The most efficient way to begin your Projects page is by keeping a journal. All you need is Notepad, a spreadsheet or a Moleskin notebook. Before you go home at the end of the day, jot down the projects you worked on, any obstacles you encountered, any success you achieved, any recognition you received, or anything else that stands out:

• Lucky Lu’s Tattoo Shop: worked from creative comp — no spec sheet. Again. Found codebase from 1998, not helpful. Considering transition to HTML 5. She wants a tattoo gun that people can use.
• Sea Hag iPhone App: can’t figure out the film strip mode to view images. Reconstructed the database. Again. Lost my mind.
• John’s Rebate Coupons: sent first draft to John. Expecting feedback Monday. I bet he’ll want QR codes, he thinks he’s cool.

This seems like such a simple thing, but with the right dataset to work from, you’ll be able to whip out a projects page that contains not only your functional keywords but also gives a human-usable description of your abilities.

Don’t forget to note somewhere which technologies you used. Additionally, even on the days you don’t remember to write things down, you’ll have something there at least to jog your memory:

• Lucky Lu’s Tattoo Shop http://www.luckylus.com Developed and implemented a fully interactive entertainment site , working only from creative comps; delivered product on time and with few change requests. Client was pleased with the results and did not miss her old site at all. Used HTML 5, CSS, C#, and edited videos.
• Sea Hag iPhone App: Used film strips, integrated menus, WCF, and GL. Overcame lack of client organization throughout database to secure and promote functional leads. Certified iPhone Developer.
• John’s Rebate Coupons: supplied content management system and supporting database to deliver QR code-based coupons into the hands of over a thousand subscribers. Client has since requested repeat business and has signed a contract for three years of support, maintenance, and coupon design. Used Constant Contact, Excel, C# and PhotoShop.

It’s five minutes of your time for a life’s worth of accomplishments. When you get to the entries that say, “Those idiots, WTF,” and you know it’s time to start looking for a different job, you’ll be well prepared to update that resume quickly and efficiently.

In 1976, when these people were 18, there wasn’t any “internet.” Arpanet didn’t even come around until 1982 — the youngest of this group was already out of college. By 1991, when CERN released the World Wide Web — that’s WWW, for you old fogies — this group was in their early thirties. The internet hadn’t even gone mainstream yet. Most of them didn’t get email until 1996, when they were already over 35. They communicate with phone calls, hallway conversations and fax machines. Oh, and happy hour.

In the meantime, the Echo Boomers were born, the largest generation since the Baby Boomers from the post-war era. These Gen Yers don’t know a time without the internet, without cell phones or with privacy. They use instant messaging wherever they’re at on whichever platform they like. They send chapters of books out on their phones with no vowels. They know you got their digital message. They know it was sent just fine. They figure you’ll get to it when you have time. They’re not going to poke you. They won’t remind you — it’s right there, in your inbox. They expect a response. They have other things to do. Like, work. In 2015, 80% of the population will expect you to respond to your email. Just do it. They don’t have any privacy, remember? They need to cover their asses. You’re not pushing this off on them because you think it takes too long or it’s confusing. Learn faster, make an effort. In fact, they don’t even want to use email. It’s too slow. People get too much of it. That’s probably why you’re so far behind, anyway. How many messages are in your inbox? Do you even know where your inbox is?

You can’t fight it. You shouldn’t try. Digital communications are efficient, effective, time-savers that reduce frustration, fatigue burn-out. They allow their users to use their days to their best productivity. This generation completes the tasks for which all the information has been gathered. You want your projects done, then you answer their emails. First come, first served. You’re on notice.

Eventually you’ll be ignored. 80% of the population will learn to ignore you because you can’t respond in a timely or effective fashion. 80% of the population will forget that they requested something from you, because they use their digital communications as a task list. If your email is older than two weeks, don’t even bother answering it, it’s too late. If it’s older than a week, your project is delayed because of it. Longer than 2 days, and your workers already started on something else. You move to the back of the line.

You’ll be pushed out. 80% of the population works as digital team players, communicating information quickly and accurately and without mistakes. Your boss will be a 22-year-old kid because the kid can finish three PowerPoints, six Visios, four vendor price quotes, and seven office orders all in the same day. Because he has copy-paste fu. He just ctrl-v’d and ctrl-p’d the info from another email.

I used to be an advocate of “everyone to his method:” some people prefer phones, some hallway conversations, and yes, some daft and blind old farts and most government offices still use fax machines. I’m not anymore. I’ve seen the benefits. I’ve watched middle-aged men go down fighting an invisible foe of a text message or call log. I’ve been called in to help them retract emails, pix, inappropriate phone calls and sexual harassment jokes, and it’s impossible. I’ve witnessed the descriptivism abound throughout the language, to accomodate for this invisible force. And I love it.

Accountability, FTW.

White papers are not supposed to be marketing tools. Yes, they can help sell. Yes, they’re an important part of an array of documentation. Yes, they are easy ways to get keyword saturation. They are not intended to replace direct mail, brochures, billboards, or sales presentations.

White papers are intended to be an expert’s thesis concerning the topic of the white paper. That being said, here are some people who should never ever request a white paper, unless their department is your business model:

• Marketing director
• Sales director
• Accounting or Finance
• Communications
• Public relations
• News desks

If your business is jump drives, your marketing director should never request a white paper. Your lead engineer can request a white paper. In fact, your lead engineer should write the white paper, as he builds jump drives and it is assumed that if he builds them, he knows them pretty well.

A technical writer might coordinate with an engineer for a white paper on jump drives. This is acceptable. Heck, you can have your advertising copywriter collaborate on a white paper if it’s understood that nothing is to be written that isn’t directly related to the words coming out of the engineer’s mouth. If your lead salesman gets involved, it’s time to reassess the project.

White papers’ audiences are people who have a want or need to learn more about that subject. Will the CEO or Purchasing department be choosing your jump drives? No. You ask your IT people to choose your jump drives. Because IT people are supposed to be familiar with jump drives. Florists are supposed to be familiar with roses. Adidas is supposed to be familiar with shoes. Adidas engineers and designers should read white papers on New Balance’s shoes to make sure they’re not missing an important technology or a way to boost productivity or methods for reducing costs. Sales people should help create brochures and billboards. They can use a white paper’s contents on the brochures and billboards, sure, but white papers are not advertising materials.

In the past several months I’ve been going through a lot of consolidation. Five physical servers in my house have become one physical server with Xen virtual machines. Obviously this included a move to Linux (Centos 5.4 to be precise).

As I’ve become more comfortable managing the Centos server it became apparent that I spend the same amount of time managing that and its five virtual machines as I spend managing the one remaining FreeBSD machine.  Now, some of that can be blamed on some decisions I made with FreeBSD, staying away from the binary updates and packages and instead using source and ports.

So, with a slight twinge of regret, I’ve been preparing to rebuild that server sometime late this week or early next and putting Linux on it.  The move will mean I’ll be fresh out of FreeBSD, the mainstay for me for so many years.

It’s funny the things you’ll become sentimental for.

We both had the best of intentions.  You kept your packages cutting edge and I liked that.  I wanted frequent releases, and you provided them.  Your support for wireless networking was great in days when that was unusual but recently hardware changes and advancements have slowed down.  Hardware manufacturers are starting to release Linux drivers.  Cutting edge and brand new are becoming less important to me.

We still both agree that I need a desktop OS that doesn’t require me to fret and fuss with building drivers and software on my own, that I should be able to retrieve them from binary packages and have a unified updater for all of my software.  What I’m finding more and more, though, is that we don’t agree on when I should get an update.  You think I should get one as quickly as possible, but more and more you have been giving me broken updates.

Your 9.10 64 bit release was the final straw.  Applications were crashing, shut downs would randomly cause beeping from the PC speaker, suspend to RAM only worked for between one and three times before it required a reboot, you couldn’t burn a CD using K3B, and a lot of other reasons I won’t detail here.  We both know what they are.  We both know they’ve been getting worse with every release.

So I’m leaving.  I’m leaving for someone whose goals are more in line with where mine are now.  Someone who provides me with a stable, 64 bit KDE experience that just works, like you used to.

I called Fedora, but we didn’t agree on drivers.  Centos and I didn’t really hit it off.  FreeBSD and I have been talking about getting together outside of the server room, but that will probably be a long process.  But I’ve been seeing openSuse behind your back for the past two weeks, and I think we might have rekindled our old flame.  I’ll still check in with you now and then to see how you’re doing.

Yours truly,

Eric

According to Dell support this indicates the battery is “bad”.  They can’t be any more specific than that, because according to them the error is non-specific.  The battery does hold a charge, though it is shorter than the charge it held when new.

But here’s the great part.  I rebooted and went into the BIOS to see if I could at least clear the warning.  I can’t.  I did, however, notice this lovely screen:

Picture of the BIOS screen trying to sell me a battery.

So my laptop is trying to sell me replacement parts for itself.  This might not be as bad if I could stop it from trying to remind me without taking out the battery.

While speaking with Dell support, they too were more than happy to try and sell me a new battery.  They weren’t quite as helpful in trying to make the indicator stop flashing, however.

On a side note, is it too much to ask that computer manufacturers spell check their BIOS screens?  They should at least “concider” it.

We’ve all been subjected to this scourge of the Internet over the last several years.  As you’re filling out an online form you come to the sudden realization that the form is asking you to put in your email address twice.  The first time I saw this I was dumbfounded.  I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why, in this day and age, we, the self proclaimed enlightened Internet folk, were taking cues from the worst the insurance industry had to offer.

I fumed slightly, but accepted that I would just have to cut and paste what I typed (or, more than likely was auto-filled by my browser) into this second field.  Then recently I found a site that was using javascript to block me from being able to cut and paste into the second field.  So now you’ve gone from making me duplicate information to jacking with how my input devices work?  Really?

Oh, I’ve heard a few excuses from people about why they put two email fields on their forms.

1. The email address is very important, it’s how the user will receive (insert notification here).
2. Their email address is their user id, it is critical it be right.
3. Bad addresses clog up my spam, err, mailing lists.
4. It was on the best practices list at xxxxxx.com.

Let’s start with reason #4 (because it’s my blog and I can do them in whatever order I want to).  First, you shouldn’t believe everything you read, especially if you read it on the Internet.  Second, and more importantly, is that every best practices list of any value in the world will tell you to eliminate duplication.  This reason is a non-starter.

Reason #3?  Also hooey.  If your mailer software was well done it would dispose of invalid email addresses.  Asking every user of your system to double up forever on part of their work so that you don’t have to do work once to correct your problem should never be the answer.

So let’s examine the first two reasons.  In these two instances it is important that you get the user’s correct email address.  However, let’s examine the reality of asking for their email address twice.

First of all, you’ll have the people like me who cut/paste it.  If I screwed it up in the first box, the second one will be identical.  You aren’t helping me.  The people who cautiously type it in to both boxes?  They were being cautious and would have gotten it right anyway.  So you didn’t really accomplish your goal there.

Additionally I believe you are missing the real point.  Your goal is to establish that the user is receiving emails at the address provided, not to see if they can type the same thing twice.  The only way to do this is to send an email to that address with a link or some other registration verification device and require the user to act on it.  So the form might go as follows:

1. Ask the user for their email address, then explain that the system will email them a code that they will enter on the next screen.  The user enters their email address and clicks the submit button.
2. On the second screen we ask the user for all of the information we want.  First name, last name, dog’s maiden name, whatever is pertinent.  The final field, just before the submit button, should ask for the registration code we emailed to the user.
3. The user submits their form, with a proper registration code, and all is right with the world.
4. In case the user did submit the wrong email address on the first form, we should provide a link on this second page for them to click and re-enter their email address, pre-populating the field from the information previously entered.

By asking for the registration code at the end of the form it gives our email time to arrive in the user’s email inbox and keeps them busy while we wait for it to do so.  This allows us to verify that the user can in fact receive emails at the address provided.

The next time you’re considering making your users work twice as hard, ask yourself if it is really worth it and if it will really accomplish your goal.  In most cases it isn’t and won’t.

I want the ability to exclude a song based on a word in its lyrics, preferably by frequency and/or total count.  I would love to be able to say, for instance, “don’t play any song where the word California is used more than twice”.  When I brought this idea up with a coworker he mentioned it would be great to only hear songs with the word “shotgun” in them.  So we’ll need this feature to allow for inclusion/exclusion of key phrases entered by the user.

You guys over at Pandora get to work on this for me please.  In the mean time I’m going to check into body armor in case my coworker has a particularly bad day…

About a year has gone by, and the filling has begun to settle even more.  It was to the point where the top was flimsy and the bottom was hard as a rock.  So, time to refill  the bag.

What I can tell you after finally getting it finished (on my second try) is this: They call it repacking a heavy bag for a reason.  If you just fill the heavy bag you’ll never get enough material in there to make it the right density.  You have to actually pack the material.  I started by putting about one foot of rags back into the bottom of the bag, then I began smashing the material from the top down into the sides, spinning the bag as I went.  I continued this process until I couldn’t get any more material down the sides, then I added about six inches of material and repeated the process until it was full.

The bag isn’t perfectly smooth on the sides, but it’s pretty good and there aren’t any hard spots.  I got all but a couple of handfulls of the material back in the bag, so the weight should still be good.  The consistency when punching the bag is uniform from top to bottom, which was really what I was after.

Like so many other things in life, though, now that I’ve repacked it I have a greater feeling of ownership.  I guess you could say we spent some quality time together.  Time where it wasn’t just me dishing out a beating, but time where I was working on maintaining my equipment.  I would also say repacking the bag is not a bad low-intensity workout.  I can certainly feel it in my hands and forearms.