“Apple is teh suck”. I have had a large number of phones, with a large number of stupid things wrong with them. A phone thats supposed to be an IPOD and have a bunch of these nifty apps is great. Guess what Apple? When all of them stop working because you have a DRM bug? And the is no concrete fix and when you restore the phone it breaks, damn it.
In software development there is a process called convergence. It is that time when everyone thinks they are done but nothing works yet. I think classic project management techniques don’t necessarily account for it. I have been struggling with the formulation of this concept and understanding how much time to plan for it. I find that it depnends less on the amount and complexity of work done before but much more on the specific people involved.
I have worked at companies that don’t actively practice convergence and projects there tended to never be on time. It’s final rush to the finish line which I personally still find exciting.
So we got a trial subscription at work to getAbstract. What a cop out. Not only do people not read but now they have the ability to get the cliff’s notes for everything. It’s one of those convenient thing so you can sound smart in conversations since I have the feeling that in a particular crowd of people where such things are popular everyone will have the same limited knowledge of the books anyway. On the other hand it is possible that the books these guys tend to summarize are your typical business books that should have been a two page article anyway.
So I got an iPhone and I am conflicted. Although it is an interesting device it is clearly version 2 whereas the windows and palm phones I had before clearly had much richer feature sets if not as polished an interface. I really wish Microsoft made the feature set and apple made the ui and palm made it fast. Now that would be a device. Also where is my todo list and message flagging. Full exchange compatibility my ass.
So I’ve decided I hate web apps. At least the old kind, not the new nifty restful kind (although I don’t use any of the new fancy ones yet). I am trying to download my order history from Amazon.com. You’d think they being cool and knowledgeable about technology with all their webservices and S3’s and stuff like that. Well no, really stupid actually.
I sent them this email:
Your Name:Mark Friedgan
Comments:
So this is more of a suggestion but I would find this incredibly useful as I am sure others would and it’s trivial to build. What I want is a “Last year’s orders page that doesnt have lots of nice buttons but rather a simple table, kinda like this:
Order #, Item #, Amount Paid, Item Description, Date Ordered, Date Shipped
Can you help out?
I get a response like this:
When you visit Your Account and click “Go!” next to the default option of “open and recently shipped orders,” you will see a list of any unshipped orders as well as orders that were shipped within the past 30 days.
If you would like to view an older order, please
1. Click the arrow next to “open and recently shipped orders” to see the drop-down menu.
2. Select “orders placed in the past 6 months” or “complete order history sorted by year.”
3. Click “Go!”
If you select the “sorted by year” option, we will display all your
orders from that year.
Sadly, they didn’t actually read my e-mail, they saw “Orders from last year” and replied with a template. Well I did what they say which is why I sent my original e-mail. This process produces 4 pages of 10 orders a piece in order to find out how much I spent on each one I have to click a button that opens a new page to see the amount. This is rather silly. So now I am writing a CURL script to do this because that’s just the kinda guy I am.
I hate this! People, otherwise considered intelligent and educated, continue to make this mistake in public forums and blog posts. It is really frustrating.
For those who don’t know the difference (from m-w.com):
Lose: to miss from one’s possession or from a customary or supposed place
Loose: to free from restraint, to let fly
Very different, most people seem to type loose when they mean lose. Stop doing it, just learn the stupid difference and stop doing it
Interesting tidbits. DHH didn’t get let into a presentation because his badge wasn’t gray. Tutorials were all a little too newbie oriented. Got the neatest business card (a broken CD) from guys at http://rabb.it
Do you come to a conclusion after an intensive period of thinking or immediately while spending the rest of the afternoon trying to build a backstory to the decision.
So I am watching Jet Li kicking ass in Fearless and I think to myself — I’ve been writing software since I was a kid, just like the character in this movie. This is probably terribly vain but I feel like I am at the Kung-Fu master level with this stuff. But the thing is being the master doesn’t mean you’re perfect, far from it, the reason you got where you are is that you had to go through a lot of stuff. But it has hardened you to the worry and has made you good at what you do. You become merciless, cold and efficient. Strange, no?
Your results:
You are Iron Man
|
Inventor. Businessman. Genius. |