Kyle Smith

As part of the preparations for our move to the Boston area next month, I’ve been shredding old receipts I had saved for some reason. It was rather enlightening to look back on what I’ve been doing for the last two and a half years.

Most of the receipts from 2005 were from Potsdam favorites such as Eben’s Hearth (big beers & wings), Maxfield’s (beer), P&C (beer), T&R (liquor), and Sergi’s (fat bags). Looking back on it, I can see where my spending and temporary drinking habits started, as illustrated by the daily Maxfield’s receipts between April 1st and May 8th and the weekly trips to Eben’s before COSI meetings that spring.

You can even see how my habits have changed. There are plenty of receipts from Starbucks and the Eveready Diner in the fall of 2005.

There are better ones too, like December 17, 2005, when Stacy and I went to New York City for the first time. The receipts reveal the plans for the day: a train ride down & back, coffee at Dean and Deluca, cheesecake at Roxy’s in Times Square, dinner at Planet Hollywood (it sucked), a quick stop at Starbucks, and then Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway. Reading through them the whole trip came back to me.

Stacy always asks why I keep receipts. Now I have an answer. Because they’re just as revealing as photographs.

One of the main selling points of software as a service is that people don’t want to maintain their software and don’t want to worry about security. There are plenty of services out there today that people love to use — Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Notebook, Twitter, Flickr, IBM’s Dogear and Plaxo.

I’ve had my own domain name and web site for almost 8 years and in recent years I’ve grown tired of maintaining the various software packages that my site is comprised of — WordPress, Gallery 2, WikkaWiki, and others. Software as a service is a partial solution to this.

The problem with the current generation of services is none of them are integrated all that well. I don’t really want 7 distinct services to manage and keep up to date. It’s no more efficient than maintaining the software myself.

I would like to see those service providers team up with web hosting companies to offer an integrated solution where the hosting provider provides a breadboard of sorts that the services plug into. The hosting provider would be responsible for my site, including billing, but the actual functionality of the site would be provided by the service providers.

If that vision isn’t working for you, think of the hosting provider as an EJB container (which provides all the common supporting services you want) and the service providers as the developers of the add-on components (the actual EJBs) that are deployed in the container. I like this notion even more, because it suggests that if I’m not happy with a particular service, I can swap it out for another that’s written to the same API.

No more building your site from scratch and then trying to integrate it. You log in to your hosting provider, pick your domain registrar, your webmail provider (Gmail, Squirrel Mail), your photo management solution (Flickr, Picassa, Gallery), etc. and then click the Make It So button.

A couple of months ago I was complaining to people that I hadn’t see any good movies playing at Upstate Films this year. Last year it seemed like I was in Rhinebeck for a movie at Upstate every week. Well, that drought has ended. Last month Doug, Rahul, Stacy and I went to see An Inconvenient Truth, which I think we all agreed was pretty good, although some bits of it seemed a little unnecessary.

Last night Stacy and I went there to see Who Killed the Electric Car?, which we both thought was excellent and I would highly recommend that you all go see it if you have the opportunity. For those of you in the Poughkeepsie area, it’s playing at Upstate through Thursday (7/20).
Over the next two months I’m going to have to go back there to see Army of Shadows, Little Miss Sunshine, and A Scanner Darkly.

Oh… Been a while so, photos from Georgia and Florida in early May, updated apartment photos (although already outdated!), and black and white photos I took and scanned a few months ago. Also, good books I’ve read so far this year: The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, Sync by Steven Strogatz, The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, and Emotional Design / The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman.

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I feel bad for my current housemate Jason. This evening he had to listen to me utter a near-constant stream of obscenities and insults as I attempted to navigate IBM’s Opportunities Marketplace.

My intentions were rather simple. At first I just wanted to see what positions IBM had open around the country. Later, after browsing through several hundred openings I decided, “What the heck, I might as well apply to the three that sound really interesting.”

As the experience progressed, the list of problems only grew. It started with little things, like not preselecting options from drop down lists (when there was only a single option available!). Then I started to notice just how slow the site was. And how all the results had JavaScript links so I couldn’t just open interesting positions in new tabs in the background as I made my way down the list. The inability to use the Back, Forward, or Refresh buttons. The jobs that disappeared from my “Jobs Basket”. Queries being lost, forcing me to start from scratch.

Later on when I decided to actually apply the real frustration set in. Initially I was told that my account didn’t exist. Then the password for my new account didn’t meet IBM’s strict standards. Then suddenly my email address was already in use and I already had an account. After signing in and uploading a PDF copy of my resume, the tool failed to parse it, forcing me to go through 12+ pages worth of forms.

Eventually I reached a “how did you year about us?” field that was required. Trying to be nice, I attempted to mention that I originally learned about the company from a career fair, but PeopleSoft seemed to think that I was wrong and couldn’t have heard about IBM at a career fair and took me to a search page where I tried half a dozen combinations of words that lead to the same result: “No results found”. This was the final straw. Three hours of dealing with a slow, unintuitive user interfaced finally got to me and after an extensive stream of obscenities, I gave up. I couldn’t take another 11 pages of jumping through hoops for some brainless software application.

Cooper says that product interaction should not fail any of these tests: (1) not make users feel stupid, (2) not make mistakes, (3) allow users to get an adequate amount of work done, and (4) allow users to have fun. I don’t think IBM’s Opportunity Marketplace passed a single one of those rules.

I told Mike that I tried to fill out the feedback form for the application. I tried, I really did. For 15 minutes I tried to explain everything that was wrong with the application, but in the end, I couldn’t find the words. Did no one conduct any “hallway” or “50 cent” usability tests? Could a software developer somewhere actually have found the application usable?

Joel says it slightly differently: “A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.” This is a perfect illustration of poorly-designed software. I think most would consider me extremely savvy when it comes to technology and I shamefully admit that I’m an apologist (to use Cooper’s term), but as soon as I started using the site I felt constrained by the application and got the feeling that I was somehow wrong (I know the abbreviation and spelling for Vermont, I’ve lived there for 20 friggin’ years!). That’s not how a user should feel.

The sad part is that it’s not just IBM that uses shitacular PeopleSoft applications. Clarkson’s PeopleSoft Self Service application is equally horrifying. Where does the horror originate from? Bad application programmers abusing a framework, or is the PeopleSoft appliction/framework the source?

I think one of my deepest fears about being a software developer is that some day I might end up with a job working for a company that seems to care as little about the usability of their applications as IBM*, Clarkson, and others do. It’s almost equally as terrifying to be a tester for an unusable application because most of the time you don’t have a say about the overall quality of a product — the only thing you can do is hope that you somehow make a product suck less by opening defects against it.

*I don’t mean to pick solely on IBM, but those were applications and technologies that I have to use on a daily basis and so they easily came to mind.

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Jim, I would help you out, but I prefer to use existing grid services rather than write them. Plus, most of the cool ideas I currently have about improving the grid/Globus are rated IBM confidential.

And Randy, you’re right that I would have tried something. If I had known you went I would have jumped you on the way back and thrown your juice over the building.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I give you, the return of New Guy. That’s right, New Guy lives!

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In order to buck the trend that has started this week, I will not comment on how insignificant my day was. Instead, I will simply relate the following deep thought:

I was reading again today and I came across this neat quotation in reference to T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which I vaguely recall reading once before when I was in elementary or middle school:

The problem with mermaids, I mused, was that they always have to return to the sea.

The quote refers to the protagonist of the story being attracted to a girl that he saw as being a siren or mermaid and while it’s okay to be attracted to such a girl, you’ll never get to be with her for very long because eventually her need to return to the sea will arise.

Not entirely sure why that caught my attention, but it did. Perhaps it was because I was busy writing practice essays today and was in the mood to analyze and interpret some literature. Sorry if it doesn’t involve hacking on some code or reading a techno-thriller, but those are the breaks…

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Be thankful that we aren’t incoming schoolies and that the rooms in Farisee have doorknobs instead of handles.

This evening Tim once again decided to be a dickhead and lock Ray out of their room. Eli and I decided to aid Ray in his revenge. What can a group of intelligent college-age students do when facing a locked door?

Why, lock it from the other side! We initially took a heavy-duty broom handle and duct-taped it around the handle of the door. While the handles swing independently, the tape and broom handle prevent the door from opening. We then reinforced it with an aluminum bar we found in the closet and then began covering the remaining space with tape as a further annoyance. Later in order to fill the gaps at the bottom we then taped the seat cushions from two chairs over the opening.

No masterpiece would be complete without a soundtrack. We determined that the ideal soundtrack for the occasion would be an endless loop of Leslie Gore’s Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows, Reggie and the Full Effect doing Dwarf Invasion and Neil Diamond’s Forever In Blue Jeans. Perhaps some Wayne Newton too.

Update: Phase 2 has begun. We control the fuse box. The contractors that built this complex were very meticulous in their documentation. You have 15 minutes to comply.

Update 2: Phase 3 has begun. The soundtrack is reality. Subject still refuses to recognize the futility of the situation.

Update 3: Phase 3 has successfully enraged the subject. We are the better men. We have secretly removed everything unbeknownst to him.

Been a few days since I’ve posted anything. Mostly due to the fact that nothing all that noteworthy has occurred. Wednesday night the entire house was going to go out to dinner, as I don’t think the seven of us have been in the same room since we’ve been here, but financial considerations caused several people to not go. Tim, John, Eli and I decided we still wanted to go out and ended up at Ruby Tuesday’s because we figured it’d be cheap. How wrong we were. Drinks were 2 for 1 so we had several rounds (read: $24 worth) and then we decided to get dessert too. I originally went for the “chocolate shortcake” but the waitress called me out and told me I should get the “tallcake” version of it. Little did I know it was going to be this fucking big:

I did manage to finish it, and then the four of us staggered back to Marist. I don’t really remember what happened Thursday. As Eli and Matt have mentioned, Greg Lacey organized the annual Clarkson lunch. Thursday also happened to be Jason’s last day. We also had to present our project to our second line manager, which went extremely well. It helps to have several managers in your pocket.

On Friday Eli and I cajoled our manager, Tony, into going out to lunch with us at Giacomo’s, one of the better pizza places in the area. Friday night Eli, Doug and I went to Noah’s Ark for half-priced drinks and free wings. We ran into a bunch of Doug’s friends and several hours of cards ensued. Afterwards we went back to Doug’s place to continue drinking and watching movies. Unfortunately the two ladies had to split around one or two because one was expected home in good condition. Luckily for Eli and I, Doug had numerous couches to crash on.

Saturday afternoon after recovering the three of us decided to go see Dodgeball at the 2nd run theater and then hit up the Chinese buffet, which turned out to be an excellent idea.

Today was mostly spent in bed, watching old movies (Sahara and Real Genius), exploring Pok, and reading a book of PKD’s collected short stories, which I’ve come to love. Each of the 10 or so stories I’ve read all have a particular moral being espoused or a quirky ending — just what I like in something I read. Now if only I could find a class at Clarkson other than GFI that would let me read stuff like this.

To conclude, I thought I’d link to a particularly amusing post from Slashdot the other day in regards to the exploits in libpng. One moron described a particularly devastating “exploit” in which a 190Kpixel by 190Kpixel image expands to 2GB of RAM when opened. The response was especially good:

If you zip up 2GB of zeroes, e-mail the resulting tiny file to someone and they open it, it is ,amazingly enough, going to consume 2GB of memory. Do you think that’s an exploit too?

Now if opening the image causes your house to burn down, your wife to leave you and your pet dog to get gang-raped then you might have a point.

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Eli and I had a nice, long heart-to-heart with Scott that touched on where our project should be going, career plans, and how he attended Berkeley.

Afterwards we went to the Galleria to see what stores had Doom 3. Best Buy didn’t have any copies, but Electronics Boutique did, so I bought a copy. Got back to the apartment, found it was fucking hot (read: 85 - 90 degrees in our room) and then installed It while standing in a puddle of sweat. I played for an hour or so before finally getting whacked for the first time. Decided that was enough for the moment as there were several other things I wanted to do tonight. I’m not as desperate to play it as Jay Brenneman, who apparently left work a little early to buy a copy on his new-sounding videocard (purchased just to play Doom 3 perhaps?) and told Eli that he might take tomorrow off.

Just finished all 454 pages of The DaVinci Code. It’s an amazing book.

And now it’s time to rest.