got some interest in my hobonichi from my last post so wanted to share my hobonichi planners from law school and talk a little about them :))
yellow omelette cover was for 1L, josef čapek's doggie and pussycat was 2L, and hiroko kubota's tokyo metronome is my current 3L planner!! they are all the original a6 planner that starts in april 🌸 to keep them clean, i added a clear cover on cover.
i would like to say i am creative or extremely organized but alas, i just use them to write down my hw assignments (otherwise i forget) or daily to-do lists. at the top, i write down my appointments and highlight them in yellow. on days i don't have anything to do, the whole page is blank🙈 as a student, this system worked well for me because i don't use google calendar/notion or any online platform (i don't sync anything to my phone). i think once i start working after graduation, i'm going to switch to hobonichi weeks or a less daunting planner just so i can keep track of my appointments. sometimes a full empty blank page scares me.. like staring into the abyss.....
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After reading @kira-serialfaggot 's post about inaccessible menus and @butterfly-sapphire post about non-customizable menus figured I now had sufficient excuse to rant about how I hate how every big restaurant's ""solution"" to these two problems is somehow always the worst fucking app I've ever had to use in my life.
So, to clarify real quick. I agree with both previous posts. Places that serve food should have their menu easily accessible somewhere if they have an online presence, and places that let you customize your order need to have that as a feature of any digital ordering solution they implement. Good? Good.
So, a lot of places I've seen (Wendys, Taco Bell, and McDonald to name a few) Have tried to get around how fucking horrible the DD app itself is by making their own apps with DD integration for the actual ordering/serving of delivery orders. Great, this lets them provide their own menu customization options, serve discounts/coupons, and generally have more control over the user experience. Fantastic. As a bonus, this usually also allows you to just look at the menu whenever you want.
Small issue. All of these apps were written by the worst fucking programmers I have ever witnessed in my life. I havn't gotten angry enough to de-compile or try to reverse engineer one yet, but my user experience has been so consistently bad and I've encountered issues that, as a software engineer, I honestly could not tell you how fucked their system has to be in order to allow that to happen.
Allow me to tell you the worst of these. I'm trying to order delivery from a store. It's late, like 7pm, but I know the place is open till 10. I can confirm this on their website (I do later for reasons that will become apparent) and google maps. So I punch in my address, make my order, and go to checkout.
Unfortunately, the app tells me "Your payment method failed. Please select a new method and try again". Which was odd, but not unimaginable. I've had issues with my bank in the past. So I swap cards and try again, thinking nothing of it.
Except, my other card doesn't work either. Nor does using PayPal, or Google Pay, or any of the other payment options I tried. I'm getting desperate. I buy some games on steam just to make sure some of these are working, which they are. I was worried, but now that I've confirmed all my money hasn't been siphoned away somehow, I'm just confused and getting annoyed.
So I start going insane. I buy digital gift cards from several different sites and try using them. No dice, payment failed. I try using the website instead of the app, on my phone and PC. Payment failed. I boot up an android studio instance with a brand new virtual phone, install the app on it, and try to order. Again. Payment failed.
I'm starting to wonder if their servers are just completely down. A friend in a different state can order with no problems. A friend in the same town can order with no fanfare.
But my roommates can't. They have the same issue
Payment failed.
So. I'm going insane. I've now spent almost 3 hours attempting to order food, and I'm starving. It is at this point that my anger finally overcomes my social anxiety, and I do the one thing I never thought I'd do.
I call the store in question.
Now, in all of this there was one crucial mistake I made. See, that friend in the same town? Lived on the other side of town. And there's 2 different stores of this franchise in town. We didn't control for this, because the app doesn't let you pick a store anyways when doing delivery. It's hard locked to whatever one is closest, which isn't a terrible thing to do. You need to get the delivery address anyways, and you know where all your store are, so it cuts out a step for me. But having to choose a store might've clued us in to what was going wrong.
Because the store? Was closed.
Not just closed, like mega closed. It was being shut down. It hadn't been open for two weeks, and would never be open again. The order was failing because they'd already taken all the computer systems out, and it couldn't confirm to have received the order.
So there was nothing wrong with the payment. Literally nothing I could have done about this. I am just barred completely from ordering because the app defaults to the nearest location for orders, and my nearest location didn't exist anymore.
And you'd think that there would be some way to communicate this to the user when making the app. But for reasons I can only assume are profit motivated (Though I have no idea how the fuck this is more efficient/profitable), the app just defaults to saying the payment failed.
Now, I wouldn't be this mad if this was just "oops edge case lol" where I suffered the unfortunate consequences of some procrastinator forgetting to do the thing that removes stores from the database. Unfortunate but not really anyone I can blame for it. But no. This is just the most extreme example, and it's not even confined to the one app.
Almost every single app like this I've used defaults to saying the payment failed and to try a new payment method when anything goes wrong. No drivers out on DoorDash to actually move the order? Payment failed. You're trying to order a seasonal item that got dropped today? Payment failed. The companies servers actually are down? Payment failed. You're not connected to wi-fi like an idiot and there's actually something you can do to fix the issue that's not related to payment whatsoever? Payment failed.
What the fuck is up with this lazy ass programming? I seriously doubt there's enough technical debt from these apps to justify not having a robust error catching system that communicates with the user what the issue is. By the fucking stars these people love collecting intrusive data, I'm surprised they havn't used this as an excuse to harvest everyone's fucking location at all times and send "error data" back to central.
But just don't tell me my debit card was declined when I'm trying to order a burger and you closed that store two weeks ago.
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Sales & Help
6/22/2023 4 pm EST
Hiya Folks
I know not everyone just wants to give money away, a lot can't afford to do so. That's okay! There are other ways to help!
Share this!
Buy something off my Redbubble! Right now it is mostly focused on different Pride Flag butterflies. There is 21 different designs, while I work on the templates to upload for another 11 of them. Buy a sticker for $3, and while I might only get part of that, it adds up!
Buy the Special Edition of Tales of Identity: Memories & Reflections for $5 from KoFi! It comes in three different formats: PDF, MOBI, and EPUB.
Do a small commission using Paypal [cosmosbusinessventures@gmail .com]!
Sign up for the $1 per month tier on Patreon! It's got several coloring downloads accessible only for patreons, plus multiple free gimp brushes. The $5 tier includes the download of the Special Edition of Tales of Identity: Memories & Reflections too!
So please, please share this, buy something, or both! I just want to make sure I don't lose my account, pay my electric bill, and get my cat back from the crematorium.
Thank you all.
Jaimi
Goal: $0/740
Here's some examples from Redbubble:
Here's some of the gimp brushes on Patreon:
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