Minor things that bother you

[Max Rockatansky]

^^^

So basically the exact opposite approach to arguments that a certain flat lander would take?  Despite what snowc said, he never actually did delete his Amazon post.

He edited his first post to remove any claim that Amazon was the worst store ever.

I see now, I'm not sure why he would bother given the claim of "worst store ever"  context is preserved in the replies? 

I don't really get the impression that Bryce normally thinks things through before committing to doing something.

Yes, hence my above statement that I'm not really sure if we were to ask Bryce that he would say that he had engaged in hyperbole.

[kphoger]

Why do the big 9s have tails, but the small 9s don't?

https://goo.gl/maps/s4icTzhWhCRZiujm7

[formulanone]

^^^

So basically the exact opposite approach to arguments that a certain flat lander would take?  Despite what snowc said, he never actually did delete his Amazon post.

He edited his first post to remove any claim that Amazon was the worst store ever.

I see now, I'm not sure why he would bother given the claim of "worst store ever"  context is preserved in the replies? 

I don't really get the impression that Bryce normally thinks things through before committing to doing something.

Yes, hence my above statement that I'm not really sure if we were to ask Bryce that he would say that he had engaged in hyperbole.

You've gotta drop the ego and let a little undirected hyperbole go in Off-Topic.

Venting with precision is usually difficult and tedious.

[Scott5114]

Why do the big 9s have tails, but the small 9s don't?

https://goo.gl/maps/s4icTzhWhCRZiujm7

The big 9s have to have a horizontal segment there anyway to display a 2, 3, 5, 6, and 8. Since the segment is there, may as well light it up for readability (though they could have programmed the sign controller to not do that).

Meanwhile, there will never be a need to display a price like 3.57⁶. Thus, they probably don't even have LEDs there in a shape that could display anything but a tailless 9, and probably no provision in the hardware or controller that would make displaying anything but a 9 (like say a 1 or a 4) a possibility. This probably makes the sign at least $3.09⁹ cheaper.

You've gotta drop the ego and let a little undirected hyperbole go in Off-Topic.

Venting with precision is usually difficult and tedious.

I think it's not beyond the pale to consider that someone might disagree with the grievances aired in one's venting, or even be presented with a logical reason why things are the way they are or why they're not so bad (like the other half of my post). In that case, one can freely present a reason why they still feel aggrieved. (There are plenty of times people have pointed out something that bothers me makes someone money and I've replied with some variation on "I am more bothered by this than I am the thought of them losing revenue.") There's also the option to just say "Oh, I didn't know that, my opinion has changed" or just not respond on that topic any further. Someone trying to pretend that they didn't have an opinion in the first place by editing their posts just makes it seem like we are a legislature that votes on their opinions.

[Max Rockatansky]

^^^

So basically the exact opposite approach to arguments that a certain flat lander would take?  Despite what snowc said, he never actually did delete his Amazon post.

He edited his first post to remove any claim that Amazon was the worst store ever.

I see now, I'm not sure why he would bother given the claim of "worst store ever"  context is preserved in the replies? 

I don't really get the impression that Bryce normally thinks things through before committing to doing something.

Yes, hence my above statement that I'm not really sure if we were to ask Bryce that he would say that he had engaged in hyperbole.

You've gotta drop the ego and let a little undirected hyperbole go in Off-Topic.

Venting with precision is usually difficult and tedious.

Ego?  On my end it's more boredom at work and sarcasm that I wasn't sure would get picked up on.  Sometimes it leads to more interesting places like someone expounding on their statement that Amazon is the "worst store ever."  

[Takumi]

I wonder how many people bitching about Jeff Bezos' wealth and Amazon's treatment of employees also continue to purchase from the company.

Well, I certainly spend a hell of a lot less at Amazon than I did a few years ago, but getting it down to $0 is a bit of a challenge.

I haven't intentionally bought from Amazon in quite some time, but I'm sure I still inadvertently buy things from places that use them as a middleman or use AWS hosting.

It's way too easier to walk out of my security office at the Base Exchange and get what I need while working.  The fact that I didn't have an Amazon account vexed my now wife when I first dated her.

I mentioned my non-use of Amazon to my girlfriend today when I mentioned I need to shop for luggage. Her reaction was probably similar to your wife's.

[kphoger]

Why do the big 9s have tails, but the small 9s don't?

https://goo.gl/maps/s4icTzhWhCRZiujm7

The big 9s have to have a horizontal segment there anyway to display a 2, 3, 5, 6, and 8. Since the segment is there, may as well light it up for readability (though they could have programmed the sign controller to not do that).

I personally find the absence of a tail on the 9 to make for easier readability.  But I'm no scientist, nor have I ever played one on TV.

Venting with precision is usually difficult and tedious.

This forum is crowded with nerdy nit-pickers who have nothing better to do than make pedantic criticisms of the inane minutiae of road signs and squabble over the wording of transportation agency file designations from a half-century ago.  The chances that someone on here will make a snarky comment about any given forum post–if that post is anything less than grammatically perfect and literally accurate–approaches 100%.  (Hey, don't look at me in that tone of voice.)

[dlsterner]

Why do the big 9s have tails, but the small 9s don't?

https://goo.gl/maps/s4icTzhWhCRZiujm7

Dammit!  Now I will obsess with this every time I see one of those signs!

[Scott5114]

Why do the big 9s have tails, but the small 9s don't?

https://goo.gl/maps/s4icTzhWhCRZiujm7

The big 9s have to have a horizontal segment there anyway to display a 2, 3, 5, 6, and 8. Since the segment is there, may as well light it up for readability (though they could have programmed the sign controller to not do that).

I personally find the absence of a tail on the 9 to make for easier readability.  But I'm no scientist, nor have I ever played one on TV.

I wonder if it's ever been studied formally which is superior. The pro-tail-9 advocates tend to make the point that the sixth illuminated segment makes the 9 shaped more like a 9 in regular fonts. Tailless-9 advocates point out the slight energy savings and that most people's handwriting makes a tailless 9.

I'm used to tailless 9s because I was raised on game shows that used them a lot. Because 1990s LEDs weren't bright enough to avoid getting washed out by studio lighting, they either had to use incandescent bulbs to light seven-segment displays, or else use a vane display. This was a seven-segment display made of bright white segments on swivels. When the segment needed to be turned off, it would be rotated with an electromagnet so that the edge of the segment, painted black, would be displayed against the black background of the display, making them invisible. (This is the tech that made the giant calculator on The Price Is Right's Check Out game possible.) Vane displays near-always have a tailless 9, for whatever reason; my thought was it was to reduce the amount of wear on the bottom segment, but a 9 is most likely to change to a 0 or an 8, both of which use the bottom segment anyway.

The one pet peeve of mine having to do with the tailless 9 is when a display uses it, but the 6 still has a tail.

Really, LEDs are cheap enough these days pretty much all applications of seven-segment displays should transition to more readable dot-matrix displays, but you can get a half-inch seven-segment display (with bonus decimal point!) for 78¢ on Amazon, so maybe it's no wonder we still use them.

[JoePCool14]

Why do the big 9s have tails, but the small 9s don't?

https://goo.gl/maps/s4icTzhWhCRZiujm7

Forget the 9's, I'd love the opportunity to pay that much for gas today.

[kphoger]

The one pet peeve of mine having to do with the tailless 9 is when a display uses it, but the 6 still has a tail.

I look at this from a handwriting perspective.  Most people handwrite a 9 with the stem going straight up-and-down, but not so with 6.

[US 89]

The one pet peeve of mine having to do with the tailless 9 is when a display uses it, but the 6 still has a tail.

I look at this from a handwriting perspective.  Most people handwrite a 9 with the stem going straight up-and-down, but not so with 6.

Except handwriting isn’t text, and in just about every font in existence the 6 and 9 characters are just upside-down versions of each other.

[kphoger]

The one pet peeve of mine having to do with the tailless 9 is when a display uses it, but the 6 still has a tail.

I look at this from a handwriting perspective.  Most people handwrite a 9 with the stem going straight up-and-down, but not so with 6.

Except handwriting isn't text, and in just about every font in existence the 6 and 9 characters are just upside-down versions of each other.

And I think both digits can be a bit illegible in some fonts because of that fact–especially ones that use a large loop.  They can end up looking too much like an 8.

For example, if I need to be able to easily distinguish numbers, then I greatly favor fonts like those in the bottom set below over those in the top set.  The ones in the bottom set minimize the hooked-ness of both numerals.



But my point is that it doesn't bother me if a digital readout has a tailless 9 but a hooked 6–because that's how people write the numerals anyway.  This, I suppose, is why a lot of the fonts that don't use a rotated 6 for a 9 are those that seek to mimic handwriting.  Examples:

[skluth]

The one pet peeve of mine having to do with the tailless 9 is when a display uses it, but the 6 still has a tail.

I look at this from a handwriting perspective.  Most people handwrite a 9 with the stem going straight up-and-down, but not so with 6.

It's pedantic (like most everything else here), but I write my 9's in one stroke starting at the bottom. My 9's do look like upside-down 6's. It's not how I learned to write 9's. But I worked in weather offices in the Navy and I had to manually plot over 200 stations on a chart like below every shift (either at 0000Z or 1200Z) in about 90 minutes. It was slightly faster to write 9's in one stroke than two and I needed to save every second. After a while it just became the way I write 9's.

[kphoger]

It's pedantic (like most everything else here), but I write my 9's in one stroke starting at the bottom. My 9's do look like upside-down 6's. It's not how I learned to write 9's. But I worked in weather offices in the Navy and I had to manually plot over 200 stations on a chart like below every shift (either at 0000Z or 1200Z) in about 90 minutes. It was slightly faster to write 9's in one stroke than two and I needed to save every second. After a while it just became the way I write 9's.

I used to write my 9s like that, years ago.  Then I realized they looked kind of ridiculous.  I also dragged my 1s back then, too, which drove my math teacher bonkers.

[7/8]

It's pedantic (like most everything else here), but I write my 9's in one stroke starting at the bottom. My 9's do look like upside-down 6's. It's not how I learned to write 9's. But I worked in weather offices in the Navy and I had to manually plot over 200 stations on a chart like below every shift (either at 0000Z or 1200Z) in about 90 minutes. It was slightly faster to write 9's in one stroke than two and I needed to save every second. After a while it just became the way I write 9's.

I write my 9's the same way. I actually write a lot of my numbers and letters from the bottom-up, or with less strokes than typical. I've been thinking of making a thread on it to see other people's opinions.

I remember playing Brain Age on the DS, where you have to write your answers with the stylus and it just didn't work for me. In particular, I remember "5" never registering correctly (I write it from the bottom-up in one stroke).

[J N Winkler]

I write with my right hand, so I tend to avoid strokes that begin at the bottom or left as they lead to the pen pushing against dry paper.  It's the same principle as not stroking a cat from tail to head.

[dlsterner]

Going to a restaurant with paper napkin dispensers on the table - where the person who last filled it crammed in about 20% more napkins than it was designed for, and somehow closes up the dispenser.

You end up getting nothing but shreds of paper if you try to remove one.  And even if you decide to open it to remove a bunch of napkins, you find the release button is jammed from all those napkins.

[SSOWorld]

Why do the big 9s have tails, but the small 9s don't?

https://goo.gl/maps/s4icTzhWhCRZiujm7

There's zero point to that little 9 being there in the first place!!!

[ZLoth]

Last night, I attended the show An Evening with Neil Gaiman. This was a show that I had purchased tickets to on December 2nd, 2021. So, after work, I walked home, washed up, taken light rail to downtown Dallas, had a nice pre-show dinner, and arrived at the Winspear Opera House at 7:30, and promptly found my seat. Since I was at the END of the row, I constantly had to pop up and down to let other ticketholders arrive.

At 7:55 PM, there was the raising of The Moody Chandelier accompanied by the composition "The Lights Are Rising" by (then high school senior) Damoyee Janai Neroes and performed by the students at the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (recorded). So, the show is about to start.

At 8:15 PM, Neil Gaiman is formally introduced, and he takes the stage. A later start than expected, but it's a one man show, and there may have been an unexpected delay.

There are still last minute arrivals who are taking their seats until 8:30 PM.... 30 minutes after the show was supposed to start. 30 MINUTES. These weren't the cheap seats either, as I had purchased a seat in the orchestra seating section (I-26) at a cost, included added fees, of $90, and the seats closer to the stage are even more expensive. Per industry practice, Winspear Opera House was open about one hour prior to performance. I know traffic and parking can be a challenge on a Friday evening in Dallas so you plan for it. (I chose to take light rail than drive because of this, plus the light rail ticket is just $3 and the light rail station near my home is a five minute drive away). I'm aware of a playoff game, but it is being played in San Francisco, not Dallas.

Unfortunately, this isn't an isolated issue, but seems to occur with every performance. It occurred last March with a performance of Swan Lake (drove with my mom, and a noisy family arrived late), last January with a MST3K Live performance (that I drove to because of the unseasonably cold weather instead of light rail), and last December with Mannheim Steamroller. It is so annoying.

Whatever happened to "late arrivals will not be seated until intermission"?

[roadman65]

The Season 10 opener of Dallas when they revealed that the previous season didn't exist all to get Patrick Duffy's character back on the show without science fiction like daytime soaps use.

Then the season where JR stole a young girl's virginity, who was of legal age, but got thrown in a backwoods jail, with a Kangaroo court to convict him, of rape for doing it.  Then they made it look super easy for the girls family to bust him out of prison and then made the Sheriff look stupid as while thinking JR was an escaped man, the Hall of records recorded the marriage license of the secret shotgun wedding.

Then JR was even more stupid to be as instead of defending himself for the false charge against him, he tried to bribe his way out instead.  Even JR had to have known that the town was not for sale, especially the JR of the first three seasons.  Then the writers forgot that Texas was part of the Confederate South as another big issue as the crazed hillbillies who tried to murder JR for sleeping with Cally accused JR of being a northern city slick.

With the dumb storyline of that hillbilly encounter the producers should have used science fiction to bring Bobby back in previous season storyline as the Cally thing was far more unbelievable than having Bobby show up alive on Pam's honeymoon in the shower.

[Scott5114]

Whatever happened to "late arrivals will not be seated until intermission"?

What's easier, having that policy and having to deal with a rich person throwing a tantrum every time you don't let them in to see the show that they paid for? Or just letting them go inside and mildly annoy the other customers, who if they complain you can just say "I'm sorry, sir, we have no policy prohibiting late arrivals, you got to see the show you paid for, so there's nothing we can do..."

The General Public is a hydra that always has one head trying to devour you. Customer service is a game of picking your battles to dodge whichever head looks the hungriest.

[skluth]

Whatever happened to "late arrivals will not be seated until intermission"?

What's easier, having that policy and having to deal with a rich person throwing a tantrum every time you don't let them in to see the show that they paid for? Or just letting them go inside and mildly annoy the other customers, who if they complain you can just say "I'm sorry, sir, we have no policy prohibiting late arrivals, you got to see the show you paid for, so there's nothing we can do..."

The General Public is a hydra that always has one head trying to devour you. Customer service is a game of picking your battles to dodge whichever head looks the hungriest.

Late arrival seating is usually done between songs or scenes. It's usually only a minute or two wait before they can be seated. I volunteer for many local theater events and most late arrivals will patiently wait in back for the short time until a scene ends which allows them to watch the event from the back until they can be seated. It's usually a good 30 seconds between scenes (and sometimes longer with musicals with all the clapping) which is long enough to seat late arrivals. Never had anyone throw a tantrum but they'd be told to leave if they did. I don't recall any events where late arrivals had to wait for intermission.

[Max Rockatansky]

Whatever happened to "late arrivals will not be seated until intermission"?

What's easier, having that policy and having to deal with a rich person throwing a tantrum every time you don't let them in to see the show that they paid for? Or just letting them go inside and mildly annoy the other customers, who if they complain you can just say "I'm sorry, sir, we have no policy prohibiting late arrivals, you got to see the show you paid for, so there's nothing we can do..."

The General Public is a hydra that always has one head trying to devour you. Customer service is a game of picking your battles to dodge whichever head looks the hungriest.

Late arrival seating is usually done between songs or scenes. It's usually only a minute or two wait before they can be seated. I volunteer for many local theater events and most late arrivals will patiently wait in back for the short time until a scene ends which allows them to watch the event from the back until they can be seated. It's usually a good 30 seconds between scenes (and sometimes longer with musicals with all the clapping) which is long enough to seat late arrivals. Never had anyone throw a tantrum but they'd be told to leave if they did. I don't recall any events where late arrivals had to wait for intermission.

Seemingly this kind of thing that only happens to Spider Man when he's being harassed by Bruce Campbell:

[ZLoth]

Whatever happened to "late arrivals will not be seated until intermission"?

What's easier, having that policy and having to deal with a rich person throwing a tantrum every time you don't let them in to see the show that they paid for?

Let me guess.... that rich person is a potential contributor to the foundation that keeps that venue alive, right? 

I was brought up to be on time or early for events, and to allow enough time for traffic and parking. The focus of attention should be on the hard working performers, with both the backstage/technical people closely behind, followed by the theater ushers, and arriving late while the performance is in progress is disrespectful.