Apple's mean-spirited ad campaign. By Seth Stevenson
"As usual, Apple hopes to shift the debate away from a battle over specs and value and toward a battle we can all understand: cool kid versus nerd. But these days, aren't nerds like John Hodgman the new cool kids? And isn't smug superiority (no matter how affable and casually dressed) a bit off-putting as a brand strategy?"
I couldn't agree more. These ads always leave a bad taste in my mouth.
"When one buys a print on Flickr/Yahoo, the order form calls for "name on credit card." In my case, all the cards I use have "Griffeth A. Wodtke." I then put in all my info -- name, card number, expiration, security code -- and get a message "special characters are not allowed. Please remove them and try again." I couldn't see any special characters, so I redid the credit card number, no luck. Redid the security code, nope, not it. Redid the expiration date, not that either. At that point I concluded it was a glitch and the thing just wasn't going to work, so was about to give up, when it occured to me to delete the middle initial and period. As you of course have known from the beginning, that was it. But is this user friendly? What if the person doesn't know what a "special character" is? I sort of do, but don't really think of a period as a special character, more like # and $ and < and such. And when you ask for the name on the card, you're going to get some with middle initials. Interesting example of designers not thinking it through. Bet they've lost some sales because of that."
I love the The New Yorker. I read it as much as I can; I subscribe despite my aversion to weekly magazines (the opress me, the way they tend to stack up.) When Amelie was born, my sole refuge from the turmoil of transforming into a mother was to hide in the bath with a New Yorker.
Newyorker.com is a endless source of bemused frustration for me. Why do they have a website? Why do they promote it in their magazine? It's a trainwreck of a site; much like the magazine it's hard to keep up with it. The archives are not online -- you can't have them for love or money. If you aren't there the week of the magazine, you cannot send the articles to freinds or business folks who need to read them. Compare to New York Times and Harvard Business review, who seem to know 8 ways to make dough off their past.
They barely host advertisement, and then mostly for their limited set of products: the magazine, the "complete collection" on DVD, the online store and perhaps some random other company. Their media kit is bizarrely placed in between ads; their ads often badly crushed and oddly kerned.
The site seems to have been laid out for a monitor from 1998; the warning about correct browsers in teh footer harkens back to those days as well.
I picture the webstaff, a lonely guy or perhaps a Kate Hepburn like woman doing their best to keep the site alive and viable; yet constantly running into problems with a creative director who wants everythign in gifs, and a CEO who wants to know why the ads are cut off on his monitor? I know nothing about the staff, this is just idle speculation.
I would kill for the job of Product Manger for the New Yorker Online. There is a large amount of money to be made from that website, money that could be used to keep great writing alive. I would be web strategy officer for a fourth of my last salary, if I could only get to realize the dormant potential of America's finest content. I would cut gifs and write css, if I could only help newyorker.com be the destination I know it could be.
Buy this, read this. I'll say more about why later.
As a new mom, I've been reading a lot of warnings and recommendations and safety guidelines. It's not surprising that mothers today become paranoid wrecks; as far as I can tell danger lurks everywhere. But after a bit, you start to be able to tell what is definitely dangerous, and what is liability *ss covering.
That said, one warning I'd had trouble fully understand was crib bumpers. To look at the crib, I could easily see my baby banging her head. But for her to roll into a corner where should couldn't breathe seemed unlikely-- I'd seen her roll in and out of situations easily. Then I read in a book that crib bumpers should be removed as soon as a baby can get on her hands and knees. Suddenly I could picture the series of events; she wriggles into a corner, up on hands and knees, slides in between rail and bumper and is smothered. It was a chilling moment. The bumper came off. (For those of you who worry I was being careless before, she only goes into her crib to play with me in the room. She sleeps in her cosleeper.).
Of course her bumping her head is the common case, and her slipping and suffocating is the edge case. She bumps her head a lot, and I know she will unquestionably bump her head on those wooden rails, and she'll scream about it. But sometimes, as bad as the common case is, the edge case is unrecoverable-- or as programmers put it, fatal. I've spent a lot of time railing against unnecessary obsessions with edge cases, but the reality is that sometimes the question is not "how often?" but "how bad?"
