Pet peeves

The following things drive me crazy.

Ambiguous date formats. What does 06/05/04 mean? Would that be June 5th, 2004? Or maybe May 6th, 2004? Or maybe May 4th, 2006? From time to time people say—with a straight face, no less—"... but that's the international standard!" Enough already! Dates should be written in an easy-to-read, unambigous format like 05-Jun-2006, and software should default to this. I wonder what the cumulative cost to humanity of ambiguous date formats has been? (Perhaps similar to the total cost due to the MS-DOS convention of having filenames with no more than 8 characters followed by a 3-character extension? How much frustration could they have saved by making it 16 characters instead of 8?)

Speaking of dates, how about the fact that the boxes videotapes and DVDs come in don't usually list the year the movie was released. Or if they do, it's in microscopic print. I guess they don't want you to realize the movie is 10 years old. But other information is usually hard to find too, like the running time and the aspect ratio.

Speaking of DVDs, the onscreen menus on DVDs drive me nuts! Why on earth couldn't they have just designed a good, standardized interface for all DVDs? Instead, every DVD's menu is a puzzle. Ok, some of the menus are kind of artistic, but you know, I can live without that.

Even more maddening is the evil "no, you can't do that" thing on DVDs, that sometimes won't let you skip a preview or something. I bought the !@#* thing—I should be able to skip whatever I want!

And then there's CD cases where the songs are listed without the track numbers. Oooh, how sophisticated—not! It's actually useful to know that a particular song is track number 13. Otherwise, every time I want to play the song I have to count through to figure that out. Or remember that it's number 13—as if I don't have enough trivia in my head already.

Whew! There ... that feels better. If anyone else would like to join in the therapy session, please do. Or if you disagree with something I've said, please correct me!