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Uncategorized
User-focused development
Examine, if you will, the core design, development, and support trio of a company’s flagship product. This trio considers the product’s users dumb and stupid and “fucking retarded”. They’ve been told 30 times that a date looks like 3/19/2008, not 3/19/08, and certainly not “next Thursday”. They’ve been given the manuals and a tour through the product. They must be retarded if they repeatedly break the software. Customer support is, of course, a supremely annoying job. The customers don’t know what they’re talking about, and almost everything is a training issue. But those users keep that company afloat and its employees able to eat. Their needs are simple, and many…
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Shameless plug: MS Walk
March 29, 2008. 07:30. Symphony Park. Charlotte, NC. I’ll be walking in the MS (Multiple Sclerosis) Walk with Dulin, Shelly, and several others. The walk is either a 2.5 mile or 5 mile walk, depending on how I feel that morning (and, likely, what others are doing). I’m crazy excited. It’s not a race, but I consider it a first step in my goal to engage in races in the near future. Plus, it’s the first fund-raising walk I’ve done since freshman year of college. To make the walk worthwhile as a fund raiser for MS, however, I need to, well, raise money. If you’re in Charlotte, you could also…
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Succeeding at life
I’m at an interesting, forward-moving period in my life. As you may have noticed by the abundance of links around here on the topics, I’ve been studying up (geeking, if you will) on productivity and personal finance. My personal finance skills have been shit all my life. My parents were horrible role models in finance — no savings to speak of, horrendous amounts of debt, and a nice stack of neglected debts (foreclosures and the like). What I learned from my parents was how to live paycheck to paycheck. It wasn’t that money slipped through the cracks, necessarily, but it was that they were fine living in the moment. Living…
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Daily tasteeness (2008-03-07)
Crest Pro-Health Mouthwash: “I Woke Up With Brown Spots On My Teeth” I’m very, very glad I decided to wait for the ADA to approve the Pro-Health mouthwash before I tried it. Others weren’t so lucky.
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Daily tasteeness (2008-02-21)
Rock, Paper, Shotgun » The Soul of The Sims “Well, yeah, it’s some lines of code. But it’s also a precious hint as to how [Will] Wright, a man who’s had a firm hand on PC gaming’s till for decades now, views his own games.” Scratch Beginnings: An Interview with Adam Shepard ∞ Get Rich Slowly “[Nickel and Dimed] is a book that I wanted to like […]. Ehrenreich enters her experiment with the end in mind — failure — and she seems to do everything she can to make this end come to fruition.”