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Natalie’s organising a Geek Night in Oxford. She sure knows how to throw a good party and is great at encouraging geeks to share knowledge, so I’d recommend anyone who can be there to make the effort to go along!
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“These hints at a romantic or sexual relationship between the two characters became known as “subtext.””
Hence almost a million fan fiction stories ending up being written… -
“idproxy.net, launched today, is my attempt at speeding up the process [....] In effect, it lets you use your Yahoo! account as an OpenID.”
Simon working his magic again. Fantastic idea! -
“If Britain adopted the values of Daily Mailism – national narrowness, prejudice, the idea that foreign countries can still be kicked around, the failure to grasp the urgency of action that must be global on climate change – it would condemn itself to failure in this new world economy, with the consequences for our standard of living, narrowing of the range of choices available to its citizens, and environmental degradation.”
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Twitter have just made a (fairly fundamental) change to which name is used by the system. What I like is the rather nice help page they’ve put together to explain it all.
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Jon relates one of the sad symptoms of over-exposure to Harry Potter…
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“We think that’s a negligible price to pay to know that all you need to tell your mom, or your customer, is “Go to copilot.com, type in this number, and download and run the program you find there.” And to know that it will Just Work.”
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“The act of talking bollocks whilst waving one’s arms about wildly is referred to as testiculation.”
Wikipedia can teach you something new every day. -
This is very very cool. LinkedIn have just republished all public profiles with the hResume microformat — that’s 9 million new uses! As an example, you can see my Linkedin profile here: http://www.linkedi
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“It turns out that if you type in the words “African Ingenuity”, Google will ask you if you really meant “American Ingenuity”… Nice.”
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“If you play Wii Sport religiously for 30 minutes every day, you could lose weight.”
Nintendo must be so happy — they’ve rekindled the DDR market! -
“The Home Secretary has told a Westminster audience that the fundamental principle of equality must not be undermined.”
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“The kangaroos range from rat-sized animals to 3m (nearly 10ft) giants.”
Woah, I wouldn’t want to encounter a 10ft tall kangaroo! -
“Experience showed that about 50% of all pirated Windows programs came with Trojans pre-installed on them, Mr Markoff said.”
Quite a frightening statistic and probably the real deterrent for people on the ground against piracy, if they knew the risks. -
“Achmat publicly refused to take Aids medications until all who needed them had access to them, which drew former President Nelson Mandela to plead with Achmat at his home to begin drug therapy. Achmat respectfully refused Mr Mandela”
Screenshots-Insane-BA-Flightplan
Originally uploaded by meriwilliams.
Back in December, I knew I was going to have a weekend where my choice was to either stay in Ohio on my own or go down and visit friends in Austin. Since I had some British Airways miles kicking around, I thought I should at least check whether they could get me to Austin on a reward ticket.
This was the flight plan they came up with for Houston (they wouldn’t even TALK to me about Austin!) — seems to get from Ohio to Texas, you have to stop in London on the way.
It made me laugh, anyway
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Very late (almost 2 years!) to the party on this one, but this is a really interesting discussion of freelance web worker rates in the UK and abroad… I wonder how much things have changed since April 05?
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Really nice and accessibly written guide to character encoding, along with common pitfalls
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Bunch of great tips on writing effective emails. To be honest, quite generally re-applicable to other written communication too!
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Another great post from Kathy, talking about the little things that can make all the difference in user/consumer experience.
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“At this point I might as well turn around and grab my ankles. If you don’t know the year your car was made, there’s no way you’re going to know if the engine block really wore out after 20,000 miles.”
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“Networking sounds like a scary thing to do, but in reality it’s usually just a case of hanging out with people in your industry, sharing war stories and occasionally getting some work out of it.”
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Really interesting discussion of how to make the History feature in Firefox (and browsers generally) more useful
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“So is Twitter a status stream or a chat tool? It’s both, depending on the hive mind’s mood.”
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Eric’s written such an passionate article about his Briggs Riley suitcases and I’m seriously considering investing in one. I do a lot of business travel these days and if their service extends overseas, these could be a real winner.
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“Once EM evolves to include audio/video, to enable tagging by others and other intelligent backend functionality, the importance of this evolutionary product will be clear to all.”
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“Initial impressions are … not available, since all 8 million players are currently in the Outlands. I'll take that to mean the servers for the most part have not melted yet.”
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What a shock — countries valuing and investing in science may overtake the UK, where noone cares anymore!
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"I give it two lessons before Nora starts asking for scuba gear or stunt-diving tips or barracuda to be released in the water to make things more interesting."
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This would be hilarious if it weren’t so utterly and sadly true
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Some really good advice, both specifically for in-house web designers but also much more broadly re-applicable.
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“….the web-design equivalents of someone who you’d ask round to your house to fix a leaky tap and they’d start by taking a sledgehammer to your plumbing, because basically they have no idea what sort of tool is appropriate to a particular job.”
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Guy describes the type of networking that I like, practice and generally approve of — not slimy or grabby, but about being seriously interested in people and how you can help each other out.
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“But that’s not true. Just yesterday he was crawling around in his own primordial ooze, and today he’s using tools. Next week he’ll be building spaceships.”
I am such a fangirl. I just noticed that Mark Pilgrim has my delicious links on his blogroll and I totally squeaked. How sad is that? And I just used the word “totally” in a sentence, just like I was a character from Buffy or something. What is the world coming to?
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Glad to see this kind of discussion on the openness and availability of data happening.
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“So what’s your job exactly?” “I create tame ball lightning” “Ah, cool”.
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Simon is leaving Yahoo! to go freelance. I’m really excited to see what he’ll be getting up to
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Very amusing anecdote from Derek about the book-writing process.
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Jeremy’s new book looks really interesting!
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Stubborn vs gullible — brilliant!
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gapingvoid: “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”: random thoughts on being an entrepreneur“MBAs are conditioned to use their brains in much the same way as sex workers are conditioned to use their genitals. Nice work if you can get it.”
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“Place your thoughts on negative outcomes, and while the worst may not happen, it’s more likely that they will, and more likely that the best outcomes won’t.”
Screenshots-Really-Scary-iTunes-Message
Originally uploaded by meriwilliams.
I love this error message — it tells you so much about the attitude to consumers
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This is the plugin I’m now using to display my (real) blogroll in the sidebar.
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This is the plugin I’m now using to redirect my feed traffic to the new Feedburner feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/MeriblogMeriWilliamsWeblog)
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Nice tutorial on integrating Feedburner feeds in your Wordpress blog
Elana has written a great post over on BlogHer about the shift in terminology from “workaholics” to “Extreme Jobs”.
What I find most interesting about this is the shift from personal responsibility (if you’re a workaholic, then you’ve chosen to be so) to situational/corporate responsibility (the job/company REQUIRES that you work crazy hours). On the one hand, it’s an unusual trend to see a move AWAY from personal responsibility. On the other, it’s a very dangerous slippery slope for the organisations creating the types of roles that require workers to routinely work 60-100 hours rather than the baseline 40.
The main reason I think this is dangerous is not because people won’t do the jobs (someone always will) or even because it will severely limit the diversity in those top roles (although it will). The real problem is that research has consistently shown that time worked and productivity are not directly proportional. Working more in short bursts (e.g. for an upcoming deadline) can be useful, but consistently working long hours leads to lower productivity.
Tom DeMarco in Slack: Getting Past Burn-out, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency discusses this in detail. He posits that when workers consistently work longer hours, any productivity gain is lost. Essentially, we are “re-baselined” — achieving the same amount of work in 10/12/14 hours as we would have done in 8.
Overwork can cause burn-out or even death. Selecting executives who have already lived through years or even decades of overwork, hoping to win the tournament are arguably the most at risk. So if your method for choosing your top executives is not who is most productive or effective, but really who can best withstand extremely long working hours, is that really smart?
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Really useful link from Nat — visual representation of what 200 calories is. Very useful for understanding the impact of food choices.
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Great discussion of the different types of users that need to be taken into account for Linux to “break” the desktop.
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LOL — I can totally see Niamh as PM…
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I believe that Apple’s key strength is not design or innovation, but executing other people’s ideas slickly and beautifully. Airport Extreme and the Apple TV are both great examples of this.
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More cutting stuff from Jessica
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“But Ugly Betty only really works as long as the duckling remains ugly.”
That’s exactly what I find most interesting about the series! -
“You can use these characters and scenes in storyboards, presentations and brainstorming during product development; they’re free for you to use.”
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More details of the $100 laptop. I have to say I’m more excited about this than about the iPhone!
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“One idea would be for customers to have to buy two laptops at once – with the second going to the developing world.”
This would be a fantastic idea! -
“Vista’s Start Menu lets you type what you want instead of pointing at it.”
This is the first Vista feature I’m even remotely excited about. Since I’ll always have to have a Windows PC for work, this could be a real productivity gain. -
“The message should be that this is an appalling breach of confidence, and both the state agency and the Patriot Act are seriously in the wrong.”
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Ian is so right about this …
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“The easiest way to guess a password isn’t to guess it at all, but to exploit the inherent insecurity in the underlying operating system.”
Seems that I might be over-abusing Firefox. I had over 250 tabs open today and when I tried to install Google Browser Sync, it completely bombed…
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“But this option becomes ineffective when it becomes chronic: witness the ever-changing, continually reborn, constantly metamorphosing people in your life.”
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“Using Wikipedia, Technion researchers have developed a way to give computers knowledge of the world to help them “think smarter,” making common sense and broad-based connections between topics just as the human mind does.”
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Really interesting insight from danah on the recent PEW report.
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“Britons already have their credit card details and email accounts inspected by the American authorities following a deal between the EU and the Department of Homeland Security.”
Crap, I didn’t even realise this — never mind the 10 fingerprint thing… -
Every IE version … on Linux! How cool is that??
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This is a really clever idea. Interested to see whether learned behaviour can help, in a similar way to giving remedial reading lessons to kids who suffer from dyslexia.
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“As we try to push forward with the web we need to let go of the idea that every person on the web will grasp the idea of what a feed is. Instead, find ways to use feeds that don’t break the user’s experience.”
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“It’s a double-edged sword, isn’t it? The things that make us safest from others make us least from ourselves.”
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“He means you can’t load just any software on them. Translation: I made this beautiful thing, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you unbeautiful people fuck it up.”
Today the conversation (let’s use that term loosely…) on Twitter briefly revisited what Rachel referred to as the “Where are the Women”-permathread. The main question, as always, was around why numbers of female speakers remains low at most web & tech conferences. Rather than get into this particular issue again, I’m going to go off on a slightly different angle and talk about affirmative action.
Affirmative action (aka positive discrimination) is often suggested as the solution to diversity/representation problems. No female speakers? Just pick some names out of a hat! Completely white audience? Let’s give tickets away to anyone we can find with a dark face!
Sometimes, AA is truly the best/only course of action. In extreme situations, I’ve even been known to support it myself (although the interesting thing in the South African context is that it is actually favourable to the previously-disenfranchised majority, rather than a minority). The real problem with it for me though, is that it perpetuates discrimination. If the only reason that you chose a speaker is because she is female (and this is pretty obvious to people) then they are going to discount that speaker — after all, how talented or interesting can she be, given that she’s only up there talking because she has breasts?
As Tom Coates remarked in a post last year:
“There’s something deeply entertaining to me about fighting for inclusivity by suggesting that some people only got to speak because they were in a minority group. Smart move! Inclusive!”
Personally, I agree with incentives to promote diversity. I think organisations should be rewarded for actively trying to be fair — to pick the person truly best for the job, to build a diverse workforce that uses differences to its advantage. I’m all in favour of levelling the playing field and helping people to understand when they are discriminating unconsciously. But when you lower your standards to meet an arbitrary target, you insult the very group you are trying to attract.
Part of the reason that I feel so strongly about this is that I tick just about every diversity box you can imagine. I’m a gay, disabled, African woman working in technology. But if one of those descriptors is the primary reason you want me to work for you… Well, let’s just say your chances of success approach zero rapidly!
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Some interesting thoughts from Jeff Atwood about the Sugar UI on the $100 laptop. Really keen to see whether this works or not — I love that they’re trying such a different approach.
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Stuart has some great ideas about what an electronic book reader REALLY needs to look like. I agree with him on most of his points, although given I have NADD, I’d personally like more than 1 book available at a time as well.
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Tom’s written such an enthusiastic review of Guitar Hero that I want to go out and buy it RIGHT now…
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Not surprised at all to see non-citizens making such a contribution. I think this will only increase if the next administration is more liberal and less warfaring
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This type of development makes me want to go back to Science!
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“Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.”
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Guy’s right — Pluto is a FANTASTIC word. I must find a way to use it!
Kathy Sierra has written an interesting response to the 5 things meme that has been floating around recently. Instead of answering the meme, she’s turned it ask her readership some questions. I’m going to answer them here because it gives me more space than in the comments
0) What’s your name and website URL? (optional, of course)
Meri Williams — http://blog.meriwilliams.com
1) What’s the most fun work you’ve ever done, and why? (two sentences max)
Solving problems with a great team. I find that what I enjoy most is the “flow state”, bouncing ideas off smart people to solve difficult problems.
2) A. Name one thing you did in the past that you no longer do but wish you did? (one sentence max)
Ride my motorbike every day.
B. Name one thing you’ve always wanted to do but keep putting it off? (one sentence max)
Learn to snowboard.
3) A. What two things would you most like to learn or be better at, and why? (two sentences max)
I’d like to get better at coding again — I’m horribly out of practice and feel like I’m losing a valuable skill.
I’d also like to learn more about statistics, because it’s the one area of mathematics I’m really not great at.
B. If you could take a class/workshop/apprentice from anyone in the world living or dead, who would it be and what would you hope to learn? (two more sentences, max)
Nelson Mandela, to learn compassion. Anyone who can sit in prison for 26 years and come out the other end still loving and believing in humanity has a lot to teach.
4) A. What three words might your best friends or family use to describe you?
Confident, clever, pragmatic.
B. Now list two more words you wish described you…
Sociable, talented.
5) What are your top three passions? (can be current or past, work, hobbies, or causes– three sentences max)
Diversity — I passionately believe that you need a mix of different people, cultures and opinions to be successful.
Problem solving — I love fixing things/making them work better.
Guns — I love my guns.
6) (sue me) Write–and answer–one more question that YOU would ask someone (with answer in three sentences max)
Q: What is your favourite movie and why?
A: Addams Family Values, because it is camp, hilarious and a great lesson in how even families that seem really strange from the outside can still be loving.
I rather like the 5 things meme that is going around at the moment, so I’m going to take Eric Meyer’s open tag as an excuse to participate
Admittedly, I found this quite hard to do — different groups of friends know very different things about me. There are various things that would be a real surprise to work friends that are identifying characteristics to my web friends and vice versa. So I’m just going to do my best here!
Five things you might not know about me:
- When I was at school, I helped build part of South Africa’s first satellite. I also helped to develop the method by which we tracked and evaluated the results.
- I am a crack shot, best with handguns and assault rifles, although I do like to play with the occasional sniper rifle too. My parents are opposed to firearms and would never have one in the house, so I learnt to shoot when I join the target shooting team in highschool.
- My first big career direction decision had me choosing between going to study Computer Science (my eventual choice), Classics (Latin & Ancient Greek) or attending Film School.
- For a few years I was half of a soft rock duo. My primary contribution was song-writing and backing guitar.
- Growing up, I was extremely short-sighted, to the extent that I would walk into walls if I tried to go anywhere without my glasses on. After many years wearing contact lenses, they damaged my eyes, so I had to stop playing waterpolo. To remedy this, I had laser eye surgery, which gave me 20/20 vision for the first time in my life.
I’m going to tag Elly, Rachel, Simon, Guy and Nat. Oh and Mili too.
