The Simpsons: Homer Quits Flashback

by mkanderson on Aug 26, 2010

Something today reminded me of burning bridges. I always think of this.

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Bookmarks for 08/24/2010

by delicious on Aug 24, 2010

These are my links for 08/11/2010 through 08/24/2010:

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Found in the Attic: WAR!

by mkanderson on Aug 20, 2010

Business Week's War!

Business Week's War!

While looking for something else, I found an accidental time capsule, a box of old magazines. Good god. Uh. What was I looking for? Say it again.

This is the January 28, 1991 Business Week. I was working in Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Base the day of the invasion. I've not seen people scramble like that since.

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IxDA DFW Reinstatement Meetup Summary

by mkanderson on Aug 20, 2010

So last night I show up at Champps and go over to the hostess and explain to her I told a bunch of people to show up there; I have no idea how big the crowd would be but that we'd get a table when there were enough. About that time, Adam Polanski (@adamtheia) walks up to the hostess station and I'm standing next to him.

The hostess says to me, "I think one of you is already here."

"Where is he?"

"Not sure."

"Can you tell me what he looks like?"

"Well, he's...." she looks at me and Adam, "thinner. He is tall. He's handsome. He is wearing a nice shirt."

So he was the opposite of me. I never found the mystery man. Oh well. I hope he burns in hell.

Anyway, the meeting was great. We came up with good ideas to re-energize IxDA DFW. We all agreed we belong to other professional organizations (e.g. STC, UPA, etc.) so we wanted a format that didn't duplicate what we saw at those meetings. We came up with doing on-site meetings at places where interaction design takes place and get a tour, lecture, problem solving workshop, or whatever at that location. Here are some of the ideas people had:

  • Bass Hall
  • Holocaust Museum
  • DART
  • Toll Authority
  • Walking tour of Fort Worth with a city planner
  • woot's headquarters
  • Botanic gardens
  • Miller brewing
  • American Airlines
  • DFW Airport (who is currently redesigning terminals)
  • Sabre's usability labs
  • Photo studio in the warehouse district

Somebody let me know if I missed one.

Adam Polanski has the idea of creating a t-shirt that looks like a concert tour shirt with a list of the places we visit. I think that will rock.

The next meeting will be a social event where we try to get more people involved and committed. When we book the on-site visits we want a solid number. The next meeting will take place in October. The location and date are forthcoming. We are going to kick off the on-site meetings in December.

If you haven't, cart your butt over to the IxDA DFW official site and register and then affiliate yourself with the DFW chapter and then watch for new announcements. This article will also be cross-posted there.

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Little Rock Central High School Museum

by mkanderson on Aug 2, 2010

Ever go to a landmark or some place with historical significance and become overwhelmed emotionally with the place? That happened to me yesterday and I'm completely emotionally derailed after visiting the Central High School Museum in Little Rock.

Central High School

Central High School as it stands today

First some background: I grew up in central Arkansas. I dreamed of leaving that place for many reasons, one of which was the blatant racism I witnessed in the 1980s.
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Ugh: Wife Beater Brand Is Purely Disgusting

by mkanderson on Jul 15, 2010

Wife Beater Brand Woman's Shirt

Wife Beater Brand Woman's Shirt

I'll be the first to admit I find sick things funny. I listen to metal music, which is wrapped with sick imagery, usually for the sake of shock value. I get it.

However, Wife Beater brand clothes cross my own arbitrary line of what I can take. Maybe because I'm a victim of childhood abuse myself. But take a look at the picture of the women's shirt to the right. There is something deeply unsettling about women wearing a bloody hand symbol, representing domestic violence. To me that's like Jews wearing swastikas or blacks wearing the KKK symbol. There are some things I can't even laugh at.

Read more from: Geek Meets Girl.

H/T: @chris_oh

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Palm webOS on Palm Pre
Image via Wikipedia

Palm/HP is giving away $1 million in goodies for developers to port their apps over to webOS. I'm not going to pretend I'm not biased. I have a Palm Pre and I love my phone nearly as much as my own children.

Head over to Palm's development site for details.

My hopes for HP's involvement with webOS development are high. My wife has an Android phone and it's not bad but it certainly doesn't have the usability of my Pre. However, since I've had it, a few things are lacking:

  • No voice dial. By this point, it's silly it hasn't been implemented yet. So many pedestrians are needlessly exposed to me finding numbers by hand. Just saying.
  • No support for appointments received in email via POP or IMAP. Only Exchange appointments actually work. Appointments received in other mail services result in an error message. Come on dudes!
  • No basic photo editing. Before I upload any photo to any online service, I should be able to perform basic cropping and resizing.
  • Basic file management. I want to be able to rename files and organize them without connecting to a PC.
  • Audible still hasn't created a client for the Pre. I've been an Audible customer for years and I'm about to give up on them altogether.
  • 4G. Duh.

With layoffs pending at Palm and HP admitting phones are their highest priority for webOS, I probably won't get my wishes. I will also probably end up on an HTC EVO, which  is a great phone, but it's still Andriod-based and so many things about webOS have spoiled me.

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E-Books, Cynicism, and Shelf Life

by mkanderson on Jul 7, 2010

Full disclosure: I don't own an e-book reader. Maybe that's why I'm not too hip on e-books as described in this Huffington Post article by Paul Levine.

Funny, I don't recall anyone blissfully sniffing their books until the threat from e-publishing appeared. Now, readers can't resist comparing their moldy old tomes to the finest Bordeaux.

I'm not an e-book contrarian. In some ways I think e-books are cool. I work in technology. I love technology. If it was legal, I'd marry technology. As a tech writer, I've been making online documentation since before Project Gutenberg when AS/400s were the means to get electronic documentation. I may not have said "RTFM" first, but I was an early adopter. It's just that my online documentation isn't around anymore except on my hard drive. I have kept nearly every project I've written since my early days of CP/M and Wordstar. Here's the rub: when I try to open one of these old documents, here's what I get:

Really old school report

My high school paper on Jon Donne was written in Wordstar for CP/M and looks like crap now

Why is that? Wordstar isn't around. Oh and check out this error:

Your old docs are now banned

Word doesn't like older Word docs.

That is Microsoft Word protecting me from my own early Word documents. Sure there's a work around but now we get into security and old files. Those who have not adventured to DIY PC maintenance may be at a loss as to how to recover that letter they wrote Aunt Marge telling her to stick it.
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Paylpal Freezes OpenCamp? What?

by mkanderson on Jul 6, 2010

An old Social Security card with the "NOT...
Image via Wikipedia

Over the years, I've heard of people having issues with Paypal randomly freezing funds, mostly related to eBay. I never paid that much attention because I never knew anyone personally that happened to. Well, it's different now. Some good people trying to do a good thing are feeling the random Paypal wrath:

Over the past several weeks we’ve had 3-4 random calls from various people at PayPal, all of whom only identify themselves by their first name, none of whom have direct phone numbers or email addresses, and all of whom are asking the exact same questions over and over…

  • What is this OpenCamp thing?
  • How many people will be coming?
  • Why are you doing this?

Every time I go through the same speech with them. They are aware that we held WordCamp the past two years and have verified the previous registrations those years. They are aware that I personally have had a PayPal account for many years with them, and that I even have the Woopra account through them with far more volume than OpenCamp will ever have.

But despite the long term and multi-account relationship we enjoy, they’ve gone so far as to force me to send them copies of my drivers license and social security card to some strange physical address, and even run a personal credit check to allow us to keep accepting payments for OpenCamp.

OpenCamp is running all registrations through EventBrite and then into Paypal. It's an easy way to put on a conference, right? As a Big Design organizer my hackles are up. After reading this, I was on the phone immediately to co-organizer Brian Sullivan and he is with other organizers at lunch. We can take our Big Design business elsewhere. In the meantime, I encourage you to complain to Paypal if you registered for OpenCamp.

The irony of all of this is that OpenCamp needs access to the money to have a successful conference. By freezing their account, Paypal is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Paypal has successfully put the conference at more risk. Go read the whole article and pay attention to the information they are asking from OpenCamp. This moronic behavior cannot be justified.

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