A tax tip for Georgia

I've been working on an eCommerce site, and have bumped up against the beast that is Sales and Use Tax. In Georgia, sales tax is based on where the consumer takes possession, and for the most part these vary by county. However, there is also an Atlanta tax that is split between two different counties. I have no problem with any of this. However, the state seems to be doing everything in its power to make it difficult to figure out what the tax rate for any given location is. Tax rates are only available as pdf files for counties, and to determine whether a particular address is subject to the additional 1% tax in Atlanta you have to consult an Access database of street addresses that as far as I can tell is organized by Zodiac sign.

Because dealing with all of this is new to me, I've been asking around to try and figure out how other eCommerce sites deal with sales tax. The short answer is, "they don't." Levels of compliance vary, but so far everyone has fallen into one of two camps. Either they only collect county taxes, and ignore Atlanta, or they just go with the highest possible tax rate and call it good.

Here's what I don't get. It's a pain in the ass for small commercial enterprises to figure out what tax to charge, but it should be a piece of cake for the state. Given the general lack of compliance I'm finding, I have to think that if the state provided a web service to help eCommerce sites know what to charge that the increased tax revenues would easily pay for it. So why don't they do it?

Apropos of nothing

I'll keep my $35, thank you

One of the speakers in my car has been buzzing for a while if I turn the volume above the level of traffic noise. I had hoped that it was just something loose, but it turns out the speaker cone was actually torn. I could have had the dealer replace it for $57 plus installation, but that seemed expensive so after verifying that the job would be something I could tackle I decided to get a pair of replacement speakers at Best Buy and install them myself.

After selecting the speakers, the ever-helpful sales guy asked if I wanted them to install the speakers. I told him that I would do it myself, and he tried to discourage me from doing it by saying that I would have to "gut the interior" of the car, and that I would void the warranty by installing the speakers myself. I knew that the business of having to tear out the interior was crap, of course, and once I got the speakers installed I checked the warranty and sure enough that was a steaming pile, too.

Once again, Best Buy's service lives up to it's reputation.

I am not a terrorist

This is cool-- a t-shirt that reads "I am not a terrorist" in Arabic. Reminds me of a sweatshirt my sister made for me in college that says "peace" in Russian, in the style of the greek letters you see for fraternities and sororities. I used to get a kick out of wearing that around campus and catching the occasional puzzled look as people tried to figure out what frat I belonged to.

Tethered

Well, it looks like I'm one of the lucky winners in this week's battery recall sweepstakes. I filled out the form on the Apple site to get my replacement, and just received an email confirmation. They say it's going to take 4-6 weeks for the new battery to get here, and during that time I'm apparently not supposed to use my current battery. If I'm a good doobie, this leaves me with two choices: 1) I can use my old battery, which holds a charge for something like 45 minutes, or 2) I can go batteryless, and therefore mostly laptopless for a month.

Or I can live dangerously...

One button to rule them all...

I don't normally write about work here, but I've recently gotten a request recently that has been driving me crazy. I won't go into details, but the basic issue is this-- we have a screen with several form fields to fill out. At the bottom right we have your basic pair of submit and cancel buttons. At the bottom left we have buttons that do other things-- navigation and print. Last week we got a request from users to combine some of these together, so that the navigation and print buttons will also save.

In my view, this is a big mistake, but in addition to the specific issues it brings up, it has also prompted me to think about what we should be striving for in interface design. On the one hand we have simplicity, which is the direction I always find myself pulling in. This is an exaggeration, but I think something like this should be the ultimate goal:

On the other hand, I find that my clients very often pull in the opposite direction. Believe it or not, the following is actually less complicated in some ways than screens I have had to build, and in a sense represents what I suspect they might articulate as their goal, which is to have anything and everything on one screen that might be relevant to the task:

I see a nightmare in this, but in cases where there is a lot of data and variables, I suppose you can make an argument that this is more efficient than a series of less complicated screens.

For that matter, there's also a third ideal which I haven't pictured. It's kind of the opposite of the old Really Big Button That Doesn't Do Anything, and that's The Button That Does Everything For Me. Of course, this button doesn't exist, and cannot exist, at least until computers can suck all our wants and needs out of our brains. And then really, will we even need buttons anymore?

So back to the multi-function buttons...in essence, the clients claim that being able to click on one button is better than having to click on two. If all that was involved in this was button clicks, than I suppose they would be right. However, it gets more complicated than that. First, there is no "save" implied by the button labels as they exist now, so by adding functionality we would be surprising the user by saying that we're going to do one thing, and then doing something else. Second, even if the user knows what the buttons do, what if the user enters some data, then realizes he's made a mistake, or has lost track of something? Suddenly those multi-function buttons are not so attractive, because there's no way to neatly back out without saving bad data, or going back and manually re-entering the original information.

It has been suggested that we deal with these problems by providing additional buttons that are clearly labeled "Submit + X", but this has problems of its own. Namely, we wind up adding new buttons for every combination of functions that we want to have on the page. This particular case has us going from five to eight, but there's no guarantee that we couldn't end up with ten or more if this kind of thing were to take off.

Unfortunately, I don't really have a conclusion to this yet, aside from a kind of mantra of "One button, one function. One button, one function." We'll see where this ends up, but for now I'm just hoping to get more data. I'm not so arrogant as to think that the interface as it exists now is perfect, but the notion of piling functionality into these single-click buttons strikes me as highly unproductive in the long run, even if it makes one customer happy in the short run. With any luck we'll be able to find out what the problem really is, and address that instead of chasing after phantom efficiencies.

Negative != positive

Yet more evidence that the Bush administration is run by complete morons. This comes from Edward Lazear, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors:

The other thing I would say is that if we look at the behavior rather than the responses to polls, the behavior is consistent with a strong economy. We see consumption being high. In fact, the saving rate is negative right now.

Now ask yourself, what does it mean if the saving rate is negative? This hardly takes a genius. It means that people are spending more money than they are taking in. Combine that with the fact that unlike the Federal government, ordinary citizens are not allowed to rack up deficits forever. My local bank isn't going to let me have a negative balance in my account. So what does that mean when people's savings reaches zero? I'm no economist, but it seems to me that if people can't get by on what they're making that we have a problem.

Devotion

You can take my cleavage when you pry it from my cold, dead hands

Chandra and I were joking about exactly this scenario last night when we heard the story about someone with gel shoe inserts not being allowed to board a plane.

U.S. authorities are advising women not to wear gel bras on airplanes as information developed in the foiled London plot points to an expanding role for women in smuggling explosives on to an aircraft.

What's next, will women with implants be barred from travel altogether? What about nursing mothers? Will they be required to pump & dump before boarding? Jeebus...

Memories

The Evaluation

And this, dear friends, is why I work in 3D. I've been working on a set of storyboard/comic panels for "We, Robot" and scanned what I had into the computer yesterday. The top of the scan (#19 in the series) got cut off due to my not paying attention when I ran the script that cropped the images, but the rest is pretty much untouched aside from doing an Auto Levels to bring out the pencil lines.

In the words of Beck...

Apple Matters has a review of recent Mac OS releases, where they ask (emphasis added):

10.3, of course, sped the whole system up. The release also provided plenty of eye candy. People were stunned by Expose window management (does anyone still use this?) and fast user switching is still a compelling (and cool looking) feature. iChat got upgraded to iChat AV and Apple switched to the brushed metal interface. All in all, another update that kept the entire ‘Steve is gonna wow us’ vibe going.

Hell yes, I use Exposé. I use it every day, and not only is it a great way to navigate between windows, but it still wows Windows users who aren't used to seeing it. It's leaps and bounds better than dragging windows around or showing and hiding applications.

Things that are uncool

1. Blowing stuff up that doesn't belong to you.
2. Talking with your mouth full.
3. Rearranging furniture without checking with your office mates first.
4. Tugging on Superman's cape.
5. Blocking the sidewalk.
6. Cat farts.
7. Assuming that miscommunication is always the other guy's fault.
8. Hot cocoa.
9. Blaming other people for your poor judgement.
10. Dying iPods.

Surviving team projects

Ken wrote this Rewrite night survival guide for screenwriters, but it applies equally well to lots of other situations where you might be tempted to pull an all-nighter to get a project done.

I had the same thought

Repurposed slogan.

The rube needs a bigger tube

What a boob.

Bins for Lamont

Smooshed, indeed.

Don't bring a knife to a gun fight

There's some interesting stuff over on Liberal Journal on whether it makes any sense to be a centrist in this day and age, prompted by a column from Paul Krugman. In the column, Paul takes the Sierra Club to task for endorsing a Republican. His last paragraph sums things up nicely:

The fact is that in 1994, the year when radical Republicans took control both of Congress and of their own party, things fell apart, and the center did not hold. Now we’re living in an age of one-letter politics, in which a politician’s partisan affiliation is almost always far more important than his or her personal beliefs. And those who refuse to recognize this reality end up being useful idiots for those, like President Bush, who have been consistently ruthless in their partisanship.

This is exactly correct. It doesn't matter if any individual Republican has decent environmental credentials or not. As a party, Republicans do not stand for environmentalism. Unless this changes, any vote for a Republican is a vote against environmental progress. The Sierra Club has responded to Krugman's criticism, and they argue that not everything boils down to party loyalty and they "value performance above party affiliation." In an ideal world, I think this would be the preferred way to approach things, but until both parties are as fractious as the Democrat's reputation has had them, it just doesn't make sense.

Another zig

Invested in some new software, which I've been playing with the last few days. Depending on what direction I go in, the robot short may be a combination of 3D and more traditional animation. It should ultimately look more accomplished than this, but you've got to start somewhere, and a demo walk cycle is as good a way to learn my way around the tool as any...

Now we're talkin'

The Playmate article generates a couple more letters, from Joyce "Trashy" Westfall, and J.P. "I end with non-sequiters" Clark. When do you suppose the pro-ta-ta voices will speak up?

What's the expression?

I'm late commenting on this, but it's still worth noting, I think. Here's the short version-- film critic heaps praise on "Monster House" for achievement in facial expressions, a feat he claims was impossible before the motion-capture techniques employed in "Monster House" became available (for more, see summary at BoingBoing).

First, as others have rightly pointed out, this is completely asinine and betrays a willful ignorance of the power of animation in particular, and art in general. You don't need a photograph to convey human emotion any more than you need live action cinema to do so. Think Guernica or Dumbo. Neither approaches photorealism, but both convey powerful emotion.

Even this site's mascot, mute and expressionless though he may be, usually manages to convey what's on his mind in his own way...

Yawn

Apparently we have a bona-fide Playboy Playmate living in town now. I know this because the local newspaper had a feature on her in the Sunday paper (which they teased on Saturday). I suspect the picture they used would qualify as one of the frumpiest Playmate photos ever.

Since the article appeared, I've been waiting for the inevitable clucking in the letters to the editor, and was disappointed that the best they could come up with was someone complaining that the paper shouldn't refer to UGA as a party school anymore. C'mon guys, where's the brimstone?