| Comments

an insult to mankind is happening in my area.  no seriously, it is.  a radio station i listen to announced a concert happening soon in the summer...and they are calling it Festivus for the rest of us.  i think i nearly caused an accident on the 101 when i heard this...my car swerved and explicatives were flying all over the place.

that's right...festivus in mid-summer.  clearly the peak (98.7) couldn't be doing such an injustice to ?  (note: for those in phoenix and know my musical taste, i listen to 98.7 because it is the least suckiest for me on my 1.5 hr commute sometimes...oh, and the fact i have no ipod/zune adapter in my car -- so step off the jokes about listening to k-lite -- they play some hard core hits of the 70's, 80's and today ;-)).

i, for one, cannot sit idly by and watch this happen...i must do something about it, and so should you.  after all, everyone knows that festivus is actually december 23.  the national festivus conservators (NFC) are angered by this blatant disregard of the holiday.  where are the airing of grievances?  the pole?  c'mon peak, don't be so lame.  each year i hold a festivus party (okay, not on the 23rd exactly, but at least i'm honoring the time within the ballpark of a few friggin days) for friends, neighbors and family.  it's a blast.  yes, there is a pole.

so, if you feel so offended as i, let them know...preserve festivus and vote at preservefestivus.com!  let us be heard people!  let the pointy-hairs at the peak know that we will not stand for such an abomination of the holiday!  send this to everyone you know!!!

| Comments

i was recently logged in to a members-only web site (of which i'm a member) and noticed two buttons in the left navigation titled:

    • Administrator Options
    • Record Keeping Information

upon clicking on either one i was presented with a pop-up and this message:

Please note:
In order to speed up some of the lookup functions of the website, it was necessary to enable the Website Admin Button for all user screens. The Admin Button is only functional for users with Admin Rights. Clicking on the Admin Button will check if the user is a current admin and then go to the admin site if the user has rights to those pages.

huh?  okay, seriously...i'm not the best developer, but i do know there are two ways off the top of my head that i could think of solving this...1) caching and 2) role-based security (some type of bitmasking)

seriously folks, you shouldn't show features that aren't available to users...you are just inviting frustration.  this was a huge problem in sharepoint 2003 when basically every user could see all admin functionality and they wouldn't be alerted to what they couldn't do until they tried to complete the task (yes, you could walk through all steps in a wizard and then fail on the 'finish' button).

don't let systems rule your experience design...if it starts to, then something is wrong in my opinion.  systems are successful when users use them and when they aren't frustrated.  abstracting this type of stuff is key i think...

do you think this is what the designers had in mind?  design smart, develop smarter.

| Comments

ah, the irony...from my earlier post, i get this in my inbox today (and the mail merge was wrong...not in SFO) :-).  if they asked me to not participate you'd think they'd take me off the reminder list :-)

| Comments

felt this was necessary for a re-post (as i'm sure it will be all over the place).  joe stegman has announced some breaking changes and provides an updated silverlight.js file for us all to use.

see his post: Some v1.0 breaking changes

| Comments

something has been bothering me lately.  you see, i registered for a seminar, then a few days later go this:

argh.  it wasn't rude necessarily, the individual politely is asking me not attend and for the reason.  i just found it very "un-tech-community" of this particular company.  i wonder how people would react if microsoft canceled registrations for competitors attending pdc or teched or things like that?  surely they would be /.'d.  in fact oscon, railsconf and other open source conferences never do this -- and those are the audiences that don't like big blue.

what do you think?  maybe i'm over-reacting.  maybe not.  it just made me take a tums when i read it, that's all i'm saying (especially since the registration for the site said nothing about requirements).