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Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Found: stupidest damn elevators on Earth 
| | What could have a more obvious UI than an elevator? Especially in a high rise hotel, where there are no residents to charm with peculiar features? Where all you have are guests who want to get to a floor other than the one they're on, which may not be all that clear in the first place. Is the A for Atrium? The C is for what? And the O? Is that a zero? Why? |
| | Anyway, the Marriott Marquis, by Times Square in Manhattan, has an central cylinder of new elevators that rise and fall like bubbles on the surface of a reactor core. Nothing wrong with that, except there is almost nothing obvious about how to summon one. |
| | Most of the elevator doors are these anonymous portals that each look like they lead to hell (or stand a good chance). Less obvious is the keypad between two inboard (core within the core) elevator doors. Seems you need to punch your floor number into the keypad, after which it gives you a cryptic two-character message, such as this one: O> |
| | Okay, zero is greater than... ? |
| | Seems this indicates the elevator named O. Also the door named 5. But then, ALL the doors are also named 5. |
| | No wonder a man in a red uniform greets and takes you into the elevator when you arrive. They don't want wtF? to be your first experience as a guest in the hotel. |
| | The elevators themselves have no keypads. You go in the O door (or whatever) and hope for the best. As you rise like a released spirit in your glass tube through the vast atrium toward... what? the complete absence of control verges on creepy. |
| | Of course, that's assuming the elevators come at all. The waiting times can get so long that you wonder if the keypad is for making appointments. |
| | A guy told me these are "model" or "test" elevators for a "new generation" of the things. One only hopes prospective customers check out the beta test here. |
He's back!
| | Steve Lewis is back at his Bubkes weblog (complete with its now-retro design), after a long hiatus. How fitting that I find out from Dean Landsman (seen here and here clarifying something to Jeff Jarvis) while sitting with Britt at Bryant Park. Steve and Dean are among my oldest and best New Yawk friends. |
All the news that's fit from Tom
Podded Dead
Welcome to the Holocene
| | Stowe, the pro (can't resist the rhyme) is sitting to my immediate right, blogging the Syndicate conference. Listening to a panel talking about "monetizing RSS feeds" with advertising, among other forms of "content" they "pour" into a "stream" for an "audience," yada yada yada blah blah blah... arf. (This panel tomorrow looks more promising.) |
| | Overheard from a blogger in the crowd: "These guys are looking for the exit ramp to the bridge over to our side of ... whatever this is." Also discussion of what geologic age the publishers' online folks are from. Mesozoic? Tertiary? I decided we should be generous and grant that they've made it to the Quarternary, somewhere in the late Pleistocene. (See 'em all tabled out here.) |
There are responses to this message:Elevator controls: they only seem logical, jon, 5/19/05; 1:58:35 PM Marriott elevators, David Parmet, 5/18/05; 12:28:13 AM geologic ages, Christopher Locke, 5/17/05; 6:22:45 PM Re: Tuesday, May 17, 2005, Staci D. Kramer, 5/17/05; 12:30:25 PM
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