Tag Archives: cranky pants

Random Gripes of The Day

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Feeling stuffed?

Feeling stuffed?

I was annoyed by two things today and I have decided to share them with you. ((Photo courtesy of Göran Arvidson)) It’s more about the sharing than actually imparting information, but these are two things I feel kinda strongly about.  The day is young yet, so I reserve the right to add more things to this list.  :)

  1. I was going through my PayPal transactions for the last year and I discovered that providing a full and immediate refund costs me $0.30.  That’s pretty lame.  When they perform the refund, they get their money back.  All they’re out is a few zeros and ones.  And, frankly, it’s enough that I think my next few projects will be Stripe based rather than PayPal based.  PayPal’s API is a pain, I’m convinced requiring PayPal over a credit card (via Stripe) for transaction probably costs me conversions ((Oh, I could go on and on about PayPal versus Stripe and the posts about the relative benefits and conversions)) , and their policies are worse. 
  2. Online forms that require multiple steps across multiple submission pages.  The first thing this kind of UI tells me is that the people who wrote the page wanted something done quickly and easily (for them) and didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about usability.  Because I have a tendency to overthink things, I sometimes go back and revise an earlier step depending upon what I see in a later step.  When I see an online form that requires multiple steps I will typically feed it bogus information first so I can see the rest of the steps.

Um.  That’s all I’ve got to grumble about today.

Actually, in hindsight, if those are my biggest problems of the day, I’m doing pretty well!

Dollar Stores

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Have you ever browsed a dollar store, store going out of business, or garage sale?  The senses are overwhelmed with the sheer number and variety of things you’d never ever want to take home with you.  It boggles the mind to even conceive of how or why such things were created in the first place.  The frustrating part of it is – there’s probably a really good deal on something very useful somewhere inside that place.

Unfortunately, this is kind of how I’m beginning to feel about Thingiverse.  I love the idea of a place for sharing digital designs.   Over the last month it has gotten flooded with “things.”  People just uploading Sketchup, SolidWorks, or other 3d modeling files directly to Thingiverse, outright plagiarism, and stuff that could never be printable/cuttable/makeable (such as several objects with zero thickness).

I’m totally good with uploading an unfinished design, partial designs, or the outline of an idea.  But, for heaven’s sake, please include a title, description, and a copy of your file for sharing.  And, by sharing I mean an STL or DXF file – not a proprietary format.  By all means, include your source Sketchup or SolidWorks file, but please also include a file type that’s actually meant for assisting in the production of the thing.

Next in the cranky-pants series:  Hey you kids!  Get off my damn lawn!