The two failure modes for smart people who are afraid of confronting failure is to either consistently take on low risk/low reward tasks or high risk/high reward tasks.

The low risk/low reward route is well recognized. Smart people who are accustomed to and depend on praise will consistently perform well below their level such that they are guaranteed success. The high risk/high reward phenomena is one I have seen less talked about.

When the risk is high, failure is expected and can be safely blamed on chance circumstances and the nature of the task. In the meantime, the rare success can be trumpeted as a mark of true skill. After realizing this, cases of when this occurs become obvious. Smart people will often deliberately up the ante and multiply contingencies upon contingencies and then when they fail, the excuse is “at least I tried”.

The true mark of talent is to perform difficult things consistently and without drama.

Why is universal undo supported by so few text editors? When I close a file, the text editor erases my entire undo history. Being able to undo a file all the way to the very first keystroke I typed in would be a really compelling feature to me.

In fact, what I want source control to be still is a giant unified universal undo for my project. Don’t bother me with releases and versioning, just log my actions on a per keystroke level and let me revert back to the second before I fucked up.

I understand the technical challenges of implementing this and how more formal version control scales better to more complex projects but I still crave the ability to mark a folder as being under universal undo with a super lightweight mechanism.

aTheist = not believing in Gods, ie: Jehovah, Allah, Vishnu
atheist = not believing in gods, invisible men who we need to be looking down at us for our actions to make sense.

Christians have atheists pegged pretty well. They’re rightfully terrified of them because atheists are pretty scary people. They make the mistake of not realizing that most people who claim to be atheists are really aTheists.

Is aTheism a stable state though? The mental gymnastics that keep Christians from turning aTheist are the same ones that stop an aTheist from becoming atheist.

Just a note on changes in Rails 2.0 which messes up a couple of tutorials on getting SWFUpload working with restful authentication.

The gist of it is that Flash cannot send cookie data so if you’re using a cookie based authentication mechanism, it will fail. The solution is to insert the session id into the query string and then hack CGI::Session to set the session id. A lot of tutorials have you insert this snippet into either environment.rb or lib/ but this no longer works with Rails 2.0+. Instead, you need to put it in the config/initializers folder.

Knowing that would have saved me about 5 hours worth of frustration.

How do we apply HCI and UCD processes to blogging?

Faceted blogging was a HCI inspired idea, what else?

Would personas help?

Like everything else, does understanding follow a long tail model? The first 90% of stuff is easy to understand and then ever increasing understanding is increasingly hard to comprehend?

Forward motion is important psychlogically. It’s been incredibly hard getting forward motion for this blog as of late. I have half a dozen unfinished posts sitting on my harddrive. Is the lack of an audience a problem? Does lack of an audience cause the elastic user problem?

Idea: apply hci principles to blogging and come up with personas.

Say your schtick is ideas. Where would you best be served putting your efforts? Every org has a rate at which good ideas can spread. This is slower at large companies to prevent information overload. What impact does this have on an ideas person?

<rant>

My mother had to match my clothes when I was a kid, and even then, she was only marginally successful. I would still somehow manage to slip out the door wearing nothing but a bright red T-shirt and oversized Power Rangers boxer shorts. My problem was that I loved so many things, and so many colors, that I wanted to wear all of them, all the time.

I have read of many graphic designers who mix with a color palette before making a brand. I believe the people behind Pierce Transit’s “look” were just the sort of designers. There is no problem with that, but I’m afraid that those who dressed up Tacoma, Washington’s buses did so like a 3rd grader with a low attention span.

(more…)

Taste is difficult to blog about because any honest discussion of taste must eventually touch on the insinuation that you, the reader, is lacking it in some important dimension.