I am honored to accept your rice

Some time ago, the vagaries of personalization were examined in a whole spate of articles best characterized by one in the Wall Street Journal called “My Tivo Thinks I’m Gay”, talking about the amusing (or annoying) results of an out-of-context single choice leading to strange automated recommendations from collaborative filtering systems.

Now, I’m typically a fan of Amazon.com’s recommendation system, but most of us have experienced its quirks: you buy a gift for a friend’s new baby, and the next time you visit amazon; the entire home page is baby-oriented. That’s a litle amusing as long as they knock it off within a few days.

So recently I purchased a Zojirushi “fuzzy logic” rice cooker. The thing is awesome in a Hello-Kitty-meets-The-Matrix kind of way:

And next time I’m at amazon, it recommends four more high-end rice cookers. Now, I understand that buying books, DVDs or CDs is somewhat of a recurring purchase for most people, but I don’t need another $200+ rice cooker. I’ve got one. You’d think there’d be a simple MostPeopleDontNeedMoreThanOneOfThese flag in the database somewhere.

But I love my Zo’. It being 2006 and me still being somewhat annoyed that the world doesn’t contain the jetpacks and flying cars I was promised as a youngster, at least I can get a frisson of pleasure from having a kitchen device with the words “NEURO FUZZY” emblazoned on it. It makes fantastic sushi rice (and even has a “porridge” mode which pleases my Scottish self) and the “user experience” is wonderful in a quirky Japanese way: I picture the conference at Zojirushi headquarters as follows:

First Japanese: What should it do when you press the “cook” button?
(silence and much solemn thinking)
Second Japanese: It should play “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”
First Japanese (bowing). Ah. But of course.
Second Japanese: We also need a picture of an elephant.

Next stop, one of those Toto Washlet thousand-dollar toilet seats.

And while we’re on the subject of odd eastern wordage, I was browsing the web site for the great Korean web design magazine Impress and I couldn’t help but be a little amused by their icon for obtaining the Acrobat reader – and no, I’m not making this up…