Back to School

This week, I saw "Back to School" specials on tires, clothes dryers and truckloads of things that have nothing to do with going, or sending someone, back to school. Okay, maybe tires. If my daughter was going off to some faraway college in a shaky old car, I'm sure I'd want her to do it on new steel-belted radial tires. But not to pick on tire dealers, these guys are exceptionally ruthless. They are out there for every holiday. July 4th, Memorial Day, Veteran's Day, even: "Hey, grandpa! Thanks for taking that bullet on Iwo Jima. We got you a set of snow tires for the Studebaker!" But a new washer-dryer?

Having said all of that, have you checked your pages for Back To School? Are you still touting Fall, 2007 or Summer Session?

Peanut and Jocko showed up every week when I was a kid, promising a future where computers made our lives easier. Computers, they told us, would lead us away from drudgery, from repetitive tasks, from having to remember things. And maybe one day this will finally filter down to Web development in a way that automates dealing with expired information. Easily, I mean. We can do it now, with the application of enough time, talent and money. But why can't we just highlight a paragraph in Dreamweaver and set it to expire on the umpteenth of October?

Check the page on October 7th, and the information would be there. Show up on October 20th and it would be gone, with no further attention from the developer. It could be great. It could also be awful, when someone edits out the </expire> tag and the entire page from the <expire="10/14/2008"> tag on just… evaporates.

See, the thing about automating various events is that computers will always do only exactly what you tell them to do, and not necessarily what you want or what you mean. Computers won't know when special circumstances should change the rules you have carefully crafted. Computers won't know or care. They'll just do what you've told them to do.

I used to leave my computer On all of the time. Research (that's pronounced anecdotal evidence) of the day said that they didn't use much electricity keeping everything spinning and warm, especially if the monitor turned itself off when not in use. But when Chancellor Perlman said to turn 'em off, I got religion. My computer now turns itself on and off every week day. It comes on at 7:28am, when I'm usually taking off my jacket, or putting away my lunch for the day or something similar. And it shuts down every afternoon at a quarter to 5:00pm. It sleeps all day Saturday and Sunday. It's a great time and I guess a great money-saver. But it's not (yet) smart enough to know about Monday holidays.

Sometimes I wonder about my poor, lonesome computer. All alone in a darkened room, obediently waking up to tackle the days chores. Anxious, maybe. Like a little puppy. All alone in a darkened room until finally, in frustration, it shuts itself off in the afternoon, to try again in the morning.

I don't mind a macro or two. I love keyboard shortcuts that can save me from drilling down into a menu or three. And a simple macro that kicks off a repetitive action or chaining together something like "Save As…" and moving the file to the Desktop, and maybe even how to name the resulting file. That's fine. I'm there when that's all happening. I can control it. I even bypass it during special circumstances and "Save As…" my file somewhere else, if I need to.

I'm looking over my pages this week, to make sure they are still up to date. But I'm taking Peanut and Jocko at their word, and waiting for the day when computers make our lives easier.

Little Changes Make a Big Difference

If we learned anything about the recent Olympics, it's that just a little extra effort pays off. When Phelps scored his sixth (or was it the seventh? ninth? umpteenth?) gold medal, he was .01 seconds faster than the anonymous swimmer who earned silver.

Point-zero-one. Think about that, for a moment. Twelve or fifteen years of training, study, practice, doing without pizza and french fries. And the difference was only point-zero-one? If you took home the silver that night, how could you live with yourself? If you had eaten one more Wheatie that morning, it may have made all the difference.

Much of Life works like this. Especially in athletics, but it shows up in many other areas, and you can be sure that in another five hundred words I'm going to try to bend it around to Web work, too, right? You betcha!

Think about money, for a moment. You earn $100 and you spend $98. You can do that for the rest of your life. But if you earn $100 and spend $100, or worse, earn $100 and spend $101, you will be miserable in just a few years, and potentially for the rest of your life. All for the difference of only two or three dollars a month.

Eating is the same as money, really. Take in a hundred calories and expend a hundred calories and you can wear the clothes you wore to prom for the rest of your life. But if you eat a hundred calories and only manage to burn 98, eventually you will end up looking like, well, me. Think of the implications of that, for a moment.

From the Mark Hiatt Big Book of Business Clichés: "There is never time to do it right, but there is always time to do it over".

We have to start taking this one back, folks. Spell check your pages. Validate your markup. Have someone else read your new page to make sure it says what you think it says. These are each little things. Collectively, they may add another three minutes to the time it takes you to build a Web page. But the payoff is that you soon gain a reputation for building dependably great Web pages.

There are many worse reputations to have, kids.

A nationally-famous Web site made fun of some of our pages, recently. Deservedly, which really stung. The author probably knew the pages were, um, bad, on delivery. Imagine needing Flash to navigate a page. Now imagine needing to click on moving links to get from page to page. See what I mean? Someone, somewhere, and probably several people, should have caught this one early. "Uh, that's a bad idea" is all it would have taken. But the pages went live and some measure of our reputation has been tarnished. But I know one thing:

It won't happen to me.

I build compliant pages within the approved Template. I validate the markup and I check my speeling. I try to have someone else look it over, preferably someone unfamiliar with the material and someone who does not have a connection with it. If I were making pages for Athletics, I would not ask a coach to look over my pages, for example. If I worked in training, and hey, I do, I would not ask another trainer to read my work. Get a civilian, and then listen to how they respond.

Maybe one day I will be recognized for my work. Maybe one day someone will say, "Hey, Mark? Thanks for keeping us out of the papers for having bad pages" but even if no one ever does, as the saying goes, Virtue is its Own Reward.

It's a little extra effort. I can do a little extra effort to make sure I don't embarrass myself and my peers. Maybe one day I'll win a gold medal, too.

The New Guy

We got a New Guy this week. Our guy really is a guy, Dan Noennig, but that's not important. It could just as easily have been a New Gal and it wouldn't change things.

But you know how I'm really big on checkpoints, those "From here on, it'll be different" moments that we use to measure our progress, or at least our journey. This was of course one of those. But it is a good time to take stock, too. What are we doing and why, and how?

I have never learned so much as when I sat down to teach someone something. It really is the best motivator to learn that I have ever encountered. Someone, somewhere, will ask the Incredible Question and expect me to have an answer. I hate to disappoint people, so I always try to give them one. Taking someone around to meet all the new people they will be working with is another opportunity for that. "We do this, then we do that." "Really? Why do we do that last?" Geeze, I dunno. We've always done it that way.

But is it really the best way?

Back in the era of the Steam Powered Computer, I was a mainframe computer operator. Everything I was required to do came out of a Job Book. Tonight is Job Cost Accounting night, so we turn to that page. It says mount this tape on that tape drive, put this kind of paper into the printer and then at the console type >> GO JCA. Very detailed. But I was always troubled by one part. I was called upon to print a report on three-part NCR (No Carbon Required) paper, which was not known for its high print quality. But so far, so good. The instructions further called upon me to burst and decollate the three copies of this report, to put the first-generation report here, the second-generation report there, and to throw away the last copy. This job had been run in exactly this way for at least three years before I showed up.

I asked why we couldn't just print that report on two-part paper, which was cheaper and much better quality and would take less time in post-printing processing. You would have thought I was bringing them Fire.

I am not saying I am some kind of a genius. I'm just saying there is value in seeing things through new eyes. Scott Adams has made a fortune poking fun at all of the institutionalized inefficiencies in American work life. This was just one of those.

At one time, I'm sure, there were supposed to be three people who got that report. Maybe one of them was promoted, or fired, or was moved from one project to another. For whatever reason, the third person no longer needed to get a report every week of how the business was doing, and they stopped coming to get the printed report when their need for it ended—but the word never got to the machine room. After a few weeks of the third copy going uncollected, the word got back to the job book that solved the problem the computer operators had: throw away the back copy. But that's not a very Big Picture view of the situation as a whole.

I was amazed. They didn't even shred the third copy. It was routinely thrown away for three years, wasting paper, time, ink, printer hours and some measure of the environment, and it turns out exposing the company to all kinds of risks, should a competitor happen by to do a little dumpster-diving. They'd never given it any thought.

I am sure that there are Stoopuhd Things that we do here every week, but that we've become accustomed to. We did it like this last semester. We did it like this last year. We got from last year and last semester to here, so it must be okay, right? Maybe. Probably, even. But it's good to have someone check your work. It's good to have someone question your assumptions, now and then.

We got a New Guy this week. I hope you get one soon, too.

The New Computer Blues

I find myself lately thinking about getting a new computer. Again.


I am not interested in getting into a religious argument, here, about Apple Macintosh versus Microsoft Windows PCs. The two are much more alike than they are different, by now. And make no mistake, it really is a religion with some people. At various times, I have had a Mac desktop and Windows laptop, or one kind of computer at work and another at home. It really is up to you and there is little that you can do with one that you cannot also do with the other, no matter what the brand name. At some point you, too, will start to think it's time for a new computer. Here are some other things to think about when that day finally comes.


See, there are struggles ahead. The path is fraught with terrors that survive long after that new-computer smell has abated. For the last few years, all of my work has been on this computer. All of my work is in this computer. Every computer today is easily customized, personalized, to your own liking. Out of the box, most Macs have the main programs they run visible on the bottom of the screen. Me? I have mine over on the left side. Why? Because I like it that way, and because I can. If I get a new computer, I will need to spend some measure of time fiddling with it so that I can operate it without thinking too much about what I am doing.

I am going to have to move that bar of programs again. It's going to take some time, and I may have to go looking for help as I try to remember how it was done, years ago. If not for the bar, then for any of dozens of other tweaks I have performed over the years. Carried to an extreme, there are utility programs that will re-map keyboard shortcuts and automator doo-hickeys that will fire off various scripts and jobs at various times. You can "build" a computer today that is so personalized that you may be the only person who can use it.

Again, you can do all of this with PCs and Macs and probably to some degree with Linux computers, too. And once you get the computer set up to your liking, you then have to mess with all of your programs. Set aside even more time to get your word processor tuned-up the way you like. Plan on a few minutes to get your Web browser settled-in. Each program today seems to feature a Preferences section where you can choose a favorite font or color or size of type, or how things will print. All of that will have to be moved to, or replicated on, the new machine. Got a custom dictionary? An address book? Everything must go!

And then of course, there is the work. The whole reason for all of this exercise. Each of the files you have so lovingly hand-crafted since your last upgrade needs to be moved from its home in the dusty old computer to the new computer of your dreams. You need to be able to get into all of your old Web sites. You need to be able to get into all of your old word processing documents. You need to be able to get into all of your old calendars.

The result of all of this effort is that as our careers age, we tend to make both our computers and our programs ever more personalized, and we tend to make increasing use of more programs, resulting in settings files and data files that need to be transported. Any computer available today is going to be better than any computer you could get three years ago, but you have to be willing to cross off a whole day or more, it seems, to begin to use that new speed, that bigger monitor, etc.

Maybe this is A Good Thing. Maybe it puts the brakes on upgrading every six months or every year. I know I am not looking forward to the move. I am looking forward to a newer computer, but I don't relish the process of moving everything over so I can get to work. As a kid, we moved a lot and every time something got lost and something got broken. Today, with new computers, it's exactly the same.