Too Much Going On

img046.jpg, originally uploaded by Bellyrub.

This is the "self-checkout" machine I confronted upon leaving the new, huge Stop n Shop (though a letter already burned out so it's the Stop n hop). What an exercise in ineffciency. No one, myself included, made it through this thing without assistance from an employee. There are three screens, including a signature screen so small and tight against the payment machine that you have to mash your fist against the machine to make your signature legible. Successive actions always require jumping to another screen. You have to specifiy credit or debit twice, in two different places. If you so much as lay a finger on the conveyor belt, the system thinks its an unscanned item and goes into lockdown. So why did I use it? Because there was only one human cashier working. Soon there will be none.

Questionable Design

img045.jpg, originally uploaded by Bellyrub.

For a one-day roving tool sale. Not necessarily "bad" design, just worthy of discussion. A bit cluttered, to say the least, but where the deals are good enough people will scan through these hundreds of thumbnails. Doing so made me a little dizzy. But a $90 weed wacker for $50? I'm there.

Gee, I thought planes from the UK were the targets (headline from CNN video, no direct link):

Statement

Pres. Bush makes a statement on the disruption of a plot to blow up planes from Green Bay, WI.

Poor Choice of Words

Angry? AOL doesn't have the right to be angry. That's reserved for its customers. Surely, he meant to say, "ashamed" (from the NYT):

(AOL spokesman) Weinstein said he knew of no other cases thus far where users had been identified as a result of the search data, but he was not surprised. "“We acknowledged that there was information that could potentially lead to people being identified, which is why we were so angry."

AOL is taking down their walled garden years too late, and they still cling to their outdated model. And now this. Fortunately, there's a silver lining (from the Times):

Ms. Arnold says she loves online research, but the disclosure of her searches has left her disillusioned. In response, she plans to drop her AOL subscription. "We all have a right to privacy,"” she said. "“Nobody should have found this all out”"