sarren

I have just realised I have been at my new shiny, awesome job for a month!!!

I haven't really posted since then because I've been working flat out weekdays and then coming home and pretty much lapsing into a stupor, and on the weekends also managing two fannish obsessions concurrently - Merlin, the new shiny where people keep writing fabulous fics for me to read, and Green Wing, where there isn't any fic so I'm having to write it myself. I have three and counting finished, two slash and one scary crack het fic involving a strap-on. I'm thinking threesome next. I think this fandom broke my brain.

So, of course, random links naow:

Alan Cumming promoting his new fragrance. Rowr!

From Robot Chicken, Le Wrath di Khan, a Star Trek opera: via klia)

Supernatural (In My Pants)


Also! Is anybody interested in going to the Pride Quiz Night on Friday 27th Feb? Yes, we always bomb miserably. There's always hangman.

*repeats mantra* I will not livejournal at work. I will not livejournal at work. I will not...

Seriously, I KNOW ME.

So I emailed this to myself instead...

When you invent these users, thinking about whether your design is appropriate becomes much easier. For example, a lot of programmers tend to overestimate the ability of the typical user to figure things out. Whenever I write something about command line interfaces being hard to use, I get the inevitable email barrage saying that command line interfaces are ultra-powerful because you can do things like 'gunzip foo.tar.gz | tar xvf -'. But as soon as you have to think about getting "Patricia" to type "gunzip..." it becomes obvious that that kind of interface just isn't going to serve her needs, ever. Thinking about a "real" person gives you the empathy you need to make a feature that serves that person's need. (Of course, if you're making Linux backup software for advanced sysadmins, you need to invent a character like "Frank" who refuses to touch Windows, which he only refers to as an "operating system" in quotation marks, uses his own personally modified version of tcsh, and runs X11 with four tiled xterms all day long. And about 11 xperfs.)*

Of course, then I was distracted by thinking about Rodney McKay complaining to programmer John Sheppard about how any idiot could do his job. So I ate an apple muffin.


*From Joel on Software