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Share First, the dumbness. Second, lessons from this dumbnosity. I went to put in my Visa info on a site, as shown in the picture. Note that the MasterCard radio button is selected by default… though I didn’t see that at the time. I know my name, of course, and even the card’s expiration date, but I [...] Share I was filling out an online form today when I came to this section: It says Mailing Address in big red letters. Then it says Mailing Address in bold black letters. The cursor goes automatically to the first edit box. So what do I — and I suspect most other folks — start typing? My mailing address, [...] Share A NYTimes article on analyzing video of basketball games contains the delicious quote, ” ‘It’s probably the worst abuse of Microsoft Excel ever,’ said Kevin Pauga….” Pauga is apparently referring to the use of Excel rather than a database to track all the stats associated with every play of every possible opponent in college [...] Share I found the following subject line on a mail in my inbox yesterday: PMBOK Breaks Project Management The PMBOK is the grandiosely titled Project Management Book of Knowledge from the Project Management Institute (of which I’m a member). Wow, I thought, someone else thinks formulaic, by-the-book-only project management can be as much a problem as a [...] Share One of my business lines is tied to Google Voice. Today I got a voice message that was automatically transcribed by Google. I’m impressed. It wasn’t perfect, but the subject matter was very abstruse. However, it nailed all of the normal-speech parts of the conversation. Based on experience, my guess is that most voice messages are fairly straightforward. [...] Share I’ve been working with the Microsoft Office 2010 beta for a few months. Like many, I’ve been wondering, what do you do to enhance products that are already chock-full of features? PowerPoint struck me as a tough one to add value to; I’m a regular speaker who builds very complex graphics-based slides, and PPT 2007 has [...] Share When Monty Python sang about it, it was funny. (At least it was funny 40 years ago.) When it takes over your inbox, it’s frustrating. And when someone gets sucked in and loses data, money, or both, it’s a disaster — and a crime that the constabulary can’t seem to get a handle on. If you [...] Share Joel on Software — by ex-Microsoft veteran and Fog Creek CEO Joel Spolsky — has been my favorite tech-world blog by far for the past decade. In two weeks, he’s going off the air — for good, he says, in both senses of “for good.” Joel, you’ll be missed. I can think of no one in the tech [...] Share Software vendors are invariably after you to upgrade. Should you? If so, when? Right now, WordPress — the tool I use to run both my blogs and my Lexician.com site itself — nags me at the top of every screen: “WordPress 2.9.2 is available! Please update now.” [Exclamation point in original.] There’s nothing that tells me [...] Share It must be written, in the Great Book of Software Design Principles: Thou shalt never leverage the usability/design principles discovered by thy rivals. I’ve never actually seen the book, mind you. But I know it’s there. Why else would so many software designers follow the same rules so slavishly? This rule is sometimes called NIH, “not invented here.” [...] |
Steven's new book is Legal Project Management: Control Costs, Meet Schedules, Manage Risks, and Maintain Sanity, available now from DayPack Books and Amazon.
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Copyright (C) Steven B. Levy 2009-2010. All rights reserved. |
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