I've been using the tragically named iGoogle service for a while now, though I had never used a personalized home page service before it. Those clever bastards have a way of getting you to use their new services by insinuating them into ones you already use, and making it easier to use them than not to (See also putting Google Chat into the Gmail interface).

I've found Google services to usually be remarkably free of bugs, and they can of course make changes and bug-fixes whenever they want to without me having to do anything or even know about it. But there are two bugs in iGoogle that have been there for so long now (at least 6 months I think) that I'm starting to wonder if they're anything that Google could fix; maybe they're in Firefox, or in the RSS feeds of other sites, or disruptions in the fabric of the universe.

Number one: for each feed on the page, you have the title and link to the site itself that the feed comes from, and then the list of articles. Often if several of the articles in the feed look interesting, I just click on the title and go to the page itself to read them there. But sometimes this doesn't work. Sometimes what happens is this: when I click the title, the browser's scroll bar momentarily gets shorter, as if content has been added to the bottom of the page, and then goes back normal. I've never been able to see what is happening down there. This will keep happening and the fix is usually to reload the page, though sometimes I have to do this more than once. I haven't been able to find any difference in the HTML between when it is working and when it isn't.

Number two: When I click on an individual article on the iGoogle page, there seems to be a random choice made between the article opening in the same tab or in a new tab. Now maybe this is somehow being determined by the sites providing the feeds--I don't know enough about RSS to say whether that's a feature--but if so that would be a pretty weird thing for them to do. Especially if one site couldn't make up its mind: I have one iGoogle tab (not browser tab) devoted to different New York Times sections, and different sections behave differently with regard to new tabs.

These are minor but annoying bugs. What's going on?

Washington Mutual ATMs (and I'm sure those of other banks are similar), when sitting unused, have a sort of screen saver mode with a slideshow of advertisements for the bank. When you start using it, it shifts to showing screens that accept your input. But when you trigger an action that takes more than a moment to complete, such as delivering cash to you or preparing to accept your deposit envelope, the screen goes back to its screen saver mode until this preparation is complete.

I find this behavior pretty unappealing from a user interface perspective. I want to feel like the machine is paying attention to me for the duration of my usage, not going back to twiddling its thumbs whenever it stops interacting with me for more than a second. But more importantly, it sometimes seems that this interface is designed to make people forget to take their bank cards with them when they leave. This is because one of the actions that triggers the screen saver mode is when the ATM has been told that you don't want anything else from it, and is preparing to give you back your card and (optionally) your receipt. Thus the situation in which you're about to get your card back is momentarily indistinguishable from the situation that the ATM is totally done serving you. I've witnessed several people forget their cards, and done it myself once, as a result of this terrible interface design.

This would of course be moot if the ATM hardware allowed you to 'dip' your card rather than surrendering it to the machine for the duration of the transaction.