You can find some amazing pictures with StumbleUpon. It’s certainly the best way to waste time on the Internet. If you were my friend, I could send you the pictures but since I only have 4 friends, I’ll have to do it the old fashioned way.
When I lived in Manhattan, I remember this one time when we were going to head out to Long Island with Georgina’s cousins and I was really, really thirsty. I had never been so thirsty in all my life. I drank a full pint of water straight down. Then another. And another. I drank six full pints of water then we got in the car and drove out to Long Island.
About 45 minutes into the journey, I really wanted to pee. I kept quiet about it until, eventually, I whispered to Tony that it was imperative that he find a place to stop the car and let me out to relieve myself.
That was the best pee of my entire life. It was like liquid ecstacy. It was like all the sunsets that I had ever witnessed pouring out of my todger. It was the closest I had ever been to a state of pure happiness.
Until tonight.
I should have gone before the lecture - I really needed to. Definitely after the lecture…before we went to the pub and drank all those beers. To get in the car after three beers and think I could then drive 25 miles in heavy traffic without having a pee first was just plain irresponsible. I had my trousers undone and the seat belt loosened to make the situation less urgent. I even took the lid off of my coffee cup in case things became more urgent.
I made it though.
That last red light at Almaden and Trinidad was almost more than I could bear, but bear it I did. I made sure I hit the garage opener at exactly at the right moment - because if you hit it too early you have that frustrating thing where you hit it again twice and it goes up a bit then stops and starts coming down again and you have to wait until things settled down which wastes time and I didn’t have time to waste - I got it just right. I put the car in Park while it was still rolling and ran for the door. Jazz came to greet me and when I dodged right to get by her she dodged the same way but I still made it.
It was the best pee ever. It was like the twin peaks of Bora Bora peeking up over the horizon - after an 18 hour ferry ride - just at the moment that the sun chose to rise between them while handsome polynesians strummed softly on their guitars. It was like that. Made into the purest liquid happiness. Pouring out of my todger.
Hooray pee!
Kathy Sierra says there is no culture of design in the USA. She covers a lot of ground but her Exhibit A is dollar bills.
Anyone who has come to the USA from another country knows how hard it is to tell one bill from another. I would guess that it took me about a year before I could reliably tell a $1 bill from a $10 in less than three looks. I still can’t tell nickels from quarters unless I have one of each in my hand to compare side by side or unless I look very closely. I still can’t calculate change quickly because the 1¢, 5¢, 10¢, 25¢ scheme makes no sense to me.
There is something very beautiful about the 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p, ₤1, ₤2, ₤5, ₤10 scheme in my home country. If you can calculate the change from 50p, you can calculate the change from ₤50. The rules are the same (at least, that’s how it used to be when I was there. they might all be using zlotys and glotys now for all I know).
Kathy reminds us that aesthetic benefits are so closely bound with ergonomic benefits that it is hard to separate the two and therein lies the root of the problem. Too many people dismiss design as prettying something up (including too many designers). The best designers (I am not one of them) are able to make something that is both beautiful and easier to use.
