Indistinguishable from Jesse

While ordering a gift for my girlfriend through Amazon, I included a music symbol (♫) and a heart symbol (♥) in the gift note. The printed gift note that Amazon shipped with the gift showed "♫" and "♥" where the symbols were supposed to be. Amazon's confirmation page had showed the symbols correctly.

This letter was rubber-banded to my doorknob:

Dear Residents:

Thank you for your payment. We realize sometimes things can be over looked, however our records indicate that you have underpaid your account by $0.01. Please remit the amount due within 3 days in form of personal check(s) or money order(s).

[...]

Please feel free to contact me at  with any questions regarding your balance.
Your immediate attention to this matter is greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
[...]
Accounts Administrator

I went to the rental office, found the accounts administrator, and said "Apparently I owe you one cent. I don't know why, but here's a penny". He wouldn't take my penny; the payment had to be in the form of a check or money order. He looked at my account record and determined that I owned them a cent because when I first moved in, they made a rounding error and asked me for the wrong amount for my first (pro-rated) month's rent. He said they had to ask me to pay the cent I owed because of fair housing laws -- if they didn't ask me to pay the cent I owed, they couldn't ask other residents to pay money they owed.

I added a cent to my next month's rent check.

Jakob Nielsen, Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002:

1. No prices. No B2C ecommerce site would make this mistake, but it's rife in B2B, where most "enterprise solutions" are presented so that you can't tell whether they are suited for 100 people or 100,000 people.

I also thought no B2C site would make that mistake, until I tried to purchase an SBC phone line for my apartment. After I clicked "Residential customers", clicked "Local > New Phone Service", and entered my address, the site asked me for billing and credit information. At no time did I see a price or even a link labelled "prices".

I decided not to purchase a phone line.

This is Broken

• Aqua dialog instructs users to "lick OK"
• Flat railings can be dangerous
• Wash your hands

We Hates Software (blog-like archive for a mailing list)

• Having to make clean
• Useless car websites
• File pickers
• Browser detection: broken, let me bypass it
• Browsers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

My Crest toothpaste tube says "LOT318412EXPJN05". Is JN January or June? (This guy has another Procter & Gamble product and wonders the same thing.)

AMC printed the wrong date on Lord of the Rings tickets again:

Two years ago, my suitemate and a few of her friends drove to the theater on Monday night for Fellowship. As she left, she told me she had tickets to see the movie a day early. I believed her until I saw her at the theater on Tuesday night.

I'm not aware of any Mudders making the same mistake this year.

I wonder if printing the wrong date could be intentional. It's better if 10 people drive a day early than if 2 people drive a day late. Someone at the theater said the tickets are printed incorrectly because the AMC software only understands business days.

South has about one false fire alarm a year, usually due to kitchen non-fires. When there was a fire alarm at 6:50am last Friday, many students stayed in their rooms the whole time. I do not think this is a coincidence.

I took time to get fully dressed, and even then I was one of the first students in the parking lot. Only a third of the students in the dorm came to the parking lot during the 10-minute alarm. Some students came out of their rooms briefly, saw Michaela waving her burnt toast around, and went back into their rooms. The rest either slept through the alarm (unlikely, given how loud it is) or decided to stay in bed.

In California, it is illegal to "impair the effective operation of a [fire-protection system], so as to threaten the safety of any occupant or user of the structure in the event of a fire". So it's clear that we can't reduce the sensitivity of alarms in the dorm just because we find false alarms annoying. But what if we think a reduction in the false alarm rate would make residents take fire alarms more seriously? Could we argue that making the detector near the kitchen less sensitive would make the alarm system "less impaired"?

Cornell University has taken steps to reduce false alarm rates in dorms. They were able to do so with the encouragement of the Ithaca Fire Department and presumably without breaking any New York laws. This is encouraging, even though I live in California.