- Very short stories
- “We’ll be brief: Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words (‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’) and is said to have called it his best work. So we asked sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers from the realms of books, TV, movies, and games to take a shot themselves.”
- “How I Blew My Google Interview”
- “Another form of web literature is emerging: stories of job applicants rejected by Google (GOOG). Google makes all applicants sign NDAs, of course — can’t have future applicants boning up! — but unlike the standard Googleplex NDAs, these apparently don’t bar tales of office furnishings, candy banquets, and interrogators who look like Chewbacca.”
- Revisiting “Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering”
- “Simply reciting the various facts and fallacies feels like a zen koan to software engineering. Even without any of the background discussion and explanation in the book, it’s therapeutic to ponder the brief one sentence summaries presented in the table of contents.”
- Ron Paul’s grassroots graphics movement
- “What is intriguing about this fervent grassroots response is how graphic styles designed to appeal to a youthful constituency have been built around Representative Paul’s grandfatherly appearance. Even some of the stylized poster portraits look more like those found on souvenir T-shirts commemorating someone’s retirement, or ‘the world’s best dad,’ than a political icon. Nonetheless the passion behind such an outpouring of good, bad and kitschy art and design cannot be ignored. So I tracked down a few of the artists and asked them to explain their work.”
- Visualizing Fitts’s Law
- “I thought it would be nice to go over Fitts’s Law, a staple in the HCI diet, with a few visuals to explain both the concept and why it’s ideas are a bit more complicated than most would have you believe…The challenge of software application design is so complex and filled with so many variables, that blanket solutions derived from Fitts’s Law should be used cautiously.”
- Faces in Places
- A photographic collection of faces found in everyday places.
- Thingology wonders why Getting Real and other Lulu books aren’t found in libraries
- “Lulu’s most popular book, something about ecommerce, is held by NO library in WorldCat. The second, How to Become an Alpha Male, is held by just two. Let’s be clear, Lulu publishes a lot of crap! But it’s not all crap. And even if it were, publishers like Lulu represent a significant event in the history of publishing — an event libraries should be trying to capture. Lulu isn’t some obscure novelty — it already gets twice the web traffic of HarperCollins.”
- Tactile keys for the iPhone
- “My Touch Keys is a plastic shield that attaches to the front of your iPhone using static cling. The iPhone’s touch screen QWERTY keyboard keys are then outlined in plastic ‘dimples’ – allowing you to feel exactly where your fingers should be.”
- Any creative art is all about ruthless editing
- “Discerning what works from what doesn’t in the context of your own project is a tricky task. It’s one thing to say ‘if you don’t need it, get rid of it’ and quite another to realize what it means for your finished project to need or not need something, let alone having the balls to cut up your work.”
- Top floor extended on Eiffel Tower
- “In celebration of the 120th birthday of the Eiffel Tower, the top floor is being extended by bolting a new temporary structure onto it that will allow the top floor to accomodate a larger number of visitors.” Update: Charles Bremner reports the tale is false: “It was just a publicity stunt but it does offer a nice lesson in the power of the internet to disseminate nonsense and the danger that this poses for traditional media.” [tx DG]
- Adobe Photoshop Express
- Adobe launches free online photo editor.
Braxton Beyer
on 28 Mar 08It’s seems that Fitt’s Law is not being applied on the Basecamp login page. The ‘remember me’ checkbox does not have a label which makes the target much smaller.
Anonymous Coward
on 28 Mar 08ugh, teacher’s pet.
mkb
on 28 Mar 08My google interview didn’t require an NDA, but I never made it into the office. They’re very keen on memorizing algorithmic textbook stuff. If you pride yourself on being able to find stuff in reference really fast, don’t bother.
Dan Gebhardt
on 28 Mar 08The Eiffel Tower story is actually false. It was actually a publicity stunt by a Paris design firm that even got picked up by the New York Times as a true story.
Nathan Clark
on 28 Mar 08According to Techcrunch, Amazon’s going to stop selling Lulu books. Strange that they’d avoid selling a popular work done by a company invested in by their founder.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/r/Techcrunch/3/259439408/
john
on 28 Mar 08Loved the very short stories, thanks for the link.
“With bloody hands, I say good-bye.” - Frank Miller
Loved that one.
Brenton
on 28 Mar 08Re: Fitt’s Law
You also must take into consideration through what means the user is interacting. In a tablet/touch environment, the concept of infinite edges no longer applies. Quite the contrary in fact – some of the most difficult elements to hit on a tablet are at the screen edges. At the edges of the screen, electromagnetic radiation interferes with your ability to point accurately. The next time you see a Tablet PC, hold the pen near the edge of the screen. The cursor will oscillate back and forth. Furthermore, many tablets run right up to the edge of the screen and then stop. There’s not much sensitivity past the edge of the display, so there’s nothing to stop you from moving past the bounds of the monitor and completely missing the ‘infinite width’ that a mouse could achieve.
Dominic
on 28 Mar 08There was an article in the New Yorker last month about 6-word stories.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/02/25/080225ta_talk_widdicombe
Dave
on 28 Mar 08ON RON PAUL: It’s interesting to see how wide-spread and viral his campaign became. I live in a small town in Utah, so I was surprised when handmade Ron Paul banners hung consistently for a period of about 4 month from all of our local overpasses. It’s pretty cool if you ask me.
jc
on 29 Mar 08Article illustrates Hemingway’s genius, nothing more.
Ernest
on 01 Apr 08blah. you are so smart to point out Hemingway.
As the man said himself, “Develop a built-in bullshit detector.”
Do you guys even read Hemingway? Based on some of your blogging…. I’d guess not.
Anyone want to go fishing?
This discussion is closed.