It seems like today is "Firefox freak-out" day. It was doing this thing where I would use the mouse wheel to scroll the page up, but then when I moved the mouse cursor at all the whole page would jump back down to the bottom?!

[Update: Oh, it might be something like the hateful Windows and hateful Microsoft Intellimouse action I sometimes see: it gets into a mode where it thinks I have a button down still, and as I move the mouse the drag-selection is going crazy. I guess the bottom line is that all technology sucks, especially when there is so much technology involved that you can't figure out exactly which one is the root cause of the bloody suck.]

Know what is really cool about Blogger? The fact that when I click to make a new post, even with all the bloody fancy JavaScript crap it does [which slows down my laptop computer to a crawl, making editing hell, thanks] it doesn't put the focus in the text box, so you can't just start typing. No, first you have to use the mouse to click in the text box. Yay!

Pretty nifty how sometimes Firefox has a blinking cursor in the address field, and the app has focus, but when I type nothing happens. I have to click in the address field to get it going. I have no idea how it got in that state.

Hey! Genius! Here's a freaking great suggestion: don't send a broken URL as your resume. Duh!

(Yes, I'm talking to myself.)

It is pretty neat how the Nokia phone I have (OK, it is the free one, so I guess it sucks?) has removed the physical volume buttons (compared to the older Nokia phone I had) and replaced them with virtual ones you have to get to via menu. Which means I am pretty much guaranteed to never be able to change the freaking volume while actually talking with somebody else. Which, you know, might be the main bloody time I would want to change the bloody volume?!

Wow! I just had the most wonderful experience with Blogger while trying to moderate comments. Like, it was doing some Ajaxy JavaScripty spasms, redrawing the screen, moving things out from under me, etc. so that somehow in the end I managed to approve both, even though I had only barely read one.

So then I'm trying to see the history of comments so I can see what I approved, but I don't see a way to find that.

summary: I still think the Blogger UI is basically really freaking annoying! (But, as opposed to the alternatives I've tried, at least the servers are mostly up and working.)

Cool! Google Maps has made it so when I right-click on the image of the map, I don't get the usual Firefox right-click choices. Instead I only get the Google choices. So I can't even copy the image that way. Awwww, yeaaaah!

It isn't just the idea. And it isn't even executing on the idea. It is executing something that doesn't suck, which is apparently beyond us all. Oh, the humanity.

If you have a tabbed UI (like, say, Firefox) then I think you should have a right-click option somewhere (like, on the tab itself) to let you convert a tab into a separate window, and back.

I love it when a site lets you search, then when you try to use the results it makes you register, then when you are done registering your search results are dead and gone and you have to start all over again. That's bea00tiful.

It is pretty funny that the internal site you use to apply for internal jobs at a certain company is actually a piece of stinking poo. Like, when you go to edit your 'profile' it doesn't give you the old version, it gives you a blank form so you have to re-enter all of your basic data, not just tweak a resume. Hayte.

I love web sites that have fixed-width text. Especially when it is docs for open source, since it just sorta underscores that you are getting what you paid for.

All I'm saying is, Blogger's information architecture and navigation for the blog maintainer is... crap. Crap in too many tired painful sad boring angry ways for me to want to get into it. But anybody who isn't a computer apologist should notice the pain within like 10 minutes of actually trying to use and moderate and edit their own blog, I should think.

(A particular example: while viewing my own blog I'd like to be able to directly edit a post. Not have to click through a zillion things to do that.)

So Blogger does this genius thing where I post a new post, then click View Blog... and the post isn't there until I manually refresh the blog page. Sometimes. I guess there's some race condition on the post actually being posted?

Simply downloading a file in FireFox can be an exercise in blood-pressure-raising frustration. For some reason the download dialog box's "OK" button can be grayed out for a long time, although the Cancel button is active. There isn't any note as to why the bloody button that I want is grayed out for ~30+ seconds. Is this not usability insanity?

Pretty funny how Google Maps moves the zoom tool around a bit as the page loads. So if you try to click on the "minus" to zoom out one step, often it has adjusted things so that it is actually one of the last most zoomed out tick marks instead that you click on. So you get the view that's from outer space, showing all continents in all their glory. So that's nifty keen useful user-friendly right.

One of the other neat things about open source projects is how they a lot of the time have a forums section of their site. And that the forums section is pretty much crap when it comes to e.g. being able to search for stuff. So not only is there no official documentation, but you can't even find the stuff that might be in the forums that might help you. Neat!

Super cool how Camino has stopped actually adding bookmarks. It doesn't tell me that; it merrily looks like it is adding them... but they aren't actually in my list of bookmarks. So that's pretty great.

[ha ha ha it is also cool how Camino's spell-check doesn't know about... Camino!]

It is nice and all to be able to have the Windows (or X, or Mac) desktop across several monitors. What sucks is the distinct lack of features which you then pretty much immediately want. Things like being able to in one click move a window between monitors, rather than having to drag them around everywhere. Or like having Alt-Tab cause the newly focused window's border to hilight-glow for a moment if it is on a different monitor than the previously selected one. Or having the bloody Windows machine not freak out when you dock/undock your laptop; I think only like one out of 4 Windows laptops I've used didn't freak out like that all the time. And then once or twice it did anyway.

Pretty cool how I told Zillow to only find SFRs and yet it is showing me listings that have an appartment number in their address.

Oh my freaking god. I am dragging the Zillow map around and "flags" (I think they are actually supposed to represent the for sale signs) for properties are appearing and disappearing as I move around! That's awesome customer service.

Trulia is pretty impressive. About half the time when I try to change the search, it just freaks out and returns zero hits from then on. This actually also happens sometimes with the Y! real estate site as well. Pretty nifty, but I guess we get what we pay for.

Is there no shame any more?

I love how several Open Source projects have this approach of basically not
having any docs and then charging you for information.

Suddenly finding out that you are old is a bit of a surprise. I went to buy a small pizza today and was freaked out that it cost $15. I mean, I still have it in my head from college days that you can get a large pepperoni pizza for ten bucks. Heck, six if you have a coupon. And you get free soda pop with it. Delivered. Within 30 minutes or it is free. (The older you get, the faster time flies. Which is the only way I can possibly see people working a 'steady' job for so bloody long.)

We've lost the Internet again; I feel like fairly often Google's results are along the lines of the sad old days of internet search: no top hits are spot-on what I want. I don't know what leads to this, but it is sad.

It seems like most of the real estate sites are run by people who like to have sexual intercourse with swine. Y! won't show you the photos unless you register, but if you copy-and-paste the MLS # into www.mlslistings.com's search then you can get the photos for free. So there's no real point in Y! doing that other than to be jerks. Similar thing with Trulia: they don't give you the MLS # but you can copy and paste the address into other search engines to get it.

So the only thing they are doing is explicitly trying to make your life harder. Which is exactly what I want from my information providers. Yup.

Pardon my French, but Holy Crap! Trulia also somehow managed to make modify-click-to-open-in-new-tab downgraded into just acting like a normal click. That's completely awesome!

It is neat how Trulia requires JavaScript but doesn't tell you that so you can laboriously set up your search and then have it forget it all. And then you figure out it needs JS so you turn it on and start all over again. That's some pretty gosh-darned sweet usability.

The other thing I'm really loving about real estate web sites is how a lot of them were created by people who apparently don't have any clue about setting width and height values so that things progressively load and draw in-place, rather than causing the whole page to shift around like a drunken freak.

The Yahoo! real estate search front page lets you type in an arbitrary price range, and it lets you pick things like 1.5+ bathrooms. When you get into the actual search results and refinement you discover that the prices can only be set in increments of $50,000 and that the bathroom count doesn't support fractional values. So that's really great usability design work, there.

I really cannot describe how bad I think Eclipse is. There's a zillion things, but as one particular example that I think is my favourite: when you do a text search, the results do not show you the text of the matching line. So you can't skim the results. No, apparently, you have to click on each one in turn, opening up all those files.

I mean, why would you want features like the ability to expand-all or collapse-all entries of a list in your debugger? That's why IntelliJ is so great, it doesn't bother you with those far-fetched features you'd never actually want.

On hayting JavaScript requirements: I was trying to get to this blog with Lynx (I know, I know) and log in. There was no login link visible in Lynx but there was a horrible iframe url at the top of the page, so I "clicked" on that. It took me to a page that said I had successfully reported the blog as having questionable content. OK, that's actually pretty funny.

Zillow says "page not found" when you click on what is actually their own link that happens to require JavaScript. Nice, sensible, accurate, helpful error there!

Gmail sucks in many, many - many! - ways, but it is "free" and has less hateful annoying than the Y! offerings. One particularly annoyin thing with Gmail is that if I special-click-to-open-in-new-tab on a link in email, it still opens up an extra whole window as well as the new tab. [at least in Camino OS X.]

So, like, whatever happened to the idea of blog entries having titles, in Blogger?

Argh. Gotta love the way OS X, or at least Camino on OS X - although I feel like I've seen this problem with other apps too, implements the "maximize" button on the window title bar pathetically. Like, I click on it and nothing happens! Whatever. So I have a scroll bar on the right-hand side that fails to use Fitts' Law because apparently there is like one pixel there on the edge so trying to scroll ends up selecting the desktop instead. Augh!

Took the words right out of my mouth, except for how I never managed to put it together verbally, ever.

I appreciate that nobody doesn't answer their cell phone in the library. I also appreciate that nobody sets their cell phone ring tone to "silent" when they are at the library.

I was stuck at the Mountain View central downtown library today. You know, the city Google lives in? Their public access computers were... hatefully painfully evilly bad Windows XP installations that were in theory locked down. The apps which they used to in theory lock them down were all broken, kept throwing up dialog boxes about how they'd crashed; like at one point there was what seemed to be an infinite regression of the same error, a flood of dialog boxes. I had to power the cycle that machine twice and then give up and move to a different one that was also but a little less busted! And somehow they'd managed to turn Pentium 4 machines into molasses! Genius! Ship it! Hayte!

As if nobody has ever heard of Linux distros.

I went looking for something else with which to blog since Blogger sucks in several un-fun ways. But that other free size was down all the time so I couldn't really do any posting to it, so much. (Boon or bane? Discuss!) So I guess I'm back :-(