Made By Monkeys

"Found this box lying around work. It's quite a powerful charger at 16,000 mA but I really don't think it will be any match for my 16,000,000 μA charger I have at home."

Engineers are great with calculations, but needless math can be really irritating.

Take Jon Titus' experience with this bottle of fuel stabilizer and the instructions for mixing it with gas:

"Before I fueled my new snow blower I mixed some "fuel stabilizer" with the 2 gallons of gas I got at the local market.  The fuel-stabilizer instructions explain that one ounce of stabilizer will preserve 2.5 gallons of gas.  So, I had to do the math and came up with 0.8 ounces of stabilizer.  The plastic bottle of stabilizer has embossed volumes marked in one-ounce (left side of bottle) and 50-milliliter (right side of bottle) increments.  So I dumped out about one ounce and figured that would do.  Because people buy gasoline in gallon quantities here in the US, why wouldn't the company mark its bottles in units of "gallons", so you add stabilizer right out of the bottle for the number of gallons of gas you have?  Why force people to go through the gallons-of-gas to ounces-of-stabilizer step?  Beats me."

I call this kind of inside-out--thinking the "Center of the Universe" syndrome.
 

File this one under "mislabeled."

DEV-Monkey Editor Jon Titus posts a great rant on his blog about the lousy state of schematics that come with electronics development kits and boards, particularly when trying to print them out.

Having started a dev kit project earlier this year, I absolutely agree!

Writes Jon: "Most of the schematics I see fall into the "awful" category. Lines appear tiny, legends seem unreadable, and part numbers and pin designations look like smudges.  I use an HP LaserJet 1100 printer and it produces clear, clean diagrams from schematic-capture software.  But the schematic diagrams that accompany development kits or evaluation boards look more like bits of gray connected by what might be lines.  To me, these schematics are unreadable and thus, useless."  Read more....

So can someone tell us-- just why are they so bad?? And what could be done to make them better?

And you thought you were having a bad day?

Fox News reports that an angry employee (no kidding), wreaked havoc at an architectural firm when she deleted 7 years of drawings and blueprints valued at $2.5 million.

"She decided to mess up everything for everybody," Jacksonville Sheriff's Office spokesman Ken Jefferson told reporters. "She just sabotaged the entire business."

Though the company was able to retrieve the data, it cost them a bundle. And it certainly does make you think twice about data security, or the lack thereof.

EW Editor Alun Williams found the use of the double negative on this loyalty card for Nando's - a Peri-Peri Chicken cheap and cheerful restaurant chain - to be a bit of a mind-bending exercise. "The deliberate / coy attempt at miscommunication got me wondering, 'Should I tick the box or not?' But, somehow, the promise of 'enjoying free chicken' didn't seem worth the effort of figuring it out."

You want to go where? The Boston Globe's article Street Smarts? illustrates perfectly why even locals are flummoxed by the exploding number of increasingly ambiguous road signs around town. But now at least we know why -- they're designed by a committee!

The curse of bad instructions struck again in the booklet that accompanies a shelf unit Jon Titus bought from IKEA.

The original instructions for Step 1 show how to attach two brackets and eight screws and dowel pins to the top, bottom, and sides of the shelf. But, if you're not mechanically inclined, it's easy to miss where the items go. Jon's marked-up instructions, below, explicitly show where the pieces go. The brackets (A) look fairly obvious, but someone with poor vision might miss where to put the other parts, B and C.

Things get even sillier, as underscored in another cartoon from the instructions:

Engineers buy and use development kits and evaluation boards to minimise their risk and speed the design cycle -- many say they expect to get something working on a new board in a mere 30 minutes or less. So when the documentation sucks, often contradicting itself or leaving out critical details, it can be insanely frustrating. And it's especially wrenching when the hardware is interesting and useful, as engineer/writer Jon Titus recently discovered trying out a new microcontroller dev kit from Freescale.

"I have a Freescale kit here that could let engineers compare performance of
8- and 32-bit MCUs in the company's new Flexis family. The same code should
run in either processor type, which sounds like an interesting capability
for engineers. But the written instructions are so awful many engineers
will give up. And, nowhere in the instructions does the kit explain its
purpose or provide examples readers can use to compare performance, code
size, and other characteristics for each of the two processor types.