Outright Rant

Term that causes mental shutdowns: living document Rationale: Some glossaries state that “in a living document a topic is covered more completely over time” but I don’t see how that doesn’t apply to all documents. Aren’t all documents editable, with varying degrees of work required to edit them? It seems that the term “living document” is mainly used by people who want others to think print is dead. It just takes more time for the revisions to be published for printed material. When a document updates itself it can be dubbed “living” but until then it’s a mechanical turk, with me as the part that’s alive. Watch words: organic, ecosystems. What won’t make my head explode: refer to it as …

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Term that causes mental shutdowns: future-proofing Rationale: How can we future-proof anything if we can’t see the future? How will we know what to build, or how to build it, until we know the future requirements? To me, future-proofing is overengineering. It’s taking ten weeks to build a Space Shuttle Crawler when you needed to spend a week building a golf cart, just in case you need to move a Space Shuttle sometime. Watch words: anticipating growth, what if, just in case What won’t make my head explode: Keeping options open so future work is easier, but not doing the future work until it’s actually needed.

Email and instant messages that consist solely of the letter “k” drive me nuts. Why? A) You couldn’t be bothered to type “Okay” or even “OK” in full. It’s hard, I know, especially with a full keyboard at your disposal. B) You added no value to the conversation. Why even send the message? It is different if I was asking your opinion about something, where “OK” might be an acceptable and desirable answer. I wasn’t, though. C) You made me open my IM client again, to read ‘k’. I wish I could build a filter in Psi so that any messages that consisted of the phrases “k” or “thanks” or “np” could be silently acknowledged. D) This makes me think …

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The new Macintosh keyboards are missing the Open Apple. There are various movements to save the Open Apple, including a petition to have Apple put it back. Given Apple’s history of taking design advice from the masses I suggest taking matters into your own hands: Order a new keyboard from Apple. Order a pack of Sharpie Metallic Markers. Order an X-Acto knife. Print out an image of the Open Apple. You’re resourceful, you can find one yourself. Do this on card stock. Use the X-Acto knife and cut the image out to form a stencil. Put the stencil on your new keyboard, and using your new, cool Sharpies trace around the edge. Keep it uniform so it looks good. If …

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Update: we’ve all concluded that it’s my email client, Pine, that isn’t getting the job done right. Apparently it is going for the text/html part of the message, rather than the text/plain part. This is the first time I’ve noticed Pine behaving like this, but then again maybe it’s just because I pay attention to what Atlassian sends out. Thanks to Jon and Jeff from Atlassian that looked into this. I suspect Atlassian is a company that doesn’t get it anymore has an employee who doesn’t get it, based on the “Atlassian Newsletter – August Acquisition 2007” email that was sent to me. Unfortunately, the subject is all I could read: Did everything in this newsletter need to be an …

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“Functionally obsolete” does not mean “good” to me. It means the object being described doesn’t meet current standards. “Structurally deficient” does not mean “okay to continue using” to me. It means it’s going to break and needs to be dealt with. “Non-redundant structure” doesn’t mean that failure can be tolerated. It means it’s all going to go all at once. Scoring 50 out of 120 points on an inspection is a failing grade, to anybody who has attended any school, ever. You have two options when faced with a structurally deficient bridge, which is functionally obsolete and non-redundant: fix it, or continue inspecting it. “Oh, we’ll just keep an eye on it.” These engineers might be book smart, but ask …

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I just read “Geek Squad hacked dead porn star’s computer” and I have a question, given the multitude of reports of how Geek Squad has been stealing people’s porn. If you take your computer anywhere to have it serviced, or if you have anybody but yourself work on your computer, what precautions have you taken against them stealing your data? There are lots of upstanding computer guys out there that have ethics and can be trusted to fix your computer and not go scavenging around. There are computer guys that are absolute unprofessional scumbags, too. I’ve worked with both types. How do you know your computer guy is trustworthy? For example, we know that Geek Squad was copying porn. But …

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