Dead Tom’s Dead… Long John Shot ‘im

A post I started earlier this month but never published (I’ve trimmed it down to be more focused than the original):

This title of this post is a quote from the fantastically funny Muppet’s Treasure Island. However, it has very little to do with this post, and for that I apologize which is typical. Today, while standing in line at Safeway I was looking at the high quality media coverage of today’s top stars that was boldly proclaiming accurate headlines about the opinions of the stars and the supposedly accurate opinions of supposed stars. There, to my surprise, was a picture of Tom Cruise with Nicole Kidman Penelope Cruz Katie Holmes. To complete the surreal experience Safeway carefully chose to play the 80’s hit: Highway Through the Danger Zone. That’s right, from the 1986 movie Top Gun. Tommy was of course around 24 when that little flick was foisted upon the global population. Four years younger than Miss Holmes is now.

Crank It Up!

Since Jessica and Abby are out of the house this afternoon I’ve got my music turned up to levels that would normally get me in trouble. Why is it that when the music is all encompassing (surround sound helps) and loud, it just has a better quality to it? Sure, there are times like when you’re at the doctor’s office that loud is not good, but when you’re tuning everything else out it just finishes the environment?

Well, either way I’m enjoying the bass frequencies since headphones just don’t deliver that 🙂

What’s your favorite environment for listening to music? The car? A special room?

Can Vs. Should

Recently a support request for WordPress came up on the wp-hackers email list I subscribe to that reminded me of one of the big delimas of programming (and frankly much of life): If you can do something, should you do it? There is a big, and valuable, movement in web design called contingency design. This design approach says, “Given Murphy’s Law of things going wrong, what can we do to prevent that from happening?” In general this is a good principle. However, it is not a law. You need to find areas that are useful for your time, things that help where 90% of the people will need it. In programming misconfigured machines can cause ‘bugs’ that are really just the result of a misconfiguration. In design it is possible to spend extra hours working on things that do not help the end user because only 1 person in 10,000 will ever do what it is you’re working on and they don’t need to do it.

This is basically an issue of prioritization and evaluation of what is vital and what is extraneous. Sometimes in interface design choices are made that make the development process quick, however, the end user is not thought of. In this case usability is so bad users might not use the feature at all. In other cases users might misconfigure the software simply because the interface is poor. Make priority judgments based on:

  • Quality
  • Cost
  • Time

Note:Thanks David O’Hara for showing me this ‘triangle of evaluation’
Realize that you usually can’t have something that is of the the utmost quality in a very small amount of time, or that if you design something that takes more time to develop because of quality needs, the cost will go up.

Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do something.

Tasty Condiment

Caravelle is probably one of the hundreds of condiments vaing for your attention when you go to the grocery store. However, I had some given to me to try and I can say that it is a weird looking sauce with pleasant flavor and I highly recommend it in the following hamburger format:

  • Hamburger
  • Cheese
  • Guacamole
  • Caravelle

Bleedingest Edge

Well, I’m writing this post in the new Firefox 1.1 Alpha. Deer Park Alpha 1. This is not to boast, mind you. I’m doing this because my software has broken in various browsers that were not tested well enough (Read Firefox 1.03). If you’re a web developer or a person with a serious case of alpha-itis, you can download it here.

I can see the Apple influence on the UI in small places. While they haven’t tossed the Save/Cancel buttons, they’ve re-arranged how a few things work. There’s a help file popup that at least appear installed with the browser (I couldn’t tell at first whether it’s calling web based files or not) as well. Firefox 1.1 was rumored to support SVG, but I have not tested that yet. I will shortly and report back.

Update: SVG works. Brilliant. The future is looking bright, even if there’s literally clouds outside my window 🙂

Short Tales

This morning after watering the flowers with me, Abby asked me to sit down with her on the front steps because she wanted to talk. This of course if most father’s dream come true. I hope that we have ‘talks’ for years until Jesus returns or I die. She of course didn’t want to talk about boys, the meaning of life or breakfast, but instead she proceeded to tell me stories. She told me about a little girl names Abby, a story about Grandpa and Grandma (no last name given, so if you’re a grandparent reading this, pretend it’s you), and one story that started like this:

Once upon a time there was a little boy called my daddy…

Which she never finished, but it tickles me to be that boy 🙂

Dancing with the Stars

Reality TV may have possibly reached a new level of stupid: Dancing with the Stars. That’s right. It’s a dance competition wherein ‘famous’ (read: has-beens) people dance with people who have half a clue. Then, and I know you’ll be surprised: there will be judges who will grade their dancing. Stupid. Stupider. Stupidest.

Lutherans

I saw one of the funniest license plate frames I’ve seen in a long time:
Lutherans, they’re not just good looks and jello.

You just don’t know what’s around the corner 🙂