Just Watch for George Bush

Catchy tune, and you can dance to it.
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Why Couldn't I Have Said That?

I manage 25 people. They have questions. I give them answers. Why couldn't I give them answers like this?
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No, I Am Not One Of The Village People

I decided to dress up for Halloween as a contractor. I should have painted the tools gold so that I could have said I was a government contractor. But everyone thinks I'm dressed as one of the Village People. What do I have to do -- start overcharging people?
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The Art of Writing Headlines (Sucks)

Something Scoble wrote about reminded me of being an editor: the more controversial a headline is, the more likely people are to read it. I can remember BYTE's "Is Unix Dead?" cover story and the controversy it stirred up a decade ago -- and it wasn't even a statement: it was a question. Headlines are largely written not by the authors of magazine stories, but by their editors -- copy editors, section editors, managing editors, and sometimes even the capital-E Editor. You'd think this didn't make any sense, but in the world of editorial it does: the people who wrote a story are often too close to a subject to write a succinct headline. And there's an art to a good headline. "Forty-two Ways to Lose Weight" is a stronger headline than "Weight-Loss Techniques" but not as strong as "Oh My God You're Overweight and About To Die!" It's human nature that most people gravitate to controversy (or perception of controversy) and also gravitate to "quick hits" -- things that don't require a lot of thought and promise rapid return.

So it's no surprise that words like "sucks" in a headline drives up Memeorandum hits.

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Wiring a Kiln or "So That's What 200 Amps Smells Like"

Recently, my wife found a great deal on a Skutt 41" oval kiln that a school had to get rid of. It had never been used, and they were offering it for $1200 (a great deal). So we borrowed a friend and a pickup truck and retrieved it. The next task was to wire it in. This particular kiln drew 50 amps at 240 volts and would require me to run special, low-gauge (very thick) wire and install a new breaker in the box. I'd done this previously for regular outlets and was only mildly terrified of the idea of opening my breaker box again.

So earlier this week, I began to pull the wire from one end of the basement to the other. Normally, this would take about 30 minutes, but this wire as bigger around than my thumb and weighed a ton. Drilling through the joists and securing it took most of an evening. Then I went to install the breaker. Except that there were no more holes in the breaker box through which to pull fresh wire. But I was game. I opened the breaker box (a 200 amp service) and began to loosen wire nuts to try to fit in this monstrous wire.

Poof.

The smell of ozone was amazing. So was the sound. All the lights in the house went out. Somehow in removing a dead run that I'd earlier cut and safed off, I managed to trip the mains for the whole house. 200 amps worth of ozone. And I was about six inches from it. Oops. This is where everyone who reads this exclaims that I'm an idiot and should have killed the mains to start off with. But it was night, and I really didn't want to work by flashlight, and what's the worse that could happen, anyway? Yes, I'm an idiot.

My wife, ever patient, volunteered at that point to get a flash light since I needed to figure out what I'd done and whether it was wise to turn the mains back on. So she went to our emergency, earthquake kit in the basement to get the flashlight. Note to self: don't store the flashlight on the bottom of a 20-gallon crate of earthquake stuff. So she trundled upstairs in the dark to get the flashlight up there and returned after only about 10 minutes of me standing in the dark, knocking over power tools.

Work proceeded apace until I got to actually snapping the new breaker in. This is where I learned the difference between a 120/240 breaker and a straight 240 breaker. Seems that the latter was what I needed and the former was what I'd bought. Since a straight 240 breaker is 2" wide, and I was going to have to get one, I took this opportunity to actually make 2" of space for a new breaker by moving 25 breakers around. Our breaker box is now full.

The end of the story went well: the new kiln is now level and powered on. And I have to admit that I saved myself some money. And learned something. Namely that I should have hired an electrician in the first place.

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RTM is Here: Time to Remove Betas

In general, Microsoft doesn't support upgrading from one beta or CTP to another (the user-friendly instructions are to reformat), nor from beta to RTM of Visual Studio and .NET Framework. Fortunately, Dan Fernandez helped create a tool to aid in the uninstallation of beta 2 of VS from your system to help you install the RTM.
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An Ad, but a Funny Ad

Everyone once in a while, Microsoft does a good one. Check out this LiveMeeting ad.
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Evolution of the Cathedral

In his post about the changing cathedral and bazaar, Jon Udell asserts that the cathedral and the bazaar are both changing. And of course, they are -- that which stands still, dies. At the same time, my core point is that the "sharp edges" I'm talking about are manifestations of user experience. User experience is one of those things best tackled by people who aren't expert users but by people who are experts in watching other people use their software. User experience remains the last frontier -- one where aesthetic meets science. Hillel Cooperman, lately of Max and previously of AERO, describes user experience as more than just the User Interface. The user experience is the complete end-to-end interaction that the user has with a piece of software, including:

  • the user’s state – the aggregate of their goals, expectations, mental model, emotional state, physical and cognitive abilities
  • the individual elements of the interface, including all the controls and widgets
  • the user model, including the interaction model, the data model, and the concepts and abstractions
  • the underlying system bits that lets the user move between different pieces of the software
  • the aesthetic experience of the interface, including the visuals, audio, the tone and language of the text, and the general emotional impression the software creates
  • the physical hardware and devices connected to the PC (and their aesthetic experience)
  • and the environment in which this entire combination is being used

Hillel's team also did a huge amount of research into who our users are and, like Jon, found that they're evolving and raised the point that you need a huge amount of information in order to see precisely how they're evolving. This touches on everything from traditional usability testing to gathering information from error reporting services to even starting to measure emotional response.

That kind of investment is hard. Very, very hard. Novell recently released 200 hours of usability videos. Watch them and see how many sharp edges there are to remove, and think about how much work it will take -- some of it core architecture work -- to address them.

So can the bazaar, in theory, fix this? Sure. In practice? I'm much less sure.

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Are You Dumb?

A game to play with the sound turned low so nobody can hear whether you're dumb or not.

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Supersonic Flight

I guess the Concorde never made back what it cost to research and develop it. I suspected that, but didn't know it.
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VB .Next

Good article on eWeek on VB "9."
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I Suppose It's Kind of Like Goodwill or the Salvation Army

Britney Spears is selling her used clothing on eBay for charity. You know, somewhere in here, there's a really snappy one-liner that's just not coming to me.
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Text Your Teapot

Engadget picks up some interesting items, among them this teapot that you can send a text message to in order to turn it on.
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