Posting to an RSS Feed

So, this is just a basic post to see how it updates in an associated RSS newsfeed elsewhere. If this had been a real post, it woul've contained something substantive. Nonetheless, it is what it is.

What is Lorem Ipsum?

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.

The Chronicles of Outlook

(To be read aloud in a mellifluous baritone voice not unlike that of James Earl Jones or even, yes, Kelsey Grammer.)

Many ages ago there was a lone Mac All e-mail was POP. And the User was innocent and happy.

Copycats

Worried about unsavory folk ripping off the content you sweated over? You may want to try http://www.copyscape.com/.

Copyscape offers several different levels of service. The free search enables you to plug in a URL from you website and search to see if it is being copied and published somewhere else on the 'net.

The Platinum service checks to see if content on your web site is from another source. A good idea if you regularly invite guest writers to post on your site. Cost is .05 per search.

The company also offers Copysentry. For $4.95 per month it will automatically monitor the Web for copies of content from your web pages.

Once you find someone who is plagiarizing your work you can send them an e-mail and ask them to remove it. If they don't respond you can send a DMCA takedown request to their ISP/Hosting company. Unfortunately, unless you are willing to get legal there's not much else you can do.

Jargon

What is jargon? Some folks think it's gobbledygook invented by one group of individuals to keep everyone else mystified about what the first group is saying. Still, we all use jargon in our work. People in the publishing industry refer to text as "copy". Cops call suspects "perps."

People in the computer field have developed so much jargon, in so many sub-domains, that there are entire web sites devoted to the particular jargon that these sub-cultures use. One, The Jargon File, is devoted to the language of hackers. There are other that describe the slang used by system administrators, software engineers, etc.

Jargon is verbal and written shorthand that is useful because it ensures accurate communication and saves time over the course of a professional interaction. When one IT technician says to another "Let's move the XP boxes over here and put the Vista boxes there," he knows that his peer is not going to look around for shrink wrapped boxes with Microsoft Vista or Windows XP DVDs inside.

Problems arise only when a member of one culture has to interface with a member of another culture. At that point, both people have to find a baseline of communication and stick to it. If the IT guy has to to report to a non-IT department manager which computers were moved where, he should say "We moved the computers running the Windows Vista operating system to this side of the room, while those running the Windows XP operating system were placed over there. Should we mark them so that the employees who need to use each type of operating system know where to sit?"

Yes, it may take a few seconds or minutes more than using jargon, but you will have successfully communicated your point, and not incidentally have shown your mastery the most complex jargon of all - human language.

Home

I;ve had more than a few homes of my own. Rental apartments, condos, etc. Yet the places i live that meant the most to me were houses that my family had lived in. I had some poorer times, times that I couldn't bring in enough to find a good place to live in. Yet in those days my parents or grand parents

Stupid designers

I learned how to program radio station presets in my first car, a hand-me-down '73 Super Beetle, by looking at the manual. At the time the procedure was novel to me:

1. Tune in to the desired station.
2. Yank out a button under the radio dial.
3. Plunge it back as far as it would go.

Preset accomplished. Coolness. And that's the way radios would be programmed for the next few years, at least in the old cars I could afford.

A few years later I was able to buy a nicer car. Oh, still it was used, yet less than a decade! It was a hot '92 convertible and it was fast, it was sexy, and it had an electronic stereo.

The sound system was an AM/FM/Cassette with a digital clock. Apparently that was a big deal in 1992. What few buttons it had were 'soft'; they had multiple functions depending on what mode the user was in. Once again, I turned to the manual. And once again I had to learn how to program presets.

Fast forward to 2003. Smelling a gas crisis, I bought a brand new 40 MPG Corolla 'Sport'. It came with a nicer sound system than any of my previous cars. But this time I didn't have to check the manual to program the radio. It was intuitive:

1. Tune the station.
2. Push and hold the button to assign the station.

Why push? Because there was no way to pull, yet the buttons were arranged under the radio dial. Why hold? Because if I held a button, it beeped. And there were separate buttons for the clock. Separate buttons for the CD. And separate buttons for the cassette. None of this "one button, two dozen functions." Hallelujah! Somebody gets me!

You see, I have a good deal of experience programming things, be they car radios, appliances or even computers. Yet almost every time I buy a new gadget to do the same old thing I am faced with challenges created by designers or engineers who have placed non-intuitive user interfaces in my way.

Granted, stuff changes. Yet classic design paradigms don't. If I buy a new recorder of whatever medium I can now record in, I should expect to be able to find the buttons to record, playback, stop, pause and fast-forward or reverse. Just as the paradigm of setting a preset on a car radio was almost exactly the same on an '03 Corolla as it was on a '73 VW. So why was it that all of the other cars that I owned in the intervening years always had a different way to set the radio?

I still have that Corolla. I've driven it through Southwest deserts and canyons, up and down the Rockies and the Appalachians, and through South Florida storms and traffic jams. It runs like the day I drove it off the lot. I guess the folks who designed and built the rest of the car were as smart as the ones who designed the radio.

If you are designing a user interface please remember one thing about the target audience: they learned how to do it once, they may be willing to learn a second time. Just please don't make them learn it over and over, again and again.

Peace out.

E-mail everywhere

If you send and receive e-mail on just one computer or use an online e-mail provider like Yahoo! or G-mail, then this post isn't for you. Thanks for coming out, see you next time!

Have they left the room? Good. OK, so you work for an organization that has a website, and you send and receive e-mail on that domain. You have a PC at work and another computer at home, and perhaps one you carry with you. Keeping track of the e-mails you send and receive has turned into a headache because you have to set one PC to leave a copy of incoming messages on the server, and you also have to CC yourself when you reply from your "remote" computer.

The first question you should be asking your web guy is "Do we use POP and IMAP on our internet-facing e-mail server?" If he says yes, you're golden. With a couple of quick changes you'll no longer be dancing the e-mail shuffle. By switching your local e-mail account (i.e., the one you set up in Outlook or what-have-you) from POP to IMAP you will see all incoming and sent items on every computer you use.

The reason is that the IMAP protocol keeps the messages on the server and synchromizes all of the e-mail clients you connect to it.

Powerful stuff, indeed.

The way I switched over was simply to go to each of the PCs I regularly use (two laptops and a desktop). Once I had started up the e-mail client software I deleted the account I was using then re-created the same account, choosing IMAP instead of POP as the protocol. Details on how to do this on any of the e-mail clients out there can easily be found on the Web.

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Disclaimer: As always, back up important e-mails before messing with your account settings...I'm just saying.