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The day involved a decent amount of swearing at systems. It's not that things were going badly, exactly, just that sometimes things are not best arranged for happiness. I got a decent chunk of data entry done, and have commenced training on a new system that will be foisted thrust upon us.
Arrived at work to see that Santa Claus, in the person of my Overlady, had visited. I finished out the day with ribbons bedecking my braid and sparkles on my fingernails. It's like she knows me or something. :D
While plonking away at data entry, I attempted to get my thoughts in order about what it is about email and old-school email lists that keeps my personal loyalty for business communication in the face of the punks who want me to switch to not!Facebook for everything. (They are so wrong with wrong sauce: cold dead hands etc.) Something about how the Renaissance Man was grousing about the visual changes in iOS 7 (in response to that conversation I had with Mama about upgrading) clicked, and I realized how key even small bits of email client customization can be. It was way too bright and white for him, whereas I didn't notice anything wrong at all. Which illustrates how very individual things are: one person's absolute dealbreaker can fly entirely under another's radar. On LJ and Dreamwidth, you can ?style=mine or whatever, and you don't have to put up with the site skin if the site skin drives you out of your tree, is too white, too blue, too red, or whatever. (Well, in theory. My best to my buddies still on LJ.) In an email client, you often have a couple choices for theming. On not!Facebook, you're stuck with the designers' color choices, and even the push notifications that get sent to your email are themed, and when I'm irritable it makes me want to shred their canvas with my sharpened fingernails until digital blood drips out. I don't want to be distracted from the content of your message by the presentation that you chose, and even when it's just a little irritation, by god those grains of sand get all up in my privates and NO THANK YOU. (Do I think that there's a place for presentation-as-part-of-message? Probably. But that feels like it's for, idk, dashboards and shit, not stuff where people are attempting to do long-form reading.)
Also there's only external archiving for the messages, and tbh I don't actually trust that; I want an archive on my machine that I can search, and I require a powerful search. I need to be able to perform that search when I have no VPN and no internet access.
In order for an archive to be useful to future-me, present-me needs to be able to sort and label things in perfect un-self-consciousness: that requires private sorting/labeling, even if the content is whole-company-public, and even when the tag itself is unexceptionable. Even if I didn't originate a message, I need to be able to annotate and file my copy of it, and be sure that I can find it again. This process cannot be allowed to disturb my co-workers. When one person replies to a general message with a mess of hashtags, that's one thing. When a hundred people all add their own hashtags, and generate ... no, that's not 100 notifications, the internet informs me that it's 5,050 notifications all told, assuming nobody unsubscribes because of the noise factor. No. No no no no no. No. That's not scalable, and it's antisocial. Granted, with public tagging, someone else may have tagged just the thing I want to see, without me having been aware of it. That part is useful. But I'm going to start by assuming that nobody else is going to want to see me tag the fifth notification today that email has gone down as #bees, and the not!Facebook designer in particular is not going to want to see me tag his forlorn power fantasy about decommissioning the Mailman server as #wrongontheintranet #bees #codemango #followup and gods fucking help me if my #followup tag gets mixed in with someone else's. No. Fuck no. #mycolddeadhandsetc #lateadopter #biteme
In keeping with the theme, I also observed a brief IRC row, albeit in scrollback when I got home; that resulted in some other thinkythoughts (which I am sure echo many people before me, being more eloquent) which I'll nonetheless attempt to do justice to later; in summary, yet again: a community does not owe a platform to someone who seems hellbent on disrupting that community, even if that person is being "polite".
Arrived at work to see that Santa Claus, in the person of my Overlady, had visited. I finished out the day with ribbons bedecking my braid and sparkles on my fingernails. It's like she knows me or something. :D
While plonking away at data entry, I attempted to get my thoughts in order about what it is about email and old-school email lists that keeps my personal loyalty for business communication in the face of the punks who want me to switch to not!Facebook for everything. (They are so wrong with wrong sauce: cold dead hands etc.) Something about how the Renaissance Man was grousing about the visual changes in iOS 7 (in response to that conversation I had with Mama about upgrading) clicked, and I realized how key even small bits of email client customization can be. It was way too bright and white for him, whereas I didn't notice anything wrong at all. Which illustrates how very individual things are: one person's absolute dealbreaker can fly entirely under another's radar. On LJ and Dreamwidth, you can ?style=mine or whatever, and you don't have to put up with the site skin if the site skin drives you out of your tree, is too white, too blue, too red, or whatever. (Well, in theory. My best to my buddies still on LJ.) In an email client, you often have a couple choices for theming. On not!Facebook, you're stuck with the designers' color choices, and even the push notifications that get sent to your email are themed, and when I'm irritable it makes me want to shred their canvas with my sharpened fingernails until digital blood drips out. I don't want to be distracted from the content of your message by the presentation that you chose, and even when it's just a little irritation, by god those grains of sand get all up in my privates and NO THANK YOU. (Do I think that there's a place for presentation-as-part-of-message? Probably. But that feels like it's for, idk, dashboards and shit, not stuff where people are attempting to do long-form reading.)
Also there's only external archiving for the messages, and tbh I don't actually trust that; I want an archive on my machine that I can search, and I require a powerful search. I need to be able to perform that search when I have no VPN and no internet access.
In order for an archive to be useful to future-me, present-me needs to be able to sort and label things in perfect un-self-consciousness: that requires private sorting/labeling, even if the content is whole-company-public, and even when the tag itself is unexceptionable. Even if I didn't originate a message, I need to be able to annotate and file my copy of it, and be sure that I can find it again. This process cannot be allowed to disturb my co-workers. When one person replies to a general message with a mess of hashtags, that's one thing. When a hundred people all add their own hashtags, and generate ... no, that's not 100 notifications, the internet informs me that it's 5,050 notifications all told, assuming nobody unsubscribes because of the noise factor. No. No no no no no. No. That's not scalable, and it's antisocial. Granted, with public tagging, someone else may have tagged just the thing I want to see, without me having been aware of it. That part is useful. But I'm going to start by assuming that nobody else is going to want to see me tag the fifth notification today that email has gone down as #bees, and the not!Facebook designer in particular is not going to want to see me tag his forlorn power fantasy about decommissioning the Mailman server as #wrongontheintranet #bees #codemango #followup and gods fucking help me if my #followup tag gets mixed in with someone else's. No. Fuck no. #mycolddeadhandsetc #lateadopter #biteme
In keeping with the theme, I also observed a brief IRC row, albeit in scrollback when I got home; that resulted in some other thinkythoughts (which I am sure echo many people before me, being more eloquent) which I'll nonetheless attempt to do justice to later; in summary, yet again: a community does not owe a platform to someone who seems hellbent on disrupting that community, even if that person is being "polite".
