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From a travel article about Scotland on sfgate.com today:

At 1,300 feet, you can see 365 degrees to all the other islands in the Hebrides.

Clearly the editor gave 112% on that article.

This one’s from the Economist:

One of the things I never understood when I was a journalist (and still don’t) is the copy editor’s penchant for puns.  Typically the last in the chain to see an article, and typically responsible for crafting the story headline, copy editors — for whatever reason — feel its their duty to take perfectly straightforward headlines suggested by writers and section editors and turn them into bad jokes.  Why?  What’s the point?  Are they just bored?

I once asked the copy chief at one magazine why they do it.  “It’s a long tradition,” he said.

In other words: They do it because they’ve always done it.  And they’re bored.

Some RSS headlines from CNN that popped up on my Google home page today:

Some friends are doing some cool stuff this week:

Ben, who runs Virtually Blind and is an expert on legal issues in virtual worlds, has had an op-ed piece about the future of the Internet published in the Wall Street Journal.

Maggie, of Mighty Girl fame and a former colleague at Web Techniques, has launched Mighty Haus a new shopping blog focused on cool stuff for your house. As the tagline says, hooray for stuff!

Jeff, who runs the Digital Camera Resource Page, one of the top digital camera reviews sites, got to play professional sports photographer for a day at the Bank of the West Classic tennis tournament at Stanford. Love the photo of the flying braid.

First, I’d like to say that the Wife is pregnant and we are having a boy. Yes, thank you. It’s true. We are quite excited about this.

But that’s not the story I wanted to tell you. The real story is this: In preparing for the arrival of the little dude, we decided to clean the spare bedroom of all the old books we had lying around. And by that, I mainly mean the old textbooks and supplemental reading materials and management guides and coffee table books and started-but-never-finished books and every other in-between sort of book that we’ll never read again and will never recommend that anyone else read again either sort of books. We put all these in five or six paper bags and loaded them into the trunk of our car.

Our town has a large and wonderful recycling center with a not-as-large and possibly wonderful book exhange in it, so we drove our five or six bags full of books over to the center and parked in front of the book exchange. The exchange is basically a half dozen or more bookcases lined up against the wall of the recycling center, and as we hopped out of the car we noticed a few people milling about.

I smiled at them. They looked at me. And this is where the story gets interesting.

I hefted one bag of books out of the trunk, carried it over to the bookcases, and set it down on the floor. “Is there any order to where the books go on the shelves?” I asked no in one particular.

“No,” said a man in fleece just to my left, startling me with his sudden proximity. Before I could quite turn and focus, this man had bent down and was taking books out of the bag I had just left on the floor.

“Oh, hey, thanks,” I said. I watched him for a moment as he dug through the bag, efficiently examining the cover and spine of each book and setting it in a pile next to him. Well, that’s nice of him to help me stack the books, I figured. Then I went back to the car and grabbed another bag.

This time, a middle-aged woman with black hair silently intercepted me before I got to the shelves. Again, I nodded my thanks, but made sure to catch the Wife’s eye as she handed off her own bag of books to another silent receiver nearby. She shrugged.

As I walked back to the car for my third set of books, I tried to understand why I felt a bit unsettled by the exchange. Should we have offered to help sort and stack the books on the shelves? Were we not supposed to bring old textbooks? I lifted another bag out of the car and carried it back, but this time, as both the man in fleece and the black-haired woman descended upon me, I tried to strike up a conversation. “So, are you volunteers here?” I asked.

“No,” said the man in fleece. And then he took the bag from my hands.

“Oh, okay,” I said and turned away. Wait, what?

I turned back and saw the man and the black-haired woman sifting through the contents of bag there in the same spot where I had handed it to them. And then it clicked: They were book scavengers. And it wasn’t just one group — there were multiple competing individuals at work here. They weren’t putting these books away or choosing a few to read themselves — they were taking the best of them so they could resell them elsewhere.

I met the Wife at the back of the car. She had clearly just had the same realization. “Is it bad that I don’t want to give my books to them?” she whispered. We quickly debated the pros and cons of dropping off our books here. It felt as if somehow our posessions — as valueless as they were to us — were being preyed upon before we had even set them down. And yet, that was silly. Why shouldn’t someone else profit off our old books? Weren’t we going to donate them anyway? This way, maybe they would get recirculated to other communities and even other countries that might actually want old physics and psychology textbooks. Right? It seemed to make sense, sort of.

I quickly grabbed the last bag from the trunk and took it over to where a woman with two sets of eyeglasses strung around her neck was waiting. I set the bag at her feet, the way one might tentatively leave an offering before a goddess prone to sudden fits of anger. “Okay, then. Thanks,” I said and backed away slowly. She didn’t return the acknowledgement and started to pick through the paperbacks that had gone unfinished on our shelves for years.

The Wife already had the car running when I slipped into the passenger seat. “Why do I feel so used?” she asked as she threw the car in reverse.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but let’s get out of here.”

And that, my son, is the story of the sacrifice we made to give you your own bedroom.

Yoda stamp the post office does release today

(That’s the headline as it shows up in my news reader. The actual headline on the article is different, but still amusing.)

I’m pretty tough on products that have bad user interfaces, especially technical products. For instance, within three weeks of getting a Comcast (Motorola) DVR, I gave everyone who spent more than two minutes with me a treatise on just how much more I preferred TiVo’s interface. All I’m trying to do is watch TV for crying out loud, so why does Comcast think my remote control needs to look like a graphing calculator?

But the one interface I’ve always hated doesn’t have much to do with technology — or high technology, at least. It’s the Dewey Decimal System. While it’s great to have industry standards, there’s no reason to force end users to know the ins and outs of those standards to benefit from them — which is exactly what librarians have done for over a century. Looking for books about technology? Look for the 600 on the spine!

So I have to say it’s about time a library bucked tradition and started organizing books under plain-English headings and printing plain-English subjects on the spines.

It reminds me of one of my favorite stories about another type of usable “interface”: that of the footpaths at the University of Oregon, which were paved after paths naturally appeared in the grass where student and faculty walked the most.

I am enjoying a bottle of Hefeweizen from Gordon Biersch, a local brewery, when I notice that the label describes the beer as being full of “citrus, bubble gum, clove, and banana” flavors.

I stop and imagine what it would be like to mix those ingredients together in a bowl and dip a spoon into it.

Gak. I am no longer enjoying my bottle of Hefeweizen.

~ ~ ~

Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness is quite good. It’s a look at the buildings and styles that have inspired us throughout history, woven into a convincing explanation of what that all means about our own beliefs and longings as humans.

However, I’m noticing a certain undercurrent in de Botton’s similes and asides that makes me wonder if the author’s home life wasn’t on a, uh, solid foundation at the time he was writing the book…

P.12: People “…have imagined living in unattainably expensive houses pictured in magazines and then felt sad, as one does upon passing an attractive stranger in the street.”

P.22: “We may need to have made an indelible mark on our lives, to have married the wrong person, pursued an unfulfilling career into middle age or lost a loved one before architecture can begin to have any perceptible impact on us…”

P.182: “Over generations, these codes prevented architects from using their imaginations; they hand-cuffed them to a narrow palette of acceptable materials and forms, and, like the institution of marriage, restricted choice in the name of delivering the satisfactions of restraint.”

By itself, this story — about a 74-year-old woman whose personalized license plate (NWTF) was rejected because some DMV employees think NWTF refers to a bit of Internet shorthand (wtf) — is already perfect.

But the fact that it also includes the following quote takes the story to a level where it quite possibly will win the award for being the defining story of the Internet era:

“Apparently, the young people use it on the computer,” she said.

Yes, apparently they do.

That’s the sort of line a reporter could spend his entire life just waiting to hear.