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In fact, line-height values have long been the topic that dare not speak its name.  I hope it is not too immodest of me to say that writing about these subjects took no small measure of personal courage.

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OHHHH SICK BURN.  Actually, I’m very slightly impressed by the attempted use of reverse psychology, even though I suspect the vast majority of people would just delete a comment like that without ever realizing it was a spambot.

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Your previous roommate, eh?

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Wild!

The spectrum and greenish frames image are derived from Project Octant Part 13: Bug Hunt, which is where I saw this effect thanks to the Page Up key and the browser window being just the right height.  I hope Shamus won’t be too irked that I swiped copies to repurpose here.

There was one thing we had to fight a bit to get, though, which was a garbage disposal for each sink bowl.  The plumber didn’t want to do it on ground of it adding weight to the sink.  Our response was, in effect: “We’ll have the sink remounted in ten years if necessary, but put in two disposals.”  So he did, and we’re really glad.

The replacement faucet, however, does not make us nearly as glad.  We decided to get a touch-activated faucet, settling on a Delta Addison single-handle faucet.  The touch activation was because many are the times we want to wash off hands that have just handled raw meat, and being able to touch-on the faucet with a forearm seemed like a great idea—and it is!  The problem is that nearly the entire faucet body, including the temperature/flow adjustment handle, is touch-sensitive.  The exception is the pull-out head, which is inert.

Thus, if you reach past the faucet and brush it by mistake, the water starts flowing.  This is true even if you bump the base of the faucet, which is annoying when you’re trying to wipe down the countertop around the faucet.  Even worse, changing the temperature or flow rate means using the touch-sensitive handle.  There’s evidently logic built into the faucet that’s meant to prevent the water from cutting off if you adjust the handle, but it only works about half the time.  So sometimes you make an adjustment and the flow cuts off, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Frankly, the inconsistency is more maddening than the unwanted cutoffs.  For example, I’ve developed an expectation that the flow will cut off after I use the handle.  So I’ll adjust and then immediately tap the faucet again so it cuts off and then comes back on tap.  Except if it didn’t cut off, then my tap cuts it off before I can stop the impulse and then I have to tap again.

Of course, any touch-sensitive faucet is a total luxury, and fortunately it’s easy to disable the touch feature—all we have to do is pull the batteries from the battery pack and it becomes a regular faucet.  The drawback there is that there are definitely times when you want to be able to turn on the water flow without smearing whatever’s all over your hands on the faucet.  (And with three kids, one of which is an infant, there are some things you definitely want to avoid smearing.)

The really incredible part is that these problems would be completely solved if only the neck of the faucet were touch-sensitive.  If the base, which is a separate part from the neck, and the adjustment handle were inert, easily 90% of our frustration would just vanish.  We could start the water flow by touching the neck and not worry about weirdness with the adjustment handle or when brushing the base.

If you’re thinking of installing a touch-sensitive faucet, I can’t recommend this one, unless of course a future version of it fixes the problems plaguing this one.  And I have no idea if there’s a better touch faucet on the market; for all I know, they’re all like this.  Definitely do your homework, and if at all possible play with a functioning model before taking the plunge.  The touch feature doesn’t add a ton to the price of the base faucet, but it’s enough to be annoying when you’re seriously considering disabling it.

We decided to take the opportunity to switch from incandescents to something far more energy-efficient.  Having used a number of CFLs around the house, I knew I wanted no part of that scene.  The subtle flicker they generate isn’t subtle enough for me, and I hate the wan quality of the light.  I’m not really thrilled with the warm-up time, either.

So we went with LEDs.  This wasn’t as straightforward as I might have liked, but we’ve now switched and are really happy to have done so.  I’d like to share the most important thing we learned in hopes of helping others through the transition.

It’s this:  if you’re going from “warm” incandescents straight to LED, find bulbs that have a color temperature of 2700K.  The first test bulb we bought was 3000K, and the difference was enormous.  By comparison to the incandescents, it was a harsh white.  In a Modernist design setting, like say at the Guggenheim, 3000K is probably a good choice.  In our wood-and-grain center-hall Colonial home, it was all wrong.

So I ran up to Home Depot and picked up a couple of EcoSmart BR30 diffuse floodlight bulbs, which are 2700K.  I put in one as a test, and when we flipped on the lights, I couldn’t see a difference in the light given off by the LED and incandescent bulbs.  The LED gave off a little bit more light than the incandescents around it (more on that in a minute) but the quality of light was essentially the same.  I put in the other test bulb with the same results.  Now we have all six cans fitted with the EcoSmarts, and the kitchen is just as warm as it was before.

One slightly noticeable difference is that there are more lumens bouncing around the kitchen than before, because we had 65W incandescents and the LEDs are equivalent to 75W (they actually consume 14W).  There weren’t any 65W equivalents in the floods, at least when I went looking, so I picked the 75W equivalents.  The new bulbs put out 800 lumens each, whereas the old ones likely shed 650-700 lumens each.  I do notice the difference, but it’s not so extra-bright that it’s bothersome.  That said, if I track down some bright white 2700Ks in the 650-700 lumen range, I may swap out half the kitchen bulbs in a staggered pattern to see how it feels.  Whichever ones I don’t use in the kitchen, I can always reuse in the cans in our basement.

The really noticeable difference is that when you flip the wall switch, it takes half a second for the bulbs to actually light up.  It’s a bit unusual when you switch straight from incandescent, but it’s no worse than the “on time” for most CFLs, and there’s no slow warm-up time for LEDs like you get with CFLs.  Once they’re on, they’re on.  And they don’t hum or flicker they way CFLs are prone to doing.

In closing, I just want to reiterate that color temperature is absolutely crucial, and if you’re coming over from incandescents, you want to be at 2700K.  Beyond that, match up the wattage as best you can, grit your teeth through the purchase price, and bask in the knowledge that your electricity bills will be lower, plus you shouldn’t have to replace the bulb any time in the next decade or even two.  That last part alone nearly makes LEDs worth the up-front cost.

If you have experiences or tips to share with regards to LED bulbs, by all means leave a comment!

What I really want is a push queue for documents and other data fragments.  I’ll call it “Q”, both for the obvious phonic match as well as to score a little ST:TNG joke plus make a Cleveland arena reference.  The latter two work because I sort of envision the application as being a very powerful being as well as a large gathering place for data.

The way I envision it, I drag a file onto the main Q window and it’s added to the general pool.  Every item in Q can be labeled, tagged, commented, and otherwise meta’d half to death.  The queue can be sorted or filtered on any number of things—file creation or modification date, Q addition date, file name, containing folder, tags, labels, and so forth.  Also, every item can be assigned a due date.

When I double-click on anything in Q, it opens the original file just as if I’d double-clicked its Finder icon.  (I’m an OS X user, but translate “Finder icon” to whatever the equivalent words are in your OS of choice.)  So really, Q is maintaining a pool of aliases to the original files, plus any associated metadata.  In that sense, it’s like iTunes set to not copy added music to the iTunes Music folder in your home directory.  Yes, some people run it that way.  And like iTunes, the ability to create smart lists based on tags and comments and such would be really awesome.

I’d find Q deeply useful because as new tasks come in/up, I could drag in whatever file(s) relate to those tasks so that I don’t lose track of what I have to do, quickly tag them and set a due date, and continue with whatever I was working on.  There’s room for tons of even more useful features like synchronization across multiple computers, the ability to accept any fragment of data at all as opposed to files, and more, but the core need is a task queue.

To illustrate this with some examples from my recent workflow, I would drag in a copy or two of the IRS W-9 form, a couple of e-mail messages, an invoice, and a Word document containing a set of interview questions.  The W-9s would get tagged by the clients’ names, the invoice would be tagged and flagged, and so on.  The real key here is that they’d be add-sorted by default, so I can work on them first-come-first-served.  Of course, other approaches would be possible with other sorts and filtering.

It seems like, with all the GTD mania floating around, someone would have come up with this solution already, but my searches have so far been fruitless.  I tried a couple of applications that seemed like they might be close to what I want, but they weren’t.  Am I just using the wrong search terms, or is this something that just doesn’t exist yet?

So, to more or less rip off Roger’s format, please comment to say:

1. Who are you (name and occupation)?  Who who, who who?
2. Where are you from?  (Feel free to add yourself to the Frappr map!)
3. How long have you been visiting this site, either directly or via RSS?
4. What was it that first brought you to meyerweb?
5. What would you like to read more (or less) about here on meyerweb, or read/hear from me in general?  Be as general or specific as you like.

Please note that, thanks to my spam defenses, any first-time commenters will have their contributions held in moderation until I approve them.  I’ll try to stay on top of that, but I will have to sleep on occasion, so you may have to be patient.  Apologies.

There’s more to this than just a simple evolution, I admit.  The first major change is the addition of navigation links across the top of each page.  For some time now, a lot of the material that people come here to find was buried, difficult to find unless you knew where you were going, or else on what terms to search.  By pointing directly to the topic areas I think will most interest visitors, I believe the site is now much easier to use.

The second major change is the layout of “metainformation” for each post (and comments on posts). In this area, I was heavily influenced by Khoi Vinh’s Subtraction 7.0, and I definitely owe him a debt of gratitude and inspiration.  As will be evident from even a casual comparison of the two sites, I took a general design idea Khoi uses and adapted it to my particular situation.  I think it works rather well.

The third notable change is a feature addition that I’ve been planning to add for a couple of months now. New to the site is a Syndication Feeds page which brings together (dare I say it aggregates?) all of meyerweb’s RSS feeds.  The real step forward here is the debut of two new “Thoughts From Eric” feeds, including a feed of just technical posts and a feed of just personal posts.  Now all of you who just come here for the technical stuff, and couldn’t care less about the person behind the site, can restrict your feed to screen out the worthless drivel.  Similarly, those of you who know me personally but don’t understand the eye-glazing technical stuff can filter out the confusing nerdity.

Even better, each of the three “Thoughts From Eric” feeds (including the traditional “show me everything!” feed) comes in one of two flavors: summary or full content.  At long last, I’ll find out if providing full-content feeds drives my bandwidth consumption up, or eases it down.

I’ve also established a new Redesign Watch feed, which is something I know will be of interest to many visitors.

I made other small refinements throughout, and odds are I’ll continue to tinker for a little while.  Overall, though, I feel I met my goal of making meyerweb a more friendly site to visit, and a more feature-rich environment.  Explore, and enjoy.

The general idea is to pick a two-word combination you can easily remember.  For example, suppose you’re a big fan of pizza and Pepsi, and would have no trouble remembering those words.  Perfect: use them the basis of your password.  No, you don’t make it “pizzaPepsi”—instead, you interleave the words.  That would yield “pPiezpzsai”.  It looks fairly random, and yet is very easy to recreate because the seed words are so easy to remember.  If you have trouble remembering the exact sequence of letters, you can just write the words down on a piece of scrap paper and follow along.

In cases where your two words have different lengths, you can always tack on numbers.  For example, maybe your seed words are “milkshake” and “fries”.  That would normally yield “mfirlikesshake”, which is okay, but you could tack the numbers “123″ onto “fries” to get “mfirlikessh1a2k3e”.  Alternatively, you could put the numbers at the beginning, so you get “m1i2l3kfsrhiaekse”.

I’ve found that when I start using a new password created this way, it takes me a few days to adapt to it.  I usually have the seed words written down some place handy during that training period.  Then my fingers take over, and from then on I can type it blindfolded in less than a second.  I don’t even think about the actual characters I’m typing: I just start, and the muscle memory kicks in.

So if you’re looking for a way to generate harder-to-crack passwords, there’s one possibility.  How about you—do you have any nifty human-friendly password-creation recipes?

Now, suppose the Disney database stores that biometric data.  Now they have that data tied to a credit card number, purchasing patterns in the parks, probably a home address and phone number, and so on.  Interesting.  Guess what?  As of 2 January 2005, Disney is doing that for all passes: day passes, park hopper passes, all kinds of passes.  Every kind of pass.  Get a pass, get your fingers scanned.  (Okay, yes, you can opt out and be required to show photo ID, but how many people will bother?)

That’s a whole lot of biometric data associated with a whole lot of consumer data.  Interesting, don’t you think?

Then, several days later, I flipped the comments back on.  In fifteen seconds, I had four more comment spams, and these got past the spam filter, as inevitably they will, sooner or later.  So I flipped the comments back off.  Now I’m feeling a profound disinclination to ever re-enable them.  Yes, that’s letting the bastards win, but I only have so much energy to fight them.

So that’s why comments have been turned off.  No estimates regarding when they’ll be back.

But I was looking to keep myself occupied for a few minutes, and I have very few games installed on the laptop, so Big Bang Chess got the nod.  I immediately cranked the AI setting all the way over to the left (thus elevating fast thinking above smart thinking) and started playing.  As I blew through a few quick matches, it occurred to me that there are a few things that a computer chess game could do to make me more interested.

Human-like turn lengths for the AI.

One of the things that most often frustrates me about computer chess is that the AI will make a move within seconds of my making a move.  More often, it will do so immediately.  Then I sit there, thinking my slow organic thoughts, feeling vaguely stupid for being such a slowpoke even though I know there’s no direct comparison.  Eventually, I make a move.  Instantly, the computer makes its move.  My first reaction is, “That was awfully quick.  Was he waiting for the move I just made?  Did I just walk into a trap?  What am I missing?”  And then I go hunting around the board, not sure where to look, not sure that there’s even anything to see.

I’m aware that the computer needs only a fraction of a second to run through possible moves and pick one.  If it’s a really advanced system, it may take 20 or 30 seconds as it looks five moves ahead.  If the computer took a human amount of time before moving, say a few minutes, I’d feel more at ease.  Yes, I know that means having the computer pick a move and then do absolutely nothing for a few minutes.  I don’t care.  This is purely a matter of acting in a manner that makes me more comfortable, and therefore more likely to enjoy the entire process.  The UI could have a “go ahead and move” button tucked away in a corner for me to use if I ever got tired of waiting.

I realized this was what I wanted when I asked myself why I was setting the AI to be quick at the expense of being smart.  Aside from making it more likely that I’d win, I realized it was because I felt like if the computer was going to move at a speed that, subjectively, seemed reckless and devoid of consideration, then its moves should reflect that.  And they do.  But even if I set the AI to be as smart as possible, it’s still going to seem to me like it’s moving without putting much thought into its game.

So put up a picture of an opponent who looks around the board, holds a chin in his or her hand as if pondering deep thoughts, leans back in reflection, and generally acts like it’s still thinking even though it picked a move three minutes ago.  It will make the game more enjoyable.

An option to show all of the squares that any enemy piece can reach.

Part of my problem in chess is that I don’t have the patience to figure out whether a given square I’m considering occupying (or piece I’m thinking about taking) is already covered.  That’s largely due to all the possible ways a square can be covered.  Is there a knight within striking distance?  Can a bishop jump over from the other side of the board?  And so on.  It isn’t that I can’t manage this mental feat.  It’s just that I have little interest in doing so for every single last square that interests me, turn after turn.  So if a game tinted all enemy-reachable squares red, for example, I’d have a much better grasp of the strategic situation.

This would obviously be an option in the preferences, albeit one I’d never disable.  Having a similar “tint all squares my pieces can reach” option would be cool, too.  It would be even better if the amount of tinting of a square was based on the number of pieces that could move to it.

This kind of visualization would keep me from making stupid mistakes, and mean a lot less use of the “Undo move” option.  Who knows?  Maybe with enough play in that mode, I’d eventually reach the point where I didn’t need the help.

The ability to somehow create variant games.

Back in high school, I was a member of the chess club, mostly because a lot of my friends were members.  Also because I still bought into the idea that the really smart people played chess, and I wanted to be really smart.  We had a few variant games that I remember fondly, and it would be fun to have them reborn.  My favorite was Nuclear Chess.  In that one, any piece could instead of moving choose to self-detonate, destroying itself and any pieces in adjacent squares.  (Of course, if you did that with your King, you lost the game—unless you took out the opposing King, in which case it was a tie.)  And then there was Thermonuclear Chess, where any piece could make a normal move and then immediately detonate.

They were quick games.  Lots of fun, too.  The nature of the game changes dramatically when you have to make sure an opposing piece can’t just plow into your pawn line and immediately detonate, thus wiping out your King in the process.

Anyway, I’m not entirely sure how one could open up a chess game’s architecture to allow the creation of variants like that, but I’d love to see it happen.

Just some random thoughts on a game I don’t really like.  If you want to talk Checkers, though…

So the bookmarklet takes your ‘master password’, crosses it with the domain of the site, and generates an MD5-based result.  So let’s assume meyerweb had accounts.  You would fire off the bookmarklet, which would ask you type in your master password.  So let’s say your master password is ‘passwd’; this is combined with www.meyerweb.com and the resulting password is 68573552.  On the other hand, if you just use meyerweb.com, the result is 92938a6e

Now, while those aren’t the most secure possible passwords, they’re a lot more secure than ‘passwd’.  So I’d like to make use of this bookmarklet.  Fine, great.  The problem is what you just saw: the generated password changes if the full host and domain name bit changes.  This could be a problem if, say, amazon.com suddenly starts routing all logins to a server named login.amazon.com… or vice versa.  So I’d like to adapt the bookmarklet so it grabs just the domain and TLD (I probably got those terms wrong; I usually do) of a URL.  Problem is, I can’t write regular expressions for squat.  I don’t even understand how the regexp in the existing bookmarklet works.

So, a little help, please?  Given the form http://www.domain.tld/blah/foo/wow.xyz, I want the regexp to return just domain.tld.  Just leave a solution in the comments, and you’ll earn the respect and adulation of your peers.  At least those of them who read the comments.

Let the “valid and well-formed” jokes commence.

It was, of course, too obvious an idea for me to have had it first: Why Not? has a post proposing the same idea just over a year ago.  The followup comments pretty much covered all the related ideas that came up as well.

So while it turns out I don’t get points for having the idea first, the question still remains: why don’t ATM cards (and the ATMs themselves) offer this capability?

Update: I forgot to enable comments, so a few people have e-mailed me to say that Bank of America ATMs do in fact let you set your language preferences, along with several other options.  Apparently these settings only carry to other BoA ATMs, so I suspect it’s data being stored in their database instead of being written onto the card itself.  It would be nicer if the card could carry that information and have it recognized by all ATMs, but I suppose we get these things one step at a time.