We implement software solutions to help us become more productive. These pieces of code allow us to do more through creating efficiencies. Bad software hinders our ability to do the work. Normally I would call this unproductive, but I had a weird thought fighting a human resources program this morning. Unproductive software is both disruptive and…
I learned electronics as a kid by messing around with old radios that were easy to tamper with because they were designed to be fixed. Lee Felsesnsteinin The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson The story I tell about how I ended up working in information…
Back in my Netscape 3 days, my bookmark.html was incompletely saved losing about 2/3rds of the file. Researching how to fix it revealed to me the file was just an HTML file. My new editing skills could not recover it, but I could make a new copy and fix individual entry losses. Making a copy…
Do not move things right before I click on them. Windows this means you. Opening up a new window steals focus from my mouse to the new one. Opening a new window when I did not explicitly request it and while I am typing or navigating something in order to do something critical infuriates me. Facebook this…
At 30:00 Steve Jobs talks about how innovation came about because people wanted something for themselves to use that was actually good. Maybe this is the takeaway message for dealing with any technology, especially in education. If <name your institution’s LMS> sucks, then look around and cobble together something actually good. Or failing that make your…
From Crazy: 90 Percent of People Don’t Know How to Use CTRL+F: This week, I talked with Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google, about the time he spends with random people studying how they search for stuff. One statistic blew my mind. 90 percent of people in their studies don’t know how to use…
Humans are fallible. Humans write the code. Therefore, there will be bugs in the code. But that is okay. Humans are smart. Humans can try new ways of working with the software until they find the way the programmer intended it to work. … Or they hire people like me to help them. So it…
We maintain a wiki page with which DBA will do which maintenance. By convention, the months are the first three characters of the month’s name. In doing updates, I noticed only month marked as misspelled was Sep for September. So Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Oct, Nov, Dec were all okay spellings but Sep was not? Changing it to Sept made it…
Movie or television subtitles are fine. It preserves the voice of the speaker while allowing me to understand the content. However, how do people read white text on a yellow background? In this case, white text on a yellow shirt. Contrast is important for readability. Or white on light blue. Or white on white. I would…