I sometimes feel like my life is a wave. I'm not really living it, just sort of riding it. Most of the time I can more or less keep on top of it, and sometimes it all comes crashing down on my head. And then there are weeks like this, where I feel like I'm surfing the very edge of it and barely holding on - scary, but also exhilerating. One false move and I'm in big trouble, but look how high up I am!
Specifically, my thesis is due in a few weeks, I have a giant scanning project that is supposed to go next week for which I don't really have participants lined up, and I just spoke to my future PhD supervisor about applying for an NSERC grant (which not only requires filling out a huge form and writing a research proposal, but will also be the first he sees of my writing - so it's gotta be good).
As well, I just got back from a weekend in Inveraray at a festival, and before that it was Liverpool for the weekend. I also am going to try to get to Oxford for a birthday party in September and want to make it down to London in October as my aunt Judith will be visiting. This is the stuff that makes life worth living - but it's hard to cram it all in around thesis and the work and all my other projects.
However, I can certainly not say that I am bored.
Full reports (with pictures, maybe) on Liverpool and the Connect festival when I am not in quite so perilous a position on the wave...
ps. Just to make things more entertaining, I just got a new housemate (verdict so far: lovely). I got home from 10 hours travel back from Scotland and he made me dinner, so I went to grab a drink from the tap. That was when I saw that he had helpfully left a note above the sink, warning me that Bangor's infected with cryptosporidium. We're on a boil-water advisory for the moment. Good times! ... but suddenly extremely happy I have a housemate to warn me of these things, as otherwise I'd probably be racked with horrible diarrhea by now.
Showing posts with label self-indulgent rant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label self-indulgent rant. Show all posts
Tuesday, 2 September 2008
Monday, 28 July 2008
Affordances
I would just like to note how annoying it is that often I can be perfectly good at analyzing things - breaking ideas down logically, figuring out how machines work, and all that sort of thing. But then when confronted with the simplest objects I will be totally clueless. And it usually has to do with affordances.
I'm talking about the second Wiki definition - an affordance tells you how to use something, basically. If you see a handle, you know to grasp it. If you see a door with a horizontal bar, it's easy to know you should push it in, rather than (say) pulling on it or trying to twist it. One way of telling if something's a good design is by whether it has good affordances - you can tell by looking at it what you should do with it (even if it's totally new). Like the little wheely thing on iPods - circling your finger around it is obvious and makes immediate sense.
Anyway. I have great trouble, it would seem, with objects that lack good affordance. I couldn't make tea in the lab for months because I couldn't seem to turn the electric kettle on. I'm not kidding. I had to text Helena and ask if it was broken. (As my dad would say, "HOW much education does it take?!") In the end it turned out that you have to press the little lever up to turn it on, instead of down like every other kettle I've ever used. Somehow this totally baffled me. Is this how people become absent-minded professors?
And then yesterday I had to get my mate Lola to show me how to lock my back door. It's been unlocked for days because I couldn't figure it out. (Don't worry, my "garden" is about three feet deep, walled on all sides and looks out onto other peoples' gardens, so it would be very difficult to be burgled from that side, even given an unlocked door). Turns out you have to pull the door handle up while turning the key. Why does everyone else seem to know this?! It was a complete surprise to me. Now I'm wondering if I'm just really bad at common household objects and what is an obvious affordance to everyone else in the universe is totally baffling to me. Sigh.
The only solution is to become very rich and employ someone to make the tea and lock up from now on :)
I'm talking about the second Wiki definition - an affordance tells you how to use something, basically. If you see a handle, you know to grasp it. If you see a door with a horizontal bar, it's easy to know you should push it in, rather than (say) pulling on it or trying to twist it. One way of telling if something's a good design is by whether it has good affordances - you can tell by looking at it what you should do with it (even if it's totally new). Like the little wheely thing on iPods - circling your finger around it is obvious and makes immediate sense.
Anyway. I have great trouble, it would seem, with objects that lack good affordance. I couldn't make tea in the lab for months because I couldn't seem to turn the electric kettle on. I'm not kidding. I had to text Helena and ask if it was broken. (As my dad would say, "HOW much education does it take?!") In the end it turned out that you have to press the little lever up to turn it on, instead of down like every other kettle I've ever used. Somehow this totally baffled me. Is this how people become absent-minded professors?
And then yesterday I had to get my mate Lola to show me how to lock my back door. It's been unlocked for days because I couldn't figure it out. (Don't worry, my "garden" is about three feet deep, walled on all sides and looks out onto other peoples' gardens, so it would be very difficult to be burgled from that side, even given an unlocked door). Turns out you have to pull the door handle up while turning the key. Why does everyone else seem to know this?! It was a complete surprise to me. Now I'm wondering if I'm just really bad at common household objects and what is an obvious affordance to everyone else in the universe is totally baffling to me. Sigh.
The only solution is to become very rich and employ someone to make the tea and lock up from now on :)
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