Sbig (ess-big or sp-eeg) adj.

1. “So Bad It’s Good” 2. transfinxifying out of horror or embarrassment for others, like a car accident or a public breakup (not yours). Sbig is a term used in public where talking about the ironically amusing qualities of the object would not be socially acceptable.

For example, if you’re attending a convention and while surrounded by teenage girls you want to tell a friend the amusement value of a panel on “Twilight” that promises to be an absolute train wreck, you would say “I want to go see ‘Literary Analysis of the lab scene’ it’s going to be sbig.”

Questioned, you should claim that sbig means “super-big”.

w/r/t installing traffic cams without other changes, which will increase accidents

I don’t get it. If you’re going to make traffic changes, particularly large ones which might in a real sense kill people, doesn’t that require some degree of caution, vigilance, and willingness to listen to other thoughts? They should at least have said “oh we’ve got that covered” or “we looked at that and you’re full of it” or “we’ll check this out”.

If nothing else, people who get rear-ended in accidents at newly-camera-ed intersections will be able to sue the city, and that’s not going to go well.

Hey, we want a tunnel too! Check out the Bellevue Preferred Alternatives.

Especially the part where it runs underground from main street to a station at 106th and on to the transit center. Six blocks at a cost of what, $kajillion?

Traffic enforcement cameras! And no mentioned lengthening with yellows! Watch as rear-end accidents skyrocket!

Come on, use the wiki

Served to me this morning:

Before we talk about the secret of youth, can we talk about why you have four eyes and two mouths?

I dog on myself for not writing enough, but I’ve been charting it for a while now and it’s not volume, or even hours logged, it’s where it goes. Here’s a day:

– 200 words at USSM
– got gmail inbox from 3600 unread to <1700 - ...during which I wrote ~500 words of email to friends I'd neglected lately, making myself feel better - Wrote 400 word mini-essay on gmail and usability here on HLWT - more USSM - 1500+ novel words I crank out a couple thousand words on days where I don't make progress on my fiction. Maybe I need to be a little bit kinder to myself.

Today I found myself digging out from two weeks of not reading/answering emails on my gmail account, which is publicly exposed and used for signups etc etc.

What I really wanted to do is this: sort by sender to see which newsletters/notifications are responsible for the massive bulk of unread emails, create filters/etc to deal with them, delete, move on. Nope! Not there. At all. Can’t be done.

It took me a little while to wrap my head around this. I’d always figured that the reason I couldn’t do it was that it was concealed functionality.

Where this really got interesting for me that if you look for ways to do this, you find that there many complaints about exactly this problem, and the conversations are fascinating insights into how usability fails. It reminded me of my job in many ways.

“I want to be able to do x.”
“Gmail doesn’t support that, but you can do a from:sender.”
“Yes, I get that. I want to be able to do this thing.”
“I don’t see why you’d ever want to do that.”
“I need to do this thing.”
“Have you considered up setting up filters for all your contacts and then looking at unlabeled emails?”
“I need to do this thing.”
“You can have all your gmail sent to somewhere else that supports sorting…”
“You’re not helping me do the one thing I want to do.”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had conversations like that at work. It’s why use cases are so valuable in specs: “this user has to be able to accomplish this task” clearly sets out how someone needs to be able to do something and how. You get to argue that out in the definition and design phase, rather than after release.

Here’s the maxim of usability design I’d like to have drummed into everyone’s head:
No one’s intended use is wrong.

If someone’s on Expedia and wants to do a multi-origin, multi-destination search and we can’t do that, I can say “we can’t do that, for technical reasons that you don’t care about.” Or I can say “the best workaround we have is this, which takes extra steps…” Or “ah! I see what you want to do, here’s another tool that will do that.” And if their response is “that’s cumbersome” that’s their right.

No one should ever say “that’s a dumb thing to do.” It’s not. Someone’s trying to do it to accomplish something important, and they’re frustrated. They have a need that’s unfulfilled, and they’re asking for help. Help them, or acknowledge your failure. But mostly, help them.

Hooked up the PS2 yesterday to try it. I like it so far, though the first hour or so is pretty much a cut scene. Or “RPG on rails” even, where there’s no real choice about anything. The first two hours, really. Actually, it still hasn’t opened up yet entirely, but I do get to shop a little, which is nice.

I think if they’d released it for (say) the Wii with little or no modification it’d be a contender for game of the year (and not win). If you’re into Japanese-style RPGs, it’ll be one of the best games ever.

The funny thing though is that it has game mechanics that are incomprehensible to me, and I’ve been playing games pretty much continuously since Asteroids on the Atari 2600. There were whole sections of exposition where something would be explained to me and I’d just start laughing. At one point, after an entirely nonsensical jargon-filled little speech, I had a dialogue choice between “I understand” and “Can you go over that again?”

I wanted to be able to pick “Whatever, I’ll just go look on the Internet for better documentation.”

I’m worried that my cavalier attitude will end up ruining the game for me: I’ll find some level boss two-thirds of the way in that can only be beaten if I’ve cross-fused the right trio of spirit personas or whatever. More than one game’s been tossed aside only to find out later that it’s the collectible-card mini-game I hated that could have earned the armor that lets you finish the game.

It’s snowing in Seattle again. I work on the 15th* floor of my building, which has a decent view (of Bellevue!).

Today, I came around a corner to our little “neighborhood” of EU people and outside the snow fell upwards. And kept falling up.

And while rationally I thought “sure, there’s some weird wind thing going on” I also felt, deep inside, that I was dreaming or the world had come unhinged.

* not actually the 15th, as there’s no 13th