Once again today I’ve been reminded of how common my name is. I won’t bother getting into the details; the important thing is, it has inspired a new series: “Not Me.”
Do not confuse this with the “Not Me” of notoriety in the Keane household; this is simply an opportunity for me to show off, unadorned (except in this first case), a photo of a Scott Anderson who is… not me.
Without further ado…
Not me:
This is certainly old news, but it’s still news to me.
I’ve been on a big Kraftwerk kick lately, having recently purchased all of their old albums and featured them frequently on my Hall of Prog blog.
I noticed, in the video for “Pocket Calculator” (below), that Ralf is playing a humorously tiny keyboard instrument. But what I didn’t know until I was reading about the album on Wikipedia was the exact identity of the keyboard.
The keyboard is, in fact, a “Bee Gees” branded toy made by Mattel:
Sweet. You can read more about it here. And, just in case you were doubting that it’s really the instrument used by Kraftwerk, here’s a video of someone playing the melody from “Pocket Calculator” on one. Any Kraftwerk fan will instantly recognize the sound.
Any use of a font is a validation of its aesthetics, and since I find the aesthetics of Verdana appalling, I am sad to see it get validation from the likes of IKEA.
I feel like I got a bit of a scoop here, because I first noticed the use of Verdana at IKEA about a month ago. At the time I thought it was a fluke — I saw it on one of their vertical banners, posted near the cafe, and it appeared to be a locally-produced sign advertising some particular regional specialty they were temporarily adding to the menu. It looked like someone at the local store had tried to design a banner to match the corporate standard, but was ignorant of the nuances of fonts, and used Verdana because they either didn’t have Futura or couldn’t tell the difference (gasp!)… or both.
But then earlier this week I was leafing through the 2010 IKEA catalog that was sitting on our coffee table, when it struck me that the whole bloody thing was set in Verdana. How could this be?!
As I said, I feel like I got a bit of a scoop here, because I mentioned this observation on Twitter three days ago, and only now is it showing up on Daring Fireball via lonelysandwich via Hunk-O-Mass via jhn brssndn via hellaposer via Typophile. And apparently Typophile does not yet have the bandwidth to handle being “fireballed” and “sandwiched” (and… uh… “34ed”… yeah, that’s it), since I can’t get it to load right now.
I feel like I’m in good company though, because these guys are echoing my longstanding sentiments towards Verdana. From Gruber:
I have never seen Verdana look good in any way other than in small sizes on-screen.
And, even more on-the-money, from Lisagor:
Sure, Gruber uses it tastefully, but at anything larger than 11pt, it feels to me a bit squat and dopey. Friendly and readable, but a little bit simple, in the way you’d say a person is simple, but only behind his back.
Well played. Part of IKEA’s rationale is that “they want to be able to give the same visual impression both in print and the web.” Well, that can be done without resorting to this abominable solution. Especially with the imminent ascension of @font-face.
Here’s hoping 2011 will bring a return to sanity.
It’s at times like this that I begin to question my membership in the Democratic Party. This bit of ridiculousness arrived in the mail today.
I own a 2009 Honda Fit. It’s the second Fit I’ve owned, having purchased a 2008 model less than a year earlier. It’s not that I disliked the 2008 — I loved it. But we wanted to get down to one car, and it worked out perfectly to make an even trade of our 2008 Fit plus our old 2000 Civic for a 2009 Fit with a few upgrades. But we’ve already been over all of this.
One of the things I was most excited about with the 2009 Fit was the integrated iPod support. I have an old iPod that I’ve dedicated solely to providing music in the Fit, and it was great to not have to rely on the 1/8-inch audio input jack, but instead to stash the iPod in a special second glove compartment with an integrated USB port. Plug the iPod in and forget it — you can control it straight from the car stereo. Perfect.
Or so I thought.
Yes, it’s true that you can do all of that. But the controls for operating the iPod from the car stereo are abysmal. You can browse the iPod’s contents by playlist, artist, album or song, but there’s no secondary browsing (other than albums by artist). When you’ve got a 30 GB iPod with thousands of songs, from hundreds of albums, by hundreds of artists, this method is inefficient, to say the least.
What’s worse, you always have to start from the beginning in each list, and it doesn’t wrap around if you try to scroll backwards. Good luck finding music by a band like Yes… you’ll be scrolling for days. (And did I mention how slooooow the scrolling is? Spin that dial as frantically as you want, it’s still going to tick through the list one item at a time, at the same leisurely pace.) And if you’ve taken the time to scroll all the way to the Y’s and are listening to Yes, then you decide you want to listen to U2, don’t think you can just start at Y and scroll back to U — oh, no — you’ll find yourself right back at A.
I’ve been incredulous about this horrible navigation system since almost immediately after I bought the Fit, and I have been searching for any kind of relief — a firmware update would be best, but I’d even settle for the simple ability to turn off the console navigation and control the music directly from the iPod. But as soon as you plug it in, the car stereo takes over and you can’t control the iPod directly. The only solutions I’ve found are to unplug the iPod and set up the music you want, hit play, and then plug it in — the stereo will at least keep it going from that point — or to skip the USB altogether and go back to the 1/8-inch input. But that’s on the dash next to the stereo controls, and you’d end up with a cord dangling there — not the elegant, enclosed solution the hidden USB port offers.
What a drag. I’ve been searching for an answer and apparently I’m not alone. I’m hoping, at least for the sake of others, that Honda has improved the system in the 2010 Fit. But that won’t help me.
In the past, I’ve found that blogging about something like this often attracts the attention of someone with an answer. Here’s hoping it works this time. Someone… help!