Bad design: Expired cart and recommendations on Kobo

Maybe running an online bookstore is hard.

Yesterday I got an email from Kobo with this:

I click the link because the title interests me enough to expend the effort to find out more. I get this:

Indeed, using the search bar I am able to find other books by Jeremy Robinson, and none of them are named Flux. (The books is available on amazon.ca at a current discount price of $5.99, so I bought it there.)

So why was Kobo recommending a book that was clearly no longer in the store? That simply shouldn’t happen.

It reminded me of another deficient part of Kobo’s site. If I leave a book in my cart for [x] amount of time, later buy the book (while it is still in my cart), I will get an email a day or so later urging me to buy the book, because their system obviously checks value [x] but does not check value [y] (has the book been purchased since [x]?)

These are both examples of not just bad design, but actively making the user experience worse and undermining the user’s confidence in the stability of the Kobo ebook store.

Kobo can and should do better.

On drawing

I saw this quote on drawing at Austin Kleon’s site and love it:

Ken Robinson tells this story: “A little girl was in a drawing lesson. [The teacher] said, ‘What are you drawing?’ And the girl said, ‘I’m drawing a picture of God.’ And the teacher said, ‘But nobody knows what God looks like.’ And the girl said, ‘They will in a minute.’”

Sometimes I miss the sheer awesomeness of being a kid and having no filters, no limits, no preconceived ideas to slow you down or stop you.

I’ve fallen a bit behind on my drawing lessons in part because I wasn’t following drawabox.com’s 50% rule:

This brings us to an extremely important rule: at least half of the time you spend drawing must be devoted to drawing purely for its own sake. Not to learn, not to improve, not to develop your skills, not even to apply what you’ve already learned. There are no restrictions on medium, no specific techniques you must use, no subject matter you must focus on. Draw the things you’d draw if you were the most skilled artist in the world; draw the things your brain insists you’re not ready to tackle just yet.

This can only mean one thing: It is time, at last, for more Gum Gum People.

Snack-free, Day 5 of 14: Success!

Today I had breakfast, lunch and dinner and no snacks at all, not even healthy ones.

I did have pizza for dinner, which is both delicious and a caloriepocalypse, but I also did my 70 minute workout and walked around Deer Lake and Burnaby Park–over 21 km in total. So I should be good there.

Weight was unchanged today, we’ll see what the pizza does for tomorrow morning.

Snack-free, Day 4 of 14: Minor cheating

Good news: I was down in weight again, another 0.9 pounds, down to 173.4, my lowest weight since the start of the year. Woo.

Bad news: Mid-afternoon and the day felt like it was dragging on interminably. I gave in and had one serving of crackers, which I ate over a period of time instead of just shaking the box directly into my mouth.

I was very good otherwise, though, and was actually too low on my calorie goal for the day, so ate just enough to tip me past.

I felt guilty eating the crackers–as intended–and as I type this I am noshing on carrot sticks. I could learn to like these.

We’ll see if the crackers instantly convert to fat when I weight myself tomorrow morning.

Snack-free, Day 3 of 14: Cheesing out

I once again managed to skip snacking today. I would clap myself on the back but it hurts when I try.

The closest I came to Unauthorized Snacking was when I added a 50 gram serving of Havarti cheese to my dinner. I later found out this has 189 calories, which is a lot more than I’d expected. Oops. Fortunately I still came in under my calorie goal and cheese is a better snack than, say, a bag of chocolate frosted Skittles.

Also, my weight was different this morning–down 1.5 pounds. Now I am really expecting to be up tomorrow. We will see.

Treadmill walk: It rained again

The last time I was on the treadmill was on July 11, when it rained.

It rained again today, so instead of my now customary one hour after-work walk, I hit ye olde treadmill. I actually felt pretty energetic, so I guess all of the walking is paying off. My heel, which is still sore (exciting update very soon) held up without issue, at least as I type this a short time after finishing the workout.

I accidentally tracked this as an indoor run rather than an indoor walk, but it doesn’t seem to have affected anything, other than making it look like a rather sluggish run.

As you can see, I was a bit zippier (beating the official treadmill pace of 9:13/km, which assumes an incline of zero, not 10), burned a few more calories and had a marginally higher BPM, which is pretty much a rounding error.

I also continued my alphabetical music listening and have now made my way into the B’s. I skipped a few ore songs than usual because walking on the treadmill requires peppier tunes than walking outside. You know how it is.

The stats:

Pace: 9:19/km (9:22 km/h)
Time: 30:03 (30:03)
Distance: 3.22 km (3.20 km)
Calories burned: 293 (318)
BPM: 140 (146)

Snack-free, Day 2 of 14: Technical success!

I have allowed myself to indulge in healthy snacks of the fruit and veggie variety. Today I had the following:

  • A small banana
  • Some sugar snap peas
  • A few baby carrots

Other than that, it was another day of meals-only. I am noticing that I am feeling hungry at certain points through the day now, but this is good–it means my body is noticing the loss of food and over time will adapt to less snacks and more normal eating.

Curiously, my weight has remained unchanged for the last three days. I would not be surprised if it went up tomorrow.

Onward to Day 3.

Snack-free, Day 1 of 14: Success!

An interesting thing happened while I spent today being snack-free. Actually, it happened many times throughout the day.

I thought about snacks. Specifically, I would be sitting (or standing) and suddenly think, “A snack would be nice.” This would happen regardless of whether or not I felt hungry or if I had just eaten. The first time it happened today I had just finished breakfast. I sat down after cleaning the dishes and instantly thought about getting a snack.

My amateur psych analysis of this is simple: snacking has become a substitute for something I need or crave. I don’t snack because I’m hungry, I snack because it provides comfort, it makes me feel better (unless I plow through half a box of crackers and feel gross and somewhat regretful after). The phrase “comfort food” looms large, like a giant box of chocolate glazed donuts. Mmm, donuts…

Anyway, I ended up not having to engage in any of the cheap tricks I listed yesterday to keep myself from snacking, because I also felt headachy and kind of listless for most of the day, so getting up and gathering snacks never registered as more than a distant thought. On top of the headaches today, allergies the past few weeks have been beating me up like never before. I can see myself becoming a nasal spray addict before the end of the year and having to join Nasal Sprayers Anonymous or something.

However, to bring things back to a positive note, I made it through the day and did not snack. Go me! If I’m up in weight tomorrow, I’ll just chuckle at how day-to-day fluctuations don’t matter, it’s the long term trends that show the real results. (I’ll still be mildly peeved, just because.)

Cold turkey crackers (and chocolate and other snacks)

It is time I faced a certain reality: I like shoving things into my face–specifically, snack-type things which go into my mouth, then to my stomach, then to the fat reserves around the mid-section of my body, which are now sufficient to sustain me through several winters.

Although my weight has been starting to trend back in the right direction recently, it is moving downward at a pace I would describe as extremely gradual. Given my current weight loss goal, my on-a-napkin calculation is I will reach that goal when I am 576 years old.

While I hope to live a long and fruitful life, I suspect I will not live top be 500+. But science has worked miracles before.

Barring scientific miracles, I need a new plan, and here it is:

Going cold turkey on all snacks. This starts tomorrow, as I’m considering the last two weeks of August to be a trial period of sorts. Here are the rules I have invented:

  • No snacks at all. This includes:
    • crackers
    • cookies
    • muffins
    • strudel things
    • potato chips
    • chocolate bars
    • Turkish Delight
    • brownies
    • donuts
    • even things that are technically not donuts, but are really donuts, like chocolate eclairs
    • anything else that is high calorie, comes in a bag and is not exactly “natural”
  • One exception: the chocolate I share with my partner each night as a ritual sort of thing (he started it, I am not as big on ritual sort of things, but when they include chocolate, I am more willing). These are 46 calories each, which is not too bad.
  • Cheat days? No! No cheat days! Cheating is not just wrong, it weakens my resolve, because a little cheating leads to a little more cheating and suddenly the pantry is devoid of all snacks.
  • If not full cheat days, how about an occasional cheat, but only if I exercise enough that same day to cover three times the calorie cost? So a 100 calorie snack would require me to burn off an extra 300 calories to make up for it. This seems like a reasonable approach and I may hold it in reserve, but for now, I am still in the NO camp, because it’s too easy to snack, promise to workout, then whoops, I forgot to workout and it’s too late now oh well.

I figure for this to work I need to have two things ready to go:

  • Snack substitutes. I figure peas and carrots will do, along with the occasional banana or other piece of fruit. Small cubes of cheese might be okay, but that can lead to a calvalanche, because cheese is yummy.
  • An immediate counter-action to take when the urge to snack hits. I have a few things I can try:
    • Drink water
    • Meditate
    • Listen to a favorite song to distract myself
    • Write 300-500 words about anything, as long as it isn’t a lovingly detailed description of blueberry cheesecake
    • Go for a walk of suitable length
    • The above could also include hitting the treadmill
    • Play a game
    • Take a shower. Not a cold shower, just a shower

We’ll see how long this bold new plan works. Today I stepped on the scale and was 175.8 pounds, 25.8 pounds away from my target of 150. We’ll see what the scale says in two weeks.

Art lesson 4: Planes (not crashing)

The final exercise of the Lines part of drawabox.com’s Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes is Planes. The exercise requires two pages of work and I have only done one, so I have one more to go.

A few observations:

  • Rushing will always yield poor results. There is not a single time I rushed on the ghosting (drew in the air over the paper as I would when applying pen to paper) and it turned out well. Fast is bad.
  • Every time I loosened my grip on the pen my line quality improved, and quite often my accuracy did, too.
  • Likewise moving away from using the wrist, which is one of the main focus points of these exercises–to get you to draw using your shoulder and elbow, and not your wrist.
  • Focusing on the ghosting made it easier to stop at the endpoint instead of overshooting it. As you can see, my focus needs work. 😛
  • I did one plane using a ruler, so you can see what the page would look like it I had the precision of a robot or a really good artist. Or a really good artist robot named Drawbot 8000.

As mentioned before, when I finally complete Lesson 1 (in ten months), I am going to switch over to ctrlpaint.com’s traditional drawing lessons and try the first few there to see how they compare, then decide which one to go whole hog on. Because I never half-hog.