figby.com

I’m no user interface expert, but I suspect this may be a poorly-designed error message. For the full effect, imagine it popping up out of nowhere while you’re just sitting at the desktop doing nothing, and imagine having no idea which program has an error.

After a bit of investigation, it turns out this message is from The Weather Channel’s Desktop Weather tool, which spends most of its time at the more productive task of displaying your local temperature in the Windows taskbar tray. It means it was unable to connect to a server, probably a network connection problem.

I guess these sorts of problems are bound to crop up when you’re using a combination of software on your desktop, a Web server, and a distributed network of worldwide monitoring stations all connected via a public Internet to act as a cheap thermometer…