Shut up already....

Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds has a column on noisy devices that hits close to home.

I have an over-the-range microwave that nags me like this. If you don't open the door or hit stop after your food is done, it keeps beeping at you until you do one of those things. The one at my parent's house is even worse - it will nag you midway through the cycle to beep and display a message that says to "turn food over" - unnecessary for most things and downright dangerous if you are making, say, soup.

That isn't to say that dings aren't useful in some applications - I'm greatful my truck will ding and let me know I left the headlights on, saving me the hassle of a dead battery. But when it's information I know and don't care about, like that my bowl of previously frozen terriaki-flavored chicken has been sitting in the microwave for 30 seconds, it's annoying.

This brings me to another pet peeve - web pages that play music. I constantly make fun of my boss, who loves putting stuff in the backround of his website. Considering the number of people who surf from work and probably shouldn't be, anything that autoplays on a webpage is a bad idea. Sure, it was great in 1997, when it seemed like a novel concept, but not anymore. For example, I check a local realty site pretty much daily, to see what other houses are for sale in my development and to remind myself what an idiot I was to buy at the top of the market. If I don't remember to mute my volume, I get odd looks from coworkers thanks to their music.

When using a device or a website, I just want it to do what I want it to do - no song or dance, no nagging me about something I don't need to know.