Strange love 31 January 2008
I am working on two individual clients’ sites today.
Both have broken the news to me today that they’re getting married.
How weird is that?
Design Police! 30 January 2008
Enforcement tools to bring bad design to justice.
You have to have been screamed at to the point of tears over your baseline grid to appreciate the humour.
The Cat’s Paw is the cat’s meow 30 January 2008
Like many web professionals, I have struggled against RSI in my “mouse hand” for years. It actually stems from my horrendous desk setup years ago in DC, where I worked in a VIP office which was designed to look good and impress visitors, not keep the lady comfortable. The damage it caused was so serious that I had to give up the needlework and embroidery I had been doing since the age of five.
Despite best efforts at posture and ergonomics, my RSI bugbear flares up from time to time, especially in cold weather, so I am always looking for new ways to combat it.
Recently I met a personal trainer, Donna McVey of Your Personal Best, who suggested a little gadget called the Cat’s Paw. I ordered a set from the US and, damn, does it work. I can feel my muscles waking up and stretching again, and my hand is no longer ice cold from lack of circulation. I highly recommend it.
Pretending the web doesn’t exist 29 January 2008
Yesterday I weighed in on an excellent piece in The Scotsman’s legal pages which raised the exact issues I had discussed a few months ago in relation to the Tobin/Kluk/Hamilton murder trials. (30 second summary of that - a man has been convicted of one murder, and is accused and is pretty obviously guilty in the second, but the Scottish media are not allowed to mention the first murder and subsequent trial even though it only happened last year and everyone remembers who he is.) As an experiment, I mentioned the accused party’s previous conviction for murder in the online comment page of a story about the Hamilton case and the comment was deleted almost immediately by the newspaper admins. It’s the legal insistence on see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, in the midst of an interconnected web 2.0 world.
The quote below just happens to be from Donald Findlay QC. His personality aside, take the quote for what it’s worth.
“The establishment position is based on what might be the case in the old-style media: that it would be open to any individual prospective witness or juror to go along to The Mitchell Library and read up back copies,” he says. “They say the internet is no more than an extension of that. This misrepresentation is combined with steadfast insistence that the juries are able to do what they are instructed by the trial judge when he tells them to disregard all other accounts they may have heard. I don’t think that’s good enough. Prejudicial publicity is our real problem in the criminal courts these days. It’s very serious. And the biggest part of the problem is the internet. For example the courts go to great lengths to excise any material that may refer to previous convictions of the accused. But it’s not the rare obsessive going to the Mitchell Library that makes a mockery of that. The fact is anyone can put the name of the accused into Google and come up with a complete history of the investigation and all the accused’s previous convictions in a second. Don’t tell me jurors don’t do it when they get home after the first day of a trial.”
The whole article is here. Let’s hope that this piece becomes an ongoing dialogue which results in real change.
I’m just sayin’… 25 January 2008
Over the years the monthly e-newsletters sent out by the American Consulate in Edinburgh have been a source of entertainment for me. There is usually one useful piece of information but the rest is standard Homeland Security scaremongering right out of the Jon Stewart show (warning: brown Al Qaeda people are following you!! YES YOU, HEATHER!! In Scotland!! He’s behind you!! And this is why Brave Leader Condoleeza Rice would like to remind you that rendition flights are gooooood… ) And so forth. The dire urgent warning not to pick up any dead birds I might find lying on the ground in Fife (as one tends to do all the time), lest I spread bird flu, will always stand as a classic. As for the panic alert about the bad jars of peanut butter which might well be circulating around Scotland via care packages from the US, I had to check that the date wasn’t April 1st.
So after years of trying to combat terror by creating it, this morning they mailed out an absentee voting update but instead of BCCing all the recipients, they put them in the “to” field. So they have more or less provided an easily transferrable list of every American registered with the Consulate in Scotland.
Looks like they’ve picked up on the Scottish public sector trick of perpetuating a problem on purpose. I’ve unsubscribed.
When web sites are forgotten 21 January 2008
The Scotsman carries a piece about the legal issues involved when a company changes hands and its web site becomes one of the transferred assets. This piece was written by a lawyer for a managerial audience, so it’s not a light read.
http://news.scotsman.com/scotland/When-websites-are-forgotten.3692223.jp
One could say that the Scotsman’s web site was forgotten in its recent horrendous revamp, but let’s not go there.
Happy days at Idea15 16 January 2008
This week I have been offered the opportunity to revamp the web site of the Scottish Motor Neurone Disease Association. It will be a genuine challenge - in the best possible way - to create a web site which both educates the general public and remains completely accessible to those with impaired mobility and viewing abilities. The Association are a great bunch and I look forward to working with them.
I lost my mother to MND, which is known as ALS/Lou Gehrig’s Disease in the US, and although I was active in MND advocacy when she was alive, after she was gone I understandably felt burned out by all things MND and so I chose to live my own life for a while. After I became a mother myself, I felt guilty about losing touch with something so critical, so I approached the Association last year about some work. I can’t care for patients or conduct medical research, but there is something that I can do, and that’s web sites.
So wherever you are, this one’s for you, Mom.
Bore-out 14 January 2008
The Times writes about a workplace phenomenon which has been officially diagnosed as “bore-out”. Boreout is not a friend of Azamat, rather,
Boreout works like this: a boss refuses to delegate work, frustrated underlings ask for more to do but are trusted only with mind-numbing tasks. After a while they stop asking and enjoy the free time at their desk, stretching out the low-intensity tasks with a series of strategems. But mimicking work day after day erodes self-esteem. Result: the boss hurtles towards burnout while at least some of his staff edge towards boreout. The symptoms are almost identical.
Read the full story and take a quiz to see if you’re suffering from bore-out at
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/career_and_jobs/article2456531.ece
Bore-out is endemic to this part of the world. I had just two jobs where my day’s work could stretch past lunchtime. In my most recent experience with bore-out, I was contracted to be in a certain office 9 to 5, five days a week, but was finished with all the day’s assigned work by 9:50. The petty act of having to sit there, from 10 to 5, doing nothing, just so the management could keep up appearances, was unbearable.
Unfortunately, in the west of Scotland, asking for more work to do is interpreted by employers not as a sign of enthusiasm or competence; rather, it is viewed as proof that the employee is “building an empire for themself” or has “ideas above their station”, charges which were often whispered about me while I struggled to fit into the local work force. Please, sir…?
Across all sectors, too many managers refuse to shed their antiquated mindsets of rigid hierarchies and roles and ranks and “levels”, and view management as a passive reward rather than an active obligation. Indeed, bore-out was one of the factors which led me to set up my own business. Why should I dumb myself down and settle for a life of menial boredom because some “manager” could not “manage” their way out of a wet paper bag? Life’s too short.
The Printable CEO 7 January 2008
For many of us, our professional new year’s resolutions involve better productivity. You could do worse than spend some time with The Printable CEO.
http://davidseah.com/blog/the-printable-ceo-series/
The point of the Printable CEO series is that if you work to a to-do list, with the goal of ticking boxes, you’re going about it wrong way. The Printable CEO forces you to approach your work strategically, rather than reactively. And the tracker sheets for recording what you really spend your time on every day are not for the faint of heart.
I use the Emergent Task Planner, and keep it blu-tacked to the wall in front of my desk, where it stares at me all day like the Evil Monkey.
Print out a few of these planners and give them a try. It’s the first week of 2008, you might as well start it with a bang!
Silverburn sucks 6 January 2008
So last night I finally braved the wilds of Silverburn - Scotland’s newest, largest, glitziest, and most expensive shopping mall ever. The verdict? I thought I was back in Boca Raton. And no, that is not a compliment.
As with Palm Beach, it is a home for luxury brands showcased in marble and terrazzo, with blinding spotlights and cavernous ceilings. And as with Palm Beach, there is no soul, warmth, or feeling to the place. It is not a place where you go to wile away the day with friends. It is a place you can’t wait to leave. And although there were thousands of cars in the lots, I walked through the centre feeling utterly alone. Buchanan Street it’s not.
Bluewater is bigger to the point of absurdity, but you could spend a day there and never feel strained. The mall under the Louvre has even more marble and glass, but the energy coursing through it is unmistakable. Although the goods are for an elite beyond imagination, even a brief walk through the path is life-changing. In Silverburn, I felt thirsty, bored, and suffocated.
Although the mall is far from complete, storefronts in progress are draped with building-size covers with Biblical slogans like: “And there shall be sorrow no more, for ZARA has arrived.” Just like Boca, the mall takes no shame in asking people to substitute money and status symbols for contented happiness.
When I worked in the bullshit “regeneration” industry, on the site where Silverburn is now, the mall was touted as the magical solution to all of the neighbourhood’s problems of poverty and unemployment. Now, with those “poor deprived” souls putting up Bible verses about luxury brands, the corrupt circle seems complete. One billion pounds later, that area of the city is as artificial and empty as it was before, and its people have the same vacant and hopeless look in their eyes.
