I have been getting more interested in Twitter, since Digsby makes it much easier to tweet. Coinciding with this interest, I have gotten more followers. Each one with a little email announcement. Many of these followers are wierd. By wierd, I mean that they have a strange pattern on their profile. Something like this: What…
UX is all about human psychology. Here are some key truths. People are dillusional optimists. Whether it’s estimating how much work something will take, stock market speculation, gambling, or any other predictive test, people will always exaggerate their chances of success. It’s hard-wired into most of us. How many times have you said, “Just a…
I saw this image on Coding Horror by Jeff Atwood, which borrowed it from Thom Holwerda. on this page. I redrew the image using Balsamiq. Since, I saw it, I have been internally using this metric for a slew of other topics besides code. American Idol. For each contestant, I used this metric to measure how…
We have been using MediaTemple for a while to host Marketo’s public website. They have a great design sense and cost twice as much as Bluehost, but we hoped that the added expense would mean better quality. Recently, we moved from their DV to GS services and got put on Cluster 2. From that moment,…
I love watching/analyzing people argue, including with myself. It is the key attribute of human civilization. We all have points of view and opinions. I have thought deeply about the key differences people have and how to deal with them. In the end, we all want to “win” the argument and get our way. So…
Lately, I have been itching to use a custom font for my headers. One of my unwritten rules of powerpoint presentations is to use an interesting font. Times New Roman and Arial are just saying to your audience, “I didn’t feel like taking 5 minutes to make this interesting on your eyes”. I had been…
I have been looking for a solution to turn PNG-24 with alpha transparency into a PNG-8 WITH alpha transparency for a while. This possible with Fireworks, but I didn’t really want to install, buy or fireworks. (It scares me). Side question: Why o’ Why can’t Adobe make Photoshop do this? Ok, the instructions on the…
I switched over to Threatfire for my anti-virus/malware protection. I had been an evangelist for Avast for quite some time, but the registration process was just a little too annoying. It seemed that every time I turned around, I had to re-register. I have alot of computers that I take care of (friends/family) so it all…
By request, here is a zip of my cloud theme. I don’t feel like it was perfect, but I liked it for my first try. Feel free to use it and modify it. I can’t sit still on themes very long. I keep feeling the urge to change them. It’s not good UX, but I…
Kevin at work pointed me at a new Instant Messenger on the block called Digsby. Installation was a little scary because it asks you if you want to install all this other junk. I guess they need to make some money, but I clicked “decline” all the way through. You have to make a digsby…
Playing around with this theme. Why do I change themes all the time? It’s bad user experience to switch that much. I just can’t help myself. I get so bored with the same look. This theme feels nice. Today, California passed a budget and gave huge concessions to a single state representative. Why did they…
Have you ever experienced a person is describing their product and say, “You can skin it however you want!” I hate when people do this. It’s an obvious assumption that the only thing one might want to do is change the color of the button or text. Here is why it’s a mess: The structure…
Trying out a FLV Player plugin for WordPress. This is my presentation from The Ajax Experience, except I am hosting it myself. [hana-flv-player video=”http://commadot.com/test/TAE2008.flv” width=”400″ height=”320″ player=”3″ autoplay=”false” loop=”false” autorewind=”true” /]
Windows 7 has been working well, but the other day it just stopped being happy and refused to launch any Explorer windows (like file manager). It said, “Interface Not Supported” and that was it. Come on Microsoft, please be a little better about your errors and give some information. I google’d for a while and…