For things like the FedEx caveman commercial, why not let TiVo email us a link to the video on the FedEx website - that's great for me and great for FedEx - AND I'd probably forward it to me friends. Wow!
I really don't understand why companies don't post their ads to their website. There have been plenty of times when I wanted to refer people to a clever commercial or when I've heard about a commercial that I haven't seen. If I could easily find commercials online, I'd be far more likely to refer to/watch them.
If you increase the text size on that design, the article eventually disappears under the right and left sidebars.
Similarly, unless your browser is very large at a high resolution, only the tippy tops of the topic icons on the top of the page are visible. (This happens in SeaMonkey 1.0, but IE6 renders it correctly.)
Always remember to check what happens to your layout when someone changes the text size.
The other two are slashdotted, so I'll just talk about this one.
First impression: My God, this is cutesy. (And I mean that in a bad way.) Too many rounded corners, and the light green on the dark green looks off somehow.
As others have noted, making the font big enough to read screws up the layout. Most notably the posted by name and date disappear completely.
There are little right-facing triangles next to the "from the X department" lines and the headline only stories. The collapsible menus have downward-facing triangles on them. My first expectation is that clicking on the triangles will trigger the collapse/expand function and turn the triangles so they face down when collapsed and to the right when expanded. This is not at all what they do. If you have an image to signal an action, you shouldn't reuse the same image as a static pretty thing.
Good things: The font is nice if too small on the default. I like the sensible blocks of color with lines for the menu.
Or the reverse. My brother and I have both done tech support for a woman who has an amazing ability to make electronics and computer programs fail in ways no one has ever seen before. We often joke that we should just advise her to get a Mac and then we'll be able to say, "We don't support Macs."
My officemate and I started work on the same day. At this point, we earn 15 days of vacation a year (you earn more the longer you work here, up to 25 days per year) plus whatever it is our company gives each employee for sick time (I think it's 3 days per year).
My officemate never has sick time (she has two kids and all three of them have chronic medical conditions that require regular visits to the doctor) and always has a ton of vacation time. I always have tons of sick time and never have vacation time.
It seems to me that PTO--assuming they didn't use it as an excuse to bump down the total days/hours of time off we get a year--would be great for us. We could each budget our 18 days of PTO per year (again, assuming they didn't use it as an excuse to reduce the hours off we get) appropriately for our lives without having to worry about how much sick time versus vacation time we have left. This, of course, penalizes people who don't have enough common sense to always have a day or two in reserve just in case you actually get sick.
I can't imagine they'd ever do it, though, because they already highly discourage people from using their sick time (for a while if you were maxed out and stayed there for a certain amount of time, they'd give you cash), and they want people in the office as much as possible.
We have people creating mind maps with large paper and markers, but they then sometimes want to recreate them electronically for emailing or handouts. These are not technical users, and they're from small nonprofits (read: poor). Based on your experience with mind mapping software, do you have a recommendation for something we could suggest they use?
I've always wondered why bookmarks don't sort themselves by most often used to least recently.
Good God, no. I use my bookmarks all the time, and I know where things are based on where they are in the list. This would just make it impossible to find anything.
Your four steps are focussed on physical violence. To really deal with all bullying, any strategy has to include:
1. Stop ignoring non-physical violence. I was bullied all through junior high and into high school, but none of it was ever physical. I think if it had been, I would have been a lot better equipped to get some help. I was taught from a very young age that physical violence is not okay and that you should find an adult if someone hurts you, but no one ever really taught me what to do when someone was systematically tearing down my sense of self-worth.
2. Adults have to get involved. I've come to a place where I can forgive the kids who bullied me, even the chief bullier, but I'm still so angry at the teachers who saw some of the hurtful things happen and didn't do anything or the teachers who should have been paying attention to my (in retrospect, obvious) cries for help and tried to do something. It is absolutely the teacher's job to make school a safe space for learning.
Here's what I find weirdest about it: They have this huge advertising campaign (billboards, TV commercials, inserts with my bill, AT&T logo on the bill) about how they're now AT&T, but they still want the check sent to SBC.
it sorta devalues the point of doing book reviews if you never see negative ones.
I'm the editor for a publication, and we used to have a "book review" page. I had the same objection you do--"review" implies review and not necessarily recommendation--so we started calling it "Recommended Reading" instead.
Another real world consideration: personal safety. Common travelling advice is to never tell someone else your room or floor number and wait for the next elevator if anything about the current car makes you nervous. This system sounds like it might make that difficult.
I've noticed a couple of comments here where you've said what your personal approach to stories is. What about the rest of the editors? Do you have a consistent editorial policy about how you deal with links, grammar/spelling issues, dupes, criteria for acceptance, etc. or is left up to each individual editor?
As a former teenage girl, I strongly second the Tamora Pierce recommendation. The Song of the Lioness Quartet was my favorite series in junior high. Also strongly seconded: Mercedes Lackey (she doesn't hold up well, but my friends and I all loved the Valdemar books in high school) and Patricia C. Wrede.
I strongly recommend Connie Willis. She's a fantastic author, and she shouldn't be over their heads, although I would suggest starting with something like Bellwether, which is both hilarious and romantic, instead of something like Doomsday Book, which is a little heavier (literally and metaphorically). One of the stories in Fire Watch is not appropriate for younger teens, but if they're young enough, they just won't get it. Miracle and Other Christmas Stories might be an especially appropriate gift for the season. Impossible Things has a hilarious story about menstruation they might be able to appreciate.
I just read Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion on the recommendation of a teenage boy and thought it was fantastic. I then picked up The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, which was also good.
Robin McKinley's fairy tale retellings are absolutely fantastic, and mostly appropriate for teenagers. (I wouldn't give Deerskin to a younger teen, but books like Beauty could even be given to school-aged kids.)
Nancy Kress would be good for older teens, but she can be a bit depressing.
Yes, yes, yes! This is one of the things that most pissed me off about The 40 Year Old Virgin. The whole assumption of the movie was that the extrovert kind of fun is the only kind of fun worth having. I'm not just talking about sex here. The extroverts got him to get rid of his video games and action figures in addition to getting him to try to have a sex life.
Thanks for the link. As an introvert who hates meetings with our training staff where we try to design or plan something, I found this particularly useful: "We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours." It's a good reminder to me that other people have a different style, and that it might actually be necessary for them to go through the process that way.
Word is definitely spreading. It was on the front page of The Sacramento Bee last week. Yesterday I was tracking down an odd sound issue on one of our laptops, and one of my non-technical coworkers said, "Maybe someone put a Sony CD into it."
This, of course, leaves open the question of what happens if you DON'T have autorun on, or you decline the EULA and play the CD via other means.
That's what I keep wondering! I own one of these CDs, and when I first put it into a computer, it popped up the EULA. I wasn't about to install some sort of extra player just to listen to a CD, so I disagreed, turned off autoplay, put it in again, and played it with Media Player Classic. (You can also use task manager to kill the process that starts up under autoplay. I was frustrated with it and not thinking clearly the first time.) I'm enough of a geek not to install odd players, but not quite enough of one to really know how to go about figuring out if it does anything if you let it autoplay but don't run their install. That would be much more insidious than the rootkit being installed with the player you do agree to install.
A coworker with a troubled teen said, "What I like about knitting is that I can do it wherever I am. The hospital. The probation office. The police station."
Slashdot Mirror
For things like the FedEx caveman commercial, why not let TiVo email us a link to the video on the FedEx website - that's great for me and great for FedEx - AND I'd probably forward it to me friends. Wow!
I really don't understand why companies don't post their ads to their website. There have been plenty of times when I wanted to refer people to a clever commercial or when I've heard about a commercial that I haven't seen. If I could easily find commercials online, I'd be far more likely to refer to/watch them.
If you increase the text size on that design, the article eventually disappears under the right and left sidebars.
Similarly, unless your browser is very large at a high resolution, only the tippy tops of the topic icons on the top of the page are visible. (This happens in SeaMonkey 1.0, but IE6 renders it correctly.)
Always remember to check what happens to your layout when someone changes the text size.
The only people moaning about corruption will be those who give a hoot.
The other two are slashdotted, so I'll just talk about this one.
First impression: My God, this is cutesy. (And I mean that in a bad way.) Too many rounded corners, and the light green on the dark green looks off somehow.
As others have noted, making the font big enough to read screws up the layout. Most notably the posted by name and date disappear completely.
There are little right-facing triangles next to the "from the X department" lines and the headline only stories. The collapsible menus have downward-facing triangles on them. My first expectation is that clicking on the triangles will trigger the collapse/expand function and turn the triangles so they face down when collapsed and to the right when expanded. This is not at all what they do. If you have an image to signal an action, you shouldn't reuse the same image as a static pretty thing.
Good things: The font is nice if too small on the default. I like the sensible blocks of color with lines for the menu.
Norway is much weirder. Number 8 is Harry Potter. Number 11 is also Harry Potter. There is no number 15.
Or the reverse. My brother and I have both done tech support for a woman who has an amazing ability to make electronics and computer programs fail in ways no one has ever seen before. We often joke that we should just advise her to get a Mac and then we'll be able to say, "We don't support Macs."
My officemate and I started work on the same day. At this point, we earn 15 days of vacation a year (you earn more the longer you work here, up to 25 days per year) plus whatever it is our company gives each employee for sick time (I think it's 3 days per year).
My officemate never has sick time (she has two kids and all three of them have chronic medical conditions that require regular visits to the doctor) and always has a ton of vacation time. I always have tons of sick time and never have vacation time.
It seems to me that PTO--assuming they didn't use it as an excuse to bump down the total days/hours of time off we get a year--would be great for us. We could each budget our 18 days of PTO per year (again, assuming they didn't use it as an excuse to reduce the hours off we get) appropriately for our lives without having to worry about how much sick time versus vacation time we have left. This, of course, penalizes people who don't have enough common sense to always have a day or two in reserve just in case you actually get sick.
I can't imagine they'd ever do it, though, because they already highly discourage people from using their sick time (for a while if you were maxed out and stayed there for a certain amount of time, they'd give you cash), and they want people in the office as much as possible.
Yep. We always had homemade and never the storebought (I think it was mostly because my parents are hippy types), and it sure was salty.
We have people creating mind maps with large paper and markers, but they then sometimes want to recreate them electronically for emailing or handouts. These are not technical users, and they're from small nonprofits (read: poor). Based on your experience with mind mapping software, do you have a recommendation for something we could suggest they use?
A neutron walks into a bar, orders a beer, and asks, "How much?"
The bartender says, "For you, no charge."
I've always wondered why bookmarks don't sort themselves by most often used to least recently.
Good God, no. I use my bookmarks all the time, and I know where things are based on where they are in the list. This would just make it impossible to find anything.
52 card pickup?
Your four steps are focussed on physical violence. To really deal with all bullying, any strategy has to include:
1. Stop ignoring non-physical violence. I was bullied all through junior high and into high school, but none of it was ever physical. I think if it had been, I would have been a lot better equipped to get some help. I was taught from a very young age that physical violence is not okay and that you should find an adult if someone hurts you, but no one ever really taught me what to do when someone was systematically tearing down my sense of self-worth.
2. Adults have to get involved. I've come to a place where I can forgive the kids who bullied me, even the chief bullier, but I'm still so angry at the teachers who saw some of the hurtful things happen and didn't do anything or the teachers who should have been paying attention to my (in retrospect, obvious) cries for help and tried to do something. It is absolutely the teacher's job to make school a safe space for learning.
Here's what I find weirdest about it: They have this huge advertising campaign (billboards, TV commercials, inserts with my bill, AT&T logo on the bill) about how they're now AT&T, but they still want the check sent to SBC.
it sorta devalues the point of doing book reviews if you never see negative ones.
I'm the editor for a publication, and we used to have a "book review" page. I had the same objection you do--"review" implies review and not necessarily recommendation--so we started calling it "Recommended Reading" instead.
Another real world consideration: personal safety. Common travelling advice is to never tell someone else your room or floor number and wait for the next elevator if anything about the current car makes you nervous. This system sounds like it might make that difficult.
I've noticed a couple of comments here where you've said what your personal approach to stories is. What about the rest of the editors? Do you have a consistent editorial policy about how you deal with links, grammar/spelling issues, dupes, criteria for acceptance, etc. or is left up to each individual editor?
11. Paragraph breaks really start to catch on.
2-1-1 is becoming a human services referral number.
As a former teenage girl, I strongly second the Tamora Pierce recommendation. The Song of the Lioness Quartet was my favorite series in junior high. Also strongly seconded: Mercedes Lackey (she doesn't hold up well, but my friends and I all loved the Valdemar books in high school) and Patricia C. Wrede.
I strongly recommend Connie Willis. She's a fantastic author, and she shouldn't be over their heads, although I would suggest starting with something like Bellwether, which is both hilarious and romantic, instead of something like Doomsday Book, which is a little heavier (literally and metaphorically). One of the stories in Fire Watch is not appropriate for younger teens, but if they're young enough, they just won't get it. Miracle and Other Christmas Stories might be an especially appropriate gift for the season. Impossible Things has a hilarious story about menstruation they might be able to appreciate.
I just read Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion on the recommendation of a teenage boy and thought it was fantastic. I then picked up The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, which was also good.
Robin McKinley's fairy tale retellings are absolutely fantastic, and mostly appropriate for teenagers. (I wouldn't give Deerskin to a younger teen, but books like Beauty could even be given to school-aged kids.)
Nancy Kress would be good for older teens, but she can be a bit depressing.
Introverts don't want your kind of fun
Yes, yes, yes! This is one of the things that most pissed me off about The 40 Year Old Virgin. The whole assumption of the movie was that the extrovert kind of fun is the only kind of fun worth having. I'm not just talking about sex here. The extroverts got him to get rid of his video games and action figures in addition to getting him to try to have a sex life.
Thanks for the link. As an introvert who hates meetings with our training staff where we try to design or plan something, I found this particularly useful: "We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours." It's a good reminder to me that other people have a different style, and that it might actually be necessary for them to go through the process that way.
Word is definitely spreading. It was on the front page of The Sacramento Bee last week. Yesterday I was tracking down an odd sound issue on one of our laptops, and one of my non-technical coworkers said, "Maybe someone put a Sony CD into it."
This, of course, leaves open the question of what happens if you DON'T have autorun on, or you decline the EULA and play the CD via other means.
That's what I keep wondering! I own one of these CDs, and when I first put it into a computer, it popped up the EULA. I wasn't about to install some sort of extra player just to listen to a CD, so I disagreed, turned off autoplay, put it in again, and played it with Media Player Classic. (You can also use task manager to kill the process that starts up under autoplay. I was frustrated with it and not thinking clearly the first time.) I'm enough of a geek not to install odd players, but not quite enough of one to really know how to go about figuring out if it does anything if you let it autoplay but don't run their install. That would be much more insidious than the rootkit being installed with the player you do agree to install.
A coworker with a troubled teen said, "What I like about knitting is that I can do it wherever I am. The hospital. The probation office. The police station."