Much love and many thanks, cAcLnE.

I was the service manager at Markline from 1980-1984, servicing desktop and portable calculators and dictation equipment and IBM Wheelwriters.
Hello Bill Hanson!

It truly is a masterpiece of gaming music.

The old panasonic was great at defrosting food on low wattage settings (non-inverter microwaves don’t use lower wattage they pulse… again, don’t care as long as the results are good). I didn’t even get to that point.

I do happen to prefer the new interface… really, a 30s/start cooking button is all you need for most tasks. It’s an RCA RMW1324

I’m also trying to figure out the thought process that goes through the mind when your at the line when it changes. You will need a split second to think about it.

Wetmore and 35th, says the article from the Herald!?

Wetmore and 35th, according to the Herald article! ?

I tried to find a whirlpool microwave when I moved to the US, but those were just as terrible as others. Finally bought the Panasonic with the button, but that one is disappointing too : you cannot increase /decrease the time once it started, nor change the power and the start button does not start/add 30 seconds.

Half-baked design, again.

I’ve talked with the City multiple times. The answer was to put some yellow “turtles” right before the intersection at Thomson. So far many people seem to ignore them. Oh, and according to the city there is no reason for a yield or stop sign there. I’m also getting tired of people blowing through the stop sign at 40th and Crescent. There have been many near misses there, and coming within a foot of being t-boned is not my idea of fun (well, almost being t-boned 5 times this year so far means that I’m extremely wary of driving or walking to Safeway.)

But hey, no one has died lately so that means it’s all great! *sighs*

I originally thought that this was an “engineering overriding design” problem. That engineers were to blame because they’re coming up with features that customers don’t need and cram them in using buttons.

But a conversation with a friend working at BAT convinced me that the issue was more complex than that… He said that when the first microwaves with LCD displays and lots buttons came out, they were more expensive and sophisticated. Having a big, complex microwave oven in your kitchen meant that _you_ were also more ‘sophisticated’. Microwaves with buttons and displays sold better, at bigger margins, than microwaves with knobs.

I thought that marketers were to blame in this case for the terrible UX of microwave ovens, but I’m wondering how much bad design exists from people intentionally purchasing poorly designed products precisely because they’re poorly designed.

This is totally Fascinating. I we love to know where it is so I can bring d daughter, whose four to see this and donate some books. This I think would help with creating a desire to read. Who would want to get a book from the bear Library. How Awesome. FABULOUS idea and artwork???? Truely CREATIVE ???????? PLEASE let me know. Sincerely, Betty Bensch???????

Having spent an hour in a traffic jam on the freeway this morning behind a Sherwin-Williams truck I was trying to figure out if this is possible?

Would a giant paint can suspended above the Earth’s equator actually pour out paint and cover the Earth?

I decided that yes it can.

Assuming that the can was truly suspended by some force and not actually in a equatorial orbit. Meaning that somehow the tremendous weight of the can was supported against the Earth’s gravity, such that if the lid is removed the paint actually would pour out and cover the Earth. I think the splash might even be realistic. The drips, however, are defying gravity.

They not only sold electronics, but we created an internal software system with the programmers to become one of the more sophisticated systems in mail order. Among its features was a fraud prevention system that I created and implemented which allowed a daily exception report to allow us to prevent shipping over 99.9 % of fraudulent attempts.

We put this system on the market with a few sales people and sold it to quite a few places, like The Company Store, and eventually The Sharper Image. From what I heard from legitimate cardholders in conversations, LL Bean and Sharper Image were getting clobbered with fraud, and Sharper Image bought our system, then stole 2 people away from us.

We Also did fulfillment programs for Hormel, The Bear Necessities, The Smithsonian Institute, and about a few dozen other large businesses. TRW also came down to look at what we had. The Secret Service came once a year to borrow a copy of my “fraud list” in which I accumulated several thousand nationwide addresses from Coast to Coast, and they made quite a few arrests.

Those were truly the good old days.

If it’s labelled with “inverter melt & soften” – and nobody knows what that means – then the technology is useless *no matter how brilliant it is*.

Good engineering is wasted if the UI is so bad that nobody ever uses it.

The thing is Derek…..I don’t care. And that’s just it. Most people don’t care.

Clearly there’s a market for the old-school, one-knob units, and equally clearly there’s a lot of room for improvement in UI design for models with more features. Keep up the fight! As Alan notes, our smartphones have spoiled us all for other devices.

Then just apply it automatically when defrost is used. What is the point of still having the lesser defrost ?

Look at your TV’s remote control, your car’s in-dash “entertainment system”, or your house’s thermostat (unless you have a Nest). They’re all covered in 4000 buttons, often non-tactile, and arranged in no particular order. Lousy user interfaces are the norm.

We’re spoiled because smartphones generally have pretty good user interfaces, especially considering all the complexity they manage. But of all the electronics in our lives, it’s pretty much just cell phones that made the leap to good user interfaces.

Interestingly, if you want a microwave oven with a good user interface, the cheapest models tend to be the best. I bought a no-name $20 microwave once that has 2 knobs (time, power) and it’s the best I’ve ever used.

Wow, I am not the only man to like the knob! This fact gives me a bit of hope…

Steve’s right. You need to include a bit of graft to incentivize city officials to adopt this.