Make no mistake, it is great to suggest alternatives should the search turn up nothing. That is a favor and can help when typos are made.

But take the example I encountered today on MyFaceInATube. (That's YouTube's alter ego from a show called The Middleman.)

I was searching for videos about a plugin to OpenBVE (a train driving simulation) called BVEC_ATS. I know about the plugin and where to find it. I was hoping to find videos of trains running in OpenBVE with that plugin enabled.

So I searched for the string "bvec_ats". Freakin' MFIAT came back with "Searching instead for bobcats" and returned a long list of videos about bobcats.

What it didn't say was that my search returned no results. It did offer me the chance to search for the exact thing that I asked. Which is what I thought I'd done in the first place!

I'm sorry, guys, replacing my search with something else is the opposite of friendly. It's what I call user hostile. 

In my opinion, the proper way is to show the empty search, in case that is what I wanted, and offer the alternative search in case I had really misspelled "bobcats" so horribly that my typing teacher would retract my "A." (That'll date me. I'd bet real money that high schools don't have typing class anymore.)

I pretty much cannot watch Youtube videos directly in my browser.  They start playing, and I watch the buffer grow to about one third, then stop.  The player quickly hits this one third mark and I get the spinning buffering symbol. Forever.

Not to worry, there is software called youtube-dl which can download youtube videos.  That means that I have to wait for them to finish downloading before I can watch them, but that's what I get with my slow Internet.

But what if  I want to download 7 youtube videos? The program has a helpful read URLs from a file option. But it reads the file at the beginning.

What if I want to add more videos after starting? Well, youtube-dl can resume downloading a video in the middle, so Ctrl-C and restart.

What if the first video in the list is HUUGGE and I want some of the later ones to run first? Edit the file, Ctrl-C and restart.

What if the file was already downloaded? Either edit the file, Ctrl-C and restart, or use the archiving feature. But eventually I have to edit the file to remove the ones that are completed, or else I see a spew of all ready downloaded.

I'm a big believer in that's the computer's job. So I wrote a bizarro world queuing system for myself.

It listens for URLs and adds them to the queue. It runs one at a time in submitted order, but it also has a configurable cycle time. So for example, it will run the first one for 2 minutes, then push it to the end of the queue and run the next one for two minutes. It adapts the duration to how long the queue is, so if there is only one entry, it just runs. I can also override the queue rolling to make it finish a video I particularly want and I can change the run time while it is running. And I can delete an entry while it is running.

It doesn't do any of these things really brilliantly, but it does them in code with me only having to poke the right buttons.

That's what I did on Mother's Day after talking to my mom.

Heavy downpour with chunks. Frequent lightning.

I couldn't even count between flash and thunder. But not because they were so close together. The thunder was continuous and I mostly couldn't associate any particular rumble with any particular flash.

After about 15 minutes of continuous thunder I was moving past awe into "well, I'd really like to start relaxing soon."

Then it ended abruptly and I thought my ears had popped because it was so very quiet. I finally realized that I could actually hear my computer in the next room and wasn't deaf.  Then I heard a rumble of thunder off in the distance and began to relax because the storm was moving on.

Here is the red flag for me: I have seen a number of software projects decide to radically change their entire design, but keep the same name. Version 2.0 ends up being a completely different program, not just completely different code.

I understand the need to refactor code. Long history of development accumulates cruft and eventually you are trapped in a spaghetti code nightmare. Sometimes rewriting from scratch is the only hope of making the code supportable again.

But when you do that, you should make it your plan to recreate the existing functionality. That is what DEFINES your software. You shouldn't call it 2.0 if it isn't at least as functional as 1.9.

I've been trying to express this without calling out any names. Here I am failing: KDE4.

KDE is a window manager system on Linux. It runs your desktop. Applications ask it to place their windows. Users configure its look-and-feel. It controls most of what you see and how you work when you are doing stuff before, after and between multiple applications. And it had long history and spaghetti code and design decisions that limited the developers' ability to add new functionality and fix old functionality. Slash and burn rewrite was probably the only hope.

But KDE 4.0, the first result of slash and burn, was bad. It wasn't stable enough to support users. It probably didn't implement 50% of what KDE 3.x could do. I say "probably" because I couldn't use it for long enough to find out whether my problems were due to broken code or just missing functionality.

And yet they managed to convince Linux distributions to not only include KDE 4.0, but make it the default after an upgrade.

They needed this hugely, because they really needed people to test it in order to iron out the copious bugs.

I don't know about you, but I route around impediments to my work. I'm not a software test engineer. I never signed up to be a beta tester for KDE 4.0. I DIDN'T WANT THAT CRAP ON MY COMPUTER!

KDE 4.1 was better. It only seemed to crash every few days instead of every few hours. Now I CAN tell that it didn't implement a lot of what KDE 3.x had. I downgraded again.

KDE 4.2 was required. "It's good enough now that we won't even include that nasty old KDE 3.x." Well, you were wrong. It still crashed at least once per week. That's unacceptable. I found my way back again.

KDE 4.3 actually got to the point where I could use it. Now I really began to miss my old friend features from KDE 3.x.

You know what? I still miss them. KDE decided that they would never reimplement some of them, I guess because they had their hands full just making the dang thing stay up for long enough to be useful.

KDE 4 was only the first package that I saw do this.

Here's the big hint for any software package that decides to completely change their interface during a major release:

If I have to learn how to use your new version from scratch again, then there is NO ADVANTAGE to learning your new version over learning SOMEONE ELSE'S software.

Every time one of my favorite packages has done this to me, I have ended up using a different program. Every time. And advertisers? I have no brand loyalty either.

All I want is for an updated package today to be at least as good as yesterday. If you are going to make me run as hard as I can just to remain in the same place, I'm going to call you the Red Queen and go off looking for the White Queen. So what if she's just as eccentric as the Red Queen? At least I'm not out of breath just trying to do the same thing today.

Months of healing and physical therapy and changing seasons later and I am finally exercising again.  But because I am still out of balance strength-wise, I am riding my bicycle this year.  We will see about the unicycle after I get back into balance.

Yes, I can still ride my bicycle.  But there are really some subtle things that you do forget in several years when not riding.  Here's a sampling.

My first rides were on the streets in my neighborhood. Later, on the first day I tried commuting to work on the bike path, I found myself hogging the middle of the path. I was really not confident enough in fine details of steering to ride near the right edge of the path. It has taken a few days of riding the paths to get better about not hogging the middle.

The bike path also challenged me with twisty curves.  Another confidence issue arose with me leaning as far as necessary to make those twisty curves.

Finally, the first couple of rides I invariably shifted the wrong way. Spin! Or else Bog Down! Shifting got better quickly and today on my fourth day of commuting I didn't mis-shift once.

Manuevering confidence is slower to return, but that is moderated by the fact that as my confidence increases, so does my speed, which depresses my confidence.

I'm in a race, strength versus emotional healing. Who will win? I just hope that it isn't gravity who wins. But doesn't gravity always win in the end?

So I did.

Not really. I used Google Translate and it's ability to semi-recognize hand drawn Chinese characters. I have usable notes about a sizable fraction of the interface.

There are also many cases where Google Translate left me scratching my head trying to figure out what they really meant. In particular, I decided to forego figuring out what most of the names of the other players should actually be, and left them with the direct results of Google Translate on Player Name Table.

I am trying to collect images for all the scoring possibilities on this image.

I have two columns of 1 faan possibilities.

Then there are three 3 faan possibilities.

Then a collection of higher faan possibilities, one of each. Note that apparently Seven Pairs is not a valid win in this game application. (I will screenshot proof of that the next time I see it.)

Finally, there is a collection of limit hand possibilities.

I haven't decided what to do with the 2 faan possibilities. They are only doubles of the 1 faan Wind sets when the player's seat matches the round.