The Day I Blended My Wine

I buy wine for one and only one reason; Sangria. I am not a wine connoisseur (yet) but I'll take wine when I cannot find any hard liqueur...ok..almost never. I don't understand wines and I cannot tell flavors apart. "It is okey", or "I didn't like it" are the two categories I have for wines. Thus, my expectations for this experiment were very low.
I did not expect to notice any difference.

I listened to these guys and blended a glass 337 Cabernet Sauvignon from Noble Vines. The shot glass has contents right out of the bottle while "aerated wine" went from bottle to magic bullet for 15 seconds to wine glass. Both my wife (who is a non-drinker) and I tasted the samples and we could tell the difference between the two.
Well, the difference was significant; even for us. The wine became much smoother and well, more "blended". To me, it tasted like dead wine; like something out of a bottle opened 15 days ago and left open in the pantry.

In my second trial, I blended it for just 5 seconds. But when I opened the mixer, I could hear the wine die out in form of bubbles. It was again, a dead wine.

What a horrible thing to do. Let the two glasses I blended not die in vain. Let this be a lesson to not to blend any wine from this point forward.

Prometheus: Lesson in user experience

Hopefully, by now, everybody has seen Prometheus. I do think it was a good movie.

The one technical thing that stood out for me is how the access keypads were designed and how they were used in "reality". If you've noticed, these were located on every door of the ship. Each keypad was well designed to prevent breach(es) and with a futuristic setting, each one could probably have more functions available to empower users than any given website's security measures in existence as of today and probably a "security management module" to program all at once.

But how were the keypads used in reality?

Just like the picture of a no-brainer garage door opener shown in the picture on the right. This unit is placed in almost all garage doors and it is fairly simple to use it. In short, the two main behaviors expected from slapping that button are:
"Open the damn door" -or- "Close the damn door".
Pretty basic right?



In terms of UX, it's the first two behaviors of the system as "must haves".