Neblog

A public service announcement, and experiment with the human psyche. I repeat: Do not click the link!

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My friend and colleague Kevin Powick recently posted a help wanted ad for consulting work: 30-40 hours per week at $35/hour over a period of about six months. One way to look at this is that for someone who doesn’t have a job that’s over $25,000 that they didn’t have before. Some people who charge more for their services consider this to be an indignant slap. I’m fascinated by the thought processes on both sides.

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On a somber note, we all know what a living will is, or a last will for distributing our worldly goods, but how many people have a will that helps those who come into our office to pick up the pieces when we’re gone?

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I need to set this up briefly. I don’t just hang around in MV forums, I hang around in a lot of different forums. My latest venture was to the usenet forum microsoft.public.internetexplorer.general where people go to get advice with problems with IE. The mentality of the people providing responses there has just floored me. It makes me take a step back and consider this monster that we’ve all created called information technology - a monster that expects grandma to read manuals.

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In my last blog entry I mentioned a couple tools I use for tracking time. Today a forum posting mentioned the difficulty of doing accurate project estimates. I’ve made mistakes on both sides of the estimation game, and documented a couple of them here. I’ve been doing this for years but I confess I still need to work on some of these points.

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I haven’t written many blog entries lately. I keep saving up material that I think would be interesting but somehow I never get to publishing it. Right now I’m looking at about 25 unpublished blog drafts, most of which will never get published. This is just an FYI that I intend to start publishing on a fairly regular basis. Rather than full articles I will post mostly one-of little bits of insight that I think will help people with their development. Please let me know if you prefer frequent tidbits or less frequent indepth explanations and commentary. I’m sure I’ll sprinkle in some of those now and then too.

On another blog I read which focuses on Excel, the author is wondering whether he should keep the Archives sidebar (to the right) with the list of links by Month/Year. I’m wondering about that too.

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I’m highly amused at attempts I’ve seen in public forums to munge email addresses.

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If you’ve subscribed to this blog you probably received some automatic pings recently that changes have been made.

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My first book, Using DesignBais, will be available soon. Here’s the current status. Comments and suggestions welcome.

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