General

I got an email from

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I got an email from a former co-worker at Teaching Network. He was laid off last week, along with some of the other remaining people. The company ran out of money, but they’re going to try to keep the web site running another 3 weeks or so. I was hoping they’d be able to survive.

I lost my job there in September (the week before 9-11), along with about half the company when the death of one of the partners caused a financial crisis.

I'm now officially a home

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I’m now officially a home owner. I closed on my new home today. I paid a shitload of money, got writers cramp from signing documents, and left with the keys and a gift basket. Starting next month I’ll never pay rent again! The mortgage payments are much less than the rent on my current tiny apartment.

Ken Bereskin from Apple asks

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Ken Bereskin from Apple asks what apps are in your Dock right now?

Thought you might be interested in the apps that I have on the Dock of my Titanium PowerBook. Here’s the current collection:

What’s on yours? [Ken Bereskin’s Radio Weblog]

Here is what is running on my Dock at the moment, from left to right (* denotes what is running):

*Finder, *PowerMail, Palm Desktop, BrainForest Professional, Fire, Adium, *Radio, Internet Explorer, OmniWeb, *Mozilla, *URL Manager Pro, iTunes, *AppleWorks, *TextEdit, *GraphicConverter, *iPhoto, BBEdit, RBrowser, VNCThing, *CopyPaste, *Terminal, Internet Connect, Disk Copy, Script Editor, Epson Printer Utility, Quicken Deluxe 98, Microsoft Word 98, Photoshop 6, System Preferences, Apps folder, Documents folder.

What do you have in your Dock today? Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog. [Mac Net Journal]

Here’s what I have in mine:

Finder, Internet Explorer, Entourage X, ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Mozilla, iTunes, QuickTime Player, System Preferences, Terminal, Palm Desktop, Radio UserLand, DragThing, BBEdit, CodeWarrior IDE, Favorites Folder

I keep the dock on the right side of my screen, where it takes up less usable space and doesn’t get in the way.

What Is .NET, Anyway?. Almost

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What Is .NET, Anyway?. Almost drowned out in the din generated by Microsoft’s Visual Studio.NET developer tools

release was a question that many ordinary computer users are asking: What is .NET

(pronounced dot-NET), anyway? Matthew Berk, site technologies and operations analyst at

Jupiter Media Metrix, gave NewsFactor a one-word description of .NET — mystical. [osOpinion]

Joel on Software – The

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Joel on Software – The Iceberg Secret, Revealed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with my development team,” the CEO thinks to himself. “Things were going so well when we started this project. For the first couple of weeks, the team cranked like crazy and got a great prototype working. But since then, things seem to have slowed to a crawl. They’re just not working hard any more.” He chooses a Callaway Titanium Driver and sends the caddy to fetch anÊice-cold lemonade. “Maybe if I fire a couple of laggards that’ll light a fire under them!”

Meanwhile, of course, the development team has no idea that anything’s wrong. In fact, nothing is wrong. They’re right on schedule.

I learned this lesson as a consultant, when I did a demo of a major web-based project for a client’s executive team. The project was almost 100% code complete. We were still waiting for the graphic designer to choose fonts and colors and draw the cool 3-D tabs. In the meantime, we just used plain fonts and black and white, there was a bunch of ugly wasted space on the screen, basically it didn’t look very good at all. But 100% of the functionality was there and was doing some pretty amazing stuff.

What happened during the demo? The clients spend the entire meeting griping about the graphical appearance of the screen. They weren’t even talking about the UI. Just the graphical appearance. “It just doesn’t look slick,”Êcomplained their project manager. That’s all they could think about. We couldn’t get them to think about the actual functionality. Obviously fixing the graphic design took about one day. It was almost as if they thought they had hired painters.

I’m smiling & nodding as I read this. That’s exactly what I’ve seen in meetings as I demonstrated some new feature. They didn’t care about the functionality, but spent hours discussing one pixel on the screen or what color a button should be.

The Nation that Freaked Out

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The Nation that Freaked Out

We’ve been at war with terrorism for about five months now, which may come as a shock to you if you’re an eccentric hot air ballooner just coming down from your ridiculous two year trip around the world. In which case, let me tell you, we’ve been doing a lot of freaking out. We’ve almost stabilized, so I’ve categorized the specific types of freaking out we did and possible ways to avoid them in the future just in case terrorism wins the war and we end up living in a world where it’s required by law to be terrifying.