-ins. Without the listing of available products, offerings, mix-ins and flavorings, it’s no wonder that people suddenly became unaware that they could get marshmellow fluff and irish cream flavoring added to their coffee ice cream. Now, it takes even longer for people to figure out what they want….and when they do figure it out, chances are they had already (impulsively so as not to take too much time) asked for the first mix-in in their sight (instead of what they really wanted)

It makes me mad enough to ***rampage***. Pretty soon, Coldstone is going to be as simplified as In-N-Out burger….just go up and order a double-double animal style (not on the menu) or a 4×4 protein style (also not on the menu). I thrive on the variety and simply want the option to have some marshmellow fluff mixed into my “product”. BRING BACK THE FLUFF

Surely at some point in your life you have purchased a new product you were just super excited to try. You were so excited that you rushed home in excitement in order to open the box (that you just paid for) like it was some gift from a far off land (China), even though it wasn’t a gift (you paid for it). Perhaps it was a new phone, or some tool, new blinky shoes, a gadget, or something else.

So you get the product home and rip open the cardboard (perhaps you even show enough patience to read the manual and assemble the darn thing correctly) and start using your new “toy.” And then it hits you…..there is one feature missing. A feature so simple and obvious that you can’t believe they forgot to include it. Sometimes it is even a feature that would NOT add any appreciable cost or complexity (ringer-off switches on phones, for instance). Sometimes it is a feature that is absolutely critical to how a user interacts with the device that you have to hold it funny to use it in your left hand.

This ongoing rant looks at some of my favorite products. These are products I use everyday, all the time or simply rely on to get-r-done. And, of course, I rant about how/where these products fall short. This is not about the super-bad products (the ones that suck and have no hope), but rather about the ones that made it 99% of the way to glory and got hit by a stupid stick, or rushed out the door.

RANTING

4-23-2005………Portable Hammock Stands….here

First, the praise: Hammocks are nice and comfy. But not everybody has 2 stout redwood trees in a sunny spot in their backyard spaced a perfect 15 feet apart. Portablee hammock stands neatly solve the problem. They are stout steel frames and are easy to assembly and locate anywhere you have a flat open space.

Second, the silliness and The Rant: The one problem with the “Portable” stands is that they are so awkward it takes two able-bodied adults to move them. What’s so portable about something that takes 2 people to move. The device is not so easy to disassemble, either. Furthermore, given the simple construction, dragging it is nearly impossible. This is a classic example of how a product can get 95% of the way and fall short. I want to be able to follow the sun (occasionally repositioning the hammock throughout the day). On hot days, I want to move my hammock into the shade. I want to be able to move my “Portable Hammock Stand” on my own and I simply cannot. Sure, I have a bad back and all, but that’s not even the problem. This blood thing simply needs a cheap set of wheels!! Is it so hard to put wheels on a hammock stand? The thing already costs $80, so what’s an extra $5 for some cheap-ass wheels?

How to work around this shortcoming: Check this photo and this photo. Piece of cake. I had an old scooter sitting around in my backyard, so I removed the plastic wheels off of that. Then, I found a closet rod lying around and figured that it would make a good axle. Sure enough, it fit inside the square steel tube perfectly. Cut that rod to length, put a few fender washers between it and the wheel and then “thread” a bolt in place. That’s it. 30 minutes of scrounging and hacking and I had two wheels on my NOW-portable hammock frame. I totally recommend this hack (don’t have a scooter, use wheels off of an old lawnmower or something). The best part is that it works so well, I can even roll the hammock across the grass with somebody in it! I simply lift up one end (the end without the wheels of course) and push/pull the hammock frame to where I need it.

4-18-2005………The Litter Locker…..here…here…and here

First, the praise: I use this product daily and love it. It captures and contains the smell, nastiness, and foulness associated with the poop of litter-using life forms. You can go a good week before having to take the entire device out to the garbage. The refills are available and easy to install and the bag plastic is tough enough to never break or split (unless drastically overfilled). A typical refill cartridge lasts for a good month, too! The wind-up feature on the side gives plenty of leverage. There is even a handy razorblade-thingy inside for cutting the bag (so that you can tie it off and dispose of it). It even comes with a matching colored scooper that lasts fairly well.

Second, the silliness: So, there are two silly features with this product. I can live with them since they are minor design flaws (at least they tried). First, the scoop is wider than the input to the plastic containment chute. If you miss the chute, on the floor goes the poop. The other silly feature is the “scoop holder” on the back side. In all honesty, if you were to use this deep drawn “bucket” it would fill with all sorts of yumminess and need frequent (and difficult) cleaning. Since this bucket is physically inside the envelope of the “locker” they could have perforated the bottom of the bucket and let litter simply fall through and be capture for later disposal.

Finally, The Litter Locker Rant: So where did this beautiful product fall short by 1%?? Put yourself in the user’s shoes. If you are using this, you are lazy (like me) and only willing to take the poop out once a week. You will probably (since it is full of foul smelling fermented feces) want to handle this disposal outdoors so as not to make a mess. In order to handle the disposal, you need to carry the thing outside. The trouble begins, for the Litter Locker “Plus” (no Pro or Extreme version is available yet) has no handle. No only that, if you try to carry by the upper portion, the clam shell hinges open and the bag of FFSFF (see above) falls to the floor. So, you decide to carry it by the two twisting handles on either side…..same problem. So, you resort to holding the locker close to your body like a smelly plastic teddy bear. Blech. Get it right, guys!!!

How to work around this shortcoming: To enable your Litter Locker Plus (and turn it into the Extreme Litter Locker Pro 256 XGL VSLI) you need to do at least one of the following two modifications. Modification #1: Drill holes on the very bottom of the clamshell on both sides (just under each of the blue wheely thingys) and string some twine over the top. The twine needs to be loose enough to allow you to open the clamshell, yet tauught enough that you can balance the unit with your thumb (this does work….it’s what I do). Modification #2: Find a way to make the closing snap/clasp something REAL. Perhaps a brass swing-hook or a sheet metal screw. Even if you do this Mod, you may still need a stable handle of some sort.

WARM-UP TO THE RANT

Stop for a moment and think about the various Standards that surround you.

I’m not just talking about the obvious Standards (like USB, IEEE1394=Firewire, 802.11abcdefgthruz), but also about the subterranean foundational standards (ANSI screw sizes, ASCII, double-click-to-open-files). Standards are literally everywhere, and more often than not, I bet we are totally unaware of their existence. In fact, good standards fit into our lives seamlessly and fail to get in the way (unlike the current alphabet soup in a blender that is USB/IEEE1394/802.11/RS232/blahblahblah).

How about some other standards that we all take for granted:

• The size of a milk carton or jug
• The size of a 12oz cola beverage
• The location of pedals in automobiles (whether it be a sports car, stick shift, automatic or Big Rig).
• The standard lightbulb socket.
• The cigarette lighter in your car that is now really just a power port.
• Common Batteries (at least the good ones…see below about the bad ones).
• Toilets (at least those in the “Western World”…Japan had some interesting hole-in-the-floor contraptions that scared me).
• …and thousands of others…

No, this is not a rant opposed to standards.

In fact, I think well applied standards, or even well-evolved standards are wonderful things. The more static a standard (think nuts and bolts or the span of a railway track) the more comfortable we feel with it.

I’m not even going to rant heavily about standards that can’t make up their own friggin’ mind. For this we have 802.11*, USB123, BlueTooth and all the other jokey never-got-it-right-in-the-first-place standards. Give me RS232 and ethernet baby. Standards of a different era that have STOOD THE TEST OF TIME.

Heck, and I’m not even going to devote this rant to DVDs and HDCDs, even if they deserve it.

But real quick: Why the F#*# are there so many gosh-darn DVD, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD!R, DVD#R, DVD@R, DVD%R, burning standards? It’s almost like they decided to fit every single SHIFT-# between the letters “DVD” and “R” and make a standard for it. Worse yet, why the F*#* are there 2 groups working on the next generation DVD standard!? Why do we need HDCDs and $3000 audio cables?

THE RANT BEGINS

What I am here to rant about tonight is the LACK of standards on certain products that have been around for quite some time and DEFINITELY NEED STANDARDS. As a user, I suffer because of these Reinvent-The-Wheel-Jockies. For instance:

Microwaves

We’ll start the list with a ubiquitous item that isn’t really seen as a “tech” item anymore. Microwaves have been around for decades, yet every single microwave I have ever used has it’s own bloody interface. Could we please standardize on the method of nuking food? Is it so hard to unify COOK–1-0-0-START for a minute’s worth of radiation? If that’s too much for the little 8-bit microcontrollers, then we can cut it down to 1-0-0-START. I have a microwave that makes it that easy and I love it. On some, I have seen the TIME-1-0-0-START, which scares me into thinking I am actually setting the microwave CLOCK TIME instead of nuking the bacon (setting the clock time on this particular model is its own joy). For gosh sakes….CALCULATORS DO FAR MORE THAN MICROWAVES AND ARE FAR EASIER TO USE (except, of course, for bloody reverse pole calculators…those things have terrible interfaces). And I haven’t even begun to berate Microwave “defrost” settings, power settings and autocook settings (never use ‘em). Time to start knocking heads at GE, Sunbeam, Daewoo and all of the other jokers who claim to “design” microwaves.

Voicemail

Another ubiquitous yet reinvented interface is voicemail. At this time in my life I have 3 different voicemail boxes AND A DIFFERENT INTERFACE ON EACH ONE. On SBC, it’s “1″ to repeat, “2″ to save and “3″ to delete, yet I have no idea what fast-forward and rewind are. On my AT&T wireless it’s “3″ to fast forward, “7″ to delete and “9″ to save…I think. At work (I’m not making this one up) it’s “D” to delete, “K” to keep, “P” to play again. What’s funny is that some idiot decided that “D”, “K” and “P” were easier to find on a phone than the big bold numbers printed on the center of each button.

So, can we please just standardize on one bloody voicemail interface? It’s not like there are that many commands one needs for a voice message (save, delete, play, pause, fast forward, repeat). Email is far more techno-seeming, yet has kept the same set of headers for decades.

Cell Phone & Laptop Batteries

Nothing irks me more than the downright lameness that is the tech industry when it comes to rechargeable batteries. I like my AA and AA and 9V batteries. You notice how C & D cells are almost nonexistent nowadays? Well, when it comes to the world of laptop and cell phone batteries, they make you shell out between $40 and $120 for a custom packaged battery. Sure, some cell phones share, but there must be at least 2 dozen different cell phone battery sizes out there. Same thing for laptops! There is no need for that array of sizes (I doubt there are that many different voltages or communication standards for all those batteries).

Could you imagine if every car you bought had it’s own special fuel requirements? This is what cellphone and laptop manufacturers require of their users. You would have to buy a tanker full of “Special Fuel” that would last (if you’re lucky) for the life of your car. Even if you had 2 cars of the same make, forget trying to swap fuel around…wouldn’t work. Worse yet, if you had a vintage car, they would stop making your special fuel. The car analogy is a good one for the tech industry to be embarrassed by. Face it, we spend nearly as much on computers as we do on automobiles (at least I do) yet we accept >10x the product abuse from our computers (ever had to reinstall the OS in your car or virus scan your engine?). Seriously…..time to slow down the product differentiation and standardize on a few package sizes and colors!

Inkjet Ink Cartridges

Speaking of flagrant user abuse, the printer industry should be summarily executed. For the last couple of years, there have note been enough giant leaps in inkjet cartridge technology to merit the hundreds of various cartridge sizes out there. Truth be told, the manufactures make money on the ink and they will even admit to that fact. However, it is the users (and landfills) that suffer for all of the poorly manufactured, one-time-use, non-cross-functional cartridge designs. Like laptop batteries, Inkjet Cartridges should have fewer standards than I can count on my 10 stubby fingers. Go to a reputable art store and you won’t find the same variety of paint brushes that you find in inkjet cartridges at a Fry’s. It just doesn’t make any sense.

DVR’s

One word: TiVo. If you’ve ever tried or spoken to users of any of the other DVRs you’ll find that they *think* they have TiVo when in fact they have nothing more than a VCR+ enabled hard drive. TiVo rocks and has a user interface that simply kicks ass and runs circles around all of the other knock-offs and re-invents. Comcast finally woke up and signed a deal with TiVo. DirecTV is threatening to break with TiVo (and will lose my business as soon as they do). Simply put, the world doesn’t need a bunch of DOS-like knockoffs winning the market over on cheap price and monopoly deals (think Windoze vs. MacOS…..which interface stays out of your way and lets you get the job done….it certainly ain’t the clunky-ass ExPee).

So, I would love to see us all standardize on the TiVo interface and QUICKLY. Sure, TiVo may come and it may go, but things like the 7 second back button and the wish lists and the preferential season pass manager and the To Do List and the Program Searching and the Suggestions and the Messages box and the cute little guy that stands in your corner waiting for you to select your Now Playing choice in less time than it took to write this run-on sentence. I vote for TiVo!

THE RANT ENDS

So that’s all my Products That Need Standards rants for now. Maybe in the future I will add more listings, but right now I got some Modern Marvels episodes saved up on my TiVo.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about Rants.

• What makes a good rant?
• What makes a rant more interesting?
• What makes a rant more valuable to the general web-populice?
• Why rant at all?
  

Let me tackle those earth-moving questions in reverse order:

Why rant at all?

We rant, therefore we are. Perhaps that is not reason enough. Perhaps I rant to share my experiences and thoughts and try (in some backwards way) to make the world a better place. Maybe somebody will pay heed to a rant and that somebody will have the power to affect the issue at hand. After all, it seems that Manic Panic has finally started making their hair dye thicker and I would like to think my ranting about it all these years had an impact. Or maybe I rant for the same reason I yell “echo” in a canyon….

What makes a rant valuable?

Having read dozens of rants, it seems there are a few things that separate simple angry tirades from intelligent ranting.

1. The Rantor should have had significant experience regarding the Rantee. This implies firsthand use of a product or devotion to a service. This implies firsthand knowledge of the workings of the device. This implies more than a casual “beef” to be aired. This implies some thought given to the subject at hand. Third hand rants are no fun.
2. The Rantor should have been harmed or let down in some way by the Rantee. Some of the best rants come from disenfranchisement or general abuse dealt by a product/service. When simple and easily met expectations or simply not met in a glorious fashion of “don’t care”, a rant is born. Classic examples of tired (but true-to-form) rants include any/all rants about all-things Microsoft. Additionally, rants about outsourced customer service calls meet this criteria.
3. The Rantor should actually care about the Rantee. This is the most sick and twisted of the things that make a good rant. A good Rantor will actually make an attempt at suggesting reasonable alternatives in a humorous manner. A good Rantor is actually trying to affect change in spite of the odds and outsourced individuals stacked in his/her way.

What makes a rant interesting?

This one is easy. Humor makes a rant more interesting. Rants work well as vehicles for humor because they require no exaggeration. A well-thought-out rant already has the absurdity typically found in the raunchiest of jokes. Rants sometimes contain the unexpected twist that simply drives those fingernails across the chalkboard even further.

What makes a good rant?

Well, if you can waste a couple minutes of the workday reading it, it is likely a good rant. If you laugh at least once, or (heck) even finish off the rant, then it was likely worth your time. The truly illustrious rants become forwarded millions of times like so many viral advertisements.

And so I leave you with a commitment:

From now on, my rants will be on those items/services I have had firsthand experience with. I promise to have received first hand abuse or disappointment from said items/services. And I promise to care enough to wish the gosh-darn item/service was better!

Second….I don’t think I will be a Sharks fan for years after this. Screw the players. I’d rather watch a bunch of scrappy amateurs (my GF for instance) play with their hearts and not their pocketbooks.

“Screw the Fans”

This is what the players (and the NHLPA men-in-black) are saying. They told me to inform you fans that you simply don’t count in their world. Why else would they demand $100 a ticket for a 5th tier sport. Yes, that’s #5 behind NFL, NBA, MLB, and NASCAR. I work hard for my money, and the players should be bloody thankful when fans show up and pay a week’s worth of grocery money for a couple of hours of half-ass play (unless it’s playoffs, in which case the play is full-ass and the ticket price is doubled!)

If you don’t think the lockout is the fault of the pig-headed players then you must feel that playing 84 games of a (fun-to-play) sport for a small fan base should net you the same salary as a MLB player. Do the math and screw the fans.

“Screw the Support Staff”

We fans like abuse. We take it in regularly in the form of jacked up ticket prices and insane food costs. However, the people hit hardest by all this are those most easily forgotten. I am referring to the support staff, of course. From the trainers to the bus drivers, ushers to the concession stand workers, local restaurants to the color commentators, sports writers to the puck makers. Not a single member of the support staff earns even a significant fraction of what a well-payed player makes! Yet, somehow, the players figure this is all about them. I hope the players’ favorite bars (severely depressed due to the lockout) deny to serve them anything but tap water.

Clearly, the 600 players (the NHLPA…”or NAMBLA” as TDSWJS would call it) want 75% of league revenue to go to their pockets. Screw the thousands and thousands of hard working individuals who’s livelihoods are dependant on the league.

“We Just Can’t Solve This Mess”

Screw the players, I say. Somebody get some balls and solve this labor dispute. Maybe GWBush will bomb Canada after he bombs Iran, for I hear the NHL is developing wicked silver bullets from melted down Stanley Cup fragments. There are only 2 issues that Bettman (overpaid suit) and Goodenow (overpaid suit) should discuss. These two flunkies should get locked in a closet without food, water or pay until they reach a solution. It makes sense….no season = no pay.

Issue # 1: What qualifies as league revenue?

With the help of a third party auditor, figure out WTF qualifies as league revenue. Sorry, NHLPA, jacking up the price of the replica jersies to $250 to pay for your (insnae) salary does not make it a source of league revenue. Revenue, first and foremost, is ticket sales and TV contracts. Perhaps concessions can be included. But leave the merchandise out of this. The merchandising really is a side business that should profit on it’s own. The fans (Screw the Fans!) would surely love to see a reduction in the paraphanelia that we like to wear or give as gifts.

Issue #2: What % of league revenue should go to the players?

For a salary cap to work (any form of cap) it needs to be tied to a sensible number, like revenue. Fixed salary caps do not fluctuate with the market (or decline therof). The NHL and NHLPA can argue this % number until they are blue in the face…..so long as they don’t get food/water/pay until they have reached a consensus. With all the fixed numbers being thrown around ($42.5M or $49) and a sure-to-be-declining revenue base next season, the player take-home percentage will be in the neighborhood of 80%+. That is simply insane. Not even rock stars make that much of a percentage!

There…I’ve done it. I’ve added my rant to the thousands of other NHL rants out there. Now I can sleep better at night.