bouncingboomergirlgeek: fyi & fwiw

Slow Dancing in the Fast Lane While Loving XP

I am an early adapter and a quick shifter -- except when I'm so the opposite. And changing my OS or my CPU has always been in the "aww, do I hafta?" column for me, although I do succumb eventually.

My slow-mo switching is not only about the cost, but also about the disruption of deeply-etched routines. I don't want to take time to burn in a bunch of new menus and moves. My eyes and hands already know what to do without thinking twice. So when it comes to my daily work life, I'd rather be extra-adept at an old routine, if it still gets a good job done, rather than learn a new one. It gives a nice illusion of maximum ease and maximum speed.

The mental sense of hunt and peck involved in a new OS or a new GUI puts all kinds of kinks in the seamless flow I get from my old faves. Just call me the Legacy Lady.

I am so hard-over about this, that when brainstorming drafts and sketches in "Back of the Napkin" mode, I still open my older versions of Word and PowerPoint. It is so much more faster and fluid for me than squinting at menus in their '07 equivalents.

In short, I am the kind of user I am sure they love to hate in Redmond.

When My DVR Said Delete or Die

Fresh from the Things They Don't Tell You Until It's Too Late Department:  Last night I was forced to permit a complete delete of every one of the 50* shows waiting in line on my DVR (a VIP622 from Dish Network). What's worse, in the end, I had to pull the trigger personally.

The system appeared to give me no choice and no hope, no invitation to call for possible help. The only options were to click "Delete Now" or leave it locked up. Nonetheless I hopped online and then phoned Dish before I could bring myself to push that big orange button.

Now In the hope you will be spared the same wasted 90 minutes, I will give you both the short story and the long one, then hope some web spider finds it before this hits another customer.

Punchline first: If you see a blue screen of death like the one at left with the warning code 760 (click on image) whatever you have saved on your Dish DVR is probably toast. Hasta la bye bye.  But if you hope for a prayer of saving your shows, read on past the jump. Perhaps one of the tips to follow (including what "soft reboot" means) will do more for you than they did for me.

I just wish I could say I had as happy ending as did some of the folks who were giving me tips. Instead, around midnight, all my neighbors probably heard me say "aaaaaaaaaaargh!" This was not just because I could not stop the loss of saved shows (some of which were kept for work). I was also kicking myself almost as hard as I wanted to kick the DVR since I did not heed the warning signals soon enough.

Bits & Bytes from the Front of My Brain

Hot out of my InBox and my RSS feeds, some potentially interesting snips crossed my path this week:

• WallStats site is "reborn"
  Jess Bachman, one of my favorite info-artists, has changed the whole look of his blog and web site. Page and web designers will enjoy this posting with his before and after pics, along with  detail about the reasoning behind his new format. (Looks to me like he's been spending time around the work of Steve (Don't Make Me Think) Krug.) While you are at the WallStats site, you might also enjoy his latest, a lightening-fast-forward video replay of how he built this one poster frame by frame:
  
     Flowcapping: Golden Parachutes
     from Jess Bachman on Vimeo. 

• Speaking of favorite info-artists, Jessica Hagy (Indexed) made me laugh again today:

Genes or grades. Or grades of genes.
Debate away.

An Emerging Threat to Cloud Computing?

I recently wrote about server-based "cloud" computing and its potential to help volunteer groups synchronize internally with a level of elegant ease that does not depend on sharing specific pieces of software or machines. I also noted that despite these benefits, it might take awhile to get an assortment of users to converge on a single online platform, because the expertise of individual members varies widely and they may be wedded to old routines that are hard to change.

Nonetheless I was optimistic that many everyday users would soon be converging online to take care of everyday business. It simply makes too much sense not to do it.

Shortly after that post, John Dvorak on Cranky Geeks reminded me of a different threat to the spread of cloud computing and Web 2.0 -- metered bandwidth.

Hands Across the Clouds

(click on image to see full size)

I have been exploring server-based apps online the last few months, trying to help an offline group with 100+ members develop a platform for sharing news and schedules. As with just about any volunteer entity, there is, to put it politely, a wide range of computer comfort among its members.

On one side there are the fast adapters who are quick to learn new things and find it fun to do so. In the middle, there are the semi-techs, or later bloomers, who may know the basics of a few favorite functions such as email and word processing, but not a whole lot more. On the other end of the spectrum are the semi-Luddites with high computer anxiety who mouse around reluctantly.

And the icing on this layer cake is that all of them use an assortment of software and CPUs, old and new.

In short, it's an IT management nightmare to get them all on the same page doing similar things online at a similar time. What seems like the simplest instructions aren't so simple at all for those who are flying blind and clicking by rote without much of a mental paradigm.

If they all stuck with their own applications and their old computing habits, supporting them all would become more than a full time job. That's tough for any entity run by volunteers for free.

New & Neat, No.2

My "New & Neat" Nominee this week is Clip2Net, a (free) little Windows utility I seem to be using constantly.

Clip2Net does one simple thing: screenshots. But it does it with such quick, fluid ease, I find myself getting much more visual in everything I write because what used to take a half dozen steps to snip, save and share now takes only two or three moves from me. It's a dream date for visual thinkers who like to show as much as tell.

Clip2Net does two things: (a) it turns your cursor into a temporary marquee to grab any part of what you see on screen and (b) saves that image to clipboard or disk or to a private online bin with its own URL that you can share anywhere. If you register your copy you also get control panel management of all your uploads, including a download counter and a generous hunk of storage space. You can also tag your uploads for how long you wish to keep them.

Consider the effect of simply putting the C2N logo at the head of this post. You instantly see if you already know what I'm talking about, and if so, you keep surfing. Or you have your interest piqued and decide to keep reading. So you, the viewer, can maximize the ROI on your time, while I, the author, can add visual impact, and the developers of C2N can reap more eyeballs if you decide to use it too.

That's the kind of thing I am talking about when I mention the "Win-Win Web" which is what all of Web 2.0 is rapidly coming to mean to me. But more about that in the next post and back to this handy little utility. Read on to find out more about what Clip2Net.can do.

1.2 Yahoo Buried My Arrows

from the cranky girlgeek dept./ theme: useability

Some brains, like mine, are especially sensitive to the perception of extra effort around small things such as pointing and clicking. In a hyperspeedy world, we even hate wasting nanos of time. When we sit at our screens creating things, the difference in one extra click, or one extra glance, is not insignificant.

So here's my latest beef in the ease of use department: Yahoo Mail  recently changed the menus in the toolbar of the online composing editor to make one pivotal move more cumbersome. It used to be the html editor had a 1-push button for indents; now it has a drop-down menu in which indent is stacked above outdent. (Follow the story jump to see more screen shots.)

This may sound less than trivial, but it's not if your eye-to-hand auto-routines work like mine.

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