Random thought of the wee morning hours: There are several banner ads out there lately which, through technologies such as Flash and Shockwave, annoy viewers with not only animation but also an automatically activated sound clip.

Such banners, I think, are wrong on so many levels. If you’re at work and just happen to have your speakers turned on… if you’re listening to MP3s and are suddenly interrupted by random sounds of race cars, bicycles, and babies crying… if you’re on a computer without an easily accessible volume control late at night… OK, I think you get the idea.

Stupid Computer Tricks: photographic evidence that some people just don’t quite understand how computers work. (via NTK)

Heh. Via taint.org: If spam were graded like an English paper…

If there’s anyone who could manage to create a user interface that’s absolutely elegant but utterly nonintuitive, it would be the government. And the interface for the online FAFSA definitely fits that description.

How so? Well, check out this screenshot from one page of the FAFSA form which momentarily stumped me as I was filling it out. The situation: you’ve selected one of the colleges for which you’ve registered, and you’re now selecting the type of housing for which you’ll be applying.

One slight problem: where’s the “next” button?

My first instinct was to click the big button at the bottom of the screen, as many others have most likely done; this, of course, was before I actually noticed the text on said button: “Delete This School”. Let’s just be thankful you could add it back once it was deleted!

It turns out that the little note that “this page may scroll downward” was quite important on this particular page of the form; the “next” button was just below the fold on the 800×600 screen I was using. Oops!

We all know that people with electronic keyboards can churn out the worst music possible, save it to disk, and then upload it to the Internet. But only at Ugly MIDIs has anyone actually taken the trouble to archive such travesties… (via NTK)

An interesting typographical error spotted on CNN which has lately been making its way around the world of weblogs: apparently the space shuttle Columbia had attained warp speed.

Via Meryl’s Notes, yet another example of non-intuitive interface design. I, too, would’ve pushed the green button, for a number of reasons; not only does green signify “go”, it’s also the uppermost button on the console.

Recently over at Fark there was a Photoshop contest to come up with new cards for Magic: The Gathering. Some of my favorite entries, mirrored here for your convenience (with the originals available in the thread above, as long as the images remain on their respective servers):

• Trogdor from Homestar Runner (Severin)
• StinkoMan K 20X6, also from Homestar (Dantheman)
• Cats from Zero Wing (Flaminio)
• A selection of Hitchhiker’s Guide characters (Timpicks)
• Monty Python’s Killer Rabbit (Mhooglan)

Typo of the day, found on a student recital program: Puccini’s O Mio Babino Casio.

I suppose this would be the aria in which a love-struck robot pleads her father, an electronic keyboard, to let her marry the machine of her dreams.

Hee. One of my friends sent me this link, and music geek that I am, I simply had to share it with the world: Tales from Band Camp.

You know you’re a band geek if you even get half the jokes…