Internet Annoyances

I’ve spent much of the last two days with patchy and unreliable internet access. This has recently been fixed by (a) restarting the router again, although that hadn’t done anything earlier, (b) my husband closing and restarting Firefox on his computer (uh, huh) or (c) something further up the line that we had no control over but that happened in conjunction with the other two.

In any case, the whole experience reminded me of other internet annoyances. Here are a few tips on how to not make truly annoying websites.

Know the basics of don’t: splash screens, Flash-based navigation, media that loads without warning, flashing text, mystery meat navigation and text/background color combinations that will trigger a migraine.

Do not accept any ads you can’t wall off from the rest of your layout. Last month, one of the very large internet ad companies was experiencing slow servers, and I don’t know how many pages I couldn’t see until the ad servers responded. Browsers just didn’t know how to draw the pages without the ad information.

Don’t design something that looks like navigation but isn’t. If that link is on what looks like a button, particularly if that button changes color when moused over, I had better be able to click on the whole button, not just the text. Yes, really, companies do this.

If you can, try not to cram a bunch of links up against the right side of the page; i.e., the scroll bar. Even a few pixels of clear space makes a difference.

Yes, I get that your website is complicated. However, if you’re providing information that is available from every publicly traded company, there is no excuse for burying it six to eight clicks deep. It should take me one (easily found) click to get to your corporate site, one to tell you what category of information I’m looking for. At that point, give me a page with a lot of links under different headings instead of making me guess which link I have to click to get to the next step.

Check your traffic logs every now and then. I know of one Fortune 500 company whose website–the main page–has generated errors every time I’ve tried to load it in the last six months. That doesn’t help either of us.

There, just a few tips to make my life more pleasant. If everybody follows them, I can stop being annoyed and get back to writing something interesting.

Internet Annoyances
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Why I Hate the Suburbs

From the local paper:

Although Anoka bills itself as the Halloween Capital of the World, city officials and some businesses are a bit spooked by a macabre-themed head shop that has opened a pumpkin’s toss from City Hall.

Redrum — which read backwards, spells murder — opened in late September with a skull and crossbones above the door and red-stained razor blades dangling in the window.

Okay, so far, so good. If this were downtown or in Uptown or Dinkytown or on Lake Street or University Avenue, no one would notice. They might not go in if the shop didn’t carry anything they were looking for, but at most, they’d snicker and move on.

“The kind of people it brings downtown we don’t need,” said Beth Lennartson, co-owner of A Girl Thing, a women’s boutique a few doors away.

You mean people who buy things? Is there any other kind of people a business should concern itself with?

“This doesn’t help our ladies that come down here,” added co-owner Donna Texley.

You might be surprised, honey. But even if it doesn’t, does your corner of the world exist only for your customers? Do you protest barbershops opening up? Those don’t help your ladies either.

“Yes, we are the Halloween capital, but that is taking it too far,” said Krista Rothmaler, who owns Krista Artista art gallery down the street. “My opposition to Redrum has to do with the fact that it is not very family-friendly.”

Unlike boutique clothing shops and art galleries. Those are always so open to sticky-fingered younglings.

What actually gets me about all this is not the totally expected reactions. After all, I grew up in the suburbs–right up until I had a choice about where to live. No, what gets me is that Anoka is the Halloween capital. According to this article, they can’t handle anything remotely morbid or weird and they don’t like the sorts of people who love Halloween. How does that work?

Don’t get me wrong. I think Anoka is a plenty scary place. I just don’t think it’s any scarier than any other closed-minded, repressive suburb.

Why I Hate the Suburbs

Young Science

Psychology, sociology, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, history, economics, political science.

Biological sciences, earth sciences.

Chemistry.

Physics.

Read one way, this is how sciences are commonly ranked on a Mohs scale of scientific snobbery. Real sciences, hard sciences, are at the bottom. Soft, squishy, fake sciences are at the top.

Read another way, this is both an inverted history of science and a ranking of the complexity of measurement.

A History of Complexity
Physics was one of the first sciences to be studied scientifically and the first science in which many of the fundamentals were discovered. Why? Because physics, at least the parts that most people learn, has the simplest subjects to test. Kinetics are visible. Pressure can be felt. Wave interaction is already present in our environments, ready to be observed.

Chemistry was harder. We can’t see or feel the building blocks of matter. We can’t see the bonds that create matter with its own discrete properties from two or more unrelated elements. We can’t directly assess molarity. Chemistry had to build the tools to do the very basics, even as it determined what those basics were. That put it far behind physics.

Biological and earth sciences are more difficult yet. Not only do scientists have to study all the parts of complex systems in order to understand the systems, but they are also constrained in two important regards. They have to observe the system without changing it enough to make their observations invalid, and they have to exercise ethics in how they manipulate the system. These things can be done, but they require additional tool development, including the development of complex systems math, which makes for slower progress.

Then we come to our “squishy” sciences, the social sciences. All the difficulties of biological and earth sciences apply, only more so. These are studies of complex systems made up of complex systems. Observation of social phenomena is social phenomena itself. The ethics of personal and political interference are extremely touchy. The sheer number of variables that the math needs to be able to accommodate is intimidating.

Does that mean that the social sciences can’t develop the tools they need? No, no more than the biological sciences can’t. What it does mean is that developing these tools should be expected to take time. How long? I don’t know. How long did it take physics to figure out how to observe the universe free of the interference of our atmosphere?

The Forgotten History
One thing that hard-science snobs like to point to as evidence that the social sciences aren’t real science is the current influence of politics on the various fields. For example, in the current economic situation, people cite the influence of libertarianism on economics. Others have pointed to single-culture-centric definitions of mental normalcy.

Both are valid critiques of the state of the field, but they have no bearing on whether economics or psychology are sciences. Politics affect every kind of research. They always have, however pure someone might think their brand of science is. Cosmology has historically had some killer debates (literally) about theory, based on politics. It got over them with time. Do we judge genetics by eugenics or physics by the atom bomb?

The social sciences are very young, they seek to understand phenomena at several interrelated levels, and they face the additional challenge of having to ask the balls for permission before dropping them off the tower. This means that current results are of dubious universal applicability. It does not mean these are not “real” sciences.

Nor does it mean the people theorizing and testing with the limited tools at their disposal are not real scientists. Some of the people clinging to theories against all evidence may not be scientists, but the evidence against most theories is slim or mixed at this early stage of the game. It will take more work and more data from the empiricists to drive the irrational theorists out, just as it always has for every other science.

They’ll probably do it faster if they’re allowed and expected to sit with the big kids at the “science table” instead of being pushed away. They’ve earned more credit than they’re usually given on that score, even if they do have plenty of work left to do. And it can only help to steep the kiddies in each field in a culture of rigor.

Young Science

No Sympathy, No Idea

I’m about ready to eviscerate the next idiot I run across in the blogosphere who says, “I don’t have any sympathy for the borrowers. It’s not my fault if they’re idiots. They should have known better than to think they could really afford a house.” Actually, I already took a fair swipe at the last one. He was dense enough it probably didn’t leave much of a mark, though. I’ll do a more thorough job on the next one.

Leaving aside for now the classist implications that these people didn’t deserve an arrangement that allowed them an opportunity to accumulate a sliver of wealth–only because if I don’t, this post will consist solely of hateful gibberish–these statements tell me two things about the person making them. First, they tell me that they didn’t start with much sympathy. Second, they tell me they can’t do math.

The reason people can’t make these mortgage payments is not that they couldn’t afford their original payments. It’s that their payment amounts changed in ways they hadn’t been prepared for.

There are two types of risks to the lender in making loans. The first is the risk that the borrower will not make the payments. This risk may or may not be covered by the collateral, especially if the collateral is overvalued at the time of the loan.

The second is that you won’t earn interest from the loan quickly enough to cover the decrease in the value of the money you put into it. With an average 3% rate of inflation, the principal of a $100,000 loan is worth about $40,000 at the end of a 30-year repayment term. Any interest rate has to be higher than the rate of inflation in order for a lender to make money off a loan.

In a housing bubble, with interest rates indices held below inflation rates by the Fed’s determination to keep the War on Terror from having a visible impact on the economy, lending to borrowers who represented some unknown additional risk beyond that of regular borrowers, lenders didn’t like their odds. In order to push some of that risk off their plates, they made the borrowers liable for changes in interest rates, which for at least the last 30 years have varied with inflation as a matter of policy.

Adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) protect lenders by passing changing rates on to the borrower. Good Math, Bad Math did a great job of explaining why that didn’t get rid of as much risk to the lender as claimed. What it did do, however, is greatly increase the risk to the borrower.

“Of course it did!” the sympathy-challenged holler. “How could they not have known that an adjustable rate mortgage could be adjusted upward?”

They did know. What they didn’t know, because nobody told them, is how far they could go up and how quickly. Following this requires a little sympathy, but stick with me if you can.

Say you’re a borrower, excited at the prospect of buying your first home (or being able to buy a home again after you filed bankruptcy years ago to deal with the lingering costs of the cancer). You’re talking to a mortgage broker about what you can afford. The broker says, “Well, with this ARM, you’ll have a starting rate of about 6%. Your take-home income is about $1,800 a month. Figuring that a third of your take-home goes into your mortgage, which is less than you’re paying in rent, you can afford a $100,000 mortgage.”

Now, a $100,000 mortgage buys you a one-bedroom bungalow in an interesting neighborhood, but you can give the kids the bedroom and sleep on the couch if it means you’re going to get them into a house. And a decrease in your housing costs…oh, wait. With taxes and such, it’s not really that big a decrease. Huh. “So what happens if interest rates go up?”

The broker says, “If they go up a full percent, your monthly payment will go from $600 to $665. That’s 37% of your take-home instead of 33%.”

Well, there goes the rest of the money you save by not renting. A few bucks more a month, too. But if you have to, one of you will get a second job to get the kids into that house. “Okay. We’ll do it.”

Sounds simple, right? Remember what I said about interest rates being held below inflation? What the broker didn’t tell you was that interest rates were two to four percentage points lower than they had been through the late nineties. Flash forward two years, from 2004 to 2006, through the inflation caused by rising gas prices, and your interest rate is now 10%.

There are people whose credit cards don’t charge them 10% interest. And those cards give them frequent flyer miles.

Your broker told you what would happen if rates went up 1%. What happened when they went up 4%? Your mortgage payment is now about $880 a month. Even with small raises over the last two years, that’s nearly 50% of your take-home. If you’re lucky, one of you can work that second job and just hold it together. If not, well, there aren’t as many second jobs as there were before gas prices went up and the price of everything else is so much higher now too. You love your little bungalow, down to the drafty back door, but you’re now in default on your mortgage.

It isn’t because you didn’t ask what could happen to your mortgage. It’s because the person who should have given you better information either didn’t know enough or didn’t care enough to give you a full answer. If it helps, your broker is watching the value of his/her IRA plummet and thinking it might be a couple extra years before retirement.

Yeah, I know. It doesn’t help.

For what it’s worth, you have my sympathy.

No Sympathy, No Idea

You People Need to Time Things Better

Every year brings a few invitations for friends’ and relatives’ weddings. Not this year. This year, we received two.

One is for one of my favorite cousins. The fact that I only have four cousins makes this no less true or meaningful. She’s one of the people who, without complaint, makes the world keep going. She played the music for my wedding. I look at her and see her mother, who died all too recently. She’s sweet and funny and cheerful and always quietly herself.

The other is for our second-best man at our wedding (she looked good in the tux, but not at all masculine). She’s my husband’s ex-roommate, the ex-fiance of one of my good friends from college, and hooked into our lives in so many little ways that a friend refers to her as ubiquitous. She’s a force of nature.

I’m so happy to see both of these people happy, but I want to shake them. Off all the days this summer to pick from, they had to put their weddings on the same day–in different towns, so we can’t even manage one ceremony and one reception.

I’ve been staring at the date on the calendar all summer, knowing this was coming. Finally, this morning, I had to put the RSVP cards in the mail. We made the choice over breakfast. Bah. I’ll get over it and be happy for them again soon, but not just yet. I’m still grumpy over having to choose at all.

All I can say, guys, is get it right next time.

You People Need to Time Things Better

You Want to Sell Me What?

When the doorbell rings late on a Saturday morning, it means one of two things. Unfortunately, it’s almost never one of the neighborhood kids who wants to make some money cutting my grass. No, instead it’s someone who wants me to buy their god.

Today’s was special. I was getting ready to run out and do some errands when I heard the familiar chime. Usually they send the well-dressed and stately (for the black churches) or the ultra-sincere but casual kiddies (for the white churches). Not this time. It was just some white guy my age with glasses and a stack of glossy half-page flyers.

He handed me one. I took it because I don’t really trust these people to recycle the leftovers. Then I looked at it. “Miracle for Muslims,” it said at the top, with the picture of an older black man at the bottom in a very western dress shirt.

“I’m from the X______ Church, and we’re hosting a lecture on–“

I set the flyer back on his stack. “Thank you. No.” Then I closed the door.

He didn’t seem too disappointed, just surprised by the flyer. Maybe I’m not the only one who hasn’t trusted him with them.

He wasn’t targeting me anyway. The people he really wanted to have buy his god are my neighbors from Somalia. They’re the folks who have kept our neighborhood from turning into a ghost town as the housing market collapsed, the ones who have opened new stores and restaurants and coffee shops in empty buildings, the ones who are bringing community back to our streets by gathering outside in groups just to talk to each other.

These are the boys who politely make room on the sidewalk, even when they’re walking in big groups. These are the girls who have figured out how to tuck their cell phones into their headscarves so they don’t have to hold them and how to make ankle-length skirts some of the sexiest clothing I’ve ever seen on a teenager. These are the kids who run and giggle like kids should.

This is who the door-to-door salesman wanted to lecture–lecture! They’ve gotten their hands on one guy who adopted the ways of his new home by converting, and you just know they’re trying to use him to “civilize” the rest of these strange new people. They want to make them less strange, less scary, less Muslim.

Miracle for Muslims? Yeah, right. The real miracle is how infrequently my doorbell rings now that I have new neighbors. Now that’s civilized.

You Want to Sell Me What?

Verb Regulation

They’re beiging my language.

I’ve tried to learn other languages. I have studied them, but the most that’s consistently stuck with me is “Please,” “Thank you,” and “I speak only a little ______,” all said with pretty decent accents. But every time I’ve tried, especially the year when I was taking French and Spanish at the same time, I’ve learned more about English and come to love it a little more.

I don’t like it because it’s any sort of a rational language. Quite the opposite. I love every little quirk and irregularity. I collect idiom. I like that we’ve stolen words from almost every other language, and that I have to know something about each of them to know how my own words work.

But now, someone, some nefarious, well-meaning clown, is going around trying to make my language tidy. They’re taking my beloved irregular verbs and making them regular.

They started with the less common ones, and I’m sure they thought I wouldn’t notice. Silly them. When I was a kid, I dove competitively (well, it wasn’t terribly compatible with acrophobia, but I tried). Future generations of youngsters will not have had that opportunity. The most they’ll be able to say when they’re my age is that they dived (although probably better than I did). And while I dreamt of being able to go off the high board without my legs shaking, they will only have dreamed.

And let us not forget the poor campers. I knelt beside coals and burnt my marshmallows, listening as others wove thrilling ghost stories. Today’s children will have burned theirs for a lesser cause as they kneeled, their stories merely weaved. When spooky sounds came from the woods, my heart leapt. Theirs will have simply leaped.

I know there are good reasons to simplify our language. It’s replaced French as the language of commerce and diplomacy, and holding tight to these words create barriers for others who must learn it. But I can’t do it. I can’t embrace this rational, streamlined, beige version of my love. I have no choice but to fight it.

It isn’t for me, you see. It’s for the children.

Verb Regulation

Post-a-Rejection-Letter Friday

I’ve been a bit busy the last couple of days, watching As the Cracker Crumbles.

Thanks, therefore, to Sean C. Green for making it easy for me to quickly weigh in on the Helix “sheet head” fiasco. Here’s my rejection letter:

Thank you for submitting “Unwinding” to Strange Horizons, but we’ve decided not to accept it for publication. There was some really nice writing in this piece, but overall I’m afraid the core plot just didn’t click for me.

We appreciate your interest in our magazine.

See? That was easy. Professional, helpful, pleasant. Totally cool.

What Sanders did was racist and uncool. That the author who posted his letter has been forthcoming about details of his story and correspondence, so everyone could see what bits of the letter came straight from Sanders’ seedy little brain, is very cool.

And to S. F. Murphy: if Toby and Tempest are “PC Nazis,” then I hope I get to be a PC Nazi when I grow up. Tempest has been one of my heroes since I met her, and everything I’ve seen from Toby has earned nothing but my respect. You? Also uncool.

Post-a-Rejection-Letter Friday

Oh, the Horror

Hopkins horror: 90-year-old was slain

The woman was found dead in her apartment Monday, the city’s first murder case in nine years. Neighbors and police want answers.

I read this article yesterday morning. It immediately pissed me off, but I thought I’d give myself some time before talking about it. It’s still pissing me off.

Meanwhile, concerned neighbors at the normally safe and quiet Hopkins Plaza Apartments flocked Tuesday evening to City Hall in search of answers from police.

Those in the well-kept apartment complex, where wind chimes and flowerpots adorn patios, said the woman…

I’m so tired of the assumption that living in the suburbs, in a “nice” place, can (and should) keep you safe. I’ve lived in the hood for more than fifteen years now. The closest I’ve ever been to a murder was when I was a kid living in deep, prosperous exurbia. One of the neighbors whose yard abutted ours was shot by her husband.

No one can promise you safety in the ‘burbs. That won’t stop them from trying, but you’ve got no business listening. If you pay any attention at all to who dies violently, you’ll know that if it happens to you, it’ll be someone you know. If you live in the ‘burbs, that just means it’ll be someone from the ‘burbs.

Random violence does happen sometimes, but it’s not particularly more likely to be a stray shot in the city than it is to be freeway congestion road rage or a drunken hunter.

So Hopkins has had it’s first murder in a while. Yes, that’s news. That people in the area are shocked? That’s just stupid. ‘Cause you know, when it happens in the city, none of us less-than-nice people give a damn.

Classist jerks.

Oh, the Horror

Why Am I Here?

Yesterday at work, despite my best efforts to check off the 1,001 tiny things on my to do list and to clean out my inbox so I can figure out whether there’s anything that never made it onto the list, I spent much of my time on two Projects That Will Not Die. Just when I think about catching up, just when I dream of breathing space, up pops one or the other of these. Yesterday, both.

These were supposed to be finished months ago. In fact, they’ve been finished several times, so when I see one again, it’s like looking at a zombie. Now, I didn’t sign up to work with zombies. Nobody said there’d be zombies. And I can’t even take a shotgun to these zombies. No, I have to treat them just like any regular project.

So it’s time for a deep breath and to remind myself why I’m in this job in the first place.

  1. Variety. I can’t see it when I’m staring at a zombie, but very few people have jobs with as much variety as mine. I have my own research project, my own administrative project. I crunch numbers, write client materials, edit client materials. I’m an IT backup, on a data security team, and a “guru” for most of the applications we use locally. That can be a lot of interruptions, but it doesn’t get stale.
  2. Impact. I make a difference at work. My administration work is a chance to smooth the path for people going through tough times. My research project puts me in communication with decision-makers in the company and was recently disseminated outside as well. I can make someone’s day a little easier by helping make their computers do what they’ve been trying to do. What I do matters.
  3. Challenge. Most of the projects I get come as goals. “The client wants to do this.” or “The client wants to know this.” Sure, we repeat some work, and I’m not on my own to figure out how to get it done, but I get to do it because the client couldn’t do it themselves.
  4. People. Since this is the kind of work we do, and since we do it successfully, you know I have to work with a pretty sharp bunch. What you don’t know is that they’re also hired for their people skills. Friendly, funny, smart, minimal gossip, no backstabbing–what more could I ask for?
  5. Authority. I don’t have a boss. I don’t have anyone reporting to me. I have things that have to get done, people who work with me on them, and a coach who is also a coworker. I have effectively sidestepped the chain of power, and the arrangement couldn’t suit me better if it had been made for me.
  6. Compensation. This isn’t why I do anything, since I’m mostly internally motivated. However, it’s hard to feel under-appreciated when someone apologizes to you over a pay increase that is above most companies’ top of the merit range.

There are more reasons to stay and love my job, but those are the highlights. Besides, it’s time to go see whether I can finally lay those zombies to rest.

Hah.

Why Am I Here?