Category: Computer Geekiness

Happy 10th Anniversary to this Weblog!

Published on by Andy Affleck

Wow… ten years ago this month I started jotting down interesting things I wanted to share on my website. I just remember seeing some stuff I wanted to remember and thought it would be interesting to put them on my website as a sort of public journal. I don’t know where I got the idea or why but I did. Granted, my second entry was four months later or so but, hey, it started in November 1994 (see the link to the archives on the sidebar). So, happy 10th anniversary to my blog!

I recently saw one of those memes go around the net which asks you to jot what your life was like 10 and 5 years ago and where you think it will be in 5 and 10 years. So, this is a good place to do that.

Ten Years Ago: In the fall of 1994 I was in “dating retirement” taking a break from things to grow up a bit and trying to figure my life out. Shortly afterwards (the following spring) I met Ann and began applying to graduate schools so my work on my life at that point paid off quite nicely.

Five Years Ago: In the fall of 1999, Ann and I had been married six months and she was in her second trimester with Jack. I had a good job at WebCT (which was still Universal Learning Technology at the time) and things were looking up. The dot com bubble burst was still a ways off.

Five Years From Now: I know I want to do a lot more writing so by 5 years from now so I hope to be published and starting to make a real go at writing. In addition, I want to get back to doing more teaching and more lecturing/seminars than I am today.

Ten Years From Now: Jack will be a teenager so I just hope that I survive the experience.

User Memory Effect

Published on by Andy Affleck

In Information Is Not Knowledge comes the post So true it hurts… which describes a story of a blind dog that will, years after running into some object, always moves around that spot when running. He’s memorized the landscape in his mind and always moves around objects, even if they are long gone. The story is drawn into a parallel with users working with computers and echoes everything I have experienced in all of my years in technical support.

I often find myself getting frustrated with my wife when I am showing her how to do things on her computer. She never uses keyboard shortcuts, if I ask her to go look at a particular menu, she has to read left-to-right across the menu bar to find it (even though “Window[s],” say, is always right near the far right end), she has a million sticky notes on her desktop when we have a perfectly good shared calendar/to-do list in iCal and shared address book in Address Book, and so forth. Of course, she’s learned how to do things and she gets things done. It’s perfectly fine. My problem is that I am never satisfied with learning one and only one way to do things. Once I know how to accomplish something on the computer, I immediately ask how I can do it faster. Is there a keyboard shortcut? Can I create a macro? Can I write an AppleScript? I realize that I am the exception, not the rule.

That, and I’m a big pain in the ass. Ask my wife.