It needs to be easier to set your road width to zero.
I want to be able to specify the road value that causes me to derail (critical edge), currently I can only control the centreline and the critical edge gets decided by beeminder magic.
The “Amounts due by day” table makes it more obvious that this is a problem. See this Useful Table calculation bug forum thread for more on this.
I expect that resolving that issue is going to take some time, so until then I workaround it by setting my road width to zero.
But currently this requires a lot of steps:
Settings -> Terrifyingly advanced -> Convert to custom (requires premium membership) -> Abs lane width -> enter 0 -> save
It would be nice if this process was easier.
I guess the only reasonable proposal I have is to have a terrifyingly advanced option to toggle ‘set lane width to zero.’ but I’m sure that’s got all kinds of implications I’m not appreciating at the moment.
Or maybe I need to use some api magic.
Agreed. Personally I don’t even find the “lanes” concept very useful because IMHO the only thing that matters is number of safe days. The website and Android app both sort by safe days, but it’s easy for a blue goal to have fewer safe days than an orange goal depending on how the road widths happen to be.
I see that the dynamic adjusting lanes are useful for weight loss, but for all of my other goals I don’t see what value the lane concept adds over safe days.
Totally agreed. We will get there. Beeminder originally (very originally – like in 2008 when it was a side project) was just for weight loss and we kind of designed ourselves into a few corners with the lanes thing. But we’re gradually making things saner! (I do still like the idea of color-coding the amount of safety buffer – red for eep days, orange for day-before-eep-day, blue for 2 safe days, and green for 3 or more).
I think the lane adjustment required for weight loss is a symptom of the wrong thing being measured, because it is measuring an outcome rather than an input action.
I’ve just created a few short-term goals to help me get ready for a big event coming up and I realize that none of them will actually force me to finish the things I need to do because of the width issue.
[sheepish] No but as penance can we help via admin intervention? (It’s also possible the road editor would solve it, which would be good for us to know – maybe even an argument against road editor being premium.)
If you want to set best_birth – drtall – beeminder 's width to 0 that would be nice. I think test – drtall – beeminder is already okay because I set the target to -1 instead of 0 (it’s called test because I discovered you can unarchive odometer goals even if you can’t create them, before I gave in on Infinibee)
I don’t understand how the road editor would help? It controls the center line not the critical edge right?
