Post-It Notes - 25 Years of Hypertext in Paper
RexDart writes "A Minneapolis/St. Paul magazine, The Rake, has a fascinating article revealing the history and development of the humble, ubiquitous Post-It Note. An intriguing tale of a dedicated visionary working the system to bring an innovative product to life in a monolithic, tradition-bound organization." From the article: "Two and a half decades later, as the little yellow notes celebrate their silver anniversary, it's easy to forget what a recent innovation they are. Thanks to their material simplicity, they seem more closely related to workplace antiquities like the stapler and the hole-punch than integrated chips. Instead, they're an exemplary product of their time. Foreshadowing the web, they offered an easy way to link one piece of information to another in a precisely contextual way. Foreshadowing email, they made informal, asynchronous communication with your co-workers a major part of modern office life."
Because they are comparing Post-It Notes to the Internet wouldn't it be fun (and time-comsuming) to create an Internet Map using just Post-It Notes? Of course, Post-It Notes stock would go through the roof since it would require billions of stickies but it would be fun!
TW
Television is dead. Long live That Weasel Television
I which they'd come up with full page size Post-Its with full adhesive backing with a removable liner. That way you could print off CAD drawings and use them as guide templates for drilling and cutting out parts. Sort of a poor man's CAM tool. Think of surfaces like plexiglass where you can't mark on it directly since it would ruin the finish.
I actually find it easier and more convenient to stick real notes onto my monitor than work with those things on my desktop. The notes are always on top, can be moved easily if necessary, and can adhere to the frame of the monitor to stay out of the way.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Amongst other things I provide consultancy for help desks and call centres (migration, training, expansion, logistics, workflow etc.)
On that kind of environment I strongly recommend AGAINST using sticky notes because they are apt to get lost, fall down the back of desks, under keyboards etc. and they do not stick well to fabric partitions, plus, when you see a desk/wall/monitor plastered with dozens of 'please call' or 'urgent' notes not only does it look extremely messy but it also devalues the urgency of the notes and looks unprofessional - it's a bit like if you received all incoming emails flagged urgent.
If a call centre or help desk cannot send electronic notes, I recommend a clipboard for each employee hooked by their desk in a specific location upon which A5-sized pre-printed notes can be left - because each note is arranged in the same way with regards to from/date/subject/priority etc, it is easier than wading through tons of stickies all written in a diferent way and placed on your keyboard, monitor, chair back, or whereever the person chose to leave it. Some advocate sticking notes on the monitor, but if someone comes back to their desk and needs to check something out on their computer they just peel off the pile and put it 'somewhere' to deal with later and they can get lost, forgotten or ignored.
This may all sound a bit over the top bit it just takes one note from a very important customer to go astray and you can appreciate the need for organisation and consistency - I'm not a control freak but sticky notes are not always the best way to do things in some environments.
AT&ROFLMAO
Theres still no better way to get a bunch of people to collaborate over solving a problem than sticking ideas on postit notes on a framework sketched out on a Very Large Piece of Paper (TM.) stuck on a wall.
What I could do with is a way of capturing these things and then cutting and pasting portions of the thing and moving them around and then reprojecting them, rinse and repeat..
I could do it with a laser scanner (of the sort used to capture egyptian tombs) and a high deffinition projector I guess.
Good for web site design, FMEA, Business process re-engineering and the capture of complex systems.
No time to lose, I'm off to start up a new business right now, just as soon as I have recorded the idea on a postit note stuck on my monitor. Now where did I leave them....
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
The best use of Vaseline® has to be by Mr. Chesebrough, himself. He believed that a person should eat a spoonful every day for good health. He lived to ninety-six years of age and never missed that delicious spoonful every morning.
Vaseline is about as harmless as mineral oil. Eating a spoonful of vaseline every morning would keep him regular and otherwise be harmless assuming he didn't inhale any of it and monitored his fat-soluable vitamin intake. Now, gasoline would cause him some real problems if he had a spoonful of that every morning.
With great power comes great fan noise.
For instance, Propecia was originally a prostate medication. It blocks the uptake of testosterone in certain tissues. The effect they wanted was that the prostate would shrink. It also makes one's dick shrink and it stops hair from falling out (eunuchs don't go bald, by the way -- one way to think about Propecia is that it chemically castrates the man who is taking it). One of these side effects was worth a lot of money.
There's a lot of tetracycline that gets prescribed in this country for zits.
There was one drug I remember reading about that was intended to treat some kind of frivolous Western medical problem, didn't do so well at that, but turned out to work really well on a particular tropical disease. The drug company gave the remaining stock to Doctors Without Borders, but didn't make any more of the drug because there was no profit in it.
With great power comes great fan noise.