Always Get It In Writing

Over the summer I had to pay for my own utilities. Water from American Water Co, electricity from Duke Energy, and sewage from the city of West Lafayette. I called to start service at the beginning of the summer, paid every month, and then on August 2nd, called and canceled service for all 3, effective August 4th. I moved out on August 3rd, paid my bills for July and the first couple days of August, and then thought I was done.

Then I got a bill from Duke Energy, for August. (Aug 4th-Sept 4th). So I called them up, and they told me I never canceled service. Thing is, I did. But I can't prove it. When I called the cancel, I clicked through the phone options and eventually got to the cancel service menu on the phone. It's an automated system they offer, and I made the mistake of thinking it would work. Obviously it didn't, but since the machine didn't give me a confirmation number, I've got a problem.

So when I called Duke, they told me that I'd either have to pay the bill, or get the current resident to call them and tell them to backbill him for August. Will he do it? I can hope so, it would be the moral choice. I really have no idea though, and if he doesn't, Duke holds me responsible. I'm obviously not, since I canceled, and moved out. The question then is, which is more expensive. 50 bucks for the bill, or lawyers fees.

I can win if I really fight it. I hardly expect Duke to go up in front of a judge and say that they're charging the person who doesn't live their over someone who does. But, it'll cost me lawyer fees, way more than 50. Is that extra money worth saying screw you to Duke? They are lying and basically trying to extort money, so I'd say yes, it is. Depends on what the lawyer costs turn out to be though. I've got a booklet of coupons and a bunch of them are for free consultations around West Lafayette, so I'm looking into scheduling one to see what my options are.

The lesson here though: Always get it in writing, and never trust companies.
 

The Depreciation Of Hover

One of my favorite effects to use when designing a website is hover. Changing the state of an object, normally a link, when the mouse hovers over it can create pleasing visuals. It can show which items on a page can be interacted with, before the user actually interacts.

Hover is dependent on a mouse though. A touchscreen has no way of telling if your finger is hovering over a link until said finger actually touches it. And since touching equates to clicking, there's no way to effectively display the hover. If you touch and hold down, it will appear, along with whatever active effect the designer has built in (active is the state when clicked), but most users just tap and go, and so never see the hover effect.

Because of this, sites built for mobile don't incorporate hover at all, instead placing their state changes into the active category. These normally consist of items getting darker to simulate buttons being pressed down, vs lighter to simulate highlighting, which is more common with hover. And active changes are great, I've got nothing against them. I'm just sad that in switching from the mouse to the touchscreen, we're losing half of our available effects.
 

Why Windows Tablets Have a Chance

Windows as we currently know it is useless on the touchscreen tablet form factor. We know this because Windows came out with tablets as early as 2002, (years before Apple released the iPad), and all of them were colossal failures. Windows is inherently a desktop OS. It’s gone through 15 years of refinement for the mouse and keyboard, and as a desktop OS, it’s great. What that Microsoft completely missed though, (and what Steve Jobs caught), is that as wonderful as desktop OSs are on desktops, they are terrible for touchscreen tablets.

Read my full article at TekGoblin.com.
 

Fixing Facebook With Stylish

Facebook is a great website, and after Google, my main destination on the web. But there are some annoyances. People You May Know, as well as Sponsored Ads, for example. I've been looking for a way to fix that, and the only working method I'd found uses Greasemonkey to kill the entire right column. This removes Upcoming events as well, and leaves a large white space, which is almost as annoying as the Ads. What I wanted to do was remove just the People You May Know box, and the Ads box, and using the power of Stylish, I have done it.

Stylish is a Firefox addon that allows me to run custom CSS on top of a website's own. This lets me make any changes I desire to the look of the site. Hiding an element in CSS is simple. You set it's "display" to "none". The problem lies in finding what an element on a page is called, so that you can call it out in your code.

Fear not though, for we have the Page Source view on Firefox. And since the title rows of the sections we want to remove are plain text, I can search for that text in the source page, which gets me close. Facebook unfortunately uses minimized code, meaning that instead of single lines, spaced nicely for ease of reading, it's compressed. This allows for a faster page load, but a slower read. Which is also a benefit to them, since a site like Facebook doesn't WANT us messing around with their code. Understandable, but I'm out to please myself, not them.

So, looking around, I finally found what I'm looking for. The class of the container holding the unwanted items is "ego_column". So I pop up Stylish, and set up my document. First I place in a beginning line, which just tells Firefox what type of document this is.

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

I then place in my container, which specifies that the code only affects Facebook.com.

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("facebook.com") {

}

Inside that then, I write my code.

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("facebook.com") {

   .ego_column {display:none !important;}

}

The result is immediate. Here is a screenshot from before:



So, yay for Stylish!
 

Music, Here There and Everywhere

I'm a very random person I guess, my taste in music jumps around. The three artists/bands that have been in my head for the past couple weeks consist of eletronica Hurts, sorta Indy sounding Kimbra, and ... I don't even know how to describe Massive Attack (they did the song that became the intro to House, if that rings any bells.)

So, I thought I'd share a sample of all three.






 

Apple Minus Steve Jobs, Take 2

In a letter written to the Apple board of Directors, Steve Jobs has officially resigned as the CEO of Apple. UPDATE: Apple has now confirmed in a press release that Tim Cook will be taking over as CEO. This is actually the second time Jobs will be leaving the company he co-founded, the first being in 1985 when he was forced out. He returned in 1996 when Apple bought NeXT, the company Jobs had founded after leaving. By 1997 he was again running the company, albeit officially as "interum CEO", a title which he kept until 2000, when he dropped the "interum". Jobs' return to Apple is wildly recognized as having saved the company, as his return heralded a return to the profitability of the early years. It'll take time to see how his second departure will affect Apple, but it's unlikely Apple will face problems any time soon, given the massive profitability of both the tablet and smartphone markets.

August 24, 2011–To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

 

Just Google It

Every now and then when I get stuck on how I want something to look, I'll just google it, and look at what other people are doing. Today I've been working on a revamped Useful Links page for my new website.

The reason that I am changing the style of the page itself is that the way it's set up now is in a 3 column page, with a navigation panel on the left, content in the middle, and my picture on the right. For the new site, the right-most column will only be on the homepage, nowhere else. So I'm changing the setup of the links page to use all the extra space that it's now going to have.

I got stuck on the design though, because I've decided that the current setup, while modern looking, is also not as useful, because the links aren't immediately apparent. Using red non-underlined text for links isn't normal at all, and while block highlighting looks pleasant, it's also confusing. Because of this, I'm going to be changing to a more classic style of links for the new page. I tried just basic blue, and that looked okay ... but the purple of visited links didn't fit at all.

Stuck, I went to Google and searched for "useful links", and the results were mainly the links pages or a random collection of websites ... exactly what I was looking for. The methods vary widely, but one method technique which I thought looked really nice was used by Clemson University. The links don't change color, and the color fits the scheme.

The purple they use doesn't fit with my own color scheme at all, but I've got an off color blue which does, and by removing the change to purple for visited, I think I've solved the problem. Thank you Clemson University.