Aron 2 Blue

Stormlight Archive #5, by Brandon Sanderson Ten days until the contest of champions, and we follow everybody every day, kinda.  Dalinar, Navani, Gav in the Spiritual Realm, followed by Shallan, Renarin, Rlain, and Mraize, Iotyl? ghostbloods - trying to find Mishram's prison Big battles to try to keep the capital cities - because that's how the deal reads. Sigzil leads defense on the shattered plains, so Alethi can have a homeland. Adolin helps Yanagaun in Azimir - dome over the oathgate, defending against wave after wave of troops trying to break out.  Kaladin and Szeth do a pilgrimage to Shinovar, and Szeth has to go to each of the monasteries to defeat the honorbearer and retrieve an honor blade - they are overtaken with a darkness, and infect/oppress the countryside around them. Kaladin therapizes. Szeth has to confront his father and sister, and former mentors.   Jasnah helping defend XX, realize that the fleet is just a ruse, with mostly empty holds. Tarvangian ...

Stormlight Archive #4, by Brandon Sanderson Prologue: Navani recalling Gavilar's assassination, strange anti-light orb. Rescue Lirin, Kaladin's father, using floating ship. Mink, herdaz general, rescued too. Pursuer and Kaladin clash, horrible exchanged where Pursuer stabs Kaladin's neck repeatedly, paralyzing him, forcing healing. Saved by headbutt, I think. Lured into building, fabrial suppresses Kaladin's power, he kills Pursuer anyway using a knife to the neck. Navani gets to study suppression fabrial later. Venli and Fused infiltrate tower through the tunnels, turn the tower's defense against the radiants, who all fall unconscious except Kaladin and Lyft. Raboniel and Pursuer.  First battle to try to protect the tower's column. Soldiers valiant stand and defeat, buys enough time to infuse the shield to protect the column. First node is destroyed. Navani captured and cooperates with Raboniel. Dabbid communicates with the Sibling. Moash plots with Odium to se...

Stormlight Archive #3 Plot summary mostly for my benefit, with my interpretation. Oh so many spoilers! Flashbacks are all Dalinar, with him gradually recovering his memory of his wife. Kaladin follows some Parshendi, realizes they are just people too.  Dalinar is trying to forge an alliance with other kingdoms, Tarvangan/Karbranth  is first to join, with the assumption that Dalinar would try to conquer them if they didn't join. Tarvangan is following the Diagram, healers help in Jah Keved, and the sick/injured ruler makes T. king to spite the other factions - as the Diagram predicted. Dalinar uses the Stormfather to bring other rulers into the visions, eventually convinces Queen Fen and the Lyft/Gaz duo.  Kaladin flies Elhokar/Shallan/Adolin/bridge 4 to Kholinar, capital of Alethi, to see what's up with the queen. If fabrials (spanreeds) are used, screaming corrupt spren are attracted, and Fused attack. Parshmen army is gathering outside walls. Darkness palpable in palace...

The Stormlight Archive, Book 2 Plot summary follows, my interpretations of course! Opens with Jasnah's experience of Gavilar's assassination, and Parshendi taking responsibility and telling Jasnah that it was because "he was about to do something very dangerous". Jasnah hires Liss the assassin, experiences Shadesmar, sees Szeth walk on the wall. Jasnah has plan to betroth Shallan to Adalyn, to help her house/family. Shallan sees Jasnah's murder on the ship, soulcasts the ship into water to prevent the murder of the rest of the crew. Ends up stranded, and manipulates slaver and deserter bandits into helping her travel to shattered plains. Using Lightweaving to change appearance without really knowing how. Dismisses slaver Tvlakv (who had Kal), saves slaves. Tyn recognizes Shallan as a budding con artist, starts to advise her on how to deceive. Shallan poses as Herdazian when meeting Kal on patrol, takes his boots. Flashbacks are Shallan's history, showing her f...

How long do successful mature games get improvements? Some new features in PoGo: When incubating an egg, now you have the ability to purchase an incubator on the spot. Previously, this element was missing, so you had to back out, navigate to the store, purchase an incubator, then navigate back to your pokemon list and eggs, and incubate. Making purchases like this easier likely increases use of coins, which are the one of the few things you can directly buy for money, and otherwise are limited to 50 coins/day for defending gyms. Incubators cost 150 or 200 coins, so 3-4 days of waiting for someone who doesn't want to pay $. This makes me think the UX team is being encouraged to design for ways to get players to spend $. This is obvious in PoGo's emphasis on paid ticketed activities, up to $15 per event. Free to play still gets some benefit from the event, but early access to new Pokemon is often sold through these tickets. I'm not a game designer, and have mostly played PoGo...

Now on Netflix (sigh). I didn't watch it, I read the English edition. "The Three-Body Problem" by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu. What a weird thing. The start during the Cultural Revolution in China is really disturbing. A wholesale persecution of scientists and social elites that seems crazy. The zither bothered me. Ultra strong molecular wires - nanomaterials - can be strong under tension but not stand up to shear forces. How fast does it cut?  Unfolding a proton from higher dimensions so that it expands to the size of a planet but still has the mass of a proton - I don't think gravity would matter at all. It sorta hangs together, but is also wildly fantastic. Sci-fi, I guess?  I did enjoy the strangeness of the fairly direct translation. I liked everything enough to keep going and read the full trilogy. Recommended if you can overlook any issues caused by translation. 

SPOILERS I wanted to write down what I thought the major events of the first book because I'm re-reading the series so I can read the 5th book with everything fresh in my mind. Opening: Gavilar assassination by Szeth, truthless, assassin in white. Lashing to change gravity, stick objects together. Kaladin: we get his full back story, training as a surgeon growing up, joining the army to protect his little brother Tien, then having to watch him die. Later, he kills a shardbearer to protect his lighteye lord Amaram, then when he refuses to claim the shardblade because it caused the death of most of his squad, he has to watch the rest of his squad killed and is made a slave, so Amaram can claim the shards. This is told in flashbacks throughout the book. The main timeline follows him as a slave, meeting Syl the spren, then being made a bridgeman in Sadeas's army on the Shattered Plains. He despairs and nearly kills himself, Syl convinces him to try to help. He figures out how to tr...

John Green is really startling sometimes. He describes his work as a chaplain in a children's hospital, and that his work was not about questioning or communicating beliefs, but listening, and acknowledging other peoples' pain, without being able to offer a solution. "Don't just do something, stand there."

Hmm, read back in Jan and didn't finish a review. Lovely book, with lots of potential sub-text, but I think it's mostly about starting again with good people around you - and giving people who don't fit the mold a chance. An orc with a violent past starts a coffee shop, which is unheard of in this city. A succubus joins as a partner, who doesn't want to be judged by their species. And then there's the ratkin cook with extraordinary talents. Magic that helps and hurts, and a final redemption due to just being good people. The dire cat is an added bonus!

 "The Fault In Our Stars" by John Green. This is the book that launched John Green. And I get it - it is hard and touching and romantic and realistic and optimistic and depressing. Hazel Grace and Augustus both have cancer, are snarky teenagers, and they fall in love. "I don't want to be a grenade" hit me really hard.  And then Hank Green got cancer! Thankfully, his treatment was successful and he's back to normal health, because I like all-the-things that Hank and John have done, and I hope they keep doing for a long while.

Space empire, anyone? Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy, by Anne Leckie. Imperial Radch series . I picked the first one up for a book club I couldn't attend, and highly recommend it. It explores a number of deep themes, and I can see why it won all three major sci-fi awards. *** Spoilers *** Multiple minds, multiple viewpoints, single consciousness. The main character is a ship and most of it's crew, made up of "ancillaries". These humans are integrated into the ship's consciousness as additional brains/bodies. The author noted the difficulty of portraying a being with many viewpoints available to it, but I think they did an admirable job. Surveillance - what is a relationship like when the ship can sense everything about her crew except their thoughts? Gender - the main language does not have gendered pronouns, so all characters use she/her until specifically proven otherwise, and often the main character forgets. Imperialism - beings are not c...

I'm never sure how these things make it into production - did someone test it? They must have relied solely on automated tests, I guess. I had a FedEx delivery coming, and I wanted to add delivery instructions. There's a link as part of the tracking page, but it makes me set up an account. If I have to, sigh. The delivery instructions page is dead simple - a drop-down for preferred location to leave a package, and a text entry for notes.  However, the "submit" button at the bottom of the page is not enabled, and won't become enabled no matter what I type in the text field. I had to find the "try our new design" checkbox at the top of the page and flip to the new design for it to work. Strike 1: didn't test the old form, which is the default. I tried to type in a front door code for my building, but when I typed #, I got an error "No special characters permitted". Somehow all punctuation is disallowed, including comma, period and apostrophe....

Nettle & Bone, by T. Kingfisher Make a dog of bones for your companion. The dust-wife has power, but Marra is never quite sure how much her folk-magic can do. Marra pursues a plot to get revenge and protect her sister, but what happens if it actually works out? Fun in that creepy way. Recommended.

Babel, An Arcane History, by R. F. Kuang Alternate history Oxford, England, 1830s, where the mismatches in translation between languages powers magic. The total obsession with language is a central theme.  It was a hard book to read. The very likable main characters always seemed on the brink of a happy resolution, until crushing twists and turns dragged them to a darker place. It can be taken as a parable on the modern techno-state, and the absolute reliance we have on all forms of technology. What happens when the modern support structure breaks down? Well, New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, for example. The people at the top of the pyramid only care about ordinary people as pawns, laborers, inputs to the system, to be exploited. I was shocked at how easy it was for the British noble class to dismiss and minimize the value of all other people and cultures. I was wishing for some happier resolution for Robin and his best friend Ramy, but I think that I knew it would not have bee...

The town Chapel Hill now uses three separate charging station types at town facilities, which means three separate apps. A user thinks: how annoying. A UX designer thinks: opportunity! The ChargeUp app had me swearing at it this morning. I had used it once before, and remembered scanning a QR code on the station to get started. I open the app and click the big "Charge" button at the top right: This dumps me to a screen "We notice you haven't added a vehicle yet" - what? I didn't have to last time? The add vehicle screen has a list of every car company that has made a chargeable vehicle. Why can't I type so I don't have to scroll to "T"? OK, now I have a vehicle, can I charge? I can't click the vehicle to charge. If I hit the back arrow, I'm adding a vehicle again. I click "add" and now I have a second vehicle? What? **swearing commences** Are there other buttons I can click? Oh, there's navigation at the bottom of the...

School communications are frustrating. I often find them incomplete or confusing, and I think the schools are tired of hearing parent complaints about communication, too. As a parent, I don't know what technology support the schools have for their communications, so I feel like I might be unfair expecting a bunch from them. On the other hand, I think there are some low hanging fruit the schools could fix. My thoughts: Don't make me click through Shocker, I know, but school emails are not on my must read list. I want something quick and easy to scan, with critical dates and action items front and center. If I get an email like this (links removed): In this week’s issue of  The Weekly SPARK : DPS  Celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month DPS  Heroes Celebrated at Duke Football Game Morrison-Danner Named Vice President of National Association … and much more ! I'm probably not going to click. Looking at that summary, maybe that's OK. Communication hub I would love to know what s...

I've posted a couple UX observations recently, and they've been examples of a poor experience with a website - widgets or inputs not behaving the most convenient way for me. I started by labeling them as "UX fail", which was blunt, true, and pretty unkind. I realized that I also want to highlight good UX when I encounter it - although one of the functions of good UX is to make you not notice it! It gets out of the way and let's you quickly and efficiently accomplish the task you set out to do, without fuss. A "UX trip" has a double meaning - either the site tripped and stumbled, and possibly fell flat on its face, or I'm highlighting an interesting UX journey, with potentially excellent UX. I hope I find some of those positive examples to share soon. My next post is probably going to pick on Tesla. 0_o (=_=)

I encountered this annoyance registering my child for a class. First, the form asked for birthday and age, and both were required fields. I was tempted to be inconsistent. The real annoyance was the birthday field. It used a pop-up calendar widget, and did not allow me to type in the field. It started with today's date. To select my child's birthday, I had to navigate back through multiple years of months using arrows, which didn't stay in the same place on the screen because different months have different numbers of weeks (rows), so the widget got taller and shorter. If I missed a button, the widget would go away without changing the date. It would be so much easier to just type the date. Even with a required MM/DD/YYYY format, I'd still be happier.

I'm doing the Google UX design course on Coursera, so I've resolved to post UX I notice as a result. Seems fitting to start with a Google product -  Contacts . When I'm looking at a contact, all the phone numbers, email addresses, and even physical addresses are links. The most common reason for me to look up a contact is when I'm filling in a form. I don't want a link to send email or start a phone call - I want to copy to the clip board. Because it's a link, it's hard to select. Try it out - tell me if any of your normal habits for selecting text work. I nearly always have to close a mistakenly opened tab before I get the info I want selected and copied. How to fix? Either make the link separate - like a -> icon next to the text, or add a copy icon next to each of these entries. Still not ideal for the physical multi-line address, because I often need to select one line at a time.  Seems like a good UX workshop topic!

These two books follow the same characters, but have completely different plotlines and focus. They are both excellent for different reasons. Reamde  is a thriller. It takes place over a short span of time, only a few weeks, and has computer viruses and Russian crime lords, leading to international terrorists and spies, with gun battles and noble sacrifices. Fall, or Dodge in Hell  still follows Dodge and Zulu Forthrast, but spans a (very long) lifetime, and explores a radical transformation of all of humanity.  I wanted to write a summary of the major plot points and themes of each book since this was my second read of each, so I wouldn't forget as much as I did the first time. Just notes, really. *** Lots and lots of spoilers follow *** Reamde starts with Zulu and Peter getting mixed up with a crime - Peter sells some hacked accounts to XX, and then XX comes back when his computer is infected with the Reamde virus, and the hacked accounts are encrypted and inaccessible....