The washroom experience
Blog Instead of being asleep at 14:12 on 18 March 2015, kitt created this:Two things are becoming more and more common and more and more problematic with bathroom UX, and those are automatic flushers and poorly placed dryers or towels. Whoo! Nice number of ands in that sentence.
Every automatic flusher flushes no fewer than three times when I use them. Something about my magical placement or movement or my butt triggers a FLUSH FLUSH FLUSH reaction with the things, sometimes taking personal effects down the drain with the water. My dislike of auto-flushing toilets is likely going to become legendary, a one person campaign to restore personal responsibility by nondestructively disabling automatic flush sensors and teaching people how to PUSH THE LITTLE BUTTON for a flush.
And then there are the paper towel dispensers that require you to lift your arms above your head to retrieve a paper towel. Or the hand dryer that requires you to lift your arms up to use, THEREBY CAUSING ALL THE WATER ON YOUR HANDS TO ROLL INTO YOUR SLEEVES as you lift your arms. Come on, install them lower. Not that hard.
For a room that just about everyone uses every day, the experience could be so much more pleasant. The design could blend into functionality in an unnoticeable way, so as to be perfect.
Today is not the day for that design, says the accidental triple flusher with the wet sleeves.
Madame Bovary
Book Notes Instead of being asleep at 13:29 on 17 March 2015, kitt created this:
Okay, this is a book that you can find plot summaries, historical references, and literary commentary all over the internet. Some kids were required to read it in school, some into minute detail (looking at you, Wardog). Its social significance and public reception are well documented. Here, have a Wikipedia page on the book.
Madame Bovary has been seen as a commentary on the folly of aspirations which can be never be realised, or a belief in the validity of a self-satisfied, deluded personal culture, termed 'bourgeois' and associated with Flaubert's period. For Vargas Llosa, 'Emma's drama is the gap between illusion and reality, the distance between desire and its fulfillment' and as such shows 'the first signs of alienation that a century later will take hold of men and women in industrial societies'.[12] However, the novel is not simply about a woman's dreamy romanticism. While it is true that Emma is lost in delusions, Charles is also unable to grasp reality or to understand Emma's needs and desires.
As for reviewing the book's contents, I related to the book more than I was expecting to relate to it. I found Emma to be annoying and melodramatic in a large number of her actions, but the motivations, ugh, I understood too much. I rather wish I had read the book years ago. The translation I read was by Geoffrey Wall. I read a few parts by another translator, and kept coming back to Wall's translation. It worked well for me. It was engaging enough for me to be able to focus on it for more than 30 minutes on the treadmill without noticing the time go by, which seems to be my new measure of "good" in books.
I recommend reading this book.
That all said, what I do not recommend is the crap binding of the copy I read. I love books. This has been well established. I love physical books. The heft of them, the smell of them, the entire experience of them. I buy hardback books if I have the opportunity, because the experience of them is superior to trade paperback books, which is superior to paperback books. As a result, I bought a copy of Madame Bovary, or the "Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition" edition of the book.
Penguin Books and Random House should be completely embarrassed at publishing this binding. It was CRAP. Hardcover books should be stitched and open flat. This binding was a glued binding, a trade paperback with a hard cover. It is complete and total shit. It doesn't open well, doesn't stay open. The spine cracked. The printing appears to be from a laser printer. All of it was a disappointing experience.
This particular binding of this book, and all "of Penguin’s beautiful hardcover Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design" books should be removed from the shelves and burned in a great bonfire. They are crap.
I'm hoping to find a good hardback binding of Wall's translation. Something worth keeping on the shelf. My current copy is not.
I do not recommend the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition edition of this book.
I swear, Rails is gaslighting me
Blog kitt decided around 08:12 on 17 March 2015 to publish this:I add a test and run it. It fails. Fine, I walk through the code, step by step, line by line, and figure out where the error is.
I add unneeded parentheses to the return statement and run the test again. It passes. Great!
I remove the unneeded parentheses, and run the test. It fails. Okay.
I put the parentheses back in, commit the change, and create a pull request.
The reviews come in. These parentheses aren't needed.
Yes, they are, it fails without them.
Really?
Um, let me confirm.
Remove the parentheses. Run test. It passes. GDI.
Commit the changes, push the updated pull request, all the tests pass.
I look dumb for having added the extra parentheses.
Two days later, value being set is nil in an each loop. Okay, so I add a check to assign a variable only if the value being set isn't nil. Seems reasonable. Except the each never executes if the each value is nil, so the loop happens only once and the value will never be nil.
EXCEPT THAT I WALKED THAT CODE. I checked that it was running in a loop, that it was a nil value, that's why I put that check in the code in the first place. I killed spring before running that test to confirm. Remove the nil check, it is sent nil and the test fails. Put the nil check in and it isn't nil, and the test passes. UNTIL I SUBMIT A PR. Then, the nil check isn't used at all.
Twice in four days, I look like an idiot for describing what I see, even though it doesn't match what I believe should happen. Becoming rather frustrating to be gaslighted by a f'ing application framework.
And open to suggestions on how to stop this gaslighting. Maybe calling it out will help.
Block pinterest from pinning your stuff
Blog kitt decided around 18:00 on 16 March 2015 to publish this:From Pinterest's docs, you can specifically prevent pinterest from pinning content from your site.
<meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" />
Mine reads thus:
<meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" description="Posting to Pinterest from ki.tt is a violation of Pinterest's ToS. Why are you unlawfully trying to put my stuff there?" />
Live it or lose it
Blog kitt decided around 10:57 on 16 March 2015 to publish this:An aunt of mine had her birthday this past weekend. She's the next generation older than I am, so I asked her,
Now that you've hit middle age, what advice can you give me?
I love her answer:
Live it or lose it.
Live the life you have, make it a good one, or lose the opportunity to make a life worth living.
Yep. My aunt (all of them) is awesome.