Thaddeus Rocks

alternateorg on November 30, 2000

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

alternateorg on November 29, 2000

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

alternateorg on November 29, 2000

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.

We Want to Know What You Think

alternateorg on November 27, 2000

If you look to the left of the homepage now, you might be rather startled to see the addition of a poll to our site. In our never-ending quest to be just like MacOSRumors, we decided that we needed one. So we have one. Use it, so we can know about you and what you think. Right now, you can flood it every 10 seconds with votes, but we’d rather you didn’t do that. So vote your conscience, and try to just vote once per poll. Insert your own reference to the botched presidential election…. -HERE-

Stats for Nerds (Windows still sucks)

alternateorg on November 27, 2000

Here are some cool statistics about server uptimes for all you uber geeks out there who might give a fuck. Of course the stats are from the always reliable NetCraft so go ahead, be a nerd and check it out by clicking here.



Scott from SVN thinks it’s interesting that Apple can run a somewhat-beta OS and get that level of reliabilty. Word, my brother. Word.

Also, take a peek at those lack of uptimes on IIS 5.0 and 2000, ewww!!!! They still can’t get shit right out there in Redmond. I’ve got a hint for them, its called (shhhh) Unix. That makes me think… hmmm… how scary would MSLinux be… I think they could do serious damage if they could pull that off… let’s hope they don’t.

The Best Website Ever

alternateorg on November 26, 2000

Okay, so I know that most of my posts tend to lean a little toward me hating whatever it is I’m writing about. But you’re in for a treat today, because this past week, I found (via a link from the unbeatable Kaliber10000) the International Herald Tribune, which just happens to be the best website ever, news or otherwise. It has the perfect balance between the elusive ‘compelling content’ and out-of-your-way-but-really-damn-cool interface.

First of all, it looks as if the right designer (or team) was given total control over the interface and functionality. You can even hide the banner ad at the top with a little ‘x’ right next to it. The whole site is done with DHTML layers and Javascript, so it isn’t exactly the fastest loading site in the world, especially for modem-users, but I trust it’s much quicker than a Flash site would be with the same quantity of info. Browse by region or section, or you can browse all the clippings of the articles, and make your own list of articles to read. When you click the little icon next to the clipping, it ‘moves’ to the top bar, and the number next to the ‘clippings’ menu item changes to reflect the number of clippings you have. But I digress. I can’t really go into a full feature list here, just see it and click all the cool little buttons. You can even change the weather listings from Celsius to Farenheit and back if you wish. It’s awesome.

So check it out.

But you knew I would have something to bitch about, right? This has nothing to do with the IHT, but more with my ISP, Earthlink. And not really Earthlink, but the ‘My StartPage’ service in particular. This week (right about the time I discovered the IHT site) Earthlink decided that, despite the fact that I already have DSL through them, they needed to add a little Flash movie to my startpage, letting me know how great it is. It has music. So if any of you have used a personalized startpage, you know that there’s a lot of clicking on news stories, then clicking ‘back’ to get back to the startpage again, right? Well the geniuses over at Earthlink didn’t do the Flash correctly, and so every time I hit ‘back’ from a news story, the animation and shitty music start up all over again, letting me know how great the DSL I already have is. So I’ve stopped using it. If you know of another decent startpage service,let me know.

Another Q&A

alternateorg on November 22, 2000

If you read the story below first this will make more sense. I was *almost* hired at the same Denver New Media shop as Kevin… Problem was I knew Design, HTML, and Network Administration and wanted to be paid like someone who knows and will use all those abilities. So, was I right in requesting more money than say a “low-end” designer would make? I think so, BUT they don’t. Funny thing is, I know Macintosh like the back of my hand as well as Windows and several flavors of UNIX. In fact, I can think of at least 3 or 4 ways to get that piece of shit Dave off the godamn desktop whether they are using NT or Solaris. Damn. Fuck. I hate people in high places in the tech industry, they seem to know nothing except that they *should* use Microsoft products. What a crock of shit that is. Think different and think for yourself.

Simple Question, Not-So-Simple Answer.

alternateorg on November 21, 2000

Okay. So here’s the question I pose to you, the reader.

As some of you know, I am a web designer working at a midsize web shop in Denver. We have a CTO, a VP of Technology, and a Network Admisitrator. Now, the Network Administrator has had a number of servers (Sun and otherwise) delivered to him to set up, and an entire TEMPERATURE CONTROLLED server room built for him. So far, no problem. Where the friction starts is here: over half of our staff uses Macintosh computers, in some form or another (iMacs, G3 PowerBooks, G4 towers, etc.), and all of the aforementioned technology people have ZERO experience either maintaining or using Macs. I’m surprised the network admin even knows what one looks like.

Fully half the office needs to use a piece of shite software to connect to the filesharing servers, and the one that most of us work from is a tiny PC-shaped box. It isn’t even rack-mounted. It just sits on the floor and takes our abuse. Now, Dave (conveniently the name of both the SMB software and the network admin) is very unstable and crashes our computers often. And besides that, as most casual Mac users, the designers manage to get their machines in horrible states of crash and sub-crash, and guess who comes to the rescue? Me. Because our tech people could give a shit about us or our OS.

I’ve always been the person in the class that the kids come to instead of the teacher for computer help, from elementary school on up through college, but right now, I’ve got other shit to do. How come I’m the only one the designers trust to set up a new machine that comes in? I don’t get paid to do Mac support, but my question is, should I? I mean, I love doing it (most of the time), but sometimes it’s just a bitch to do, and I could be doing other things. The admin and myself tend to butt heads on a lot of issues, and I’ve just kind of given up on trying to be cordial to him. I mean, I understand that an OS is not nearly as important as another human being, but he honestly pisses me off sometimes. I’ve often thought of just ignoring the cries of my co-workers, and sending them over to have the admin help, but I know that if I were to do that, he would just come back to me with a question, and undoubtedly anything he did would have to be undone and done right by myself. And I would do all that, too, because I care that much about people having stable Macs to use. So there’s the second part of the question: Are he and I destined to be mortal enemies? Let me know what you think.