"Please listen closely to the following options as our menu has changed" The Enron Voice Mail System (requires Flash)

Joel on Software has written a new column, "The Iceberg Secret, Revealed" in which he discusses how non-programmers view demo software, prototypes, mock-ups and how this can lead to unreasonable expectations by the users. "Understand that any demos you do in a darkened room with a projector are going to be all about pixels. If you can, build your UI in such a way that unfinished parts look unfinished."

The discussion about the article contains many real-life examples of this. One reader discusses why he never uses real text anymore on his mock-ups and instead uses the pseudo-Latin starting with Lorem ipsum.

What is Lorem ipsum anyway? Cecil Adams, author of Straight Dope, a syndicated newspaper column, answers the question in a column from last year.

Another interesting link from Weinberger's blog: trustworthycomputing.com - fun with redirection!

Heard in an All Things Considered feature (RealAudio) on weblogs, David Weinberger says "In the real world everyone is going to be famous for 15 minutes, on the web everybody is famous to 15 people". Naturally, Weinberger has his own weblog. I liked his enhancement of the Blogger's Manifesto (posted Feb 14).

Here's one way to get around in heavy traffic (seen in an article in the March 2002 issue of The Atlantic.

Big list of languages for creating PalmOS programs.. Smalltalk, Lisp, even *gasp* COBOL.

Well... the COBOL was an April Fools joke and the best part of their page is this disclaimer at the bottom:

Although we produce a COBOL compiler, Yorick Systems in no way endorses or condones the actual use of this crusty old language. Neither Yorick Systems, nor its parent company (Tasaday Software), may be held liable for any loss of productivity caused by wondering what the hell they were thinking back then.

From SatireWire Passed Over, Syria, China, Libya Form Axis of Just As Evil

I'm getting a new cell phone soon because I'm not happy with Cingular's reliability and I can't use my current phone with Verizon. I'm probably going to get a Motorola phone with predictive text input -- the phone tries to guess what word I want based on only a single tap on each key. Motorola calls this iTAP. Nokia and some other phones use something similar called T9.

It looks like such a good idea, that I thought it'd be nice to have that on my Palm, too. Candidates for this are WordComplete and TextPlus. They were reviewed head to head in this review from Nov 1999 (the review compares WordComplete 1.0 (currently 2.0), TextPlus 3.0 (currently 3.8) and LookDA (which the reviewer found more lacking))

Interestingly, I found these because the makers of the fitaly keyboard didn't allow them to be used in this contest which compared speed of input methods (fitaly won, of course). Gee, what are these products that I'm not allowed to use because they'll make me too fast? It looks like you can use fitaly along with either WordComplete or TextPlus for super speed.

Does anybody have experience with any of these products?

"Enron shares" and "Aeron chairs" not only sound alike but are both associated with financial mismanagement.

Enron shares and Aeron chairs
doo-dah, doo-dah

Found on another onlineblog.com, Under wraps: How they kept the Segway secret from USA Today. It also discusses the Segway technology a little.

The first installment of Oliver Twist from classic-novels.com arrived in my mailbox this morning. A little Dickens to start the day each day should be fun...

The fact is, that there was considerable difficulty in inducing Oliver to take upon himself the office of respiration,--a troublesome practice, but one which custom has rendered necessary to our easy existence

and it appears that classic-novels.com may be publishing this just as originally published by Dickens. Here's the close of the first installment:

as he knocked at the gate and read the bill next morning: 'I never was more convinced of anything in my life, than I am that that boy will come to be hung.' As I purpose to show in the sequel whether the white waistcoated gentleman was right or not, I should perhaps mar the interest of this narrative (supposing it to possess any at all), if I ventured to hint just yet, whether the life of Oliver Twist had this violent termination or no.