Who's your data?

I've been working lately with a less-than-polished bit of open source software that, unfortunately, was written to be used by non-technical users. The user experience is not enhanced by my ignorance, and my ignorance is not much abated by reading the instructions. So the upshot was having to do work over again because the software in question took the painstaking fruit of all that typing and clicking (and proofreading and fixing) and moshed it into a format readable only to it. Which would be forgiveable if I had been allowed to correct "mistakes" after they were published to the website and found. But I wasn't. And of course, some mistakes couldn't be caught until after the changes were published. (Nice catch-22, that!)

All of which left one option: Delete-and-do-over.

Needless to write, I was less than thrilled. Mostly because I have this entitled notion that, regardless of platform or software, the actual data is mine. My typing. My clicking. My wading through misspelled Help that would have had me on the curb Back In The Day. Which is to say, my time, darnitalready! Time that could be much more productively used. Thus, if data is time and time is money, I want my money back. Except that consumers have always allowed software--commercial and free--a pass on the havoc it can wreak, and changing that mindset is akin to boiling the ocean.

Yes, there's definitely a case to be made for making passwords unrecognizable through encryption--no question. But otherwise, a user should be able to take her/his data and go home anytime s/he wants. And despite the fact that the folks who wrote the software in question are more skilled at writing code than I, I can't say as I think much of their design. Or, for that, matter, their low valuation of their users' time.

Small failures don't always add up to big ones

My husband and I spent a few hours at our respective jobs today. Before I bailed out of my pod for the afternoon, I called to let him I know I was heading for the hizzy--which in the dialect of our marriage translates to, "Do I need to stop for anything on the way home?" And in the course of that conversation, I enquired whether he'd accomplished a lot in a quiet office. "Not really," quoth he. "Yeah, me too," I replied, "I think I mostly just got mistakes out of the way." "Well, that's progress," he pointed out.

And he's right. Probably not only for our trade, either. Yes, yes--I know Thomas Edison said, "I haven't failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Which is great if you work for yourself; Unfortunately, bosses & clients don't always take such a sanguine view of failure on billable time.

All the same, it is a reality of industries that are expected to be innovative, and where a failure to fail in tactical ways ultimately means the strategic--make that epic--failure of obsolescence.

Frivolous Friday, 02.26.2010: Intellectual exercise at the gym

(Credits: Tonight I'm borrowing the concept and sometimes-straight-up-sometimes-sarcastic style of the "Oh, The Things I Know!" posts on the unapologetically left-leaning political blog DailyKos. After ~90 minutes of walking, stretching, biking and bouncy skiing, here are some of "the things I know.")

• Having TVs in the gym would be more effective if pedaling/walking faster would fast-forward through commercials and pre-game shows.
• It says much about our progress as a culture when a Friday Night Fight (SpikeTV) ends with dudes who were trying to pound the snot out of each other hugging after the winner is declared...and the loser kissing the winner on the top of the head.
• I'm convinced that more people than admit it watch the Winter Olympics for the same reason people go to the circus--namely, to see someone buy it.
• If Joy Behar thinks she's holding her piece of TV ground against upstart internet entertainment by obsessing on the lewd and vapid, I've got news for her: The internet's going to win.
• (That being said, the reason I get the overwhelming majority of my news and entertainment via the internet is because I have considerably more control over the level of lewdness and inanity I find there.)
• States in the Upper Midwest must receive three times the snowfall of New York City for it to receive national news attention.
• Purdah as practiced in other parts of the world has nothing on my gym's version: There, the genders (mostly) don't even share the same dimension. I know this because there are fourteen locked lockers in the women's changing room and I'm the only other chick in the place.
• When a guy works out by himself, it's a whole-body thing; when guys work out together, jaw muscles get the lion's share.
• When you neglect to fully clamp down the recline bike's seat and then pedal fast, the slight rocking almost achieves a "magic fingers" effect.
• Some machines display metric heart-rate, but no one can tell me the conversion formula.
  
• The difference between humans and hamsters is that humans pay for the privilege of alternating between running in place and drinking from oversize bottles. That and humans don't look nearly as adorable (or happy) munching sunflower seeds.
  
• When brain and body don't want to be in the same place, odd blog posts are born.
  

Two lessons from one presentation

Bugger: I neglected to obtain advance permission to recap tonight's presentation to the La Crosse Programming Users Group. So you'll just have to trust me when I say that a homebrew solution to a specific business problem kept its small audience informed and asking questions for just under an hour and a half. This even in light of the fact that the programming was done on the DOS--i.e. pre-Windows--platform because of its operating environment.

For this part of the audience, at least, it was also a good reminder that Cool Factor alone doesn't pay the bills. Unless you make your living writing about technology, of course. Sometimes that sounds like a fantasy job...until I think about how closely it equates to being a paparazzo. Blech. No thanks. Those who developed the "Who's up and who's down" instincts in high school (and before) are welcome to all that. But the time for paying attention to who's truly "successful" is at a reunion with a "0" after it. Technology's not so different in that respect.

So big ups to --- for a successful presentation and my extra thanks for the bonus "refresher" lesson. Good job!

Data without context is just noise

If you've worked in software tech. support, the thought of receiving a bug report (for three separate bugs) via a brief email forwarded by your main client contact probably makes your toes curl, yes?

It was actually pretty awesome. Insofar as learning about three bugs from a customer can be, anyway. Here's why. In each case, the reporter noted which web page she'd visited, what'd she'd been expecting to see vs. what she actually did see.

A little poke at the database, a couple prods of the web application itself, and I shortly had three answers: 1.) User error, 2.) You need to keep your data up-to-date, and 3.) Someone else needs to keep their data up-to-date. But not having to scramble to actually "fix" anything was merely the proverbial cherry on top. So when I replied to my contact, I asked her to pass along my thanks. I know I'm spoiled--when the folks I usually work with let me know about a bug, they typically include screenshots. But that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate it.

I've probably said this before in other ways, but it never, ever ceases to blow my mind how many intelligent, articulate and socially clever folks still expect mind-reading when they open a bug ticket.You can probably imagine the resulting hours squandered trying to debug the wrong problems. Simply put: If you don't have time to provide the context of your problem, you don't have time to have it solved.

"The thank you economy" in action

Not to be all goody-two-shoes, but I wanted to go on record with a small donation I made tonight. Some days previous, I managed to screw up an HTML image map--if you don't recognize the term, it doesn't matter--because I typed X-Y coordinates by hand without any validation. (I'm a fast typist, but at the expense of accuracy.) In retrospect (you know, that place where we're always so much smarter), I should have automated the process.

When someone else caught the error, it was time for someone to look over my shoulder. The Omniscient Google turned up this tool that allows you to upload your image, mark the areas on it that you want to turn into "hotspots," and kicks out the HTML code. In other words, zero danger of incorrectly transcribing something.

I may be giving away my time and training on the project in question, but that doesn't mean that I necessarily expect others to save my bacon without any recognition. So I thought that a shout-out was in order.

I don't think that was the intended outcome...

I clicked a link (courtesy of @traceymgoodson) to catch the latest news from the Toyota saga, and a Flash-based ad managed to break through the blinders developed over a decade-and-change. A narrow panel showed a night-time road out of which a Mercedes Benz bore down on the peripheral vision. The overall impression was that one was about to be run over a second hence.

Yes, I understand the concept of guerrilla marketing. The subtler end of its spectrum ambushes the sense of humor; the more extreme end goes straight for the lizard brain. Thus a men's room stall is co-opted to shill a crime show and a gruesomely life-like poster at the bottom of a swimming pool shocks parents into a heightened awareness of their children's whereabouts.

But the medium has to coincide with the message, and somehow, I don't think that Mercedes Benz want my visceral reaction to their 2010 E-Class series to be the impulse to dodge to the side. Marketing #FAIL.