Holy Inkjets, Batman…
Just a word of advice: if you’re looking for a printer, don’t go to Printers.com. I swear, some people REALLY need better things to do with their time.
An Old Idea, Presented Again
My day as if it were coded in HTML was linked to on Signal vs Noise a few months ago, and I thought it might be worth revisiting. If you didn’t see it before, it’s kind of my way of merging the way I live with the way I make my living. Whether it says anything about technology interfering or helping people live, I don’t know, I guess that’s for you to decide. I was honest, in the way something hard-coded can only be, and everything that the code describes did in fact actually happen.
Mac vs Win Article
(I’m pretty excited. This is my first reference to IHT.)
This article might be worth your time, it might not be. It’s a fairly bland consumer-oriented response to the age-old ‘chicken or the egg’ that is the Mac vs Windows argument, and (let’s face it) we’ve all been a part of it, at one time or another. Although the writer does say something to the effect of both OSs crashing a lot, unless you can spend the time to tweak them into stability. This is misleading, I think. My parents’ iMac has never had any problems whatsoever, and their Apple menu is exactly how it was when the damn thing was shipped to CompUSA (not that the Apple menu is that important, it just tells you how very little they do in the ‘customization’ department). So yeah, Macs crash, but I think you need to do an awful lot more to them to get them there than you do with Windows. I had Windows 2000 lock up on the INSTALLATION. But that conversation is old and tired, isn’t it?
Broken Form
Okay, so the survey form was broken for a moment, but it has been fixed.
Thaddeus Rocks
We’re finally getting this site to where we wanted it to be a year ago, with the help of Thad Batt, the resident PHP expert at my place of employment. What did he help me do? Well, now (unlike in regular Blogger-type blogs) if you wish to send someone a link to a specific story on the site, you can click-and-hold (Mac) or right-click (PC) on the new ‘View this item only’ link supplied with each story and put that bastard in an email, or put it in your own blog. Whatever. The possibilities are endless, although this feature is currently only on the homepage, so older stories don’t have it yet. But they will.
Late Night at the Office
I swear, the best work I do is after 9:30 PM. Which isn’t that big a deal until you factor in my wife and 2-year old son at home, who haven’t seen me in exactly 14 hours. How sick is that? Sometimes the love for design just kicks in and takes control. I’m just lucky that they understand that, and that this situation happens pretty infrequently. I don’t know what it is, but the work I’ve done in the past 4 days has surpassed in quality the work I’ve done all year. Weird.
YA JN Post
Okay, so an IA friend of mine attended a usability conference in sunny San Diego recently, and happened to take part in an interesting Jakob Nielsen discussion. After spending 20 minutes discussing why designers hate him, someone who apparently knows Jakob jumped in, letting them in on a little secret. It was divulged that Jakob is not actually as much of an ass as he makes himself out to be, and often-times, his outrageous statements are usually made in an attempt to get any reaction out of the community he can. And I can see that. When a two-year old is not responding to your requests, you make a harsh statement that you really don’t mean in order to elicit a response from them. So if Jakob feels that what are actually his relatively moderate views on usability are important but ignored, it would make sense to make some outrageous claim in order to get the community to listen. The side result is that the more press he gets from it, the more he can charge for his seminars (with a rumored $20k per engagement). Just a tip, I guess. Take what he says with a grain of salt, and I think it’s even more reason to ignore him.
Old School Browser Emulator
Do you remember Netscape 1.0, ever used lynx or Mosaic? Do you want to? Well now you can find out for yourself what the early days of the web looked like because I saw this cool link over at www.arstechnica.com and thought all of you should see it.
Are You Talking to Me?
Sometimes you need a little Pantera to get some work done, you know?
RE! SPECT!