Omega Point

Wikipedia doesn’t have an entry for “gulliable”.

As seen on Digg: Did you know that Wikipedia doesn’t have an entry for “gul­li­able”?

How to write a US Political Thriller: Start with the Secret Service codenames.

So the most press­ing ques­tion of the post US-election period, beyond “did adults seri­ously come up with the name ‘labradoo­dle’?” and “will Team Obama need to buy their own key­boards?” is clearly, “what is Sasha Obama’s Secret Ser­vice codename?”

Appar­ently, it’s Rose­bud. I find that a lit­tle weird on its own, but par­tic­u­larly so in light of the oth­ers assigned to the Oba­mas, Bidens and Bushes. Accord­ing to the Chicago Tri­bune:

President-elect Barack Obama: Rene­gade
Michelle Obama: Renais­sance
Malia Obama: Radi­ance
Sasha Obama: Rose­bud
Vice President-elect Joe Biden: Celtic
Jill Biden: Capri
Pres­i­dent George W. Bush: Tum­bler
First Lady Laura Bush: Tempo

Aside from Bush’s code­name, which I assume means that some­one has a sense of humour, these all sound like cars. Crappy, marketer-named cars.

“This fall, test-drive the 2009 Chrysler Capri and dis­cover an auto­mo­tive expe­ri­ence that demon­strates why no one wants to buy Chrysler. Act now before the recall!”

Also, as an aside, I love the names-that-start-with-the-same-letter bit and all, but seri­ously, you guys are pos­i­tive every­one can hear the dif­fer­ence between “Radi­ance” and “Renais­sance” over an ear­piece, right? I ask because the sit­com viewer in me thinks this is going to end with some­one get­ting fired by an enraged Pres­i­dent Obama.

Adventures in self-checkout UI

Part of being me is that basi­cally every pos­si­ble task I decide to under­take in my day-to-day life is com­pletely unac­counted for by city plan­ners, archi­tects, design­ers, doc­tors, soft­ware engi­neers, and so on. Some­times, this is sim­ply due to the fact that I am tall^[1], as in the case of the face-level wall sconce mounted in the hall next to my desk at work, or the fact that every­thing from door­knobs to toi­lets are gen­er­ally too low for me to com­fort­ably operate.

Other times, it’s due to my trade­mark life planning.

Con­sider the fol­low­ing scenario:

I stand in line for the self-checkout sta­tion at the Real Cana­dian Super­store in Metro­town^[2], hold­ing a $4 bag of chips and noth­ing else. Super­store shop­pers will note that this bag is going to end up weigh­ing some­where in the neigh­bour­hood of 1-2kg. In my defense, I’m not aller­gic to pota­toes. So it’s healthy.

Upon actu­ally step­ping up to the machine, I am prompted to enter the num­ber of bags desired. Super­store shop­pers will recall that part of their no-frills pol­icy, they have a suck­ass web­site and charge 3 cents per plas­tic bag.

I select zero bags, pleased to see that what­ever cir­cu­la­tory prob­lem that pre­vents me from using touch­screen kiosks has tem­porar­ily reversed itself. Prompted to scan my item, I do so.

“Please place the item in the bag,” instructs the machine. I do not.

Instead, I toss my chips onto the bag-filling plat­form, trig­ger­ing the weight sen­sor which tells the com­puter that an item has been added to… noth­ing, in this case. The machine prompts me to either scan my next item or to com­plete the sale. I briefly spec­u­late about the num­ber of peo­ple who bring their own reusuable bags to Super­store com­pared to the num­ber of peo­ple who don’t want shop­ping bags because they’re buy­ing the biggest pos­si­ble bag of potato chips before decid­ing that it prob­a­bly isn’t worth attempt­ing to guess whether or not some­one is liv­ing entirely on carbs and trans fats, just to see if they’re more likely to want to com­plete the trans­ac­tion. Besides, I can’t imme­di­ately think of a way to make the “I am done and want to pay now” option any clearer.

For­tu­nately, the “pay­ing” part goes well and only a mod­icum of grum­bling and frown­ing is required.

[1] (Dude, please stop being offended that I won’t sit in the bus seat next to you. My legs don’t fit in there.)

[2] I am not afraid of Metro­town crowds because I can just push every­one out of my way and they’re usu­ally too bewil­dered to do any­thing. Tragedy of the com­mons, bitches!