Poor Website Planning

In looking for Milwaukee-area jobs to see if I can get any lined up on my return from Japan I went to AskHRS.com to see what kind of opportunities that staffing service (a.k.a. temp agency) had available, I found I could not apply for any of the listings.  The sign up process was easy, but I could not get anything to work after that.

I spent quite some time seeing what different things could be done to get it to work.

I tried logging out and logging in again.  I tried exiting and restarting Firefox.  I tried clicking everything.   It frustrated me greatly.  How could they possibly have such utter fail making up their website.

Then I thought to try a different web browser.  So I open up IE7.  I hate the layout of the new Windows programs (IE7, Media Player 11, etc.), but I figured it might work.

I load up the job listing screen and it looked significantly different.  It looked smoother.  Text didn’t run together.

It looked like I had found the solution.  And sure enough, I click a listing and it brings up the window for the listing and lets me apply.

Okay, I finally got it to work, but that’s still a major, major issue for that website.  Designing sites to work in only one browser is a serious oversight and extremely annoying to those who don’t much care for that browser.  While it is in some ways less annoying than sites that block all but one browser, it still is an abomination.  And, interestingly, less annoying than sites that block all but one browser.

The glaring issue with this website is that not all computers even have IE on them.  Any non-Microsoft system will have only have older versions available.  If any at all.  It really only makes sense to make your website works in multiple browsers.  Not doing that is quite silly.

Also, if you want to know why it’s less annoying to have a site that just blocks all traffic that isn’t using a specific browser, it’s because that is relatively easy to overcome.  Once you have the ability.  All you have to do is modify your user agent tag, which I can with ease.  It’s setting up that stuff that is a major pain, if you even know such is possible.

Search Engine Hits

I found that WordPress has a built in engine for finding out what search engine searchs have brought people to my site.  Sadly, it only goes back a week.   And I didn’t get any juicy ones.

I can some up the vast majority of the hits in four words:
Carnelian
Touhou
Type-Moon
Higurashi

I got a few others.  But almost all–95%+–were related to those 4 things.  And Carnelian and Touhou made up the largest group of those.  The only non-Japan related search item was “Finite Simple Group of Order Two song.”

Lots of people searching for a 奈落の花 torrent.  Poor fools, that doesn’t come out until August 22nd.

Got someone looking for a Mystic Square download, but they decided to type ‘mystic square’ twice.  Odd.

Got someone looking for ‘tsuyokiss game translation project.’  Does anyone actually think that will ever happen?  There have only been 5 full length visual novel fan translation projects that have been completed and released.  4 more have been completely translated, but unreleased due to editing issues.  Tsuyokiss doesn’t even have a prayer.

And every single hit yesterday was Carnelian related.  Weird.

Metric and 24-Hour Clock

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I even had a brief argument about it at work.

I made a few claims that my coworkers found quite silly, elitist, or stupid. Yet they are very solid claims.

1.) The 24-hour clock is superior
2.) Metric is superior.

They are. They are pretty much unquestionably better. The real question is not whether or not metric and military time are better, because they just are, but whether or not they are superior enough to justify changing which systems are used. Changing such fundamental systems is a headache. And it would carry a monetary penalty as well.

The main advantage of the 24-hour clock has over 12-hour clock is that it is simpler. No need for a.m. and p.m. notation. No potential confusion between morning and evening.

Wikipedia has a list of the advantages of each clock system.

The only real advantages of the 12-hour clock lay in the analog face clocks and chiming clocks.  You can’t chime zero and a face clock would be horrid with 24 marks.  Everything else is pretty bogus.  There is no good solution for chiming zero, however there is a solution for the face clocks: no numbers.  If you remove the numbers a regular, 12-hour face clock can just as easily be a 24-hour face clock.

The 24-hour clock’s main advantage is simplicity.  It is beautifully simple.

This is also metric’s main advantage.

Whenever people complain about the difficulty of either system, their problem is not with the system itself.  Their problem is in conversion.  If I saw something is 100 klicks away, people will be trying to convert that to miles, and that is a pain.  It’s a little over 60, by the way.

When you accept things as it is in the 24-hour clock system or in metric, they aren’t difficult at all.  It’s only when you try to backtrack to the 12-hour or Imperial that things get messy.

The 24-hour clock’s superiority?  Each hour has its own number.  No doubling up.

Metric’s superiority?  Working with 10s.  With everything being based on tens, scaling up and down is a breeze.  Which is easier: taking a measurement in inches and turning it into feet/yards/miles or taking a measurement in centimeters and turning it into meters/kilometers/megameters?

Speed of light is approximately .3 gigameters a second.

Same with mass, weight, and volume measurements.  Scaling up and down the ladder is a breeze.  Granted, it doesn’t exercise your multiplication and division muscles as much, but when it comes to daily things like measurements, sometimes you want your answers fast.

Also, I want a cell phone that will display time with a 24-hour clock and will display both UTC and local time.  Simultaneously.

Harry Potter Spoiler Warning

For all those who have not read the book and do not wish to be spoiled it would be a good idea to quit reading this post now.

Former Post

Just in case anyone can’t tell, the previous post is my itinerary for my trip to Japan.

I’ve placed a reservation for some tickets.   I’ve received my booking confirmation, but have yet to receive my ticketing confirmation.  My booking confirmation email said that my reservation not complete until the ticketing confirmation arrives.  I hope nothing bungs up that part.

I still need to get my JR Pass exchange order and see about that reservation system with Hostelling International.

I’ll be in Japan for the Obon festival, which will be cool.  I’m going to see about being in Kyoto for the festival so I can see the Daimonji.  My other major destinations will be the Izumo Shrine, Hiroshima, and Akibahara.  Maybe I should see about Comiket 72, too.