Year: 2006

I was passing by this shop with large windows.  One of the shirts caught my attention.  It was a plain white shirt with a shiny (disco-style) writing on it’s back that said “Million dollar man”.

Somehow, I thought, the only thing that one can be sure about is that a person wearing this “Million dollar man” shirt doesn’t have a million dollars.

I have witnessed something today that made me think about Murphy’s Law and how easily it is extended to every action. Even those actions performed by children.

I was waliking the park with Maxim today, when we saw this boy who was riding a new bicycle. The boy was very proud (Lev: guess who am I talking about. OK, I’ll give you three attempts.). It turned out it was his second day on the bicycle and he was riding it very good. Without any tricks or anything, but solid – without fallings or ugly manouvers.

So, this boy was making circles around us. He was shining with delight. I complimented him on the newly acquired skill. And he started to show off. He made the face like he could ride all by himself, without any concentration or focus. He even started ringing his bell.

And that was the point where he lost control. His bike started going from left to rigth and back to left. He lost the touch of the pedals. His speed decreased, which made it even more difficult to keep the bike straight. He was about to fall on his face. Luckily, his reflexes were fast enough to jump off the bicycle and stay on his feet. The bicycle fell though. Noone was hurt.

But the look on this boy’s face was all about a question: “Why did it happen to me right now?”. It could have happened to him on any given moment in the last two days. And noone would have noticed it. And those who would notice, wouldn’t care for it long enough, and would forget immediately. But it happened exactly at the worst moment – when he was showing off.

The answer to the kid’s question is, of course, Murphy’s Law.

Little did the boy know about the worst moment though. The accident didn’t just happen when he was showing off. But the accident happened when he was showing off to a blogger. Now, the memory and humiliation of this accident will stay in the history of the Universe forever. And there is nothing he or anyone else can do about it. Because in exactly half a second I’ll press the ‘Publish’ button and within 30 seconds at least two major search engines will index this story. Oh, boy.
P.S.: Am I cruel or what?

I am a great fan of tagging.  I find it to be very easy and very effective.  There are, of course, a couple of minor problems with tagging.  These have more to do with the way my mind works, rather than with actual tagging itself.

The first issue I have is about user interface.  I see two approaches used most commonly.  One approach is to ask the user to enter each tag separately.  One by one.  This is a real pain, if you want to add more than one tag.  It is unbearable pain, if you want to add more than ten tags.  The second approach is way better in this regard, but introduce the problem of it’s own.  The approach I am talking about is the use of single input field, where the user can type as many tags as he wants, which are then automatically separated by the sofware.  This is so much better and easier.  But the common problem with thisis the deference in tag separator.  Some applications use a space, others a comma.  There are pros and cons to both of these.  And  I don’t have a strong preference in the matter (a weak preference is a space).  But what is often missing is the simple instruction underneath the input field which separator to use.  Tagging has become a common practice for many sites, and when these sites differ in the way they handle data, it is difficult fo the user to remember, which site uses which method.  Adding a sentence like ‘Use space to separate multiple tags.’ is so easy, but too few actually do it.

The second issue is of the good practices.  There is no strict guidelines or rules around tagging, which leads to great flexibility.  But great flexibility without any guidelines leads to great confusion.  My most often confusion is with singular versus multiple form of words.  Should I use ‘blog’ or ‘blogs’, ‘feed’ or ‘feeds’?  I happen to think differently at different time of day.  It would be nice to have a reminder somewher nearby, saying ‘Use singular form of word, if in doubt’.  Or something like that.

That I’ve finished writing this post, I suddenly remembered that I have posted something similar to this somewhere already.  Oh, well – too bad.