Dave’s Happy Place

We have finally got an alarm installed at our place after being robbed some months ago. It was interesting to see that the introduction in the manual contained the following statement:

Programming simplicity and speed were some of the major considerations and we believe that our objectives in this area were more than satisfied.

By all counts the alarms is pretty easy to use with consistent use of tones and buttons to achieve the variety of tasks that it can perform. The manual is also laid out well enough that you can find out what you need to know. There is some terminology that isn’t clearly defined though.

The manual is also a printed/photocopied booklet that is stapled together at the spine. These booklets are almost impossible to flick through because the pages at the right hand side stick out by different amounts. This can be easily remedied with a guilotine though.

It’s good to see a company that is actively considering usability during the design phase. Unfortunately the purchasing decision was only loosely based on design (we wanted an alarm with a small keypad as opposed to a silly large one). The first considerations were a reliable well established company, price, no monitoring contract and general features. Just goes to show that design alone doesn’t get the sale.

I am unfortunate to have come down with some stomach bug thing on Boxing Day…

Isn’t it strange how all of the stressful things in life seem to go away when you are feeling a long was from 100%. Makes you realise that your health is something that you shouldn’t take for granted and helps put all of lifes problems and issues into perspective.

I watched Oprah’s Christmas Special (man she does some amazing things) and was astounded to find out how many people in Africa are dying from AIDs. One particular statistic was that an orphan in created every 14 seconds because their parent(s) have died from HIV. Truely shocking.

Anyway, I’m starting to feel better today and might be able to get out of the house to take advantage of all the Boxing Day sales at the moment.

This morning I was woken up by what sounded like big fat rainy hail. And big and fat it was… It’s the biggest hail I have ever seen in my life. The largest pieces of hail were probably 20c sized. Probably not all that big compared to hail around the world, but definitely bigger than what hail normally looks like in Auckland.

It probably only hailed for a couple of minutes but the ground outside looked like it had been snowing. I would have taken a photo of it, but Shelly had my camera at work.