Alot of what people forget when using a computer is, well, that it's a computer. This is a machine that performs mathematical operations on numbers and stores the result. Over and over again. It's not inherently a calendar or a file management system or a communications tool. The job of good software is to make these functions feel native, and not like the side effects they really are.

My mother in law just got a computer for the first time, just figured out how to control a mouse and double-click. She would be one of those people stomping on the foot pedal if she didn't have help. Her ramp-up is showing me all those little things we "experts" do that novices would never think of. Like rightclick-open in new window for a link. Like single clicking a link and not double. Like window management in the taksbar. Like if you get a link that is longer than 40 characters, how you need to cut and paste twice into your browser to see what you need to see.

We invited friends to our son's birthday party. Since hardly any of our Portland friends have cars, we're throwing one down there too. When I was a kid, I had my list of friends and their phone numbers, most of which I still have memorized. Now, we're lucky if we have a phone for folks and certainly not a postal address. No worries, we're using evite. Evite works great for things like recurring events and soccer teams. For rare events that require maps, it's not so good. Especially if the fancy html mail is too complicated for the novices. I mention this all to point out that socially, we are at a rollover point where technology has still not quite replaced paper and a stamp, even though we assume it has. We think only having a friend's email address is good enough, even though the quality of the interaction is of lower quality compared to paper and a stamp. (If paper and a stamp gets them to the party, then the quality is higher). The modernization that we have had with computers so far has been "lossy." So, another goal of software is to make this modernization less lossy.

After resolving the issue with my hosting provider kicking me off for abuse of sendmail, I haven't cracked the books again on my SMS project. I've moved into a support role in our family's other deadlines, one of which is a string quartet (Tues Oct 21 2003 at Seattle's Town Hall). We stand to lose almost a thousand bucks on the thing even if we have great attendance. Then there was the solid two weeks of allnighters. String writing is the hardest to accomplish on computer. If you start with a MIDI file, you can't simply print it out. All the bowing and dynamics will be ugly, not to mention notes crashing in to each other and enharmonic spellings mutilated. (Anyone for B#?).

I've started another hobby which is entering a writing contest in conjunction with Hugo House. Each writer gets a deck of cards and does a novel synopsis and a first chapter.

Last week a friend of mine was having a hard time working with a developer who did not have a left brain. She had to repeat herself, overexplain, a lot of time was wasted. Mostly the developer rearchitected the code constantly, probably in an effort to understand the project better. I recommended tape recording the conversations for him so he could listen to it in the car, etc. I've been in situations where I'm "over my head" lots of times, and tape recording has occured to me although I've never done it. I would have loved it if the other party suggested it and provided the equipment. This is not an insult, it's a tool. We shouldn't assume that everyone we work with has an oversized short term memory. These are not always the best coders anyway. But those of us who fit this category should know this about ourselves and use whatever tools we need to contribute at our best.

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