May 23

Nurse Joy has been secretly replaced with Hermes Conrad

When I originally imagined a revamping of the heal my Pokemon system with a “Nurse Joy” button, I was still operating, as a new player would, from a place of scarcity and curation.

Now the game is overrun (at least in my part of the world) with megaplayers. Jixny3829 and Jinxny4293 and Jinxny084 to invent a few examples. Niantic and Nintendo don’t care, it means more money.

But they have, at long last, somewhat improved the healing system. You can now group heal your Pokemon in bulk! Or selected groups.

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July 8

Everyday Emojis

Even with threaded messages, my emoji-spreading habits aren’t gone. Many software orgs have adopted discussion and ticket systems that use markup and simple emoji, and I’ve learned very quickly to use them to my advantage.

I write about configuring servers to run software packages all day. And most of my team for the last four years have been remote and we do a lot of asynchronous communication in fits and spurts. And sometimes there are a lot of tricky little details involved in fixing the docs.

One of my Ukrainian colleagues started using colored text to indicate changes: green for gone, orange for add. It was such a great idea that I adapted it ight away. Then we got fancy and started using emoji and colored text blocks. Snowball a few years in and I’m juggling multiple brands across multiple projects, often with the same teams. A Jira ticket that shows off use of emoji for context.So I swiped an idea from Madcap Flare — contextual tagging. One brand of changes is marked with little red boxes, one blue, one green … but I hope that they don’t add any more brands as I’m running low on colors. Bonus: it’s the same colors I use in Madcap Flare for conditional text, so it’s easier for other writers to get what changes go for what brands and where. Big help on a large conversion product where we pulled in 400 more articles and got ready to sync up another few hundred externally.

It’s more than boxes when I’ve got the tools handy: I also use Jira’s status tags extensively. Those and other indicators help us all track and show what’s what when we are speed-reviewing content for multiple brands in quick order.

Use what you’ve got, you never know what you’ll pull together.

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June 4

Multi Panic

My scattershot approach to reality always has me trying to make work some solutions … and some of my ideas are better than others (where is mail all tabs, darnit?).

But I got into a multi tasking panic the other day while I was, well, multi tasking this micro blog project. I had set up some huge documentation builds and publish jobs in one instance of my application. I was also doing a huge synchronization for a different project with source control. Set and forget, just check on it every so often to make sure it’s not all crashed, like a good slow braise in the oven.

I looked up, and my working memory panicked. The application on screen wasn’t showing a build progress. Flew to my machine, and it turned out I was looking at my sync instance of the application, not the build instance. Sigh. I’ve got two screens, I should have used them both instead of multi panicing.

But it got me thinking … why not let us color our apps? I’m working on huge 27″ screens, I’d love to have Project A open in a blue skin of an app and Project B in a green … it works for me on spreadsheets!

Oooh, shiny, I can do this with my browser tabs at work now, too! Yay! There have been add-ons for years, but nothing that was IT-approved ….

But hey, Madcap, Microsoft, etc … give me color variation instances, please!

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May 1

I heard there was a a secret code

To get your movie types to load
But Netflix says don’t play with it, my user
Just binge this baking competish,
Three episodes, a fourth, a fifth
Just let us tell you what to watch, dear user

Don’t use cheat codes, don’t use cheat codes
Don’t use cheat codes, don’t use che-eeaaat codes

So, apparently Netflix didn’t bother to lock users out of developer tools to find items by their category codes. Nice. Here’s a video and a link for more. I love it when users can get around the algos. https://fb.watch/rOwyytPfTj/

But it must not be that secret if Netflix is blogging about it … (top hit for me) https://duckduckgo.com/?q=secret+netflix+codes+2024&ia=web

Category: algo, Free Beta Testers, Netflix | Comments Off on I heard there was a a secret code
April 23

Netflix thinks I’ll love stuff white people love

I don’t actually rate things on Netflix much, so it’s building an algo of “things they have, that I watch, that I don’t already own on another platform”. I’m holey on purpose.

Today’s suggestion (and the first I’ve seen like this):

Not getting the white people hands … they think I’m white, and/or white people like this movie? Maybe I should start streaming a lot of Bollywood and see if they bothered to consider other profiles than default white tech bro.

Category: fix it already, Free Beta Testers, Netflix, User eXperience | Comments Off on Netflix thinks I’ll love stuff white people love
April 22

Eventually, the algo is going to figure out I don’t like Mark Ruffalo – but it’s still too dumb

If I have to pick my least favorite Avenger actor, it’d be him, though the other contenders in his role are hard to live up to (I was a Bill/Lou fan). But generally, if you want me to watch a movie, don’t put Ruffalo on the cover card.

I spend a lot of time thinking about algos and machine intelligence modeling (the pretty little thief machines that current “AI” represents) and thinking through how companies use them. It really puzzled me when Netflix nuked the five star Likert scale for a simple “thumbs up / thumbs down” system. Where would they get useful, measurable data? Maybe five stars were too noisy data wise. Maybe they preferred another way of figuring out what we wanted to watch.

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April 16

Back in my day … we made do any way we could

The Internet used to scream. Before that, message boards used to scream. A guy I knew named Screech could connect at 300 baud with his vocal stylings.

Things were, in a word, primitive. Discussions, compared to today, were nearly up to the speed of Victorian England mail delivery if the message board owner had splurged for two modems and phonelines.

Our emojis were simple text characters or abbreviations, such as <EG>, Evil Grin. Eventually, “always on” internet became a thing, smart phones became a thing, and we could message as fast as we could think.

So I started using emojis for each train of thought, and still sometimes remember to use it today. You know, maybe we could use AI, the pretty little thief machine, to help? First, make emoji easier to tab to when texting, then train AI to start to string our thoughts together for us.

Just a thought.

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April 16

Who needs social media to micro content?

Yeah, I’m busy. We’re all busy. But we gotta get stuff done. Social media does help with virtual and actual “task/body doubling” or “XYZ goal challenges”. Helps make them visible and get them done.

As my kids move out of their school years into the work world, I’ve tried to make them see how important keeping a regular portfolio going is … and failing miserably at it myself.

So now I’m microblogging like all the cool kids. The goal is to every week team-microblog with my kids and just throw stuff out there instead of GETTING ALL SERIOUS WITH A SERIOUS FULL BLOG POST.

Welcome to the disarray.

Category: dev random | Comments Off on Who needs social media to micro content?
September 16

Filter me this, Netflix

Let us teach your algos more about what we really want, Netflix.

I’ve a friend who posts “the date” every day to help us keep track. Today is Wednesday, March the 199th, 2020.

Social media has become more widely used in the last decade, and the tools to manage them have matured as well. You can hide specific dates or people from popping up as “memories” on Facebook. You can mute or enhance keywords, hashtags, and channels on Twitter, Slack, Discord, and more.

But what about our TV streams? I’m sure I’m not the only bingewatcher out here. Help a binger out, Netflix.

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December 19

PokémonGO Buddy Gameplay Upgrade: Broken Buddies?

I got into tech writing (and righting) because I wanted to understand and improve technology more. But my approach to efficient (lazy path, minimal clicks) gameplay made me think the old buddy stats were broken or gone due to this week’s PokémonGO client update.

I’d walked nearly 20km to evolve a Feebas last week, but the update insisted he had 0km on his counter … or maybe 3.1km.

After a ridiculous amount chasing through menus, I found the right count. But did it really need to be gone? Maybe so. Because the cost to ‘right’ it might be too high.

How I think the feature replacement went down

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Category: Data Architecture, Free Beta Testers, games, Niantic, PokemonGO, User eXperience | Comments Off on PokémonGO Buddy Gameplay Upgrade: Broken Buddies?