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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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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