“As the Web grows, websites continue to come up with ways to annoy users. Following are ten design mistakes that were particularly good at punishing users and costing site owners business in 2002.” Jakob Nielsen —Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2002UseIT) Quibble: Stating that “websites continue to come up with ways to annoy users”…
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Dark Lord in possession of a desire to rule the world must be in want of a ring.” —Austen writes Lord of the RingsPemberly.com) Hmm… that’s a bit of a stretch… “a Dark Lord in possession of The Ring must be in want of the world.” But…
“On September 23rd, 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter, after travelling from earth to mars, missed its re-entry to the atmosphere by 143 kilometers, and burned to a crisp. Why? One engineering group used english units, the other used metric. 3 years of labor. Toast. They’d made a big mistake. They’d screwed up. Email to engineering:…
“We love these programmes not only because they show us how curious the products of evolution are, but also because they remove us to a parallel planet, the Garden of Eden before the sixth day of creation, when God went and messed it up by making man…. Today, conservation officials in Kenya often concede that…
“[M]y first reaction was to abdicate and let the editor wield the knife. But that impulse quickly passed. If anyone was going to cut my story, it was going to be me, as painful as I knew it was going to be.” Chip Scanlan learns about brevity. —Surgery Without Pain: A Tale of RevisionPoynter Online)…
Trent Lott comes to mind, when we consider the permanence of a celebrity/politician’s statements, of course. Few of us who were alive in 1980 have to be concerned that any of our statements from that year will come back to haunt us, let alone some of our more obscure comments, aimed at audiences that we…
“But since many bloggers have no background in publishing, they often come to the medium unaware of the rules that apply, and complaints are becoming more common. Many people publish [weblogs] as if they were untouchable, assuming that because what they write appears in a virtual world, it won’t come back to burn them in…
“In the real world, everything you put into space is going to be visible to visitors by default. The designer of the space has to choose to hide something. With an information space, everything is hidden by default. The only parts of the space visitors can see are those the designer has chosen to reveal.”…
Charley XWell-punished laughter,Token of a child’s longing:Beehive disappoints. —Star Trek HaikuWeasel Breweries) This page presents every episode of classic Star Trek, reduced to a single haiku. Thanks for the link, Rosemary. Hey… there’s no haiku for “Turnabout Intruder”. I’ll fix that… His gold-tunic’d bodEnraptures Dr. JaniceShe swaps hers for his Similar:'Babylon 5' Reboot in Development…
“Freshman Bobby Berg says he sought out UW-Stout this year because he knew he would be assigned a laptop computer. What he didn’t know is that most of his freshman classes aren’t structured around the computers as Berg initially thought. ‘We don’t use them hardly at all,’ Berg said.” —UW-Stout students find laptops helpful, but…
“The future is now. My pocket video camera stores hundreds of images on a single plastic stick of gum. My mobile phone means I’m reachable virtually anywhere I go. I have hundreds of digital TV channels beamed to me from space. I can communicate with millions of people in one go through this weblog –…
“Now, before you call me Ebeneezer Scrooge or jump all over my my seeming lack of Christmas spirit, let me just say that Christmas is far and away my favorite holiday and the source of some of my best memories. But these are just plain bad….” Place your children’s stuffed animals under the tree as…
“They noticed in a citation database that misprints in references are fairly common, and that a lot of the mistakes are identical. This suggests that many scientists take short cuts, simply copying a reference from someone else’s paper rather than reading the original source.” —Scientists Exposed as Sloppy ReportersNew Scientist) This one is going to…
“Like Shakespeare, or many of the greatest writers, [P. G.] Wodehouse is violently cavalier with English grammar. The dictionary will tell you that ‘window’ is a noun, ‘small’ is an adjective, ‘Fred’ is a proper noun. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra sees herself ‘window’d in great Rome’; Hardy has a figure which ‘smalls into the distance’; a character…
You may have heard that an early version of computer translation software took the input “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” and changed it to “The whisky is strong, but the meat is foul.” Or maybe it was “Out of sight, out of mind” translated to “Invisible idiot.” Or maybe the mistranlsated…
“Internet-based surveys, although still in their infancy, are becoming increasingly popular because they are believed to be faster, better, cheaper, and easier to conduct than surveys using more-traditional telephone or mail methods. Based on evidence in the literature and real-life case studies, this book examines the validity of those claims.” Matthias Schonlau, Ronald D. Fricker,…
“[T]he command bridge of the Enterprise? Give me a break. Does it have to look like the control room of low-wattage Midwestern TV station? All those little blinking lights? What, is there a fly-into-space knob that has to be set to ON to get the thing to move? Then the fly-into-space light lights up, so…
“The unlikely chain of circumstances that would make Braille possible began during the Crusades with King Louis the Ninth of France. Already a religious man, Louis met a crushing defeat in the Crusades, barely escaping death. He returned to Paris certain that God was trying to teach him humility. This belief intensified his interest in…
“Submit late. This is the basic rule in having your abstract ejected. Don’t even start writing it until the deadine for submission is long past. Prove trivial results in exhaustive detail, breaking your proofs into as many lemmas as ou can and disrupting the line of reasoning with notes, remarks, and asides. On the other…
A series of pictures describing how usability professionals would handle the “blinking 12:00” VCR problem. Quite amusing. —Usability Review of a VCRUsabilityMustDie.com) Similar:Standardized-test robo-graders flunk“According to professor of theory of kno…AcademiaGreebles make me happy.Before CGI, filming a science-fiction st…AestheticsThere is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer.I have so far resisted the jump to strea…BusinessUdacity's…