Sometimes you're mandated to use multipart forms. Example: Cover sheets for Treatment Authorization Requests sent to Medi-Cal have to be printed out onto the multipart form paper they send us. We print them on our dot matrix printer, they get signed in our office, sent to Medi-Cal where they're signed by the Medi-Cal folks, and then one copy is sent back to us for the chart. If we didn't have a dot matrix printer, we'd have to write the forms out by hand, making more work for the people who would have to write them and for the people who would have to sign the same form three times instead of just once.
I've yet to make it somewhere to read the original story (and I didn't like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which makes me slightly less likely to do it in the near future), but the huge, glaring security holes were the worst thing about the movie.
SPOILERS: Why on Earth would the security department for a paranoid/evil company (a) let him send himself an access swipe card and (b) leave him in the system? I might have somewhat liked the movie, if it weren't for this one horrible plot hole.
Not to mention how many survey questions are badly written.
I participate in The New Yorker's online marketing polls (mostly I'm interested in what kinds of things they're asking, but I also like to think I muck up their expected results because I'm nowhere near as rich as they expect their readers to be nor do I live in a large urban area), and one of their recent surveys was just a mess. First, they asked what ads you remember from the latest issue. I wrote in the Borders ad because I did remember it. The next question asked whether or not you remembered the Borders ad. Then they showed you the ad and asked if you remember seeing it. Then, and this was the stupidest thing yet, they asked you to describe what you remembered about the ad. You just showed it to me; of course I'm going to remember more about it now!
Here's what I don't get about this and similar comments about personal IM discussions at work: Why the hell don't you have one screen name for work, to be used at work and known only to business colleagues, and one for personal matters, to be used at home and known only to friends and family? You clearly have such a system for e-mail, so why not extend the same boundaries to IM?
Fifth, RSI. I have a scroll wheel mouse at work, and I got used to scrolling every time I wanted to move down a page. Then my knuckle started to hurt all the time. It took me a few days, but I finally realized that it was hurting because of the scrolling. I've retrained myself not to use the scroll wheel, and now my knuckle is much better.
Here's how it works: Everyone brings one gift that cost something under a pre-determined price limit (our department is doing a $15 limit, my mom's book group that doesn't read usually does $10). You write out numbers on slips of paper from 1 to n where n is the number of people in the game. 1 goes first and picks a gift from the pile and opens it. 2 can then steal 1's gift or pick a new one from the pile, and so on up to n. If your gift is stolen, you have the option of stealing one from anyone else or of picking from the pile.
Additional rules: You can't steal back the gift that was just taken from you, and we often have a limit on how many times a gift can be stolen.
Not only is this a ton of fun, it can also fulfill all your holiday obligations to your coworkers (as is the rule with ours at work).
If you have too many people coming for it to be practical, you could always split people up into any number of smaller groups to play.
My limit's about 80 pages these days, but I'm a fast reader.
Other limiting factors: If I fall asleep within ten pages every time I sit down to read, it's time to get rid of the book and start something else. Exception: The Bourne Identity, which I struggled through in vain hope that it would be somewhat related to the movie.
If I dread picking up the book to continue reading, it's time to stop. Example: Fiona Patton's The Stone Prince, for which I had high hopes as I've loved some of her short fiction.
I liked the first few books because when my best friend and I were sixteen-year-old feminist-raised sci fi/fantasy fans, we read anything that had girls kicking ass. We still love books with girls who kick ass, but we're a bit more selective about quality these days.
My mother is a great fan of puns, and so my brother and I grew up hearing many of them. One day, my brother said that some of his difficulties were all her fault: "Someone asked me, 'Why are you always so cheesy?' I said, 'Because I need the calcium.' It didn't improve the situation."
And we all thought Jessica Simpson was just stupid. It turns out she's really psychic.
Re:Too many passwords - so I write 'em down!
on
Real Security?
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· Score: 1
There's an odd psychological element to password remembering. I sometimes forget the passwords I've used for websites I almost never log in to. However, I'm the entire IS Department for a small agency, and I can remember nearly all the passwords that our staff has to use to log on to our network and in to our database (two different passwords).
I don't actually know anything about voice recognition software, so maybe this has been thought of/dealt with, but what if people are sick? I have a cold, and I'm sure it's changed the way my voice sounds.
I've seen a lot of good suggestions about types of boxes and shelving to use and the one year use rule, but I don't think anyone's brought this up. When you're thinking about where to put things, you need to think about how you're going to use your organization system and how you're going to access stuff later.
Point 1: Your use of the file system. My mother had file boxes that she stored her files in. After a while, however, she couldn't get into the boxes to file things because she had too much stuff stacked on top of them. We got her an attractove open file box that she can't stack things on as a working file. The idea is that now those things that went in stacks can go into folders in this box. The closed file boxes seem like a good idea, but they might not work for everybody. Any other seemingly good idea might work perfectly well for one person and be a disaster for someone else.
Point 2: Future access. Don't put the things you use most on the highest shelves (or the lowest if you have bad knees). Whatever organizing gear you choose to use, make sure that the things you use the most are most accessible. Things you don't use as much but that you're not ready to get rid of should be the least accessible.
The basic point here is that there is no one size fits all solution to any type of organization. It all depends on how you work.
Hah! In my house I nag at my mom until we clean up. We just did her office (aka our dining room) and it's taken us about a month to get everything mostly organized. And she's already stacking things up again!
Twist ties are your friends. When I was moving in and out of dorm rooms, I would loop the cable into circles (it's clearly too early; I can't think of the right term, but you probably know what I mean) and then tie two twist ties around them, without crimping it in the middle so it was a hot dog shape--keep it in the round, one near each place where the cable ends were so the ends wouldn't fly all over the place. Then when I put them into boxes and pulled them back out, they were just these self-contained rounds that didn't go all over the place.
I like it that they're asking us to get naked with them. I guess that's a fast way to get to know new people.
Re:Erm... a lot of people
on
Who Needs Radio?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Anyone who doesn't have fast internet access
Amen! One of the biggest problems with any sort of "downloadable (insert product here) is the wave of the future" arguments is that there are still people stuck on--gasp!--slow dial-up connections, either because they can't afford anything else or because that's all that's available in their area.
Slashdot Mirror
He may be laughing his ass off somewhere around here. The official site says that Tommy "pays his bills with work as a software engineer."
There may be some prior art on that.
Some of us already know how that will play out.
I saw that on an X-Files episode once, but does it actually happen in real life? And if so, where can I get adult-sized light up shoes?
Sometimes you're mandated to use multipart forms. Example: Cover sheets for Treatment Authorization Requests sent to Medi-Cal have to be printed out onto the multipart form paper they send us. We print them on our dot matrix printer, they get signed in our office, sent to Medi-Cal where they're signed by the Medi-Cal folks, and then one copy is sent back to us for the chart. If we didn't have a dot matrix printer, we'd have to write the forms out by hand, making more work for the people who would have to write them and for the people who would have to sign the same form three times instead of just once.
I've yet to make it somewhere to read the original story (and I didn't like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which makes me slightly less likely to do it in the near future), but the huge, glaring security holes were the worst thing about the movie.
SPOILERS: Why on Earth would the security department for a paranoid/evil company (a) let him send himself an access swipe card and (b) leave him in the system? I might have somewhat liked the movie, if it weren't for this one horrible plot hole.
Not to mention how many survey questions are badly written.
I participate in The New Yorker's online marketing polls (mostly I'm interested in what kinds of things they're asking, but I also like to think I muck up their expected results because I'm nowhere near as rich as they expect their readers to be nor do I live in a large urban area), and one of their recent surveys was just a mess. First, they asked what ads you remember from the latest issue. I wrote in the Borders ad because I did remember it. The next question asked whether or not you remembered the Borders ad. Then they showed you the ad and asked if you remember seeing it. Then, and this was the stupidest thing yet, they asked you to describe what you remembered about the ad. You just showed it to me; of course I'm going to remember more about it now!
Here's what I don't get about this and similar comments about personal IM discussions at work: Why the hell don't you have one screen name for work, to be used at work and known only to business colleagues, and one for personal matters, to be used at home and known only to friends and family? You clearly have such a system for e-mail, so why not extend the same boundaries to IM?
Fifth, RSI. I have a scroll wheel mouse at work, and I got used to scrolling every time I wanted to move down a page. Then my knuckle started to hurt all the time. It took me a few days, but I finally realized that it was hurting because of the scrolling. I've retrained myself not to use the scroll wheel, and now my knuckle is much better.
Here's how it works: Everyone brings one gift that cost something under a pre-determined price limit (our department is doing a $15 limit, my mom's book group that doesn't read usually does $10). You write out numbers on slips of paper from 1 to n where n is the number of people in the game. 1 goes first and picks a gift from the pile and opens it. 2 can then steal 1's gift or pick a new one from the pile, and so on up to n. If your gift is stolen, you have the option of stealing one from anyone else or of picking from the pile.
Additional rules: You can't steal back the gift that was just taken from you, and we often have a limit on how many times a gift can be stolen.
Not only is this a ton of fun, it can also fulfill all your holiday obligations to your coworkers (as is the rule with ours at work).
If you have too many people coming for it to be practical, you could always split people up into any number of smaller groups to play.
My limit's about 80 pages these days, but I'm a fast reader.
Other limiting factors:
If I fall asleep within ten pages every time I sit down to read, it's time to get rid of the book and start something else. Exception: The Bourne Identity, which I struggled through in vain hope that it would be somewhat related to the movie.
If I dread picking up the book to continue reading, it's time to stop. Example: Fiona Patton's The Stone Prince, for which I had high hopes as I've loved some of her short fiction.
I liked the first few books because when my best friend and I were sixteen-year-old feminist-raised sci fi/fantasy fans, we read anything that had girls kicking ass. We still love books with girls who kick ass, but we're a bit more selective about quality these days.
I'm sure Williams would find it juvenoid.
Q: What do you get when you take the dot product of a giraffe and a mountain climber?
A: Nothing; you can't take the dot product of a scalar.
My mother is a great fan of puns, and so my brother and I grew up hearing many of them. One day, my brother said that some of his difficulties were all her fault: "Someone asked me, 'Why are you always so cheesy?' I said, 'Because I need the calcium.' It didn't improve the situation."
And we all thought Jessica Simpson was just stupid. It turns out she's really psychic.
There's an odd psychological element to password remembering. I sometimes forget the passwords I've used for websites I almost never log in to. However, I'm the entire IS Department for a small agency, and I can remember nearly all the passwords that our staff has to use to log on to our network and in to our database (two different passwords).
I don't actually know anything about voice recognition software, so maybe this has been thought of/dealt with, but what if people are sick? I have a cold, and I'm sure it's changed the way my voice sounds.
I've seen a lot of good suggestions about types of boxes and shelving to use and the one year use rule, but I don't think anyone's brought this up. When you're thinking about where to put things, you need to think about how you're going to use your organization system and how you're going to access stuff later.
Point 1: Your use of the file system. My mother had file boxes that she stored her files in. After a while, however, she couldn't get into the boxes to file things because she had too much stuff stacked on top of them. We got her an attractove open file box that she can't stack things on as a working file. The idea is that now those things that went in stacks can go into folders in this box. The closed file boxes seem like a good idea, but they might not work for everybody. Any other seemingly good idea might work perfectly well for one person and be a disaster for someone else.
Point 2: Future access. Don't put the things you use most on the highest shelves (or the lowest if you have bad knees). Whatever organizing gear you choose to use, make sure that the things you use the most are most accessible. Things you don't use as much but that you're not ready to get rid of should be the least accessible.
The basic point here is that there is no one size fits all solution to any type of organization. It all depends on how you work.
Hah! In my house I nag at my mom until we clean up. We just did her office (aka our dining room) and it's taken us about a month to get everything mostly organized. And she's already stacking things up again!
But do you trust them more than your government?
Twist ties are your friends. When I was moving in and out of dorm rooms, I would loop the cable into circles (it's clearly too early; I can't think of the right term, but you probably know what I mean) and then tie two twist ties around them, without crimping it in the middle so it was a hot dog shape--keep it in the round, one near each place where the cable ends were so the ends wouldn't fly all over the place. Then when I put them into boxes and pulled them back out, they were just these self-contained rounds that didn't go all over the place.
I like it that they're asking us to get naked with them. I guess that's a fast way to get to know new people.
Anyone who doesn't have fast internet access Amen! One of the biggest problems with any sort of "downloadable (insert product here) is the wave of the future" arguments is that there are still people stuck on--gasp!--slow dial-up connections, either because they can't afford anything else or because that's all that's available in their area.