Technically Speaking

A couple of weeks ago we decided to rent the movie _National Treasure_ to watch with my parents. We decided to rent from Redbox a new kiosk-style DVD rental machine located in McDonald’s stores in our area.

Renting from Redbox is easy. You walk up to the ATM-like machine, press the “Rent DVD” button, pick the DVD you want to rent, swipe your credit card, and the movie is dispensed. When you want to return the movie, you go back to ANY Redbox location, press the “Return DVD” button, and enter the DVD in the slot.

There are a couple of unique things about Redbox that I think make it a great contender in the DVD rental market. First, movies are one dollar a night. Period. No late fees or any other fees. The movie is due back in a Redbox location by 10PM the day after you rent the movie. If you have it after 10PM, you just get charged for another night. Once you reach 25 nights, the movie is yours to keep.

Second, you can rent from one Redbox location and return to another Redbox location. Why hasn’t Blockbuster figured this out yet? This is one of my favorite features of the SL County Library System. Now Redbox has it figured out as well. In fact, you can rent from a Redbox in Salt Lake, take the movie on a trip with you, and return it to a Redbox location in Denver. Very slick.

Third, Redbox has a lot of promotional giveaways to try to get you hooked. In the month of October, you can get one free movie rental per credit card each Monday by entering the promotional code MONDAY when you check out. That’s five free rentals in October. Rent the movie anytime on Monday, and return it before 10 PM on Tuesday, and that’s it. No charge.

Then every other day of the week is 2-for-1. You can rent two movies for one dollar! (One free movie per week.) Here’s how it works:

On October 4-9, use promotional code ORANGE.
On October 11-16, use promotional code LEAF.
On October 18-23, use promotional code BASEBALL.
On October 25-30, use promotional code GHOST.

Now I’m pretty sure that the “get-one-free” rentals are only good for the first night, so don’t rent two movies thinking you will get them free for more than one night. The first night you would get charged one dollar for two movies, and the next night you would get charged two dollars.

So far, Redbox has rented more than 3 million DVDs, and they are only in a handful of markets. I can’t wait to see how they expand. Christina thinks they should put Redboxes in airports so all the laptop users could rent in one airport, and return the movie in the next one. I think they should put them along the interstate highways at truck stops. Currently Redbox plans to expand into McDonald’s locations and grocery stores in the current markets. I t will be interesting to see when they pick some different markets (like Northern California; that would be good for us!).

So say goodbye to long membership forms and late fees (even when they don’t call them “late fees” anymore. None of us are really fooled). This company is working hard to make you think “Redbox” when you think “Movie Rental.” It’s working for me.

This is another _Better Living by Doing It Yourself_ story.

Tuesday nights are a little busy around our house. Christina is TA-ing for a class at BYU, so she doesn’t get home until 7:00. I have a presidency meeting that starts at 7:00, so we often cross like proverbial “ships in the night.” This makes dinner interesting, because we usually are home together to fix and eat it.

Last night my presidency meeting had been rescheduled to 6:30, and I don’t get home until 6:00. I was looking for something to eat, when I found four hard boiled eggs in the fridge. Christina had boiled eggs on Friday, and these were left over. I decided that I would make myself an egg-salad sandwich. I removed the shells, and was about to mash the eggs when I remembered that Friday’s eggs hadn’t been totally cooked.

Let me interrupt myself to state, for the record, that I really can’t stand raw eggs. My eggs have to be TOTALLY cooked, or I get grossed out. In fact, I don’t even like to SEE the partially cooked egg. So, I decided that I would microwave them to cook them on the inside before I had to see that they weren’t cooked.

I put the two eggs into the microwave for 60 seconds, and started to put away some dishes that had been washed.

Right as my timer expired there was a HUGE BANG from inside the microwave. My eggs had exploded. We’re not talking “cracked” or something. They literally exploded. It sounded like a bomb had gone off inside the microwave. When I opened the door, I wasn’t sure that one hadn’t.

Here are the pics. Click on each one to open a new window with a larger version of the picture. Most browsers will resize the photo to fit the window, so if you make the window bigger, the picture will get bigger too.
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I can’t say enough cool things about Google. Today I discovered a new Google application that makes life easier. Welcome to the era of “Personalized Google Home”^TM^.

Personalized Google Home allows you to replace the standard Google home page with your own personalized content. The options here are virtually limitless. On your Google home page, you can show your Gmail box with links to the most recent messages, bookmarks to your favorite web sites, top news stories from a variety of sources, local weather, local movie show times, personalized news searches, and more.

You have to try this out for yourself. Go to the Google homepage, and click on Personalized Home (link is in the upper-right corner).

Now, if you have a Gmail account, log in with that. If you don’t have one, shoot me an email and I’ll send you an invite to create one.
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Do you remember the story of “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH”? It was a 1971 Newbery-award winning novel that told the story of some lab rats that escaped from their captors and made a new life for themselves elsewhere.

To good to be true? Maybe not. Read this ABC News article about some lab mice who recently went “missing” from the Public Health Research Institute in New Jersey. Of course, these mice weren’t like Mr. Ages and Nicodemus from the novel. Their real-life counterparts were actually part of a study on the bubonic plague. In farct, the missing mice were all infected with the bubonic plague, but scientists tell us that the health risk is low because the plague “is not contagious.” (Yeah, tell that to the residents of England a couple hundred years ago…)

What _really_ happened at the Public Health Research Institute? Maybe it is time for Jane Leslie Conly (daughter of the late Robert C. O’Brien, author of the Newberry-winning book) to write another sequel, so we can find out.

(Nod to FreeMoby where I first read this story.)

For a couple of months now, I’ve been following (and contributing to) the message boards at my web host, Total Choice. The other day, TCH-Thomas pointed out a blog posting at PC World talking about the new Office 12 — the latest, and supposedly “greatest” iteration of the worlds most infamous word processing software and related suite.

First, before you continue reading, you should jump over to the PC World blog and at least look at the pictures of the proposed Office 12 suite, so you have some idea of what I’m going to be talking about.

You’re back? Okay good. What did you think? Do you like the new interface (this is the part where you get to submit a comment; this makes the blog more interactive ).

My first reaction is that cautiously negative. As I look at the graphic, I can’t seem to find the equivalent functions for features I use frequently, like printing, inserting tables, and inserting graphics. I’m sure these functions are available, but I wouldn’t know how to use them the first time I opened Word. So I have to admit that my “cautiously negative” first impression comes simply from the recognition that the world’s most popular word processor should be intuitive. This version of Word does not seem to be intuitive, so that is a red flag.

This switch to a new user interface (UI), is the first major UI change since Microsoft released Office 97. For almost 10 years now, the Microsoft (MS) Office suite has looked basically the same. Of course, each new version has added some graphical differences, but the core application has basically remained the same. This is the first time in a decade that MS is considering a fundamental shift if Office’s UI.

Such a dramatic change to the UI carries some major risks, in my opinion. As PC World points out, MS could either be leading the pack in the new cutting-edge of UI design for Windows applications, or it could be a big flop, which would be a huge hit for MS’s major cash-cow product. With the importance that the Office suite has on MS’s bottom line, that is a pretty significant risk.

It seems to me that it will be hard to get the average daily Word users to buy-in to the new UI. These users for the most part are the office workers who use Word to write corporate correspondence, make newsletters, and such. I think that many of these users would be totally put off by a new interface; these are the same people who complain that Word 2003 was too different from Word 2000, and they wanted Word 2000 back because they were more familiar with it. (For this reason, the only supported version of the Office software at my company is Office XP; we never upgraded to 2003 because too many users complained that it was too different.) If your everyday users won’t switch, then MS has a major problem.

I consider myself to be a Word expert. I know how to use many of Word’s more advanced features, and I’m sure that I could use the newest version for a couple of hours, and then know how to do all of my projects. But I’m not sure I want to use a product that has been “dumbed down”–which is what the new Word looks like. Its as if MS is trying to make it more appealing to novice users.

However, here we encounter one of the fundamental problems of software design: Feature-rich software applications are complex by nature. It is very difficult to design a simple interface for a highly-complex software application. If you want a simple interface for novice users, then you provide that. But advanced users expect an advanced interface. These days, advanced users expect that there will be more than one way to accomplish a specific task.

For example, look at a current version of MS Office (i.e. Word 2000 or later). Offhand I can think of five different ways to make text appear in bold:
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