Sleep. I remember it so fondly. I used to go to sleep. It was great. However, the demons of academia, corporate America, and independent contracting have made this impossible as of late. Last night I had my first experience with Windows Media Server. Ovo Studios makes a claim that you can post your HTML reports to a web server, and stream the video. You can. Except, nobody has ever tried this. Until now. And wouldn't you know it, its IBM. And they found an "issue". The informed us of this issue yesterday at 4PM, and wanted a fix by Friday. Not sure why Friday was the drop dead due date, but oh well. So I had to hoof it over to CompUSA last night, use up my remaining line of credit on a copy of Windows 2000 server, install it, and configure it the way IBM has theirs configured. They were right: it didn't work. As of 1AM this morning, though, I had solved the problem, just in time to do my schoolwork and get a whopping four hours of sleep or so. So I'm feeling burly, and I'm a little snippy, thank you very much.
posted by Rich at 11:12 AM Comments

 
Pertaining to yesterday's post: My sister was wise enough, and enough of a wise ass, to point out that I had indeed misspelled the word field in my post where I blasted another member of my profession for doing the same, however more egregiously. Very funny.
posted by Rich at 8:04 AM Comments

 
So, I am taking this class in game design. The reason I am taking this class is to be a better interface designer. There are important parallels between the way that you design products for fun, and the way that you design products for work. Or at least I'm hoping that is the way it pans out. So, we read an article for said game design class, and the point that stood out was that a good game designer first and foremost knows how to write and convey ideas clearly. If a designer cannot write well, it is assumed that this might be the "tip of the iceberg" of bigger problems, such as a lack of creativity, poor management skills, or an inability to multitask.

Apply this to usability. For those of you who don't know, usability (i.e. making products more intuitive to use) is not the most accepted profession in software development. Developers, product managers, quality assurance, even tech support disrespect people in this filed of work, and discount us as hacks who can't code, can't think technically, and can't really do anything except increase the amount of time it takes them to ship their products. I wonder why. I am part of this working group with the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium, which publishes standards for web design and development), and they just set up a mailing list. So today, someone decided to write a message to the group, and here is an excerpt from that message:

"I assume I'm not alone on the usbability list.

Interstingly, for such a forum, the subscrption message I received was
not explilcit in saying what to do in order to send a message to the
list. So I hope this works."

With grammar and spelling like that, no wonder we are the first to go when the layoffs start!
posted by Rich at 9:35 PM Comments