In movies and television, no one says “Goodbye” at the end of a phone call.  Have you ever noticed this?  They simply hang up when they are through talking.  How do they know that the other person is done talking? Even if they are calling to tell each other “Goodbye” for the last time the conversation usually ends up with something other than “Goodbye”.  Maybe Hollywood thinks that it would be too annoying to hear “Goodbye” at the end of every phone call or something. Maybe they are trying to show that the characters are “too cool” to follow such social norms.  I don’t know, but I do know that if you try this in real life, it will drive people crazy!

In college a friend of mine and I decided to follow the movie model and stop saying goodbye.  We’d simply hang up when we were through talking. I can tell you it positively makes for the most annoying telephone conversations you’ve ever had.  You are talking back and forth, your friend says something and then “click”. You don’t get a chance to reply or say anything–they were done so they hang up.  You can call them back if you have something else you want to say. You end up with conversations like:

A: Hey do you want to go get some lunch?

B: Yes CLICK

A: [Redials B]

B: Hello?

A: Um did the phone disconnect?

B: No I was just done talking.

I think the calling back thing would make movies a bit more realistic.  When someone hangs up without saying “Goodbye” (and thus giving the other party a chance to finish up any important business) the person who was hung up on, should immediately call back and say, “Wait, I wasn’t through talking!” or “Did you hang up or did the call drop?”

People Found This When Looking For:

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For the past month, we have had a trash mystery at our house hold. The trash pickup that we pay for picksup every Friday morning and requires that we put the garbage can on the side of the road.

The mystery occurs every Thursday morning. Someone pulls into our driveway, retrieves the garbage can, empties the contents and leaves without a sound. That’s not all. The service we pay for will only take out the bags in the garbage can. We had several items in the bottom of the can that weren’t in bags that had been there for several weeks. The mystery garbage pickup service cleaned out the trash can as well!

People Found This When Looking For:

• mystery trash pick up (1)

We were driving home from Kansas City and Haley mentioned she needed to make a phone call. Our two year old then asked…

Katy: Who you gonna call?
Mark: Ghostbusters!
Haley: Don’t teach her that!

WikiReader is an electronic encyclopedia giving physical form to Wikipedia. Now you can take it with you wherever you go.

WikiReader

This looks like an incredibly cool device. It is fairly small, has a touch screen, can be read in daylight and only costs $99. You can download updates from the internet and it looks like they plan to update it twice each year.  Two AA batteries are expected to power the device with normal usage for about a year.

There is a “Random” button that will show you a random article.  It is similar to the button on an iPod Shuffle.  You can also search by typing on the onscreen keyboard.  There is also a history button that lets you pull up previous searches.  You scroll up and down the page by sliding your finger on the screen up and down–similar to an iPhone.

The design looks good.  It isn’t a multi-function device, but $99 for an electronic version of an encyclopedia that will fit in your pocket seems pretty good.  I am impressed that they are able to produce something like this at that price point.  I’m curious how the reading experience is.  It looks pretty readable.  The display isn’t large and doesn’t look like it shows pictures, but still looks usable–particularly for short periods looking up information like what you would do with an encyclopedia.

I’m curious if you can take your own MediaWiki and use it as the content for the device.

A programmer was working with a headhunter who misrepresented him to some potential clients.  He asked the Slashdot crowd if and how he should fire the guy.  The best response:

In my experience, headhunters are very forthright about their desire to kill people, eat them, and hang their shrunken, stuffed heads from strings around their neck. Obviously, you should fire them if they look overly hungry and there is no one else for them to eat. Or if they catch and eat people other than those you hired them to catch and eat. Employed with care and attention, though, headhunters can bring something to your business that no other employee can: abject terror in those that oppose you.

I have an article published over at Freelance Switch called 9 Steps Toward Genuine & Effective Networking.  Here are some of the things discussed:

• Mailing physical newspaper and magazine articles.
• Befriending the “little” people.
• Meeting in person
• Taking notes.

Be sure to read the full post.

Some employees work because it pays the bills. They don’t feel that their work is particularly meaningful or important. Others work with a sense of purpose because they feel like what they do matters. If your employees shift to treating their work as a “day job” (something that just pays the bills) you will see much less productivity. This partially depends on the employee, but it is even more dependent on the employer. Here are things to keep this from happening to your employees.

• Meaningful work — It is much easier to be passionate about something that you feel actually matters. Make sure your employees are doing things that matter. Make sure that they understand how their contribution helps the organization function as a whole.
• Pay for performance — If you want you’re employees to be passionate about their jobs then thier performance needs to somehow impact their life. One way to do this is to financially reward people productivity.
• Don’t throw work away — One of the fastest ways to destroy passion in your employees is to ask them to create something and then decide not to use it. Everyone wants their life to count for something, but if the results of their effort just gets thrown away they will just start “putting in their time” with little regard for quality. This isn’t to say that you can never change your plans, but good leaders know how to salvage people’s contribution even if their work is no longer needed for it’s original purpose. I’ve been in situations where I was given a difficult project to complete, but after successfully completing the project, management changed their mind and decided that what they asked for wasn’t what they really wanted anyway. If this happens once, employees will probably just consider it part of organizational change. If it happens several times in a row, most employees will stop putting any real effort into their work, saving their intellectual energy for areas where it might be valued.
• Get to know your employees — You need to know what makes your employees tick.  It is much easier for someone to be fully engaged in their job if they feel like their boss understands their life goals.
• Invest in people — This can be done through coaching, sending people to a conference, or even just by buying them a book on some topic you’ve identified is important to them and their career.  If your employees feel like they are just a means to a business goal, you aren’t going to get a high level of engagement in their work. Most people want to grow and they will give their loyalty to an organization that helps them to that end.

After reading a some comments in a blog post about how DMOZ really needs more good editors, I thought I’d give it a try. I noticed that the Personal Organization category didn’t have an editor so I pushed the button to apply to be an editor. I filled out the form carefully and spent a good amount of time trying to find the sample sites that I would add to that category.

After spending a good amount of time filling everything out, I submitted the application. Later on in the day I received this response:

Dear Mark Shead,

Thank you for your interest in becoming an Open Directory Project editor! Although we would like you to join us as a volunteer editor, you have chosen a category that is already well represented, or is broader than we typically assign to a new editor. We would encourage you to re-apply for a category that has fewer editors or is smaller in scope, in order to increase your chances of being accepted.

Feel free to reapply by submitting an application in another area. If you wish to re-apply, you must fill out another application. Please do not reply to this email.

Regards,
The Open Directory Project

Additional reviewer comments:

Now I understand if they only want you to be an editor of a small category at first. When I signed up, I tried to use a sub category, but the only subcategory was for consultants, and I wasn’t really interested in doing that.

If they really don’t want people to apply for these categories, they shouldn’t put links to sign up as an editor at the bottom. If they had of had a suggestion of a different category to try that would at least show that there was some level of thought on their side of things. Just saying “keep applying and maybe we’ll eventually let you in” seems like it has a good chance of just wasting my time.

If you want good editors, you need to make sure you aren’t wasting their time. Good editors are more likely to be busy individuals who want to contribute to the community. Bad editors are more likely to be people who will just keep applying over and over again until someone eventually lets them in as an editor.

Maybe I’ll try signing up as an editor again someday if I find a category that I’m interested in, but at this point I think DMOZ may be shooting themselves in the foot by asking for people to sign up as editors for a category and then telling them “no you can’t edit this category”.

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

– Thomas Edison

This is what is so facinating about programming. Your “pile of junk” consists of digital assest instead of physical matterial, so the raw materials are not limited by the normal laws of supply and demand. In software, you are limited only by your imagination.

Yahoo and Google are trying to one up each other on whose database contains more pages. Does it really matter? Isn’t relevancy more important? It depends on who your user is.

If most of your queries on search engines return hundreds or thousands of results, then it probably doesn’t matter who has the biggest index. As long as Google and Yahoo get the popular pages, you’ll most likely find what you are looking for. If you get a bunch of results from your search you are probably aren’t looking for a specific document on the web, so it doesn’t matter which page you get as long as it has the information you are after.

Most internet users fall in the above category. I tend to find that many of my searches return less than 20 results and sometimes only 2 or 3 or even 0. For people like me the number of pages searched is much more important. In fact for those types of searches the method used to order the results (determine the relevancy) isn’t really important. With a small number of pages, it is easy to scan through the list and find the most relevant entry.

Today I was working on a piece of equipment and it started giving me a less than helpful error message. I typed the manufacturer (in quotes) and the error message (also in quotes) into Google hoping to find out how to fix my problem. There were zero results. I tried it on Yahoo and got the same thing. After poking around in some forums I was able to find a post that described the problem on a page that was missing from both Yahoo and Google’s databases. The post contained all the phrases that I had searched for it just wasn’t in either of the search engine’s indexes.

Five years ago I taught a community college class about the internet. I used Geocities to put up the tests, class outline, etc. Today I tried search for:
site:geocities "juco internet class"
In Google I get zero results. With Yahoo I get a single result that links to the page I was searching for.

I’m sure that there are other items that I could find with Google that won’t show up in Yahoo. I’m not trying to say one engine is better than the other. The point is that the index size does matter if you are looking for a specific document. If Yahoo decides that they are going to maintain a larger index than Google, then there are going to be pages that can be found in the Yahoo index, but not in Google’s. If you are looking for one of these pages then size is very important.