Clients want their project to be perfect instantly for free. That's fine, that's what we all want.
Reality is you can only have it fast and good, cheap and good, or fast and cheap. Make sure your client understands the scope of the project and the deliverables before you begin work to eliminate misunderstandings. Make sure fee structure and payment schedule is defined. Don't cut corners in the project definition phase unless you have a free lifetime supply of Tums and are independently wealthy.
We have a person on our current team who is the self-appointed team "worrier". They constantly ask/interrupt other team members to find out "what they are doing." They make lists and lists and more lists but never actually work one of them. They think we should stay in the hot dank room we have all been working in through lunch rather than take a break (because they haven't worn themselves out worrying yet).
This type of person on a team is toxic. They pull down the flow, they sap the energy of the team. As best you can you need to find a busy task for them to do to keep them out of the hair of your producers. If you can you need to let them go. Unfortunately, they are often the boss.
At the very least identify these folks early on and come up with effective strategies to keep them occupied and isolated.
The aging hippie in me is probably just as abhorrent to making lists as the rest of you free spirits are. Understandable. Lists are just not natural. The problem is when working in a group a decent list becomes a necessary even vital component to your success. Not only is a list important but it has to have several key features to be useful.
1. It has to have an item identifier (see the "1." at the beginning of this sentence). In project management this identifier is usually part of the WBS (work breakdown structure). In less formal groups it can just be a line item.
2. It has to have a place to live that everyone that needs it can access it. The best way to do that low tech is tape it to the wall. A high tech solution would be get a Sharepoint 3.0 website (way cool).
3. It has to have a procedure for adding to it that includes notifying everyone who needs to be aware of the contents of the list. Low tech - shout out in the room "Hey I added something to the list." High tech - subscribe for email notifications
4. The list has to be reviewed at some fixed interval by every person on the team. Lo tech - look at it when you walk by. High - schedule a recurring task in Outlook to review the list.
5. There can be no other lists. The minute your create another list that covers the same functions you are "splitting" your effort and "doubling" your work load. Make sure you stick to one and only one list.
Depending on what the list is for there are other guidelines that might be useful. Like...
6. Accept all entries. Close irrelevant ones quickly. Capture everything on the list and quickly close out the ones that are not important or not relevant.
7. Make one team member the list keeper. Their role is to be manager and cheerleader for the list. They give out gold stars for the people who work the list and sad faces for those who undermine it's value
List making is frustrating and can require a lot of pushing to become a habit but properly applied, it can save you a ton of time in completing all the items "on your list."
There's a problem with Windows Vista in that it takes more time to calculate and do the gas gauge for a file copy than it takes to copy the file. I'm sure Microsoft will find and fix this problem but this raises a bigger issue. Why do we need gas gauges at all?
Honestly, it's become a standard - but why? I would be perfectly happy just to see "100 of 200 transferred" rather than go through all that CPU machination to be able to see a bar slowly fill up. I can remember a time when installing software that the gas gauge was actually a torture device because the first 20 blocks or so would breeze by and then the last 3 would take forever.
I remember the first time I saw the Apple OS X gauge appearing to be filling up with water and I thought "how cool" but really wouldn't it be better to have the machine cycles back?
Here's a simple idea. If you are going to steal machine cycles from the process to keep the user occupied - instead of just updating a pointless gas gauge - why not pull items from the Outlook tasks list and flash them on the screen? That way while the monkey is waiting to start pressing the lever again, he could at least be getting something of value.
Okay I just bought an HP Compaq laptop. It's a good machine. When I placed the order I was buying a laptop with 1 gig of RAM, 80 gig HD, Microsoft Vista Premium. I got so much more, problem is I didn't want it.
How can I present the problem? Imagine you go to the doctor and you have a splinter in your finger. You want the splinter out. The doctor examines you and says "We have to amputate your arm." You'd think he's crazy.
So I start up my laptop and there in my Start bar is Yahoo! Desktop search. I don't have anything in particular against Yahoo! it's just that their search results are not as good as Google's. Period. So I want it off. It's not that I want Google there either, I just don't want ANYBODY there. So I go to remove it. Can't. Not anywhere to be found. It's part of HP Total Care Adviser. A piece of software that also gives me updates on my hardware from the manufacturer - something I DO want. Can I just set preferences somewhere? Nope. So for the one thing I want it to do, I have to put up with a whole bunch of things I don't want it to do.
So it's gone.
In a better world, I would have either...
a) Gotten to choose which pieces of software I wanted to install in the first place
-or-
b) Had to option to selectively remove the programs I don't want, like Yahoo! Desktop Search.
Adobe recently got a taste of bad bundling. They put a button linking to Kinko's FedEx for printing, which created an uproar with competing printers who use Adobe products. That button is gone, but Adobe is still one of the worst about "over" installing software. I'm loading the trial of Fireworks CS3 right now, and it couldn't install with FireFox running - why? And I know that when I'm done I'll also have Adobe Bridge which I don't want. Why not just let me take it off. I'll also have an Apple network scanner and the very annoying Adobe Updater which I guess is a necessary evil. Macromedia had a much better solution of just checking for updates when you run the program and letting you know, and you could optionally download. Easy.
The whole experience with the new Adobe expansive install has me so completely turned off to them that if I didn't love Fireworks so much I wouldn't have a single Adobe product on my machine. And be sure, as soon as I can find something that does what Fireworks does - they'll be gone. Sorry Macromedia - we miss you.
To all you manufacturers out there you are shooting yourself in the foot. Stop installing search toolbars, and other crap. Stay OUT of the task tray. Check for updates when the software runs. You are chasing off more customers by taking away their control than you are keeping.
Just run the freaking program.
Yeah it is.
At first Digg was cool and fresh. Now it has become about being "dugg" and not whether or not the item submitted is cool and/or relevant.
To get dugg these days there are a plethora of "flamebait" headlines like "Microsoft Is Finally Going Under!" or "Aliens Steal Chickens!" hanging over one more boring story about Linux is shipping from Dell or Mexican aliens - not Aliens from Uranus.
Digg has gone from being something fun - to a lot of work to find something interesting. I call this the "AOL Effect". Yes, that AOL.
In the beginning, AOL cost about $4 an hour to use. AND it was dialup speed. So the user community in the tech area consisted of computer professionals who were for the most part serious and knowledgable about their craft. Discourse in the Chat Rooms was always civil and informative. You could find real answers to your questions and have a pretty decent conversation. As AOL prices dropped the rooms slowly became more "VB sux" "VB rox" type of exchange, to the point where eventually you couldn't even stand to be in there.
I guess it's a situation where the price of admission determines the value of the experience.
Digg has peaked. MySpace has peaked. Facebook is next and Twitter can't be far behind. It's a scale thing. Signal to noise. Web 2.0 is about architecture but also about fashion and once everybody does it - it's not cool anymore.
So long Digg, I really dug you.
I picked up a HP Compaq C500T at Office Depot on special for $374 dollars (plus $69 shipping - more later) on August 4th. My wife was using the old Thinkpad and the battery no longer held a charge so I would hand down my HP DV6000 to her and use the new one.
I like the way the unit looks which while really trivial is important to me. Also I was ready to move on to Vista (which I will write about separately). Pre-purchase I found a good review of the machine here. My machine differs from this one in that I opted for the Intel Pentium Dual Core and upgraded the RAM to 1G. Good thing too, because out of the box just booting the machine it uses 780 megs of RAM.
The ordering process consisted of going to Office Depot, where you actually order it from Tech Depot and then they order it from HP. So at the time I placed my order my machine did not even exist. It took about 6 days for my machine to ship from Kunshan, China (apparently a high tech suburb of Shanghai) and FedEx ground had it to me in 4 days. That still amazes me.
The box arrived. A plain brown cardboard box with no markings other than shipping labels. It was the only box too, no box in a box like the iPod. Inside the contents were to say the least "spartan". One laptop, one battery, one AC cord, one power adapter and one booklet. No recovery DVDs. Sigh. Okay but for $374 what did I expect?
It had an 80 Gig harddrive but that is somewhat misleading (like the old monitor debacle). It HAD 80 gigs until HP put a 8GB recovery partition, a 2GB software install folder (on C:) of software no one wants, and lord knows how much space taken up by the installed versions of said unwanted software. So my unit arrived with 48 gigs of free space. A little more than half. Sheesh.
I decided to make recovery DVDs, which in hind site was a bad idea because it took 4 hours to do. First the machine copies files from somewhere (the restore partition?) to somewhere (I'm guessing my C: drive) and that took 2 hours almost.
It only took 2 dvd's so that was a blessing. I then uninstalled all the bloatware. Which took a while. Feeling satisfied, I check my free space now. I was up to...no....down to 42GB. Huh? The only thing I can figure is I filled up my restore point cache or the recovery DVD process left files in a temp folder somewhere. More than a little frustrating. I didn't find how to get the Yahoo search bar out of the start bar but I will. HP also has this app called HP Total Care Advisor which runs at startup and takes up a good bit of RAM. I changed it to not autostart. The largest flaw of the machine without a doubt is not having a spot in the initial setup where it says "Do you want to skip the installation of the free/trial/crap software?". This would be a big boon.
As far as performance goes, the machine is great. I was expecting a very slow machine based on what I've read about Vista but considering all that is happening, it's certainly fast enough for me. Keep in mind, I'm a coder not a gamer. And this is NOT a gaming machine because it has the Intel GMA 950 video card. I can't even run Second Life, which I use to prototype things and get feedback.
The finish of the machine is good and all the connectors are tight and snug. The quality of the speakers is really good and the in front position really projects the sound better. Fingerprints do show on the top (so when I have finally touched every square inch of the top it will match) but I can't see that part when I'm using it. It's a big laptop but weight with the 6-cell battery is tolerable. The keyboard does flex and feels thin but it works fine.
The screen is bright, and I like the gloss finish. Not sure how I will calibrate it since my tools are for XP but we'll see.
One thing I really miss from the DV6000 is there is no switch to shut off the touchpad. That was very handy. There is however a vertical and horizontal scroll area on this touchpad and that will come in useful.
I think this machine will work fine for 95% of what I want to do. I have had good luck with HP product lately and probably will continue to look to them first. Plan to upgrade the warranty to accidental coverage and pick up a 12 cell battery so my total out of pocket will be a little higher but still much less than most laptops these days.
