dsandler.org/wp

Joel: The
Iceberg Secret, Revealed. Summary: Tune your presentations to
account for non-programmer distortion; that is, if your audience will
pay disproportionate attention to the UI chrome, then scale
back (or up) the chrome to better convey the state of the entire
software project.

There’s also a little SAPE case
study in there, though Joel doesn’t know it:

“Our miserable sales person agreed to a fixed price contract to build
what was basically unspecified, and the customer’s lawyers were sharp
enough to get a clause in the contract that they don’t have to pay us
until ‘acceptance by customer,’ so we had to put a team of nine
developers on their project for two years and only got paid $800.”

Stuck in traffic….

A pretty good list of pop-up ad opt-out
pages.

Chris just got through telling me about his (latest) Byrne concert
experience. Besides being five feet from D.B. (“We could smell
the man!”), he was sure to also mention the appearance of the Extra Action Marching Band.

The last major layout modification before I redesign in strict CSS2:
entries from previous days show up with a light grey background
(scroll down and see).

Soon, I’ll move on to CSS-as-layout instead of merely CSS-as-style (as
it’s used here). I’m slightly trepidated:

“You may want to go get drunk for a while, then come back and try this
again.”

Oh … oh God … I might be … part of the Dido
generation.

I love grey days. No, no, wait, let me explain.

I like they way grey days look. The whole world is subject to
some kind of massive lens filter. You can’t escape the color shift, in
the same way you can’t escape pouring rain. All you can do is appreciate
Nature’s subtle reminder that H. sapiens does not have supreme
control of its environment.

I think part of my reaction to grey days may also relate to the way
everyone else is so happy on bright days. I mean, I enjoy
sunshine, certainly in the summer — but something tells me I’m not
getting the same Jor-El effect that everyone else is.