I called someone in the US and he wasn’t at his desk; the system helpfully informed me that the guy was not available but that I could
…please leave a message – or, during business hours, press zero for assistance.
It was during business hours.
I pressed zero.
The system cheerfully told me:
Please hold! Someone will be with you shortly!
It was, technically, right. Quite shortly afterward, a nice woman picked up and I told her who I needed to talk to. She said:
All I can do is transfer you to his line, sir.
Which is exactly where I came from.
Whoever designed this flow spared no effort to integrate humans and machines into a single loop of helpless helpfulness. Or is it helpful helplessness?…
I found this setup in an office building. Ignore the shoddy execution of the cable conduit below, but ask yourself, what was this electrician thinking, when he mounted the power strip in this specific position above the conduit?!
So I was delighted to see 
As someone who spent a large chunk of lifetime working on improving knowledge worker effectiveness, especially around computer mediated communication and collaboration, I can barely contain my excitement. I’ve just sat through the lengthy video of yesterday’s unveiling of Google Wave in the I/O developer conference. Not only have the good folks at Google integrated the most central processes of Computer Supported Collaborative Work – Email, IM, Shared document editing, Discussion boards, and more – into a single tool; but they’ve upgraded their underlying paradigms – which had changed very little in decades – into a dynamic, vibrant usage model that takes advantage of the latest Web 2.0 concepts (and then some).
And guess what? It looks like it’s gonna be a good move in many ways. The “what can you possibly say in 140 characters” objection I’ve already taken care of when I became active on Facebook; The tools available, for the PC and for my mobile device, look excellent; many of my friends are already up there; and the interlinking of tweets, blog posts, facebook updates and even full length articles on my web site looks natural and promising.
Well, it would have been, if the designer had been thinking. You can see the problem in the next photo: most grounded mains plugs have the cable coming out the side – and this means the second socket in this panel is obstructed by this cable. All it would take to fix this is to build the panel the other way around, with the ground connections on the outside rather than facing the center, or better yet, place the two plugs side by side with the cables going down towards the floor. Cost and complexity of production would have been identical; usefulness would have doubled.
So, I kept accumulating old hard drives from long gone computers… intending one day to take a power drill to their pesky screws, but never getting around to it… until one day I got fed up and solved the problem once and for all.
New on my Possibly Interesting site: a weird superhero comic spoof that I drew when I was studying Mathematics in College. It follows closely the style of 60’s Superman comics, but it takes place entirely in the domain of geometrical figures (and no, at that time I hadn’t yet read Abbott’s Flatland). Lost for years, it had surfaced in a drawer of old stuff, and I figured I might as well share it: if you, too, were a comics fan, and a geek to boot, you may enjoy this.