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Design Lesson (and a little bit of news)
Current mood:  awake
Category: Art and Photography
I heard this story, but was disappointed to learn that a "mullet" is also a type of fish.
http://www.wpbf.com/sports/15377165/detail.html?rss=wpb&psp=news
"PERDIDO KEY, Fla. -- A former Olympic javelin thrower will attempt to break the world mullet toss record Friday on Perdido Key.
Roald
Bradstock competed in the 1984 and 1988 Olympic Games. Last year, he
broke the world record in the master's javelin throw, which is open to
people over age 40.
He also holds records for throwing an iPod, a cell phone and a golf ball."
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Today's
main topic is industrial design, the part of art school where the
students get to design notionally useful products. The story
begins with me completely giving up on local radio. When
Clearchannel, et al, take a long term business view and begin serving
their communities (as specified in their FCC licenses!), there might be
something to listen to in the morning. But for now we have
morning jocks that range from idiotic to unforgivably banal [and
banality is _always_ unforgivable] and both kinds of music - soundalike
flavor-of-the-week or inscrutable noise.
But back to the design
problem! To avoid having the radio come on in the morning, I
picked up a spiffy new alarm clock that plays audio from a memory
card. Like this:
Look at the nice clean lines on this unit - the flush front face and the single row of buttons on top...
Why,
it looks like a perfect underclassman-level industrial design project
sketch. I can almost see the marker lines in the fake brushed
aluminum wraparound side/back panel. I'm sure it looks nice on
most any nightstand. But...
it's an alarm clock. The user is typically half asleep and prone
when trying to use it, reaching over awkwardly trying to either make
sure the alarm is on for the next morning, or trying to beat the thing
into submission because the morning has already
arrived. A little tactile feedback from the buttons
would be welcome! Instead we get an object which deviously
hides its functionalty from anyone who's not standing overhead, in good
lighting, with the manual in hand to navtigate the menus. [One button,
one function - is that so hard to implement??]
Don't
ask me why in the world it needed a remote control. I suppose
some people need to put their alarm clock across the room so it forces
them to get up... but the remote has a snooze button! Oh,
and the tuner sucks. My cheap old analog tuner did better.
But I got it for the SD card MP3 player, which rocks. I could've
gone back to putting an FM transmitter on one of the PCs, setting it to
play music at a certain time, setting the clock radio to come on just
before that... eh, sometimes it's nice to get a box that plugs into the
wall and just does its thing.
Most importantly - waking up to 'Dawn of a Million Souls'
is a million times better than waking up to "Good good mornin'
upstate! Today's two-fer Tuesday, so here's another two-fer from
one of your favorite soft-rock one-hit-wonders. How about that,
Suzie, isn't it cool how we can do that?" "Um, yeah sure, Bob.
{giggle}" "Next up, the same news feed we played back twenty
minutes ago..."
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Currently
listening
:
Universal Migrator, Pts. 1-2
By Ayreon
Release date: By 13 September, 2004 |
9:32 AM
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