Entries Tagged 'computers' ↓

Just a quick note to say that I am trying out a small hack to integrate links from my Bloglines ‘clipblog’ into the sidebar of this page. The clipblog contains quick links to interesting feed items that I come across during my everyday news reading.

As you might have guessed already, I read my feeds with Bloglines. I use liberally the ‘Clip/Blog This’ functionality, too. If you find my ‘feed juice’ interesting, you can suscribe directly to the clipblog rss feed.

Anyway, this hack of mine is still in alpha, so please let me know if you see anything funky, or if you have any suggestions for improvement. I will play around with it some more days, tidy up the code and then I will explain more in detail what it does. If you are wondering why I didn’t use one of the existing clipblog hacks/plugins, it is just that they don’t do exactly what I wanted (or I couldn’t find one that did what I wanted). But I will talk more about this later.

Summarizing: ‘feed juice’ in sidebar in alpha-testing. Please let me know what you think.

Kathy Sierra has a great post called Featuritis vs the Happy User Peak where she talks about the importance of keeping products (all kinds of products) usable, instead of trying to add constantly more functionality. Just a look at the graphic that illustrates her post says it all.

She summarizes:

Be brave. And besides, continuing to pile on new features eventually leads to an endless downhill slide toward poor usability and maintenance. A negative spiral of incremental improvements. Fighting and clawing for market share by competing solely on features is an unhealthy, unsustainable, and unfun way to live.

Be the “I Rule” product, not the “This thing I bought does everything, but I suck!” product.

A very important lesson to bear in mind when writing software.

Terminal Island is an awesome command-line blog. Go on and have a look. ?É?ìbergeek and hypercool, if you ask me.

Mychael Hyatt @ Working Smart: Sometimes Life Is Like Skiing:
“I’ve especially missed blogging during the last thirty days. I find that blogging makes me slow down just enough to process what is happening around me and in me. It helps me clarify my thoughts and keeps me focused.”

I have watched this video twice in search of what is so wrong about it. Conclusion: it is a perfectly ok video. The video is part of Google’s campaign for recruiting female engineers, and according to others it is ’slightly off-key’, and it is also worth this very funny parody.

Really, the video is not that bad. Actually, I would say that it is not bad at all. Although it could be better, of course. But hey, room for improvement is always stimulating, isn’t it?

The worst of the video are definitely Brin’s high heels, and the bit about ‘Google is so cool they paid me 75% of my salary during 12 weeks I took off after giving birth’ is simply appalling for those watching from other countries (countries with better social systems in place). Geeks stealing each other’s undies from the laundromat is also an interesting idea… which will probably give me nightmares tonight…

There is one thing in the video that has me confused, though. Google’s women don’t look anything like the PSP users featured in the new PSP publicity campaign. Might it be that Google is getting all the plain female geeks, and Sony all the gorgeous ones?

(found via Misbehaving; PSP ad found via Pixel y Dixel)