I'm 37, I'm not old

 The latter half of February was pretty slow by our standards, though I did get two batches of beer brewed -- a hefeweizen and a dunkelweizen, which are now fully-recognized members of our family and have climate control rights. Seen here in the office before they moved to the garage.

And my birthday. My boys wanted to snuggle in with me and my delicious milk stout for a birthday selfie.

Reed has also been building some forts in our living room. After his first and most grand œuvre d'art had to be deconstructed, he decided to do another one so we could have a boys night in the fort. He started by making a scale model out of magnetiles. Also, silly face, as per usual.

Then we built in Friday morning together.

He, Jake, and I slept it in Friday. Mostly, they slept and I laid down very uncomfortably for eight hours or so.

The next day, we went to Blue Origin's facility not far from our place to do a tour. No pictures were allowed inside, unfortunately, but it was pretty awesome.

The unfortunate design of not saving preferences

I recently reformatted my phone (a statement I wouldn't have expected to make back when I was regularly reformatting my Windows 98 computer), and when I added my second email account to the phone, Picasa Web Albums asked if I wanted to grant access to Gallery. Since I already connected to my personal Gmail account, I have no need to connect my secondary, I denied this request:

However, very shortly after this request, I was asked again the same question:

I got the same request over and over again until I finally allowed it. (In fact, even after I allowed it, I was asked two more times.)

I by no means consider myself a "designer," but having at least done some reading on the subject, I feel like I see terrible design everywhere now. If you're an engineer, you'd do yourself a favor to read Don't Make Me Think, and if you've got plenty of time, The Design of Everyday Things.

Your app redesign sucks

Not terribly long ago, Google added their Google Play Music radio stations with a free, ad-supported version for everyone. Aside from the fact that their recommendations are terrible in my experience, they've nerfed their user experience. Just yesterday, in fact, I wanted to play the song The Pretender on my phone. Here's the result screen from my search:

While their auto-generated The Pretender Radio station is at least relevant, it's not what I am looking for -- the song I have played many times on my phone is nowhere to be seen.

I don't even get to my intended result until I scroll down. Here's what the full pane looks like:

Of the entire result pane, less the operating system's top bar and Music's top search bar and bottom music controls, about 11% of the real estate -- all of it below the initial view -- is devoted to what I'm looking for, and what I ultimately clicked on.

The radio stations have become a big pain point for me lately, as I tend to play music almost exclusively from Google Play Music, either on my phone or on my work or home laptops. The pain comes partially from their A1 position on nearly every screen but also from the fact that Google apparently isn't taking the hint that I don't use it and isn't letting me collapse or hide this section.

Their desktop experience isn't much better, yielding about 26% after discounting the search bar and controls:

The first project I worked on in Bing measured dissatisfaction (referred to as DSAT) with search results in XBox Music and Video search results. For example, when you search for "seven" in the context of videos, you might expect to see the results "Se7en", "Seven Years in Tibet", "Seven Samurai", and more. Ideally, the first result is the one you wanted, and if you clicked on the fifth one or if you didn't click any, that is a DSAT -- the results were poor. We took those data and learned from it to improve the quality of the results.

I imagine Google has some sophisticated ML to do exactly that; however, this is not an engineering problem. It's a simple matter of understanding what your users want, and at least in my humble opinion, this ain't it.