OK, just about everything is sorted for America, and I'm finally shifting from feeling harried to feeling really excited :)
Rants:
* It seems to me most people have a net worth of more than £20 but less than £20,000,000. If so, why do most travel insurance quotes pay emergency medical costs, but also offer you a pittance in compensation for your time if you are delayed by N hours?
* You know Cambridge buses? Despite a few nice aspects, they still suck. Suck! Suck! Suck!
* Websites with arbitrary and unnescessary timeouts. "Look, there's about three options on this form. And they're not sensitive. Feel free to stuff them into a cookie if you like. Whatever. But please don't just randomly reset the form whenever I want to look something up."
* Primary keys which don't identify what they are. "Oh, I'm sorry sir, we wanted your cusotmer preference identificaiton number. You seem to have accidentally given us your cusotmer identificaiton preference number. We'll have to start over." If you're designing one number, then fine. But most people engage in commerce with more than one company, and have to be entered in more than one database table in that company. You wouldn't even need to waste any entropy on it, you could just put a distintive part of the number in brackets, like phone numbers do, or god forbid, give it a helpful name. Unfortunately, the more important the number, the more the designer thinks "Oh, they won't get their customer number muddled up with any of the others, it's so important." Well, guess what. They didn't know that beforehand.
Things I'm looking forward to (not all of which I'll necessarily do):
* Hearing American accents
* Seeing New York
* Seeing Redwoods
* Seeing the Statue of Liberty
* Seeing Golden Gate Bridge
* Seeing Rachel
* Restaurants in New York or California
* Seeing Jen
* Seeing Darcy and Griselda and bay area science fiction geekdom
* Seeing Anna and Robert
Other things that have made me happy recently:
* Sunshine
* Warm rain
* Playing with electronics
* Seeing GURPS vorkosigan being published (still not read the PDF yet, though!)
* Schlock Mercenary cartoon
* Mitchell and Webb
* Interesting arguments on LJ
Rants:
* It seems to me most people have a net worth of more than £20 but less than £20,000,000. If so, why do most travel insurance quotes pay emergency medical costs, but also offer you a pittance in compensation for your time if you are delayed by N hours?
* You know Cambridge buses? Despite a few nice aspects, they still suck. Suck! Suck! Suck!
* Websites with arbitrary and unnescessary timeouts. "Look, there's about three options on this form. And they're not sensitive. Feel free to stuff them into a cookie if you like. Whatever. But please don't just randomly reset the form whenever I want to look something up."
* Primary keys which don't identify what they are. "Oh, I'm sorry sir, we wanted your cusotmer preference identificaiton number. You seem to have accidentally given us your cusotmer identificaiton preference number. We'll have to start over." If you're designing one number, then fine. But most people engage in commerce with more than one company, and have to be entered in more than one database table in that company. You wouldn't even need to waste any entropy on it, you could just put a distintive part of the number in brackets, like phone numbers do, or god forbid, give it a helpful name. Unfortunately, the more important the number, the more the designer thinks "Oh, they won't get their customer number muddled up with any of the others, it's so important." Well, guess what. They didn't know that beforehand.
Things I'm looking forward to (not all of which I'll necessarily do):
* Hearing American accents
* Seeing New York
* Seeing Redwoods
* Seeing the Statue of Liberty
* Seeing Golden Gate Bridge
* Seeing Rachel
* Restaurants in New York or California
* Seeing Jen
* Seeing Darcy and Griselda and bay area science fiction geekdom
* Seeing Anna and Robert
Other things that have made me happy recently:
* Sunshine
* Warm rain
* Playing with electronics
* Seeing GURPS vorkosigan being published (still not read the PDF yet, though!)
* Schlock Mercenary cartoon
* Mitchell and Webb
* Interesting arguments on LJ