Simon Rules!

Hooray for 8ft trees and LED lights! Happy Christmas!

The BBC and other news sources are reporting on an initiative to start promoting atheism to counter similar public religious messages. They want to put signs on London buses telling people to enjoy their lives and stop worrying about nonsense questions. A fundraiser was started, and the aim was to collect £5500. As of the time of writing, £125,711.32 has been collected so I hope to see lots of these signs.

What was one of the biggest reasons I got rid of my Verizon phone? Aside from the sucky service and terrible battery life, it was because of poor customer service. Not only didn’t they care when I called customer service with my issues, but they were unwilling (or unable) to solve a basic problem for me: my phone couldn’t display dates in UK (dd-mm-yyyy) or ISO (yyyy-mm-dd) formats, and it couldn’t display times in 24 hour. I think it would take a programmer less than 15 minutes to add those as options for future phones. It still wouldn’t work outside the country, though.

I’ve noticed this kind of thing a few times. Today I had to enter some security answers for online credit card access, and a hell of a lot of the pre-defined questions that I have to pick from are solely geared around the USA.

“What high school did so-and-so attend?” – they don’t call it high school in England, but I’ll let it slide as it’s a translation issue.

“When is so-and-so’s birthday (MM/DD)?” – I am not sure why they even need to know the format, since it accepts any string input.

“What is the last name of your 1st grade teacher?” – I can’t remember that far back. Even so, they are not called grades in a lot of other countries, including the UK. Translation issue again, but who remembers that far back? For me, that was 1985!

“What was your favourite college year?” – Questions like these are really problematic to me. Not only are college and university two separate things in England (we have two years of college before we go to university), but asking me what my favourite year was may result in a different answer depending on my mood.

“What’s the name of your elementary school?” – I am still not certain what elementary school is.

“In which city did so-and-so get married?” – City? Many times I am asked what city I am from in England. Addresses don’t work that way in Europe; we don’t all live in or near a city.

“Who did you go to prom with?” – We don’t have prom in England. Oops.

“What state did you first visit (other than the one you were born in)?” – That’s a big assumption! I guess I can still answer this one…

I don’t have a photo of this to hand, but CU Boulder attach computer mice in some of their labs to the right side of each keyboard, leaving about 10 inches of cord free. Thanks, CU! You have access ramps for the disabled and want to increase the diversity of your students, but you don’t think about the 10% of your population that is left handed. I don’t know why I felt so mad at the time – I just went to a different lab to do my work. Perhaps it was because I really cannot use a computer as quickly with my right hand (almost, but not quite), and it doesn’t feel at all comfortable.

This brings me onto my next theory – the 50% skill theory. I believe that when we are all born, we each have 100% of skill to allocate between our hands for various sports (some athletes get more than 100%). Left handers get so confused with what to do – do I mirror what the instructor is doing or repeat exactly? As a result, our skill gets split more like 50/50 instead of, say, 80/20 in a regular person. We have equal skill in our hands but neither is particularly good. I have always found that I am terrible in any activity that involves throwing, catching or aiming, so maybe that’s why.

Another thing. When I was in school, we had left handed scissors. You know the type – the blades cross the opposite way. If they have moulded handles, they are moulded to fit the left hand rather than the right. I just cannot use left handed scissors. I hold right-handed scissors in my left hand, but my eye is trained to look at the “cutting” side of the scissors. If I pick up a left-handed pair, I look at the wrong side and my line goes wonky. The funny thing is that I remember when I was about 7, my school bought few left-handed scissors, and they would make me use them, since there were not enough right-handed ones to go around. As a result, my work turned out utterly crap.