In the February 28th, 2005 strip Chris gives a Danville zipcode, but in the New Years' strip he gives a map that exactly matches Palo Alto--- so exact in fact that I presume he got it from the same place I got mine: Google Maps.

(The fact that this is clearly Google Maps or Mapquest source material makes me feel slightly less bad about violating the clearly marked copyright in the upper right corner of the strip.)

Speaking of which, here's a picture of my new laptop next to my old one. Isn't it nice to see that I'm making such radical changes in my work style? Look closely, my new laptop has 3 stickers instead of 2! That's 50% more!

My new laptop, although outrageously expensive, is almost exactly like my old one in every way, so it's a bit disappointing. One cool new feature that it does have, though, is a fingerprint reader. And other than the somewhat crappy line-art hands in the UI, it works pretty good (for now--- we'll see how the reader performs when it becomes clogged with chocolate and french fries.)

Even so, I found the wording of this dialog to be somewhat unsettling; I really don't ever want my fingers to be deleted. Not even my pinky. Maybe "unenroll" would have been a better word choice.

Now that everyone I've ever met in my life reads this blog, there's nobody I can be mean to anymore. Maybe I just need to become more comfortable with alienating people.

UI design textbooks are filled with rules of thumb about how to do or not do various things. I often find myself arguing for these rules to be obeyed in our application, but my arguments fall on deaf ears far too often.

Maybe if more people could experience more examples of what happens when these rules aren't followed, they might do a better job of keeping confusing language out of the product.

Take, for example, one such rule that suggests that you always use "positive language", meaning that you phrase prompts, options, and actions so that they discuss a noun or verb, and that you should avoid discussing the-opposite-of-something as a noun or verb (Such as a setting indicating "Disable Autoplay Enabled").

Sigh.

Overwhelming evidence that people don't want your stupid product:

This should be pithy enough to graduate into your arsenal of corporate platitudes:

You know that your company is in real trouble when they start listening to your ideas.

More mean-spirited corporate zombie humor:

Tardherder (n.): A manager whose primary responsibility is to accomplish useful business goals by coaxing and guiding a large number of basically incompetent individuals.