| Birthdays, wine and randomness |
[Apr. 1st, 2008|10:07 am] |
Last night was the Garrulous Grape GeekDinner, seventh in the series. A bunch of interesting people (mostly techies, but we had at least one hippie) met at Greens in Plattekloof for an evening of conversation, heckling, food, wine and generally being around like-minded people.
The food was marvelous, even better than I have come to expect from Greens. The wine was also really good (at least, the cab sav was -- I had half a bottle of that and didn't get to any of the others) and was, as is the case at all the geekdinners, free. This time, it was sponsored by Perdeberg who I had previously never heard of, but are now on my list of places to buy from.
Also noteworthy, today is the tenth birthday of the best mailing list on the tubes. I had heard of the Hivemind long before I joined, but didn't fully grok the depth of its usefulness and entertainment value until I caved in and joined. Since then I have mercilessly attacked the current copyright system, vehemently defended rationality and science against superstition and learned a lot about politics, economics and how to prod the Ivobot just so. |
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| New term: user-coddlement |
[Apr. 1st, 2008|03:39 pm] |
I came up with this on the spur of the moment and it seems that nobody else has used it within the reach of your favourite search engine.
User-coddlement (n):
An annoying modification made to a piece of software specifically to assist users who really should know better.
Examples:
- "Are you sure?" confirmations on non-destructive operations.
- Randomly chosen defaults to "protect" people from having to make decisions.
- Adding verbosity to everything in case the user hasn't looked at the documentation.
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