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RANT! Long statements in instant messages that are broken up

RANT! Long statements in instant messages that are broken up

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A lot of us use instant messaging (IM) in our private and professional lives. It is a convenient and quick way to talk to others without the formality and delay of email. A new jargon has been created to talk in this medium and emoticons are often used to express feelings and emphasis.

You can tell a lot about someone by reading their instant messages. The biggest thing you can tell to see if someone is just plain clueless is if they send you messages like this:

IDontKnowHowToIM: Did you watch the game
IDontKnowHowToIM: this weekend? I thought
IDontKnowHowToIM: it was great and I was
IDontKnowHowToIM: amazed at how well Tom
IDontKnowHowToIM: Brady played he must be
IDontKnowHowToIM: the best player in NFL

What IDontKnowHowToIM meant to type was this:

IDontKnowHowToIM: Did you watch the game this weekend? I thought it was great and I was amazed at how well Tom Brady played he must be the best player in NFL

Having to hit the return key pretty much went away with manual typewriters. In fact, I would venture to say that your keyboard doesn’t have a return key but instead had an enter key in its place. There really isn’t any reason to break up your text manually. Your client surely supports word wrap. You can keep on typing until you get to the end of your logical paragraph!

Most IM clients open up their default window and show only 1 line of text. So fools like IDontKnowHowToIM get to the end of that window and hit return. Then they keep on typing. However, an amazing thing was popularized about 20 years ago – the mouse. Use your mouse to drag that typing window up and before you know it you can see 2, 3, 10, even 100 lines of text. No more one line IM messages!

Here are some examples from Trillian and Yahoo:

Before Trillian:

before t

After dragging in Trillian:

after t

Before in Yahoo Messenger:

before y

After dragging in Yahoo Messenger:

after y

INSTANT MESSENGER USERS – LEARN HOW TO USE YOUR CLIENT AND STOP SENDING BROKEN MESSAGES!

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

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RANT! Internet browsers need to handle favicons better

RANT! Internet browsers need to handle favicons better

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Do you even know what a favicon is? It is the little image that sits just to the left of the URL in your address bar. For this site the favicon looks like this: Angry_1185 If you can’t see it then that pretty much proves my point!

When you surf to a page that you have previously visited, the browser checks to see if anything has changed since the last time that you visited. It then downloads the new text and graphics and combines this with data in your cache and displays this to you. This technique can greatly reduce your surf time.

Unfortunately, most modern browsers (Firefox and Internet Explorer) do a pretty lousy job of checking and updating if the favicon for a site has changed. In fact, if you using an older version of IE, it may not even display a favicon. Even Firefox will occasionally display the wrong favicon for a site.

This is poor software design. Favicons are very small and would not detract from the user experience if it was checked every time.

HEY SOFTWARE DESIGNERS, FIX YOUR FAVICON IMPLEMENTATION!

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

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RANT! Professional football must change their overtime system

RANT! Professional football must change their overtime system

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I write this just a few days after the NFC championship game for the 2007 season. In this game, Green Bay hosted a frigid game between their beloved Packers and the New York Giants. The game was well played by both teams and ended in a tie at 20.

As dictated by the rules, the teams then met to flip the coin again and the Packers won the toss. Within the NFL, overtimes are decided by the first team to score any kind of point. The typical strategy is to get close enough for field goal and end the OT quickly. This definitely favors the team that wins the OT toss!

As fate would have it, the Packers turned over the ball and the Giants won the game with their own field goal. While this particular instance provided both teams an opportunity to have the ball, the rules are not that fair.

Sudden death is not an effective way to settle an important football game. Rather it would be far more fair to have rules that are similar to college football and most high school leagues. The ball should be placed at a particular yardage marker (I suggest the 50 yard line) and then each team is given the opportunity to score. They should be allowed to earn first downs and they should be forced to attempt 2 point conversions after a touchdown. Each team should have ball an equal number of times to respond to the other team’s scores.

Regardless of which official rules the league would adopt, the current rules are not designed to achieve a fair outcome.

HEY NFL, GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER AND DEVELOP RULES THAT ARE FAIR!

Other opinions that you might want to check out:
From the Back of the Freezer
We MUST Change The NFL Overtime System, And Do It ASAP

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

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RANT! PC’s and the Disabled: 20 Molehills that Become Mountains

RANT! PC’s and the Disabled: 20 Molehills that Become Mountains

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I recently came across a post on a different kind of top 20 (or worse 20) list. This list is of bad software (or at least poorly behaving software). The focus of the article was on web applications but, too be honest, I think there are still some ‘regular’ applications that make these same mistakes as well.

I don’t want to reproduce the entire 20 items, you can go to the original article here and read those. I would like to point out that that author forgot some of my personal least favorites:

I did like some of the items on the original list. Especially

4. Amnesia

5. No Undo/Redo

6. No Cut/Copy/Paste

13. Tiny Fonts

19. Not Eating Their Own Dog Food (although I prefer the statement “Not drinking their own champagne”

20. Bugs – what is up with “beta” releases of software that go for months, if not years!

SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS – YOU NEED TO THINK ABOUT USABILITY WHEN YOU WRITE YOUR SOFTWARE (and yes, I did intend to have my caps lock on when I was shouting despite number 7).

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

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RANT! Drugs and bad conduct in professional sports (again)

RANT! Drugs and bad conduct in professional sports (again)

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I find myself writing on this subject again. I wrote about it when the lowlife Michael Vick pled guilty to animal cruelty charges and now I write as Barry Bonds is indicted for lying while under oath.

I know that most of the commentary on the web and the mainstream media is regarding Mr. Bonds use of steroids. But that isn’t the charge! Rather, he is being charged that he obstructed justice by lying under oath. Even Martha Stewart spent time in prison for a similar violation.

Lying under oath is a serious charge and the talking heads like Charles Barkley don’t seem to get it. They think this is a witch hunt about steroid use. It isn’t. It is about lying under oath when you shouldn’t lie. At a minimum he should have cited his 5th amendment rights when asked the question.

I don’t know if Mr. Bonds is guilty and in the US we are innocent until proven guilty. However, if Mr. Bonds is guilty of this transgression then

MAKE AN EXAMPLE OUT OF BONDS AND THROW THE BOOK AT HIM!

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

Here is some related reading for you to enjoy:
We’re Already Tired of the Barry Bonds Indictment
Bonds Indicted, or How Flax Seed Oil Doesn’t Fly
Bonds Indicted for Perjury
Bonds’ indictment comes a little too late

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RANT! Desktop Index ideas

RANT! Desktop Index ideas

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Like a lot of people, I have become hooked on “desktop search” products. These products index your hard drive’s documents so that you can quickly and easily search for that piece of information you know that you have but are missing. The most popular version of this is Google Desktop but there are others and I particularly like Copernic Desktop Search because I find it more stable than the other utilities on the market and it can read my calendar in Outlook which is a big deal to me.

As much as I like these tools, I find that there is one big thing that they all miss. They don’t rank my favorite sites higher than other sites if I am doing a web search. This simply doesn’t make sense. Obviously, I have been to that site before (or else it wouldn’t be in my Favorites/Bookmarks folder). Therefore, I trust that information more than other information.

So to all of the developers of desktop search: PRIORITIZE MY FAVORITE SITES ABOVE THE REST OF THE WORLD WHEN YOU SHOW ME SEARCH RESULTS!

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

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