I have realised that I am suffering from information overload, especially pertaining to the streetcar project, which encompasses 500+ electronic documents, several books, a collection of internet bookmarks, various photographs, two videocassettes, some e-mails, and various other stuff. I am starting to realise that I need a database of some sort. A program like Library Master is looking good -- if expensive -- since I also have a digital library of over 10K items, and a personal hardcopy library of over 2000 items I'd like to catalogue. Since it's getting to the point where one single throwaway reference in some obscure 40 year old trade journal is actually a significant puzzle piece to me, I sort of need all this stuff indexed by keyword. Not all these things have indices! And I'm actually willing to do the scary amounts of data entry required. After all, once it's done, it's done, and the catchup work is negligible.

A sample information schema or record entry in my hypothetical database would look like this:

Keywords: Antitrust, EMD (Electro-Motive Division, Electro-Motive Company)
Source: "Is EMD a Monopoly?", Trains, June, 1961
Pages: 6, 11
Authors: Unknown
Notes: diesel locomotives, NY grand jury, indictment, repower, re-engine, Sherman Act, freight traffic, 12M tons/$211M waybills/1st 9 mos of 1959, market share, competitors out of business, percentage of diesels sold

I'm tempted to buy a copy of FileMaker Pro, although it's also rather expensive, since I know that one can easily set up fields in it that are string-searchable very easily (I've used it before to manage a database of ~1000 address/contact information labels, back when I was doing targeted e-mails to schools in South Asia).

Is there anything comparable that I can get for significantly less money (like, optimally, none)? If I spend $250-400 of my research budget on software to manage my information, that's less money that I have for source materials.

Please don't suggest Base, which comes with OpenOffice. I've tried using it already, and, unless you can get the Form Designer walking and talking (I can't, and the documentation is beyond bad -- Hey, OO documentation team! Screenshots, maybe? Got a bit of a Comprehensible Only If Known Problem going on, too!!*), the fields aren't as customiseable as I need. What I want is exactly what I've shown above, and I'm not willing to compromise on organization, since I know how I search for things (by important concepts or keywords), and I pretty much guarantee that would get me the results I want, 99.9% of the time.



___________
* One of these days, once I no longer have seventeen other projects on the go, I'm going to sign on to the OO documentation team.

Discourse Analytics Notes on Microsoft Design Guidelines

I've been here before.

A coworker e-mailed me a link to "How To Design a Great User Experience," which appears on the MSDN site. (They've helpfully abbreviated it in some places as "How To Design a Great UX." The Great and Powerful UX has Spoken! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.)

This stuff is, in general, really great (if basic) design advice.

If only Microsoft would take it themselves.

You could fisk* this entire article down to the subatomic particles, but I'm really only going to pick on seven of their 17 main points, the ones that offend me the most.

#1. Nail the basics.
Creeping featuritis. Do I really need to say any more?

#3. Don't be all things to all people.
Of course, Microsoft doesn't want you, the application developer, to be all things to all people, because it's too busy solidifying its cartel status in the OS and core application market -- that is, becoming all things to all people itself -- to want anyone to horn into its market share. You could almost say that Microsoft has a corporate philosophy of trying to be all things to all people. (Tie this in to my later point about the word "enable.")

#7. Make it just work.
This is truly a laudable goal, which wouldn't be quite so laughable if anything that came from Microsoft "just worked" outside of a user space roughly the size of a breadbox. "just working" in the Microsoft paradigm is often "Do it our way, and you won't get hurt."

#10. Make it a pleasure to see. This doubtless explains the Windows XP default interface, which only a colourblind person or a four year old with a huge collection of Duplo blocks could love. Actually, personally, I think this is a misstated goal entirely. I don't think an interface should be "a pleasure to see." I don't want to take pleasure in the interface; I want to not notice it 99% of the time. Granted, since a lot of that is habituation, the design goal for a UI should be Make it unobtrusive. (That's an awfully big word for this document, though.)

#11. Keep it simple.
It would be a bad design document if it didn't mention the "KISS Principle" at least once. However, in terms of user interface design, especially in applications (operating systems are an entirely other matter, kaff kaff), I think it's more important to achieve clarity than simplicity. Complex applications generally do not (and should not) have simple interfaces, but there's nothing saying that a complex interface can't be clear. (Terrible precision of language in this document, don't you think?) Perhaps I'll go into more detail about this sometime, as it's threatening to become an entire article on its own.

#15. Don't be annoying.
This one broke my irony meter and exploded the top off my head, all at the same time. Question for Microsoft: If you know this, why don't you practice it?! It took you bloody damn long enough to shoot the paperclip (and I notice there's still an "Office Assistant" on new copies of Word). Your paradigm is notorious for the "Oh! You said 'Do X,' you must mean 'Do Y'!" problem. In the name of making things easier for novice users -- how many completely novice users of Windows do you think there are left in the world?! -- you've implemented things that you've purposely made difficult to turn off and ignore (Automatic Updates, for example) that drive the rest of us nuts. Perhaps you might want to reconsider your design paradigm in terms of relative annoyingness?

#16. Reduce effort, knowledge, and thought.
While I agree with most of the actual concrete suggestions given as bullet points under this tip, the phrasing of the tip itself makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I am always in favour of increasing the user's knowledge and thought, although I advocate gentle learning curves wherever possible. Engaged, thoughtful users help you create better products in the long run, through constructive feedback. Taken as a semantic entity, this tip is just a little too close to the prevailing Microsoft dumb-down for comfort. Don't dumb down, smarten up!

A Further Terminological Note: In the next document in the series, called "Powerful and Simple," the writer explains "our definition of power" (in application terms) thusly:

An application is powerful when it enables its target users to realize their full potential efficiently. Thus, the ultimate measure of power is productivity, not the number of features. Different users need help in achieving their full potential in different ways.

Someone walked right into a connotational minefield here, mostly dealing with pop psychology and certain social situations. As I remarked earlier, I've been here before.

You can pretty much tell they were itching to use the word "empower" there, but it got scrapped in favour of the quasi-synonymic "enable." That particular word, however, conjures up some pretty scary connotations that are rather apropos to Microsoft itself, that of the codependent relationship. Microsoft depends on its user base, and they depend on it (not too many tech writing jobs using Linux or Mac these days), but the relationship is abusive at best. You see, they'll get you all sorts of cool toys (like that application-by-application volume control everyone's raving about in Vista), but smack you around with an ugly-ass UI full of DRM and phone-home features, and then get in your face about it when you complain -- "Whaddaya gonna do, switch? Yeah, go ahead and try it, bitch."

I'm also bristling a bit at the "need help achieving their full potential" phrasing, since the other place (besides Microsoft design manifestos) I hear that phrase a lot is in dealing with programmes and services for disabled people. Usually the kinds of programmes and services for disabled people where the staff ask their adult clients, "And how are we today?" *golf clap* Nicely done. I'd shudder to think what kind of a picture of Joe and Jane Averageuser this Microserf has in his/her head. And if that doesn't tell you practically everything you need to know about Microsoft's attitude towards UI design, as revealed subliminally (or sub rosa) by its discourse, I can't help you.



________
* Dismantle point-by-point, in the style of adversarial journalist Robert Fisk

In a slashdot posting titled "Hollywood vs. Sealand" on April 2 2007, I:
  - Made a movie proposal,
  - Asserted copyright,
  - Offered to license it,
  - Threatened possible infringement suits if such a movie is made sans license, and
  - Directed anyone wishing to license it to contact me by leaving a message in my journal. B-)

This journal entry is to receive such messages.

Reed and Wright Goes Live: Rustin has managed to get his posters picked up by a major distributor for that kind of thing -- go check out the DIY Manifesto and the US Military Chronology! He's also put up a bunch of new stuff on his website, which looks really cool. If I could link images, I'd show you directly what's on this page, which is a cool watercolour painting of Rustin!

Call Me Bug Barbecue: Starting fairly soon, I'm going to be switching jobs slightly, going from straight technical writing to a combination of technical writing and testing. I guess all those bug reports I've submitted have paid off. I'm actually really happy about this, because I decided a while ago that testing was probably the logical next step in my career.

Coming Attractions and Links and Things: I'm planning on writing a musicological analysis of visual-auditory synaesthesia that I'll be posting here, and I'm also thinking about writing an entry on my blog about television broadcast signal intrusion, called "Nihilists on the Airwaves." (Also, speaking of broadcast signal intrusions real and otherwise, if someone can de-freak me from stumbling onto the "Wyoming Incident" videos, I'd truly appreciate it. Thanks in advance.)

Speaking of videos, I'm truly enjoying some of the stuff that's currently on YouTube, like:

Heck No! (I'll Never Listen to Techno) by Maldroid, because if the robots win, we'll have to listen to techno...

Becoming Insane and Suliman (music only), two tracks from Infected Mushroom's forthcoming album Vicious Delicious. (I really love Infected Mushroom's synths and instrument choices; they have great colours.)

They Don't Do A Lot of Drugs at UWaterloo; They Don't Need To: Speaking of synaesthesia, those of you with the common form of synaesthesia (the letters-and-numbers-are-colours form) should check out the University of Waterloo's (my school!) Synaesthesia Research Group's genetics study. Are you synaesthesiac? Do you have a synaesthesiac family member? Better yet, are there any of you synaesthesiac Slashdotters who've gotten together with another synaesthesiac and had kids?! They're looking for you... I'd sign up because I'm relatively local, but I'm not genetically related to my family, so I don't have any information they'd need. Bah. Oh well, I'll read their papers, although they seem to focus almost exclusively on what they call "digit-colour" synaesthesia (which I suppose is more testable than "sound-colour" synaesthesia). I'm still trying to figure out how digit-colour synaesthetes manage to read without being overwhelmed. I think it would cut down my reading speed. Anybody got any input on that?

I'm migrating to multiply. My nick there is ememalb.

Come say hi.

Multiply has all the stuff slash does, plus a whole lot more. I like it mucho better.

See you there. Or not...your call.

Hey, any of youse guys use minicom?

It's kickin my ass. I've got a cisco 2851 router I'm tryin to configurate on a wee bit.

The baud rate settings are 115200 on the router, and even when I set them to that in minicom it chokes like I'm force-feeding it Anna Nicole's bloated corpse.

Any ideas?

I'm ememalb, who the fuck are you? ;)

Post your multiply usernames here, so we can keep it all in one place.

Unless you don't want to, in which case...ok.

So uh, yeah. It's friday up in dis bizzo once again. Which means, well, not a whole lot, I guess. Still got a few more things around the house to get knocked out, but other than that, we are just biding our time. Paying rent and a mortgage as well as two sets of utility bills is kicking the shit out of my budget. Like Jet Li fighting a 3 year old. Can't wait till the house closes in ATL at the end of this month.

Anyway, this means I'm Captain Lowkey, Defender of the Couch, Freer Of the Beers(TM) for the next few weeks or so. Which kinda sucks, as I'd like to get out and explore the city some. Patience, young Lowkey, patience.

Anyway, how you kids doing today? Hope ya'll have a nice day and a good weekend.

So, in driving around VA, I've determined something.

If you see someone driving like a complete tool, for example, making a right turn across 3 lanes of traffic from the left turn lane...check the plates...more than likely they're from Maryland.

http://www.amazon.com/Sony-KDS-60A2000-Grand-1080p-Projection/dp/B000GZUN9W/sr=8-1/qid=1170866023/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-8620609-6541236?ie=UTF8&s=electronics

Thoughts?

Suppose your house in Atlanta was about to sell at the end of the month.

Suppose you plan on spending a nice chunk of the investment monies on the following things:

1) Two HDTVs. One large screen (50"+)for the living room, one smaller (in the 36-42" range) for the bedroom.

2) One receiver for living room

3) One DVD player for living room

4) wireless speakers for living room

If you were to suppose all these things, what would you get? This is my quandary. I'm not looking for a "dream setup", more like, say you had 6k to get all this stuff.

You might ask, Em, why do you need all this shit? Well, the answer is, my current tv doesn't support HD, it's down in my basement, and I have nothing upstairs in the living room to watch. Plus, TV (mainly movies and sports) is a big event in my house, I'd prefer to get a nice set or two for selfish because I can reasons. Capeesh? ;)

A couple of weeks ago, I got an offer I couldn't refuse. A company wanted to hire me to go work on a technical writing contract here in town -- the site is only about six blocks from my house, although with this Alberta Clipper we've been having lately, I'm still taking the bus.

I tried to talk them into buying Help&Manual, really I did.

But nooo, they had to go with the so-called "industry standard," RoboHelp.

Astute readers will recall that I just had a run-in with RoboHelp, and I actually just bought my own copy about six weeks ago (on 10 December exactly, actually), which set me back a hefty punch-in-the-gut $1300 CDN, accounting for the exchange rate. Ouch.

Today, I went to Adobe to download the demo so I could actually get started writing on the project. Well, guess what. They have a new version out! Six weeks and my copy is already one version behind. Naturally, the good people at Adobe are more than willing to help, by supplying me with an upgrade, for the truly nominal fee of $499 US.

Keep in mind they also didn't think to tell me that there would be a release out within weeks.

Not only that, but in the new version, the demo is broken (unlike how it was in the previous version). You can only create so many help topics, and if you do create a project and then test-compile it, an ugly red notice saying something like "THIS FILE WAS CREATED WITH A DEMO VERSION OF ROBOHELP AND IS FOR EVALUATION PURPOSES ONLY. NOT TO BE USED FOR ANY OTHER PURPOSE" at the bottom of each topic.

Thanks a lot, you chiselling bastards.

Not only that, but the new release seems buggy and slow.

You'd better believe I'm going to be recommending Help&Manual to all my future clients. "You don't really want RoboHelp -- it's a money sink. It's also buggy and slow. People are going to be migrating away from it, most probably"...

...especially if I have anything to say about it.

Well, I waited for 21 years for that game. I woke up yesterday morning at 8:30 with one thought in my head: LET'S GO BEARS!! (clap-clap, clap-clap-clap).

By 9:15 I'm sitting there watching pregame coverage. By noon I'm geeked out of my head...having watched youtube highlights of the Bear's season...ugh. I'm too pumped up.

Head over to my friend's house at 3, with beer, brats, some cheese dip and chips.

At 4:30, the brats are on the grill, I've got a beer in hand, other friends are showing up, it's time to do this.

6:35pm: Kickoff!

WOOOO!!!!

Devin Hester, you da man!!!

OMG Payton threw a pick! This is gonna be a walk!

WOW what a run by Thomas Jones! Great catch Moose!

then the bottom fell out. Where was the vaunted D? Why were they giving such a huge cushion the the Colts receivers? Why the fuck can't you guys stop the run? Holy hell! This is getting annoying.

Well, halftime, we're down by two points, no biggie!

What do you mean the Colts are gonna go on a 942 play drive and score? Come the eff on!

Rex? What was that throw? I realize it's wet, but TJ has been running the ball solid! Turner, are you watching the game you're calling plays for?

DEFENSE WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?

Game over.

Good game, Colts.

My Bears just didn't show up. Everyone will blame Rex, but fuck, the "vaunted" Bears D couldn't make a stop. How many 3rd and 5s, 3rd and 8s did the Colts convert? Christ.

RUN THE BALL, TURNER! It's a fucking monsoon out there!

For all you Rex haters: Homey was scrambling the entire fucking game. The Bears o-line sucked. The Bears D sucked. Special teams, other than the first play of the game, sucked. The turn-overs sucked. The only player who it seems even realized this was the Super Bowl was Thomas Jones.

Everyone else: I'm ashamed to have watched that pitiful effort. You sacked Manning once. One time the entire game. You got ran on (Rhodes should have been the MVP, not Manning)

A huge let-down, to be sure...

Next year: The only player on D that doesn't have a contract through 2008 is Lance Briggs. You might know him as the guy who doesn't get credit for being the bad-ass he is. Urlacher gets all the credit, when play after play after play it's Briggs making the tackle, or busting through the gaps to stop the run, taking on the fullback head on.

I sincerely hope the Bears lock him up for a few more years at least. Next year, we'll get the hardest schedule in the NFC. Which means I don't see a 13-3 season...but the North is weak, especially with Favre coming back for one more year of abuse in Green Bay. We'll make the playoffs, and then it's "all bets are off"

I hate this time of year...nothing til hockey playoffs. :(

Mac:Hi, I'm a mac.
PC:And I'm a pc.

Mac:Hey pc.
PC:Hey mac.

PC:Hey mac, bring out "Teh Ubuntu".
Mac:Shh, "Teh Ubuntu's sleepin"
PC:Well, wake him up.

(Cut to Ubuntu humping pc's leg viciously)
(cut to Mac's mouth gaping wide open)
Mac: Holy cow, you can do that??!?

Ubuntu: HUMPINDALEG, HUMPINDALEG, HUMPINDALEG, HUMPINDALEG

PC: oh boy, that's warm!

Mac: wow.

How about it?

I'm mulling over a few choices...might go with Five Guys burger for lunch. That ish is goot.

You?