It's a Wonderful Calculation

November marks the official start of the "It's a Wonderful Life" season, in which my wife and I will use the DVD of this Frank Capra classic as background viewing more or less continuously until we ring in the new year two months from now. There are several major plot points in the movie that center around specific amounts of money. It's difficult to get a good grasp on the scale of these dollar amounts unless you adjust them for inflation. Fortunately, there are many good inflation calculators available online. Using the consumer price index (CPI) data from the last 200 years, they can calculate what a dollar amount from a prior year would be worth today.

For example, when Mr. Potter tries to hire George Bailey, George angrily says he's making $45/week, not $40. In the story time line, this happens in about 1933. $45 dollars in 1933 is equivalent to about $714/week in 2007 dollars (the last year for which this particular calculator has CPI data), or about $37,130. By comparison, Mr. Potter offers him a three year contract at $20,000/year. That is equivalent to about $317,160/year. That's a huge amount of money for a small-town businessman scrimping to get by, particularly when compared to what he makes at the building and loan. That's what makes it all the more amazing when he turns it down flat.

Later, Uncle Billy accidentally hands Mr. Potter the Bailey Building and Loan's $8000 bank deposit with the newspaper. That $8000 loss is what drives George to the brink of suicide. It doesn't sound like much, but in 1945 dollars, that was like misplacing over $91,200 now. Sadly, given recent economic news, it still doesn't sound like much. I wish any banking executive could get upset over a loss of $90K. You can almost hear the modern day dialog now: "Do you have any idea what this means? Bankruptcy and scandal and prison! Well, no, not really! But after the government bails us out, they might shave a few percent off my massive annual bonus! I may have to drive the same car for two years in a row! Intolerable!!" Sigh. I think I need to go watch "It's a Wonderful Life" now...

Installing Windows XP...

My primary home file server PC recently died, so I build up a Shuttle SN68SG2 bare-bones PC to replace it. Then I got out the original installation discs for the Windows XP that had been on the deceased machine, and installed it on the new box. Just for grins, I kept track of how many times I had to reboot during the Windows XP installation. The sequence was as follows:

- Formatted the new hard drive, then copied the Windows files to it, then rebooted.
- Installed Windows, rebooted.
- Configured Windows, rebooted.
- Installed motherboard drivers, rebooted.
- Installed Windows Updater, rebooted.
- Installed Service Pack 2, rebooted.
- Installed Service Pack 3, rebooted.
- Installed the next 16 windows updates, including IE 7, rebooted.
- Installed PowerDVD software that came with DVD drive, rebooted.
- Updated Optical Drive Firmware, powered down, then rebooted.
- Installed Nero disc burning software that came with the DVD drive, rebooted.
- Installed McAfee Security Center, rebooted.

So 12 reboots to get the machine to a more or less usable point... Hmmm.

Subtly Deceptive Advertising

I have always found the effectiveness of advertising to be surprising. I like to think, "Oh no, surely I am far above being so obviously manipulated into buying stuff I don't really want or need." But I know, deep down, that I can be manipulated just like virtually all consumers. Junk-food ads, in particular, make me drool. I want that artery clogging burger even knowing that the real product looks nothing like the studio-beautified example shown in print or on TV. And a close-up of the bubbly spray off the top of an icy cold Coke brings back fond memories of happy times with friends, and makes me really want that Coke... and I don't even drink cola anymore!

But worse than that sort of direct manipulation in advertising is use of the false comparison. Often advertisers not only have to make you want their product, but they have to make you want it more than some competing alternative. Usually this involves explaining why the benefits of one outweigh the other. But there is also a way to "cheat": the false comparison. The latest example I've seen is this photo from a postcard advertising invisalign braces:

The apparent message in this photo is "invisalign looks better on your teeth than conventional braces." The unspoken, subtle and manipulative implication is "invisalign users have better, smoother skin with no wrinkles or visible pores, their lips are full and glossy pink, and their noses are tinier with smaller nostrils." This is, or course, absurd. But that's the message your brain picks up without you ever being aware of just how bogus the comparison is. All you register consciously is, "wow, the invisalign side really does look much better."

If you look for it, you might be surprised how often this trick is used in advertising, particular in "before and after" photos. But it usually only shows up in professionally produced mass advertising. Many small businesses and small web sites will run very reasonable photos of "this is what it looked like when we started" and "this is what it looked like when we finished." But the cost of mass mailings or print ads is so high that advertising firms have to do anything they can to improve the success rate for their client, to justify selling them more advertising.

This technique feels sleazy to me, and makes me dislike products that use it. And it's not even necessary. I think invisalign is a great product. But the use of this false comparison technique actually makes me think poorly of the company and, by extension, what they are selling. I suspect that's not the perception they were hoping to buy with their advertising dollars.

Bad Hardware UI Design

I am cheap. I admit this by way of explanation for why I often buy the lowest cost functional equivalent for many of the things I use. In electronics, this means that I will purchase the no-name brand if it offers the same functionality as the branded version. Looking at Gigabit Ethernet PCI NICs recently, I realized that they were ALL using the exact same Realtek chip. Thus it made no difference which one I purchased, they were all basically the same component on a PCB implementing the chip maker's reference design, with price as the only differentiator. You could possibly argue that there are differences in quality of PCB fabrication or assembly, but they are all made in China, and there's a pretty good chance that multiple brands came off the same assembly lines, or at least lines at the same manufacturer. They have all been cost reduced to the bleeding edge of functionality, so to my thinking they are all basically the same.

The differences that do pop up between the name brand products and the no-name versions are in the little design details. It struck me twice this weekend when I ran across amusing examples of bad hardware user interface design. The first was this USB drive housing for ATA hard drives:


Notice that they have helpfully labeled the LED as "LED." What does the LED indicate? I have no idea. To find out, I would have to read the documentation. And I'll bet that it was not written or edited by a native English speaker. I'm okay with this, because I bought the $19 box instead of the $29 box, and I'd rather have the $10 than a well-labeled LED since I'm generally not looking at it anyway. Still, I find it kind of sad that it was important enough to cast the text under the LED into the metal of the housing, but not important enough to actually convey any information with it.

Likewise, this consumer widget helpfully indicates the specific color of the LEDs:


Now, you might glean some additional information from the adjacent position labels on the switch, inferring that green means it is cooling and red means it is warming. Although it could also be that green means it is working, and red means it is not. Or green means that it is at temperature, and red means it is in the process of changing temperature. I just don't know. In any case, perhaps this is the last market differentiator available at the low end. If I had a choice between the cheap item with a random, useless UI design, and one in which someone had put several hours of thought into how to make it slightly more usable, I'd probably buy the slightly more usable one. Although only if it doesn't cost any more...