KPAO by Dave Cortright

Best free fonts

“But Dave,” you might say, “those fonts you listed all cost money and I don’t want to pay for any content.” OK, well there is a way to get some high-quality fonts without paying and without breaking any copyright laws. I pointed you to some of the free font resources a few days back. But here are my top picks from those lists.

Old-style Serif Day Roman Modern Serif Gentium Sans Delicious Humanist Cosmetica

What the heck is going on in Washington (State)?!

Something very, very strange has apparently caused nearly everyone in the State of Washington to go completely bonkers. Either that or editors are working hard to get their "Best Headlines of 2007" entries in before midnight tonight:

• "Nude Couple Grapple Over Dog Near Shower"
• "Man blames car wreck on prehistoric winged reptile"

Favorite fonts – break free from Arial and Times

The default web fonts are boring. They have been overused, and while they are reasonably well-designed fonts, they just aren't inspiring because they are used everywhere.

For a lot of applications, you'll be forced to use one of these standard fonts, simply because they are universal. But if you are creating a print-out, or a PDF, or even using rich typography on the web, I highly recommend you go beyond the defaults and make your design stand out with a fresh typographic look. Some of my favorites:

Serif Hightower Jenson Mrs. Eaves Caslon Vendetta Sans Serif Agenda Meta Syntax Legacy Myriad

United Airlines is Scummy

I booked my holiday travel with United Airlines through Hotwire.  During the checkout process there is a pop-up menu that asks what frequent flyer plan you wish to use.  Strangely, United Airlines wasn't among the choices.

So I asked Hotwire what was up and here is their response (emphasis mine):

Dear Philip,

Thank you for contacting us regarding your upcoming flight on United,
Hotwire Itinerary Number XXXXXXXX.

I understand you were unable to locate United Airlines frequent flyer
program from our drop down menu.

At this time, United has chosen to not be listed on our Web site as a
participating frequent flyer choice.

You will still have the option to present your United Airlines frequent
flyer number at the counter when you check in for your flight. Hotwire 
is unable to guarantee United Airlines will credit you for these miles.

If we can be of further assistance, please feel free to reply to this
email or contact us directly at 1-866-HOTWIRE (468-9473). Thank you for
choosing Hotwire.

Sincerely,

(hotwire rep)
Hotwire Customer Care

So it is acknowledged that miles are earned, but there is no place to enter them in their form by design.  The consumer is left having to remember to deal with it when checking in.

What is interesting about this, aside from the case study in egregious scumminess?

• This is in part the result of what happens when air travel becomes commoditized.  Consumers gravitate to the lowest airfares, there is a perpetual price war, airlines struggle to remain profitable, and they cut any corner they can, even if it is blatantly anti-consumer.
• It doesn't have to be this way.  United has for years exuded a we-hate-customers attitude.  Southwest Airlines continues to be pretty fun to fly in the same economic and competitive climate.

Please join me in boycotting United Airlines (except when their price is lower than everyone else's).

Price-fixing at the movies

One thing I've wondered about movies: why are they all priced the same? It's quite clear that there's a wide range of quality and demand, so I wonder why the studios don't recognize that and charge accordingly. I could see charging $5 for the latest version of the teen cookie cutter movie (From Justin to Kelly anyone?), whereas Star Wars or Lord of the Rings could command $12 for a ticket.

I know movie theaters aren't set up for this yet, but how hard would it be to change? Fast food restaurants have the technology. Sure, they might have to set up improved security on the theater doors to make sure those going into the expensive movies actually paid for them. Maybe some sort of turnstile scanner like they have on subways these days. Or just throw a minimum-wage kid on the door for the expensive films (which they already do on opening weekend for big movies) and don't worry about the rest.

OK, so if variable pricing is too big of a leap, how about coupons? A movie's not doing well, so put a coupon for $1 off in the paper/online. It works for other markets, why not movies (or music for that matter)? If studios want to stop the declining attendance at the movies, they'd better start thinking about making changes like this real soon.

FWIW, Joel Splosky suggests the reason for the price-fixing:

Pricing sends a signal. People have come to believe that “you get what you pay for.” If you lowered the price of a movie, people would immediately infer from the low price that it's a crappy movie and they wouldn't go see it. If you had different prices for movies, the $4 movies would have a lot less customers than they get anyway. The entertainment industry has to maintain a straight face and tell you that Gigli or Battlefield Earth are every bit as valuable as Wedding Crashers or Star Wars or nobody will go see them.

He could be right. But we won't really know the effects of such a change unless we test it out. There might be markets where you don't want to do this. Or times of day. Or certain movies. But ultimately if the movie studios aren't happy with the way things are going, they should start testing out these sorts of things real soon.

The British Have All of the Cool Flotsam

A mysterious 30 meter long tank / silo / spacecraft part has washed ashore in Scotland. This sort of thing never seems to happen to me. I was at Ocean Beach in San Francisco twice in the last week, and all I found was some gelatinous blobs and a lot of bubbles. 

The story on the BBC has all of the typically-British details.

Scooba – I, for one, welcome our new robot under-lords

Simpson’s memes aside, I love my Scooba floor-scrubbing robot. Nobody likes to scrub the floor, and paying a person to come do it is both expensive and a hassle. These things can be gotten for $275, or half that if you go for the refurbished one like I did.

It takes a long time to charge. I made the mistake of thinking that it would fully charge in a couple of hours, and ended up with half-mopped floors. But if you leave it charging overnight, it's good to go for a run the next day.

It also cleans with plain vinegar and water if you want. We've been trying to eliminate all of the chemical cleaners from our house, so this was a must-have feature.

And while you can get away without sweeping first, I find it works a lot better if you do. Especially if you have a menagerie of pets that are constantly dumping big clumps of hair all over the place. Hmm, so maybe it's time I got Scoobie a friend?

The Undead Return of Television

Following up on Dave's post about the demise of traditional broadcast television, I have noticed how TV has slowly crept back into my life. In 1991, I did burn my TV in my yard (metaphorically anyway -- I sold it). Though we own a television now, for a long time it was only hooked up to the DVD player. It's been remarkably beneficial to remove the "flip-on-the-tube" option from our lives.

Then the kids started destroying the DVDs. So I ripped the surviving DVDs to a big hard disk, hooked it up to an old Mac iBook connected to the TV, and taught the kids how to use FrontRow. Next comes Miro, subscribed to a couple yoga video podcast feeds. It's a (very) short jump from there to an Internet-delivered Tivo-like experience, with way more content than we could possibly sensibly consume.

Sixteen years ago it was easy to walk away from TV, and not have to make day-to-day decision about what to watch. Now that "TV equals Computer," I'm not really sure what to do.

The TV becomes irrelevant(?)

Burn your TV in your yard;
Gather 'round it with your friends.
Warm your hands upon the fire,
And start again...

Ah, the immortal words of Toad the Wet Sprocket from a decade ago, and perhaps now is the time. All of the major TV networks are now experimenting with streaming their shows online (Fox · NBC · ABC · CBS). And the site OpenHulu let's you choose from shows across all of the networks with minimal interruptions. And if you want a specific episode, you can get it from Amazon UnBox or iTunes or even using BitTorrent. So why even have a TV these days?

Well, it's still good for watching shows and movies socially. But now that typical TV content is widely available on the computer, the TV is well on its way to becoming simply a big, general-purpose display for presenting content. The Xbox 360, Apple TV, and other such devices allow you to pump content from your computer to the TV. Will it be long before people give up their cable and satellite and go for an Internet-only strategy?

I wanted to be just such an early adopter. My DirecTV receiver failed after 8+ years of continuous service. Not a bad run. As I was thinking about my options, I took a look at my bill - almost $60/month. You can get a lot of entertainment online for $700+/year. In fact most of it is free. But ultimately I replaced the receiver with an identical used one I got off of eBay (because I still use UltimateTV; and no I don't want a Tivo, thankyouverymuch). Certain Luddite members of the household weren't quite ready for such a radical entertainment shift. :-)

Windows+Escape – a better “close window” keyboard shortcut

I have been using Windows XP (I upgraded from Vista) as my primary OS for the past 3 years. One thing I've always missed from my Mac days are keyboard shortcuts for handling windows, like the ubiquitous Cmd+W. OK, so Windows does have Alt+F4, but this was designed by a sadist. There's no way to do this with one hand that won't result in carpal tunnel.

So I got a copy of AutoHotKey and started to fix it. Here are the three essential commands in my script:

#Esc::Send !{F4}
#!Esc::Send !{n}
!Esc::WinMinimize,A

The first rmaps Windows+Escape to Alt+F4. I use this all the time. The second maps Windows+Alt+Esc to Alt+N, which lets me dismiss those “do you want to save?” dialogs. And the final one, Alt+Windows now minimizes the front window.

And this topic reminds me of one of my little-known claims to fame. I was the guy who designed the Cmd+`shortcut for cycling among the windows within an application back when I worked on Mac Outlook Express. The shortcut was picked up by Mac IE and Entourage, and then someone from the Mac OS team saw it and liked it so much, he aded it to the OS. Yay!