Friday, July 30, 2004

Speaking of. . . . . . razors, I'm reminded of my favorite aphorism, known commonly as Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. I'm thinking of repurposing that as a title or tag line for this blog. Hmmmm. . . 8:04:02 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

Variants on Occam's Razor Peter Merholz rants on about things that should just work, but don't; one of the reasons being all the extra "features" appended that aren't necessary except for marketing: SHIT IS TOO HARD TO USE. I'm working on a project where I get to go into people's homes and watch them attempt to set up an internet-enabled device (excuse the vagueness). And, without fail, they cannot. What's interesting to me is how they fail --... [peterme.com] It's true; it's just astounding the geekiness that's required to make networked things work. I'm moderately geeky, and I'm frequently amazed that I can make network things work; and sometimes amazed that what I think should work, doesn't. As much as I like my ISP, I clearly had the edge on geekiness over the support guy I talked to today about my DSL issues (dropped connections). I can't imaginze your ordinary NASCAR dad dealing with this stuff, yet some folks expect broadband to be ubiquitous one day soon. So, a variant of Occam's Razor seems in order: One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to do anything. 7:56:09 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

Getting there on the U-Bahn In pointing to a German translation of a London Underground Map (Better German tubemap), Boing Boing also provides linkage to an English translation of the Vienna U-Bahn map: "Incidentally, the translation of the London map into German was part of a project that started with a translation of the underground map of Vienna, Austria into English, which might be of more entertainment value as most of your readers can actually read it. Link (Thanks, Horst!) [Boing Boing] Not only entertaining, but useful, as I never knew exactly what all those stops I passed on the way to CHI2004 meant. I mostly rode from City Park to Sweden Place, switched lines, and rode out to Emperor's Mills, where the conference center is. 3:29:52 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

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