Monday, 18 March 2002

Wednesday, 20 February 2002

Hiatus

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Tuesday, 19 February 2002

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.
-- George Washington Carver

Monday, 18 February 2002

Mr Bush added a third item to this list, the need for "devaluation" of the yen. This remark immediately triggered a drop in the Japanese currency until Bush aides hastened to clear up the confusion.

The president had "misspoken", they said, adding he had meant Japan's problem of "deflation" - steadily falling prices, which depress economic investment - not devaluation.

Sunday, 17 February 2002

...most software is like [an iceberg] -- there's a pretty user interface that takes about 10% of the work, and then 90% of the programming work is under the covers. ... That's not the secret. The secret is that People Who Aren't Programmers Do Not Understand This.

Corollary: If you show a nonprogrammer a screen which has a user interface that is 90% worse, they will think that the program is 90% worse.

Corollary: If you show a nonprogrammer a screen which has a user interface which is 100% beautiful, they will think the program is almost done.

Understand that any demos you do in a darkened room with a projector are going to be all about pixels. If you can, build your UI in such a way that unfinished parts look unfinished.

[Jeff Porten] Whenever possible, GET YOUR CUSTOMERS USING YOUR SOFTWARE WHEN THE FEATURE SET IS SMALL. ... Make them wait until it's 100% done, and they'll be annoyed by the wait, and then take for granted everything you've done. But put them live when you're at 30%, and every step of the way to 100% will seem miraculous.

[Brian Curtis] ...you know as well as I do that there’s a lot more to UI design than just "prettying up the pixels." ... What makes you think the design is something you can fix up in a day? ... coming up with a good, intuitive, USABLE interface design involves a lot more work and effort than just tossing some pretty pixels on the screen.

[Ted Boren] ...on another level customers know EXACTLY what they want. They want their work to get accomplished and they know their work far better than you or I. It would be a fatal mistake to assume that you have little to learn from customers just because you can’t trust what they say about design & technology.

Peter Pan is back in theaters with the sequel "Return to Never Land,"...
Next year, "The Jungle Book II" will hit theaters...
"Dumbo II"...
"Cinderella II: Dreams Come True,"
"Atlantis: The Lost Empire II" and
"The Hunchback of Notre Dame II." [!!??!]

Top sellers already include "Lady & the Tramp II: Scamp's Adventure," "The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea" and "The Lion King II: Simba's Pride." ... [and] "The Enchanted Christmas." [Beauty and the Beast]