clock … watching time, the only true currency

BOOK: The Skies of Pern In my adolescence, I read many of Anne McCaffrey’s books, especially the Pern books, which are about a world where dragons and dragonriders are real (eventually explained as genetically bred from small lizards… whatever!). The last of the three books I picked up at the library a few weeks ago [...]

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New contexts Just replied to an email from a colleague from my college days, and it made me think about getting to know people in new contexts. I use the word colleague, but he was a friend, though never very close. We knew each other at the boathouse, without spending much time together for other [...]

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Presentational integrity Steve Yelvington explains why the move to Cascading Style Sheets is a business decision, not a technical/standards decision. …if all things were equal, all sites should be CSS2-compliant. But all things aren’t equal. He also describes the business needs of most news sites as ‘presentational integrity’ which he defines as knowing where content [...]

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Painfully slow webserver The San Francisco Public Library website is oh-so-slow. I’m trying to find out if the local branch, or any branch, has a copy of Desolation Island by Patrick O’Brian (I’m almost done with the biography). But in both Safari and IE 5.2.2 on MacOS X, the results are empty and slow. I [...]

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Lafayette Project… still secret, but saying the right things The Lafayette Project is still under wraps, but MegNut and two other early bloggers are the founders, and at least in what little they say, I think they are tackling a real problem. That problem is “We want to help readers browse weblogs when they *don’t* [...]

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Enabling comments Should not be so hard to do, but I found the instructions, so we’ll see if this works.

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Too much typing Watched 12 hours of user tests over the last two days, typing into my work blog the entire time… more than 40 pages of single-spaced transcripts/notes, on my laptop without the ergonomic keyboard. Ouch. But also used the opportunity to make my blog more of a public item at work, to positive [...]

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How will my assumptions hold up? Bringing in real people today to look at some new ideas at work. This is labeled ‘user testing’ — but it really means ‘assumption testing.’ Various ideas and strongly-held beliefs make their way into concrete form (in this case, web pages) based on gut instinct, log files, and compromises [...]

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1,000 words I’m not going to do it, but I can write 1,000 words a lot easier than I can find/draw/photograph a picture to tell the same story. I find it frustrating to work with people who are need visuals because I have a harder time explaining myself. But it’s not worth beating my head [...]

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How I benefit from the conversation Tiny, tiny example. Yesterday I noted that I was trying ImageWell, which (I now know) I came across via John Robb’s blog. I had one odd crash later that day, after upgrading to MacOS X 10.2.5. I didn’t think much of it, nor connect the dots. But I later [...]

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