Popups From Hell -1

This is is from Windows Explorer in Microsoft Windows XP. I used a right button drag on a mapped drive. I was expecting the options I normally get when I use a right button drag on my local drives but Windows displayed this popup.



So it recognises that I could be wanting to copy or move the folder. But what is a zone? I am a seasoned Windows user and do not know what "zone" means in this context. How much more the use of this term must confuse a less seasoned user.

Rather than presenting the options as I am used to I am now asked a question. So the idioms are inconsistent.

Then I am presented with two buttons; Yes and No.

Who ever thought that Yes and No are the logical possible responses the the question "Do you want to move or copy files from this zone?"?

Its like the silly, nonsensical response we often make when we're asked a question like "Do you want tea or coffee?" and we answer "Yes".

Which button do I click to move the files and which button do I click to copy the files?

So let's itemise the issues in this one little popup:
- Inconsistent idiom for right button drag in Windows Explorer.
- Use of obscure terminology.
- Option labels totally nonsensical when compared with the option selection I need to make.

Oh ... did you notice the banner on the popup? Remember I was using Windows Explorer.

And the icon ... What? Why?

Defaults from Hell - 1

Microsoft Word 2007 - Insert Picture

I create a lot of mockup images in my design process. I insert these into my specification documents. My project folders are structured so that different types of images for different projects are in different folders.

The MS Word Insert Picture function forces me to go to a default folder every time I want to insert an image.

When I am working in an area of a design I tend to use images in a specific folder for a while then later I will use images from a different folder.

I don't mind having to navigate to a specific folder the first time I use an image from that folder. What gets me really hacked off is that the Insert Picture function does not bother to remember where I went the last time because I will probably go there the next time I need an image. I don't mind navigating to a different folder when I start using a different folder. The function makes me navigate from the same starting point every time I want to insert an image.

I don't want to change my default folder, I want to keep my default folder as the overall basket folder for all my projects. The navigation to any one of the image folders is not that onerous by itself. It just gets terribly annoying when I have to do it EVERY SINGLE TIME I GO TO THE SAME FOLDER!!!!!!!

This is not a radical concept ... Corel, for example, have used this approach for years.

Scott Adams (Dilbert)

When I first started hearing these stories [about irrational corporate behavior] I was puzzled, but after careful analysis I have developed a sophisticated theory to explain the existence of this bizarre workplace behavior. People are idiots.

Including me. Everyone is an idiot, not just the people with low SAT scores. The only difference among us is that we're idiots about different things at different times. No matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot.

Heaven helps those who help themselves

No this is not a post about politicians ...

"Heaven helps those who help themselves" is a well-tried maxim, embodying in a small compass the results of vast human experience. The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigour and strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates. Whatever is done for men or classes, to a certain extent takes away the stimulus and necessity of doing for themselves; and where men are subjected to over-guidance and over-government, the inevitable tendency is to render them comparatively helpless.

~ Samuel Smiles ~

Evil People

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ~

Les Paul, 1915 - 2009

It has taken a long time for me to get to this. My life has been very disrupted. Slowly but surely I am putting my life back on track and paying tribute to this great man has been in the back of my head for a long time ...

I have had a push-pull relationship with music for most of my life and have had a hankering to play guitar since high school. I have tried at various times with various levels of determination and many a hard realisation that I have far more love for music than talent for playing music.

In my twenties, round about the mid 1970's, I bought a second hand gold top Gibson Les Paul. I wish I knew then what I know now about guitars. I also wish I had some photographs of that guitar. It seems I might have had a '59. In those days nobody had realised how legendary those guitars were going to be.



That guitar was far more of an instrument than I was able to use but friends who were better musicians were constantly asking to play it or borrow it for gigs.

Then life happened. I became less involved in the music world and I ended up in a tight financial situation where I sold many of my belongings, including the Les Paul, a Vox AC15 amplifier and a Gibson EB2 bass guitar.

It is only many years later as, my love of music has grown and I have also absorbed so much of the lore of music and appreciate the significance of a number of key instruments, that I grasp what I had.



The Gibson Les Paul is one of those key instruments that changed musical history. And Les Paul is one of those key people who changed musical history.



Here are some of the outpouring of tributes that followed his death on 13 August this year.

Rolling Stone magazine

Vanity Fair

Los Angeles Times



Gibson Guitars

Gibson Guitars second article

GuitarNoize

PBS

PBS - Les Paul Career Timeline

And some general information from Wikipedia




Les Paul, the world and music are better for your life.

Marshmallows, Success and the Department of Education

Here's a thought provoking article ...

Around 1970, psychologist Walter Mischel launched a classic experiment. He left a succession of 4-year-olds in a room with a bell and a marshmallow. If they rang the bell, he would come back and they could eat the marshmallow. If, however, they didn't ring the bell and waited for him to come back on his own, they could then have two marshmallows.

In videos of the experiment, you can see the children squirming, kicking, hiding their eyes -- desperately trying to exercise self-control so they can wait and get two marshmallows. Their performance varied widely. Some broke down and rang the bell within a minute. Others lasted 15 minutes.

The children who waited longer went on to get higher SAT scores. They got into better colleges and had, on average, better adult outcomes. The children who rang the bell quickest were more likely to become bullies. They received worse teacher and parental evaluations 10 years later and were more likely to have drug problems at age 32.

The Mischel experiments are worth noting because people in the policy world spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve education, how to reduce poverty, how to make the most of the nation's human capital. But when policymakers address these problems, they come up with structural remedies: reduce class sizes, create more charter schools, increase teacher pay, mandate universal day care and try vouchers.

The results of these structural reforms are almost always disappointingly modest. Yet policymakers rarely ever probe deeper into problems and ask the core questions, such as how do we get people to master the sort of self-control that leads to success? To ask that question is to leave the policymakers' comfort zone -- which is the world of inputs and outputs, appropriations and bureaucratic reform -- and to enter the murky world of psychology and human nature.

Yet the Mischel experiments, along with everyday experience, tell us that self-control is essential. Young people who can delay gratification can sit through sometimes boring classes to get a degree. They can perform rote tasks in order to, say, master a language. They can avoid drugs and alcohol. For people without self-control skills, however, school is a series of failed ordeals. No wonder they drop out. Life is a parade of foolish decisions: teenage pregnancy, drug use, gambling, truancy and crime.

If you're a policymaker and you are not talking about core psychological traits such as delayed gratification skills, then you're just dancing around with proxy issues. The research we do have on delayed gratification tells us that differences in self-control skills are deeply rooted but also malleable. Differences in the ability to focus attention and exercise control emerge very early, perhaps as soon as nine months. But there is no consensus on how much of the ability to exercise self-control is hereditary and how much is environmental.

The ability to delay gratification, like most skills, correlates with socioeconomic status and parenting styles. Children from poorer homes do much worse on delayed gratification tests than children from middle-class homes. That's probably because children from poorer homes are more likely to have their lives disrupted by marital breakdown, violence, moving, etc. They think in the short term because there is no predictable long term.

The good news is that while differences in the ability to delay gratification emerge early and persist, that ability can be improved with conscious effort. Moral lectures don't work. Sheer willpower doesn't seem to work either. The children who resisted eating the marshmallow didn't stare directly at it and exercise iron discipline. On the contrary, they were able to resist their appetites because they were able to think about other things.

What works, says Jonathan Haidt, the author of "The Happiness Hypothesis," is creating stable, predictable environments for children, in which good behavior pays off -- and practice. Young people who are given a series of tests that demand self-control get better at it.

This pattern would be too obvious to mention if it weren't so largely ignored by educators and policymakers. Somehow we've entered a world in which we obsess over structural reforms and standardized tests, but skirt around the moral and psychological traits that are at the heart of actual success. Mischel tried to interest New York schools in programs based on his research. Needless to say, he found almost no takers.

I wonder whether he would find any receptive ears amongst our Department of Basic Education's strategists. Or for that matter within the Department of Social Development.