Tech sector ironies of the 2010s

from Phil Nash, London.

Welcome to the new decade: Java is a restricted platform, Google is evil, Apple is a monopoly and Microsoft are the underdogs.

My 1999 coverage of minor-league pro wrasslin' in Oxford

I was a contributing writer to Oxford Town from 1997 to 1999. That's the Oxford Eagle's free, weekly entertainment supplement, sort of a cross between the Memphis Flyer and the Commercial Appeal's GoMemphis. 

My editors included Rob Robertson, Jamie & Kelly Kornegay, Jimmy Thomas and others.

While they would publish just about anything I felt like writing, my most rewarding experiences were typical arts/entertainment/leisure assignments that somebody was going to have to write.

⚒ Pro Tip: The end of this post includes a glossary of pro wrestling terms.

Are You Ready to Rummbulllll?
Loudmouthed Wrestling Manager Issues Challenge to Ole Miss Sororities

Professional wrestling makes its defiant return to Oxford Friday night as the Dallas-based International Wrestling Federation stages several championship matches at the National Guard Armory on University Avenue.

“We want to see all the wrestling fans in the area come out,” said Mr. Sensational, manager of the controversial Sensational Stable, “including all our fans on your Sorority Row!”

Don't Make Me Think [Revisited] is out!

Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think is my favorite book on Web site usability, and he has just published a completely updated version. It's arguably the Elements of Style for Web planning.

If you're too busy to read the book, or the rest of this post, the book's title is great advice in/of itself. Don't make the site visitor have to approach your site like a puzzle or mystery... spoil the ending and get them to the right page quickly.

Since the first edition of DMMT came out waaaay back in 2000, Web designers and developers have relied on Steve’s guide to help them understand intuitive navigation and information design. Now he's back with fresh perspective and updated examples and a new chapter on mobile usability.

MBQ reprints my "Makers" article

MBQ Inside Memphis Business reprinted my article about the MidSouth Makers in its December 

2013 issue. The story originally appeared in its sister publication,  Memphis Flyer, in October.

It's titled "Makers in Memphis," and it should be archived here.  

I've also posted a one-page PDF of the print version here on my site. 

As this tech-influenced DIY community gained momentum, makers began to evolve from hobbyists into entrepreneurs, spawning their own markets and creating new products and services. Despite the movement’s grass-roots, anarchic vibe, these bands of inventive makers equipped with open-source technologies have begun to inspire new innovations in manufacturing, engineering, industrial design, hardware technology, and education.

"Making It in Memphis" my 3rd Flyer cover story: Local emergence of the DIY/tech/inventors Maker Movement

Claudio and his quadcopter, built from parts
he made on a 3D printer, which was made from
parts printed on yet another 3D printer.

read the full article here

The would-be burglar counts himself lucky that he saw an interior light switch on and immediately spotted your shadow moving across the window curtain, giving him time to flee.

... not that anyone was home.
The burglar is frightened away by a cheap motion-detector you plugged into a hobby microcontroller that turned on the electric motor that slowly waved a plastic fin in front of a lamp.

Introducing my free "Twitterglyphics" table

☠⅓☯≠♞+☁♕෴⚐♬♫♪⚾⚒⚙⚛☢

Copy and paste space-saving symbols into your Twitter posts and other tight spots

Social media sites encourage brevity, especially Twitter, with its strict limit of 140 characters and spaces per-post. Many people have simply adopted abbreviations and emoticons from text messaging, but those were developed for speedy replies, not necessarily to fit a word limit.

While Twitter conversations are often fast-paced and held on mobile devices, many posts are thoughtfully crafted. Unicode symbols can shorten the character-count, allowing you to fit more meaning into each message, and when used creatively, they can draw a lot more more attention.

I created this symbol chart because other sites that list such symbols are either too hard to navigate or they list 8 different ☛s, 5 different ✐s but not enough technical characters or other symbols that I sometimes need. I don't post equations or technical data on Twitter, it's just that Ø can mean "nothing" and ≠ can mean "not the same as" and ¶ can denote a paragraph within an article.

My own № 1 symbol is this: … It's an ellipsis that only takes up one character space. I use it to separate sentences or items in a series using only one character-space. (Periods and commas require an additional space after them.)

My software skills map

Simple, graphic approach to explaining what applications I know and how well I know them. 

If you want to be strictly empirical about this, the only thing this chart "proves" is that I know how to render a really crowded slide in Apple's Keynote program and then turn it into a jpeg. 

The real knowledge lies in how to use these tools to turn a buck or edge out a competitor... or do something really extroverted on FourSquare. Note that I always exercise a lot of restraint when doing anything "on the clock" on Wikipedia. It's generally best to let nature take its course there—else the volunteer Hounds of Hell will edit you all the way back to AOL.

UPDATE: The latest edition of Thunder Kitty, or whatever Apple is calling its current operating system (10.8, 2013) does not support Microsoft Office. I now use Apple's Pages word processor and convert the documents into PDF or RTF text files for others to use. I can export something as an Office file, but there are usually formatting irregularities that I can't see on my Mac.