Talk about your minimalist website

On one hand, it's a refreshing departure from the usual graphics-and-Flash-laden corporate website. On the other, it's just about as usable.

http://www.surplusexchange.com/

AskTog: The High Price of Not Listening

Bruce Tognazzini is an interaction designer and a principal with The Nielsen Norman Group. He has a monthly column called Ask Tog in which he addresses various interaction concerns—often human-computer interaction (aka user interface), but not always—much like Alertbox from Jakob Nielsen (yes, as in Nielsen Norman Group). His latest column is called The High Price of Not Listening, and it's about why it's important for companies to make it easy to receive feedback from their customers, and return feedback to their customers that they've been heard.

I can't take issue with the bulk of this column; I think he's spot on. It's mostly common sense, but as a friend of mine used to say, "common sense isn't". Unfortunately, if Tog falls short, it's in that he addresses only part of the conversation between customer and company, and appears to place the bulk of responsibility on the company without addressing the customer's responsibility.

He even provides what I think is a near-perfect example in his column, in the form of a letter from a frustrated Mac OS X user from Canada who is having trouble getting valuable feedback to receptive ears at Apple:

There are three Canadian options in the International System Preference: Canadian CSA, Canadian ISO, and French Canadian. All three are French. Why is there no Canadian English option? Why are there three French options? HELLO!!! Over 90 percent of the Population of Canada speaks English as their first language.

HELLO!!! Only 10 percent of the population of Canada speaks French. It is like having all US Macintoshes default to Spanish because 10 percent of the US population speaks Spanish.

Virtually every new Mac user in Canada chooses the Canadian CSA option (the preselected default option with the Canadian flag) on their first startup in OS 10, unaware that this is French Canadian. How much effort would it take to change the text from “Canadian CSA” to “French Canadian”, so people would at least know what they are selecting? FIX THIS!!!

And it goes on like that, in similar vein.

I agree that the problems he describes should be fixed. I understand the writer's frustration at not being able to get this message to someone who can do something about it. And I get Tog's point that a company can't afford to ignore this kind of feedback if they want to keep their customers happy. But while I was reading this letter, agreeing in the front of my brain, in the back of my brain one phrase kept bouncing around: "petulant whiner".

In twelve paragraphs, the writer types phrases in all caps eleven times. Six of them are "FIX THIS!!!"; two are "HELLO!!!". Nine end with three exclamation points. He uses the word "idiotic" twice, and even writes

…and giving Apple computers a bad name for no reason at all, except that somebody at Apple is too lazy to FIX THIS!!!

To recap: he yells (in text); he uses inflammatory language; and he accuses the entity he's addressing of being lazy.

I used to work customer service in the circulation department for a local newspaper. We were the paper's "first line of defense"—most complaints about the newspaper ended up in our department, whether or not they had anything to do with the customer not getting his or her paper. I like to think we handled every complaint professionally, and didn't intentionally give preferential treatment to the ones who were calm and reasonable over those who were abrasive. However, I'm sure that it happened unintentionally. If nothing else, when you hang up the phone after taking a complaint from a calm, reasonable customer, you feel pretty good about yourself and your job; here's a person who needs help, and by golly you're the person who can help them.

I understand being frustrated when something's not taken care of in a timely fashion. I agree that there's a time and a place to raise your voice. I had to do this recently with a billing clerk who told us three times that she'd taken care of something when she hadn't, and as a result we were getting thinly-veiled threats from a collection agency. The fourth time we spoke to her, I raised my voice—I honestly hope I didn't actually yell—and not only did she finally take care of it, she sent hard-copy confirmation with a handwritten note of apology.

My point? Companies have a responsibility to their customers to make it easy to submit feedback, to receive that feedback and act on it in a timely fashion, and to let the customer know that he or she has been heard. At the same time, while customers don't have a similar responsibility to the company, there are things they can do to make the process more pleasant (and thereby more efficient) for everyone. In a way, customer service representatives are customers, too.

CSS will be the death of me

Like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, I have been visited by an apparition which has shown me my ultimate fate. Unlike Scrooge, however, my particular harbinger was not the Ghost of Christmases to Come, but Inconsistencies in How Various Browsers Implement CSS 2.0. Also unlike Scrooge, I haven't been offered the opportunity to alter my ultimate fate, no matter how much I scream: "Wait, spirit! I can change! I can change!"

Not another one of those days

All kinds of firsts today, relatively speaking:

• I had lunch out of the house, with an adult I'm not married to, and talked about work. I don't think I've done this since last December.
• I replaced the photo black ink cartridge in my wife's printer, and there was a small pool of ink inside the little protective cap, and most of it ended up on my hands. For future reference, Canon BCI-6BK ink does not wash off with soap and water. Neither does it succumb to rubbing alcohol. I'm going to give acetone a try later, but I'm starting to think that I'm stuck looking like I have a skin disease for the next month or so. If there's a silver lining, it's that Halloween is coming up.
• I got a phone call from our state governor, and I hung up on her. Okay, it was a prerecorded message, and it was whatever is the telephone equivalent of spam, and it was on my work phone, which I haven't registered with the no-call list as I just recently had it installed. I can't remember if I voted for her or not—there's something painfully American in that admission, isn't there?

Fellowship 9/11

A few more of these, and people are going to think I do nothing but watch movies on the Internet....

Fellowship 9/11—how Michael Moore might have done The Lord of the Rings. (Is it just me, or is there more than a passing resemblance between Michael Moore and Peter Jackson?)

Try loading the movie through Coral if the first one doesn't work. You'll also need QuickTime.

Thanks to Darren Barefoot for the link.

OMG LOL!!!

This short movie (or try loading it from CoralCache if that's slashdotted) is laugh-out-loud funny and a little scary at the same time. I suspect that this scenario isn't all that far-fetched for some people.

(Apologies to whomever I got this link from. I'd give you credit if I could remember which blog I read it on.)

Update. A friend of a friend tells me that this is from The Brendan Leonard Show, which until this season ran on ABC Family, but (of course) has since been cancelled. A little bit of Googling reveals that Brendan Leonard is up to new hijinx at http://campjinx.pictureshowfilms.com/ .

So much for the Next Big Thing

Yesterday, I saw a blog post somewhere (sorry, I forget where, but probably either from Boing Boing or Jason Kottke) about Snap, a new search engine. (No link; we'll get to that later.) The unique and interesting thing about Snap is that it pushes some of the power to the browser. After entering your initial search terms and getting a list of results, you can refine your query by entering additional search terms, and through the power of Javascript, the list of results gets updated as you type.

I've never been a big fan of Javascript; my initial experiences were unfavorable (e.g. the energy you had to expend just to deal with differences in implementation between browsers), and the payoff was minimal (e.g. fiddly little UI tweaks that ran more to "look what I can do" than "really useful"). I'm starting to come around, though, thanks to useful browser-side scripting examples like TiddlyWiki and (I'm told) GMail. And Snap.

Except....

Cory Doctorow read far enough into Snap's website to discover that Snap has a "unforgivably stupid and evil linking policy". So no linking to it here. I'm feeling a little guilty about even describing Snap—not for legal reasons, but because bad publicity is still publicity.

Maybe they'll come around, and embrace openness in linking. Or maybe we'll just keep referencing Snap without linking, as a cautionary tale.

HTML without style

From Eric Meyer: Really Undoing html.css. He describes how to turn off all the default CSS styling in your web browser. Since it involves messing with files on your hard drive, it's not exactly something you can use in your website template, but it looks like a good way to learn what assumptions the authors of our browsers (and, by extension, we who use them) make about how our HTML is presented. It makes me nostalgic for the days of disassembling executable files to peek at the machine code, back when people still knew what those terms meant. :-)

Update. Eric has a followup article called Fractionally Restoring html.css that describes the minimal reasonable stylesheet (setting the display: block property on block elements, for instance). He also floats the idea of having a copy of your favorite browser with minimal styles, and testing your websites to ensure that the styling is coming from CSS and not from markup (in other words, embedded in the HTML).

It's del.icio.us

I don't know what took me so long. After seeing any number of posts on various weblogs about del.icio.us, I finally took a look. Then took the plunge. Now, I think we can safely say, I'm obsessed.

For those of you even later to the party than me, del.icio.us is an online bookmark manager, sort of. After you create an account, you can start adding URLs to your list through a form on their site or with a handy bookmarklet. Your bookmarks are stored in one place, available from multiple locations or even multiple browsers on the same computer.

If that's as far as you look, you probably won't be impressed. Rather than trying to present your bookmarks in some kind of fancy dynamic tree structure, they get dumped into a simple list. The real power (and fun) begins with the tags you can add to each URL.

Think keywords—more precisely, think terms you would use if you were searching for the URL. For instance, I used the tags "food cheese england" for the URL http://www.teddingtoncheese.co.uk/acatalog/de339.htm, which describes an English cheese called Stinking Bishop. The right side of the del.icio.us page has a list of all of the tags I've used for all of the bookmarks I've stored. I click on "cheese" and get a list of only those bookmarks that are tagged with "cheese".

To quote Al Pacino, "I'm just gettin' started!"

When you click on a tag, like "cheese", you also get a link to other URLs, from all users, that have the same tag. If a URL has been added people besides you, you'll get a link under it that reads "and X other people"; click on it and you can see what tags other people used for that URL.

Whether or not they intended it, the people behind del.icio.us have created something in the gap between Yahoo! (or DMOZ) and Google. Maybe the thing it's closest to is that "people who bought X also bought..." feature at Amazon.com.

Update. No sooner do I post this than I check NewsFire and find that Tom Coates has said it better than I have, and goes on to do something useful with the idea rather than just blathering on about how neat it is. (Thanks to Jason Kottke for the link.) Just another reminder that I either need to learn to write better or get out of the writing-in-my-spare-time-for-the-fun-of-it business.

Blink and you'll miss it

This is hardly news at this point: SpaceShipOne has unofficially won the Ansara X-Prize. You can read more, better commentary about it than I can provide, so I won't try. Instead, I've got a slightly different perspective to share.

When I remembered that the second flight for the X-Prize was today (should I be embarassed that it wasn't the first thing I thought of when I woke up?) I hustled downstairs to look for live coverage on TV. NBC? Nope. Fox? Nope. ABC? Nope. CBS? Nope. The Discovery Channel? CNN? CNN Headline News? Fox News? (I hope you can see the pattern.)

I finally found coverage on MSNBC, about the time that White Knight was taking off. They didn't go to minute-by-minute coverage until shortly before SSO separation, but I can't blame them for that; there's only so many times and ways you can say "they're still circling to gain altitude". However, they did go to continuous coverage a few minutes before SSO separation, and stayed with it until touchdown.

Maybe it's just me, but I'd have thought (or, rather, hoped) that one of the major news networks would have been following this. After all, they saw fit to broadcast the entire funeral procession for Ronald Reagan. I'm especially surprised that The Discovery Channel wasn't all over this. Yes, I'm sure they're not normally set up for live broadcasts, but IIRC they're owned (at least partially) by NBC, so it's not like they don't have access to resources.

(It just occurred to me that the fact that MSNBC was covering the flight may have had less to do with the "NBC" part than with the "MS" part, what with primary funding for SpaceShipOne coming from Paul Allen, one of the cofounders of Microsoft.)

I'm reminded of a night a month or so back when tornado sirens started sounding in our city. We were watching TV at the time, so we started flipping around the local affiliates for weather information. (How to identify a Kansas City resident: if tornado sirens go off in the daytime, we go outside to see if we can spot it; if they go off at night, we turn on the TV to watch the storm coverage.) Everybody was broadcasting regularly scheduled programming. Finally, one of the affiliates broke in with weather coverage, and stayed with it until the storm had passed. Only one.

How time flies

My local development server has twice in recent days lost track of the current time. The first time it happened, I only noticed because Maven complained with a bizarre error when I tried to run it. After Googling and digging and whatnot, I finally decided to reboot the machine. It wasn't until after that that I noticed that the system time had been off. I made sure that Webmin was set up to sync the clock from an NTP server, and filed it away in the "how often does that happen" category.

Well, it just happened again. Again, it was the bizarre error from Maven that tipped me off. This time, I had the sense to check the system time before rebooting, and sure enough, apparently I'd slid back to 1970 when I wasn't looking. I went into Webmin to force an NTP resync and noticed that the hardware clock was still correct; only the system clock was wrong. Webmin has the ability to set the system clock from the hardware clock, which I did, and was promptly booted out of Webmin because:

Session timed out after 54069110 minutes of inactivity.

102 years, 10 months, 13 days, 15 hours, and 15 minutes passed when I wasn't paying attention? No wonder I'm feeling old. :-)

60/- Scottish Ale

I bottled the 60/- Scottish ale tonight. The gravity and ABV were right where they're supposed to be, at least according to the BJCP guidelines. It's hard to tell by taste at this point (since it's not carbonated, and warm) but it's malty rather than hoppy -- not a rich malty like an Oktoberfest, but a clean malty.

That reminds me... I need to check the keg of Oktoberfest to see if it's carbonated yet, or if (as I suspect) I have a slow leak in the keg that keeps it from holding pressure.

Frankenstein revisited

It wasn't the inverter board. Now I'm working on the assumption that it's the backlight. I found a replacement relatively cheap on the Internet; it was shipped as a working backlight attached to a shot display. (Given that the backlight is about 11 inches long and about 2mm in diameter, I suppose it was the only safe way to ship it.) Now I just have to make time to tear the laptop apart.

Paging Dr. Frankenstein

The display on my PowerBook failed this morning. From what I can tell, it's just the inverter for the backlight -- I can still sort of see the display, as long as there's lots of ambient light (or a flashlight) shining on it.

Fortunately, the PowerBook G3 FireWire (aka "Pismo") has a VGA connector on the back. I plugged in the monitor from my Linux box and, with a judicious amount of squinting, set up display mirroring. Now I can at least see what I'm typing.

I just picked up a new inverter board on eBay for about US$12 after shipping. (Note: I believe in supporting my local certified Apple repair shop, but I figure the minimum labor charge would be at least US$75, which is getting dangerously close to how much I'm willing to spend on this laptop.) One of these days I should try to find a new backlight; for some time this one has been exhibiting the dreaded "pink Pismo display" problem.

Drive-by linking

Nigritude Ultramarine

Drive-by linking

GeekDIY (like I need any more spare-time projects).

The dishwasher has attempted an illegal operation....

Last night, I did something I've never had to do before: I rebooted the dishwasher.

About 18 months ago, we bought a GE Triton dishwasher. Is verry nice; in a vast improvement over the old dishwasher, this one's quiet enough that you can talk on the phone while standing next to it when it's running.

Instead of having knobs and buttons that actually open and close electrical contacts (I can hear Scotty saying, "How quaint"), it has a set of momentary-contact touchpads. Just close the door, push the "Start" touchpad, and off it goes. An embedded microcontroller takes care of the rest.

I tried to start it last night, and it wouldn't. None of the LEDs for the options (like the pot scrubber cycle) would light, but it would beep like it's supposed to when the door closed, so I knew it was getting power. The most response I could get out of it was that every once in a while, the LED on the start button would flash momentarily.

I toyed with the idea of taking the door apart, to look for a loose connection, when I thought, if this were a PC, what would I do?

The answer was, of course, "reboot it". So I unplugged it, waited 5 seconds, then plugged it back in. Opened and closed the door, and it started right up.

There's a moral in here somewhere, but I'm not sure yet what it is.

My first homebrewing competition

I entered my first homebrewing competition... and didn't place.

The thing about the 1st Annual Austin ZEALOTS Homebrew Inquisition that appealed to me was that beers are judged on their own merits, not according to BJCP or AHA guidelines. I don't have a lot of experience with different styles, and right now I'm more interested in brewing beer that tastes good than in brewing "authentic" beer.

Unfortunately, as the Homebrew Inquisition claims that it is "based only on a homebrewer's ability to produce quality beer", the fact that I didn't place in either category in which I entered must mean that I failed to produce quality beer. :-) I'm looking forward to getting the scoresheets, to see what comments they have.

Drive-by linking

Top 10 Reasons to Not Shop On Line

Big Brew recap

Big Brew was a success. It also was two weeks ago. I really need to post more often. The only bad thing was that while unpacking all of my gear at home, I dropped my hydrometer and broke it.