geek level maximum
Turn your USB drive into an HTTP server [via Engadget]
- As more people have become technologically aware in the last few years I've noticed that you see alot less about "geeks". Good to know they're (we're?) still out there.
Turn your USB drive into an HTTP server [via Engadget]
An excellent picture taken by my little sister at the Hudson Valley Raptor Center. She's going to college for photography, hence a photo which is actually nice (unlike mine). I especially like how the owl is very clear and the background blurred. The owl's eyes are amazing.
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(click for larger version)
Update: Buy the photo's on shirts from Cafepress - All the money goes to the New York Center of rehab for Birds of Prey.
Man this is a cool UI (quicktime 7 required)
Not so great for help desk software, but perfect for a painting app.
[movie from Gus Mueller]
So a day after Google opens their map API, Yahoo does the same. I didn't look very closely at the Google one but it did seem a bit complex. Yahoo's is very interesting in that it's based on an extension of RSS. Seems I just wrote about the muddying of the RSS waters, um, yesterday! Hopefully these BigCo's don't screw up RSS.
Those of you who don't normally follow the comments may want to check out the thread which is growing about what you do when you have a coding block. Well at least if you're a programmer. Interesting to see how other people deal with it.
Update:
MojoMark just posted my new favorite:
"Leave comments on blogs, look at pictures of palm tree'd beaches basking in the afternoon sun. and go pee."
"Forget the video game console ? your TV could already have the brains to play those games. A coy Microsoft Chairman
Bill Gates hinted Thursday that his company might license the software underlying its
Xbox gaming machine to a variety of outside companies in a bid to expand the market share for the Xbox machine ? a platform that trails the sector's No. 1 Sony PlayStation." [Yahoo]
-Interesting. It's how they won the PC market, no?
HelpSpot is a help desk ticket system and yet that label, ticket, never appears in the system. It's one of the first things I choose NOT to do when designing HelpSpot. In my time working with both good and bad help desks I've found that the major difference between them isn't usually the people per se. They are often hard working and relatively competent. No the difference is usually attitude. A bad help desk almost always has a bad attitude. They look at each new ticket in the system with disdain.
I mean just think about the word ticket. It's so impersonal, it makes me think of standing at a deli counter. Do we really want our employees feeling like they're behind a deli counter? What about our customers? Every time I get an email with a help ticket ID I inevitably feel a little down. It just has that, I'm standing in line feeling to it.
So HelpSpot uses the word "request" where other systems use support ticket or issue. Now I'm not claiming this is a revolution, or that it will turn bad employees good, or make angry customers happy. What I do think is that over time it can help change the tone, just the tone, around the help desk. Let's try something together shall we?
Say this out loud:
"Did you see that new ticket from Bill Sanders?"
Now:
"Did you see that new request from Bill Sanders?"
Yes it's subtle, very subtle. But you can hear the inflection the upper one would be said with (especially if you've worked in IT) vs the lower. Will it help? I don't know, but I think it can't hurt and over a year I could see it perhaps changing attitudes just a hair. Making help desk tickets seem just a little tiny bit friendlier, perhaps making responses to those "requests" a little bit nicer.
From a business perspective it's interesting because to me it's a feature that has no marketing value. How would you describe this in a feature list? It also actually hurts from a search engine perspective because nobody searches for help desk request system or help desk request tracking, where as help desk ticket system and help desk ticket tracking do get searched on. But this is one of those features that I hope will pay off in results even if UserScapes customers don't know why the help desk seems more upbeat since they installed HelpSpot ;-)
One of my all time favorite features of any desktop program I've every used is in NetNewsWire. When you click the "subscribe" button it automatically takes the contents of your clipboard and inserts it into the field if the contents are a URL. Just fabulous. So simply, yet I use it all the time and every single time I love it.
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Whenever I get stuck on a problem I usually run off to either check my feeds or lately I've been going off to read a chapter of whatever book I'm on. It's working out really well as when I return I usually find the answer pops right into my head or sometimes even shows up while I'm reading.
What do you do at the roadblocks?
This isn't that much of a tip for those who know it, but I thought I'd state the obvious anyway. If you're starting up a new blog make sure you comment on other blogs alot. I just found another interesting new startup via a comment on my blog. This guys seems to be starting a mac game company, excellent!
Didn't I just post about the lack of games for the Mac? Excellent.
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