Where is the Catch?

Ingenious idea to find those greedy idiots who will be cleaning out your construction debris for free thinking they are getting “free stuff”:

Where the catch is

Another funny thing about this “Dirt for Free” is that it was recently listed as “For Lease”! Poor flippers!

Oops happened

Bib, Bowl and a poor Toddler

Bib-n-Bowl: All-in-one

I like this nice combination: Bib with Bowl for toddlers. The idea direction is great, but I think the company stopped half way with their invention. So here is the initial design:

Bib-n-Bowl (draft)

But they definitely should be going further:

Bib and toddler's tableware set

..or:

Another Bib idea

Comparing to soft warm and light old fashion bibs, this combination is too much, I think.
Who likes to eat with big cold sheet of rubber hanging on your neck with feeding bowl attached on the other end?
If I be the feedee, I will give a finger to my feeder right at the feeding spot.

Update: I was so inspired with Bib-n-Bowl “combination” idea, so I came up with my own:

Shirt-n-Disposed Diapers Bag

Does your wife know about your other woman?

Does your wife know?

The car body damage tells me that she does now 🙂

Don’t Ask.com me, please!

Looks like advertisement these days is not an “engine for commerce” any more, it became a tool for commerce blackmailing.
Today I was installing Trillian Messenger software. So here it is: You have to agree with License Agreement (I agree) AND have to install 3rd party crap like Ask.com toolbar (WTF? I disagree!). They do not give me an option to choose not to install stuff which I do not need:

Do not Ask.com me, please

Ok, since the acceptance of just “license agreement” is not enough, no Trillian Messenger for me today.
How about Vuze (also known as Azureus torrent client) for legal sharing of HD videos? Same story: I have to accept license agreement AND install their toolbar:

Do not Vuze.com me, please

However in case of Vuze it is funny that if you do not check :”I accept license agreement..” check box, it will let you go further anyway, install and use the software. Does it mean that I found a bug in their Install Shiled script?

Guys, I do not need your toolbars, seriously. I already have bunch of disabled toolbars which I do not use. Let me choose what to install and what not to install on my computer. I understand your need to make money but think about me also, please: I have a web browser, not a junk ads storage after all. This pushy “consume our Ads or we make your web browsing experience miserable” approach may have opposite effect like old telemarketers calls.

And No, thank you, I prefer to have something else as a “default home page” rather than Ask.com, etc. And I do not need toolbars for: “daily calories calculation” (I am slim enough w/out any brutal diets), “weather” (weather predictions suck 100%, a random number generator predicts better), “search for local singles” (most of them are ugly as a halloween nightmare), etc. And I use Google to search stuff online.
And yes, I do not have too much browser window real estate left.

Political bump sticker: Double meaning?

Be careful when using more than one sticker on your car’s bumper: the combined overall message may be different from what each sticker suppose to send:

Brown Obama

I took this picture on the road. Most of us who are traveling 65m/h cannot read micro text from the distance of 20-30 yards, only big fonts can be seen. And what I see in this case is: “Brown Obama”. Well.., yeh, he is. What’s the point? Gotta problem with that?

In one of my previous posts (“Elect Monster Shirakawa!”) I already mention that mixing ad messages may cause double meaning.

Disclaimer: this post is not about politics and neither this blog.

Adobe Photoshop Express in Firefox: Tripple Booooo just on one page!

Today I was playing around with Photoshop Express in Firefox (v. 2.0.0.17).
At first look: nicely looking user interface written in Adobe Flex (oh, yeh, that’s for sure!). This “black glass” theme looks more appealing than the standard Flex theme (“dirty green”). Ok, let’s stress test its UI a bit; I will start with simply resizing browser window. Ta-da! It immediately shows 3 UI failures:

Just 1 page: Booo 3 times

UI bugs overview

1. Horizontal and Vertical sliders should never appear in the top navigation area. Period. Check out W3C’s CSS definitions for min-width/max-width to get a clue what are they used for.

2. Left extended menu looks like “Accordion” UI widget however it is non-clickable and non-collapsible. There is some stuff hidden off-screen below, which cannot be seen on a standard laptop screen with 1440×900 resolution. Vertical Slider for the menu will be useful in this case.

3. Browser Vertical slider never appears when the user resizes browser window which looks pretty lame:

UI implementation sucks

Conclusion: Close, but no cigar, folks. Design Fail Factor: 5 (out of 10)

WaMu at present time.

WaMu at present time