Every 15 minutes I am asked for something.  Every hour I am interrupted either from my activities or speaking.  You might think, “Sorah, you have teenagers.  So what do you EXPECT?”  Ha!  BOTH children are responsible for approximately 50% of these offenses.  The other 50% is my husband’s brother, who lives with us and is extremely needy and self-serving.  Only he would twist his rudeness to make him appear the victim when I snap.

For example:  I told him how to make tea 3 times while he logged it on his phone.  He asked me for my recipe.  He comes inside and begins making it.  I sit down and call my aunt, with whom I have NOT SPOKEN TO FOR 3 WEEKS!  He calls my name twice.  I turn and tell him I’m on the phone, and he says, “well I need to know if I pour up the tea now and do I drop the tea bags in,”  OK, I told him it was VERY important to let the tea cool.  So my answer, “NO it needs to cool, just set it aside and when I am OFF THE PHONE I will help you.”  He pouted and ran into the bathroom.  When I got off the phone, I made a point to say, “Now that I am off the phone, you need to let it cool before you pour it up.”  He got all pissy and slammed shit around then said that he made the tea “for me”and walked out of the room.  Now he will say that he was just trying to help me out and I jumped on him.  That is his style.

This morning I was on the phone with my other aunt and he came into the kitchen where I was at and was coughing and coughing right in my ear.  He also asked me for several things over the weekend at the most inappropriate times.  He inserted himself into so many moments.  My husband and I can’t have any time to ourselves anymore.  Now he wants to move upstairs and move Christopher out of his room and move into it.  I do NOT want him upstairs because he is up and down all the time and so noisy.  It’s hard enough to sleep as it is and he is becoming overbearing.

Now my stepson has conveniently began talking about last week, hearing my moans from a “backrub” (he rolls his eyes, as he is not 12 anymore) and making fun of us.  It’s hard to be quiet, and if my brother in law moves out of our basement (because he’s LONELY-OMG) and upstairs, I don’t think I will be able to have sex with my husband ever again because of the anxiety I will feel from having him only 10′ away.

My 15 yr old stepson has agreed to give him his big room and move into the little vacant room we use as a basement, because BIL bribed him with an XBox game, and agreed to let him come in and use the room, hang out to watch movies, etc…  I asked him why.  He advised that he gives it 2 months before he drives us TOTALLY nuts with him up there, and we will kick him out.  So he gets a game, and he gets his room back in just a few months, so it’s a win-win for him.  ”So you’re setting him up to fail, huh?”  I asked, “Yep!” he said.  Well the little picklehead is smarter than I give him credit for.

It is often times necessary to hold the hands of users and listen to them complain about things. Many times it may not have anything to do with your programs. Not all programmers seem to understand or perhaps even have the ability to do this. By nature a lot of developers are not social. The problem with this is that in effect your users are your customers. Even if they are not happy with something, if you allow them to vent and tell them everything will be okay it goes a long way in preventing fires that would have blown up in your face otherwise. I found myself in such a situation where users had actually gone out of their way to protect me because as far as they were concerned I was one of the few people who tried to help them. Other developers would often times treat them like they were idiots. Ultimately if you get enough users complaining about you things tend to go badly. So next time that user calls you complaining take a few extra minutes to be nice and help them even if they are idiots. Besides, if they were so smart you may not have even have a job there.

In every project with a number of users I have found that is one or two individuals who will be the ones to test your software in ways you would never imagine. It isn’t because these people are particularly bright. It’s because they are out of their minds! They are out of their minds at least in the sense of what would be considered rational thought. These are the people who will find every bug for testing scenarios that you yourself will find hard to come up with because you are cursed to already know how the program is supposed to be used. When ever I go on a new project I try to pick these people out use them as my worst case scenarios. There is at least one of these people in every user group.

The countdown has pushed us into the final week and the team at Spurr is working day and night on the re-vamp of EDUvis. So far everything seems to be on schedule. But anything can go wrong at anytime, but as promised, we will reveal it on the 1st of December come day or night.

We look forward to your genuine feedback after using our platform. We have had the most talented and skilled people work on the design and development so as to achieve the one thing that every established company boasts of possessing and every start-up dreams of harnessing – complete customer satisfaction (it’s leaning onto the ideal side, but if not complete, at least a 99.99% is not hard to achieve).

Please utilize our email ids to voice your concerns at any point in time support@spurr.in

Sorry I’m little late on this post, but you can get a job as a reporter at Comet Co.! Here are some screen shots of inside the buliding.

Article published by Eric Eldon at Inside Facebook, describes the growth of users of the Latin American on Facebook.

In October the number of new active users surpassed the month of September with 3.9 million. Increasing the region to 39.3 million active users.

In ranking leadership becomes that of Argentina with 637,000 new users, surpassed Colombia. Mexico also advanced with great growth.

As for Brazil, being the third fastest growing, and having the largest population in the region, with time lead the ranking.

See the full article.

Withdrawal symptoms from benzos are truly in a league of their own. Unfortunately, here in UK a 6 week detox is the norm, which may be long enough for alcohol, crack and heroin users but not for benzos.  Benzos play with the mind in a way that other substances do not and a 6 week detox is too fast. The brain goes into shock and GABA receptors shut down causing a  protracted withdrawal that, then lasts for years.

The Ashton taper method involves first switching the user from shorter acting benzos, such as Ativan, Xanax or Temazepam et.al. to an equivalent dose of Diazepam. The client then reduces at a rate of no more than 1mg per week. As it is impractical for users to spend the necessary amount of time as an in-patient successful benzo withdrawals must be performed at home. For further information and a support forum on using this technique please refer to Benzo.uk.org.

I went into an abstinance-based rehabilitation centre a year ago and was reduced much too quickly. Admittedly my habit was ridiculous and the place undoubtedly saved my life, but I was suffering so badly that 6mths down the line I was forced to pick up another diazepam script to stop me going completely mad! I arrived with a 400mg a day diazepam and 12omg a day methadone habit. The heroin, crack and cannabis I was using on top of this were irrelevent.

I was reduced immediately to 20mg diazepam, codeine phosphate(DF118s) and a small dose of Chlopromazine. Unsurprisingly I had a seizure but over the following couple of months I was reduced to 5mg and then none. Although I could handle the physical withdrawals, just, my head was pickled.

I was then put on a course of Buspar to help control my anxiety, amitriptyline for depression and 1 Zopiclone at night to help me sleep.  I struggled on, pretty much oblivious to the rest of the program and after 3mths I was completely clean and moved onto the Secondary stage. Mentally, I was feeling worse and worse so went to see a local GP who put me first on Citalapram, which increased my anxiety and mania. A different GP believing I may be suffering from manic depression refered me for secondary mental healthcare and gave me a strip of the anti-psychotic Respiridone. Apparently, the symptoms of acute benzo withdrawal are often mistaken for bi-polar disorder.

Anyway, the mental health team decided I didn’t need their support and I was again prescribed amitriptyline. After 6mths my funding was finished and I still felt as bad as ever. I moved out of rehab and into my own room, but soon became completely overwhelmed. I was convinced I had caused myself irreperable brain damage and in utter desperationfell back onto the only coping mechanism I knew. I ordered 1000 diazepam over the internet and felt better immediately.

By now I had discovered a couple of benzo support forums online who explained that I was experiencing protracted benzo withdrawals that would last several years. If I had reduced according to the Ashton taper method I would still be withdrawing, but much less intensely. Forum members with personal experience advised me to obtain another diazepam script and to reduce at the rate of 1-2mg every 2 weeks. I am now down to 8mg a day and with the support of ACT I am finally getting there.

I have been through hell but blame only myself and want to make sure that nobody else suffers unnecessarily to the same extent as I did. It is very unlikely that anyone reading this will ever have to withdraw from 400mg of diazepam a day, but the same principles apply. Benzo users wishing to come off should stick to the Ashton taper plan and seek support from other ex-users or professionals with experience of working specifically in that field.

In the last BT Intranet user survey I carried out earlier in 2009 I asked people in BT if merging information and applications into logical groups based around activities/functions would help them.  The majority answered ‘Yes’.

I am now testing the new version that tries to do this with users and asking for their views.

The last major change to the BT Homepage was at the beginning of 2009 with a recent change in some of the colours when the 2012 challenge countdown began earlier this month.

I’m sharing the proposed changes and how we are testing these with users in these slides.

What do you think of the changes and how we are testing with people to make sure they are right or be able to make further changes to get it better?

PS I’m on holiday for the next two weeks.  My blog decided it wants a break too .  So, my next post will be in December.

So, that is the question: Is Twitter over-explaining re-tweet? How about over-engineering?

Well I’m not one for “I told you so“s and pointing fingers and… Who am I kidding, I totally am.

What the team behind Twitter.com has done with re-tweet is wrong. It is wrong because it ignores the way the users have decided re-tweet should work. Because let’s face it, re-tweeting was invented by the community. The users found an interesting way to give someone credit, they gave it a catchy name and they found a simple, yet elegant way to do it.

What I’ve learned long time ago is that the best design is redesign. Learning from past mistakes and doing it better. And nature is the best designer there is, because throughout million years of evolution it has had the time to start over and over again and reach the “perfect design”.

And it is nature and evolution that stood behind the original, community-driven re-tweet.

That’s not to say that the new implementation is not well engineered. But ask yourselves this: did it have to be? The answer is simple: no.

What Twitter.com did was to go on and say: “The users are using my application in a “wrong” way. Let’s correct that!” Enter the new re-tweet! And that my friends is the very definition of wrong.

Info: “The users are using my application in a “wrong” way.” & “the “wrong” users are using my application” are the biggest mistakes a business may make, and I say business because it extends to every field of business out there, not just technology.

* For the record, Twitter didn’t make the second one, yet.

The good news is that they can take it back. They can make it better. It’s not too late.

Just make the re-tweet button populate the update text area control with that user’s update prefixed by “RT @username”, or just “@username:” and that’s all we’ll ever need!

It is not too late!

What do you think?

Well! Your in luck! They are now hiring jobs for the comet as reporters! Woot! Hmmm do you think lane should be hired? Hehe…..

My birhtday week just gets better and better! xD But health on friday! Whyyyy! Lolz!

Has anyone seen the new free accessibility tool on the WAVE site?  I thought you might be interested in knowing there is a simple to use and visual tool out there compared with other tools that tend to be a bit ‘techie’ in their results.

WAVE is a free web accessibility evaluation tool provided by WebAIM. It is used to aid people in the web accessibility evaluation process.  Rather than providing a complex technical report, WAVE shows the original web page with embedded icons and indicators that reveal the accessibility of that page.

Even better from an intranet perspective, the WAVE Firefox toolbar allows you to evaluate web pages directly within your browser.  Because no information is sent to the WAVE servers, the toolbar allows you to evaluate password protected, secure, or otherwise sensitive web content.  The WAVE toolbar evaluates content as it is rendered within Firefox.  This allows dynamically created, modified, or scripted content to be evaluated in real time.

I stumbled upon (no pun intended) a great presentation on Slideshare.net yesterday. Social Media in China by Mindy Zhang. Besides giving a great overview of how Chinese users interact with social networks it provided a few hints to what Chinese companies should do to use social media channels successfully.

Today – Companies are global, they should pay close attention to this deck and the Chinese user. China represents a very real market that will soon represent one of the largest social media by volume channels in the world.

There are differences between Chinese and American users in social media. I found the fact that 72.4% of Chinese users are of very low-income level surprising. I was also surprised by how many Chinese users are accessing social sites by mobile phone 46%.

The presentation speaks for itself – please take a glance and let me know your own thoughts.

The Des Moines Macintosh User Group has posted the presentation that I did for them on Automator. It’s basically the entire meeting, so quite long. However, there is some good information there for anyone wishing to learn about using Automator. I have posted it here for anyone interested.