Mike Altman | Personal ramblings and adventures

I love Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a free open source Linux operating system. Those of you who know me, know that I switched to Linux cold turkey about 4 years ago. Over the years I have watched Ubuntu mature in functionality, user base, and most importantly in innovative interaction design. For those of us who pay close attention to these things, it’s fun to play with new interface elements. The advantage Ubuntu (and all open source) operating systems have over Mac OS and Windows is that there is no penalty for failure.

Each new version of Ubuntu has some surprising new interactions.  I love to watch the interface features that work, show up years down the line in commercial software. Particularly when they receive buzz for their “Bold Innovations.”  And yes, your shiny new version of Windows is far behind. They are naturally slow (and rightfully so) to adopt new experimental design and interaction. By the time the average user gets to play with multiple virtual desktops and snapping windows, Linux users have been testing and perfecting the interaction for years.

One such innovation that drew my attention is the proposed new scrollbar for Unity. I know I’ve written about scrollbars in the past, but this is pretty cool and makes a lot of sense. We waste a lot of screen real-estate on scrollbars. We know where they are and we know how they work. Why do I have to waste my precious screen space on it? The open source community took, from what we are learning with mobile devices, and applied it to a desktop environment.

Take a look at this demo video. Then think about the benefits of a scroll bar:

• It tells us that there is more content on the current page
• It shows us where we are in relation to the size of the page
• It allows us to slowly or quickly scroll to different parts of a page

This proposed interaction accomplishes all of these things while saving screen real-estate for what we really need windows for: the content on the screen. With the growing number of touch interfaces each day and shrinking screens, why waste precious pixels on such an archaic interface element?

So what does the future of your operating system look like? Do yourself a favor and download an Ubuntu live cd and take a look.

I have to get this off my chest. Don’t let anyone ever trick you into believing that store brand english muffins are as good as their name brand counterpart.

A few weeks ago I was at the grocery store, and saw this amazing deal. Buy one Thomas’ English Muffins, get 2 free!

So I bought them… and some eggs.

I then went on a breakfast sandwich kick for 3 weeks. It was probably the greatest few weeks of my life. I laughed, I sang, I got a lot of protein.

But then one day the english muffins ran out. Things got a little stale in my food cabinet.

I went back to the grocery store looking for more english muffins and I saw another deal! Buy one get one free

But this time… it was store brand. I thought, how bad could this be? Let me tell you some thing dear blog readers.

It is bad.

Real bad. 

They taste like bread that’s just pretending to be an english muffin. When I bit into that egg sandwich, we both knew, the egg and I,  that this is was no english muffin.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Internet. Do not under any circumstances, trust the marketing ruse of the store brand english muffin.

I’ll have to let the “muffins” off easy.

Maybe a donation to a hungy roommate, or a mutation into a french toast of sadness.

My winter crew went up to the north-country for the last weekend on our ski apartment lease. We have been up there basically every weekend since Christmas riding Jay Peak and Smugglers Notch. Other friends come and go on the weekends, but it’s been the same basic crew of Northeastern cycling team riders and alumni. Every Friday after class or work, we make the 4ish hour drive up from Boston.

We brave the snow storms, the traffic, and the taxing exhaustion from the week. We wake up (sometimes) early enough for first chair/tram. We live in squalor during of the week to pay for our gas, food, and passes. We bundle up, and freeze on The Flyer which is easily the coldest lift on the east coast. We scrape our gear on windblown summits. We hike when it’s too windy for the lifts to run. We hold our secret stashes sacred. We live in between the trees both on the mountain and in the back country. Then we wake up the next day, and finish what our bodies and the lift operators wouldn’t let us on Saturday before making the grueling drive back to Boston running on fumes and redbull.

Why do we do it? For weekends like this one. We were ready for a warm slushy spring weekend. There were no expectations for quality snow in the woods. Flurries were in the forecast. Maybe a dusting of a half of an inch. To be honest, I was happy for anything extra after the 340 inches we were blessed with this season. The clouds decided to stick around all day. We woke up Saturday morning to a foot of fresh dry “champagne” powder with it still coming down. The kind that explodes with each turn. The kind, your snowboard and skis float on rather than cut through. The kind that carries the unrestrained laughter and woops of adults as they regress into childhood excitement in the howling winds of Jay Peak.

We can complain about how much of a disgusting resort Jay Peak is becoming with its ice rinks, hotels, water parks, and parking garages… Yea there’s a freaking parking garage (so you don’t get snow on your car). Gross. They even started selling green cards to rich foreigners to pay for all of this. But at the end of the day, no amount of greed can ruin the splendors that nature rewards to those who are dedicated (to use the term lightly).