Fixpert

Halloween is definitely the best day of the year. If you’re going to be stumbling from party to party, keep your hands off the car keys damnit! Instead, think about incorporating your bike into your costume. Riding is the best mode of transportation, might as well make it part of your whole get-up.

To get your creative juices flowing, here are some costume recommendations based on the type of bike you ride:

Cruisers

• Pee Wee Herman
  

BMX

• Kids from ET, plastic crate with ET in the front, red hoodie.
  

Road Bike

• Eddie Merckx - you can make a Molteni jersey to be instantly recognizable
  

Fixed Gear / Single Speed

• Kevin Bacon from Quicksilver - you’ll need feathered hair for this
  

Old-school European Bikes

• Main character from Life is Beautiful
  
• Albert Einstein
  

Can you think of any more?

I guess this is an Interaction Design thing. Have you ever called a company, let’s say…Orbitz…to have a customer service issue sorted out? And once you hit their phone’s menu system, you are prompted to say a number of choices outloud? I can see the value of this in certain situations, but I think no matter what, you should always be offered the option to press a number instead of saying your choices outloud.

Here are the problems with the outloud voice system:

• They often don’t work very well. Stating something clearly is often misunderstood by the system.
• The caller has to be in a quiet environment. Surrounding noises increase the chances that your selection will be misunderstood
• If you’re trying to make the call somewhere public, like work, saying bits of personal info outloud can compromise your privacy.
• It’s slow. With all the “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand…” error messages and slow pronounciations of words, it takes longer than pressing a button.

And the advantages of the voice operated menu system:

• They think it’s safer if you’re on the phone while driving to be able to operate this system hands-free. Guess what? Even operating a phone hands-free is totally dangerous and studies have shown even with hands-free sets, drivers using cell phones are more dangerous than drunk drivers.
• I don’t think rotary phones are around any more, last time I saw one was 1985, but if you still own one, I guess you’re in luck.

What do you guys think about these systems? Am I missing anything as far as advantages / disadvantages?

Ok, now that you guys solved the question of changing the background color on my comments after posts, I was wondering if I should also add gravatars to the comments? Do you guys have gravatars? Just curious if you use them, like ‘em, etc.

Thanks again guys!

I want to be all spiffy and change the background color on my comments on Fixpert so that when I’m scanning the comments on a post, it’s easier for me to skip over what I said. Seems like it will be helpful for my readers too, I don’t expect that it will get in their way at all.

There is probably a PHP-based solution for this, but PHP is not my forte. Instead, my idea is to use DOM Scripting to look for any comments where the value of the href is http://www.fixpert.com. Then once that particular link is identified, I can walk up the DOM to its parent li and assign it a class of site-admin. Then tweak the background color in the stylesheet.

Thoughts? Is this a dumb way to attack this problem? Thanks guys!

Here’s a gallery of interesting and crazy cargo on bikes and motorcycles. This is my favorite: