General

I’ve seen a lot of discussion lately about diversity and inclusion, and rightly so. It’s incredibly important. But there are two points that I want to draw attention to. The first is that language matters. And the second is that we shouldn’t be generalizing about people, based upon either their physical characteristics, or their race, religion, sexual preferences, etc.

Language that singles out people based on these things is regularly called out. But one that’s often missed is age.

2019-08-13

Over the years, I’ve been noticing which apps users love and which ones they don’t like, or even hate. And I’ve decided that one of the biggest indicators of this is about how well they tolerate mistakes by users.

Users tend to learn to use apps in three ways:

• They watch or read some instructional material (this is actually the least common)
• Someone else shows them how to use the app (this is really common)
• They just experiment with the app (this is actually the most common)

How well do your apps allow people to experiment?

2019-08-06

I don’t know if it’s an Australian “thing” but whenever I’m setting up new financial or government accounts, these organizations insist on actually sending things to our street address.

Given how rampant identity theft has become in many places, this is just not sensible.

[caption id=“attachment_5424” align=“alignnone” width=“538”] Awesome image by Mathyas Kurmann[/caption]

Take a look at letterboxes that people have on local streets, and please try to convince me how sending anything there, is in any way safer than sending it to a post office box.

2019-07-31

Three years back, with much fanfare at a partner conference, Microsoft announced the Microsoft Professional Degree program. It was going to be a set of courses that you could take that would lead to one of their professional degrees.

Now here in Australia, you can’t just call something a degree, and I’m guessing that’s the same in the USA, so I wasn’t surprised when I noticed soon after I started with it, that the name had changed to the Microsoft Professional Program (MPP), and they’d dropped the “degree” word.

2019-07-23

I continued to be stunned at how banks don’t get security.

Had a call just now from a sales guy from the my bank. It’s annoying enough that they call at night, but I really don’t like it when they want to confirm who you are before they can talk to you.

Told him, Sorry, can’t do. Have no idea who you are.

Why would I tell personal details to some guy who just calls out of the blue, claiming to be from my bank?

2019-07-16

I’m writing this post more to remind myself next time I run into the same problem, but hopefully it’ll help someone else too.

curl is a useful utility but the Windows version of it certainly has some quirks. Often though, that leads to error messages that aren’t helpful at all.

I kept running into an error where it complained that HTTPS protocol was not supported in libcurl. When I tried HTTP, I saw the same error.

2019-07-09

I’m an unashamed fan of TechSmith and it’s products. In particular, SnagIt and Camtasia.

Whenever I’m asked for a list of products that I wouldn’t want to live without, SnagIt is near the top of that list. I use it all day, every day. I’ve tried a number of screen capture programs over the years, and I’ve watched people struggle to do simple things, just to avoid buying a commercial application. Don’t be that person. Use the right tool.

2019-06-25

For better or worse, I spend a lot of time in hotels, airline flights, dealing with many suppliers, etc. What’s become really common now, is that a few days later, they’re sending me a survey asking me how they did.

Now I’m sure that they’re just trying to follow some best practice to make sure they’re delivering what was expected, but lately, I’m finding many of the surveys really quite annoying. I’d like to suggest some simple rules to avoid that.

2019-06-11

In a previous post, I discussed the way that adjectives have been replacing adverbs, and pondered about what had happened to “ly”. For example:

Drive Safe

rather than:

Drive Safely

I had quite a bit of feedback on this, both on and offline. Language discussions are always busy. But another similar trend came up in a discussion that I recently took part in.

A friend asked that if you used the term:

2019-06-04

In recent years, there’s an odd trend that I’ve been noticing. Adverbs seem to be getting replaced by adjectives, and at an increasingly fast rate. I see signs that say things like this:

Drive Safe

Now when I was at school, we’d have been given a hard time for writing that. We’d have been told in no uncertain terms that it should have been:

Drive Safely

I was trying to work out if it was more of a US-based thing. I see it far more often in US-based writing, yet it’s also happening in the UK, Australia, and others as well.

2019-05-28