Mark Bult Design: San Francisco, CA, Established 1988
Web design and development for small and large business, e-commerce, b2b, b2c, SAAS, and community websites. User experience design and usability testing.
“Walk Hard,” The Music Video
I watched Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story last week and thought it was hilarious. Most of all, I was impressed by the amazing songs, plus the fact that John C. Reilly actually sung them all! The title track is an incredibly catchy Johnny Cash-esque tune that’s been going through my head ever since.
Olympics photos from the Big Picture
I never watch the Olympics, but I often enjoy the great photo collections that emerge when you get hundreds of photographers together to cover a single event. [via Gary L.]
Want to know what this blog sounds like?
The Codeorgan parses the code of a given web page, removes and translates any characters that don’t correspond to musical notes, and assigns snythesizers and drum loops, making music of your code. [via Jason]
Я очень рад, ведь я, наконец, возвращаюсь домой
This one’s definitely for Olya. So she can translate the title above. And while the comments on YouTube usually just serve to prove the decline of civilization, I found these three funny: “Anybody know where I can get the lyrics?”, “From the great Russian songwriters strike...”, and “I want [to] punch this guy in the face so bad!” [via Jenny]
The weekly Thursday Top 5 lists the five most notable, interesting, funny, outrageous, cool, or simply strange things of the week. It is intended for distractionary purposes only. Do not take orally. If ingested, seek a doctor’s advice. If you like it, share it with others, or check out the long list of previous entries.
Posted by espd at 7:22 AM |
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Wednesday, February 24, 2010
“Can you super-size that please?”
At the risk of sounding un-PC and reinforcing a stereotype, it struck me as funny when a largish person (I think obese is a term with some stigma, although I’m confident she would fit the technical definition) who’s visiting the office for a week asks her nearest cube-mate whether there’s anyplace that will deliver lunch.
In San Francisco, most people who work in downtown office buildings go out for lunch to one of the many, many restaurants, delis, etc. that are squeezed into nearly every crevice that isn’t occupied by a Starbucks or office space. There are probably three or four dozen eateries within easy walking distance (a block or three) of our office, offering everything from cheap soup and sandwiches to exquisite dining.
Since I’m already probably offending people, I might as well just go ahead and add that this woman was a Southerner. Now, before you cry foul and nail me to a piece of wood for my wanton sterotyping, let’s just reflect that nine of the ten states with the most obese Americans are Southern states, and yes, she was from one of those states.
In fact, I’m always struck by the astonishing difference when we travel to Missouri (#12 most obese state) and suddenly notice that we’re the thinnest people nearly everywhere we go, sometimes the only thin people!
I wonder if people who live in the South experience a similar wonder when they travel to the coasts and see more thin people.
“This Too Shall Pass” by OK Go
This one’s for Jenny.
Hot Dog Launcher
The weekly Thursday Top 5 lists the five most notable, interesting, funny, outrageous, cool, or simply strange things of the week. It is intended for distractionary purposes only. Do not take orally. If ingested, seek a doctor’s advice. If you like it, share it with others, or check out the long list of previous entries.
The weekly Thursday Top 5 lists the five most notable, interesting, funny, outrageous, cool, or simply strange things of the week. It is intended for distractionary purposes only. Do not take orally. If ingested, seek a doctor’s advice. If you like it, share it with others, or check out the long list of previous entries.
Posted by espd at 6:24 AM |
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Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Dear New Employee
Welcome on your first day. Here is some information that will help you be a productive member of your new team.
You will be issued a security badge at some point in the future, but for now you need to sign in as a guest. You’ll be given a temporary badge that doesn’t do anything at all, so if you need to walk outside any of the electronically-locking doors on your floor, you’re not getting back in. Fortunately you have access to the bathrooms and kitchen, but if you need to use the stairs or elevators to go to any other floor, or if you want to go out of the building at lunchtime, you’re going to need an escort to get you back in. Sometime in the afternoon we may issue you a proper security badge. Don’t hold your breath.
If you’re lucky you’ll be on one of the floors which feature putty-colored 1990s industrial design reject desks and partitions. These are a step up from those horrifying fuzzy-walled cubicles in most offices, but let’s not let our imaginations get away from us and assume you’ll find the sort of quality furniture you expect to see in high tech firms at their pinnacle.
Notice how the fluorescent lighting and the putty furniture conspire to cast a lovely grayellow shade on everything around you? That is, of course, unless you are one of the few who is allowed to sit near a window, in which case the company cannot be held responsible for any negative reaction you may have to natural light. If you would like a lamp on your desk, please imagine how little we care.
When you arrive at your new desk you will observe that the top of of it is filthy, like it hasn’t been cleaned in years. This is because it hasn’t. The cleaning crew vacuums the hallways once a week (but not the floor of your workstation area), empties the garbage cans and recycling bins at every desk, and that’s about it. If you want your “new” desk to be clean, you have to go hunt for something to clean it with (it’s not like anybody’s going to supply you with cleaning equipment, or tell you where you might find some).
The phone on your desk might be plugged in. Might not. Just consider yourself lucky to have one. You can plug it in yourself, of course, but it might insist on telling you that it’s eight and-a-half hours ago and display nothing but a big red light and “Extension in use” at you. This is helpful, since you don’t know what your extension is anyway. At least you won’t have to touch the phone’s keypad, which has so much filthy scum on it, the once-gray buttons are now brown. You should probably just avoid looking too closely at the receiver, as the microscopic colony of beings that has been growing there for several months may not like being disturbed.
There will be no computer on your desk. Tough it out.
When the tech rolls his cart up to your desk sometime on your second day, you might feel a surge of hope. This emotion will be dashed to pieces when he informs you that the Mac Pro he’s bringing you has 3 GB of RAM, almost one quarter of what you’re used to working with, and a bare minimum to run crucial work apps in any useable way. The stock 19-inch monitor he’ll bring you is the default given to any employee, and they are required to bring it to you regardless of whether your manager’s hardware request specified a 24-inch monitor. It will require intervention from a higher authority — your manager or perhaps a lesser demigod — to persuade the tech to fulfill the original monitor request. Meantime, he will dutifully hook up your computer to the 19-inch, boot up, and walk away with a vague promise to “look for” another monitor.
A moment later, when the login screen appears, you’ll no doubt realize he didn’t actually give you a login or password yet, so there’s no way to actually use your computer. Should you wish to remedy this, please open a Help Desk ticket. What’s that? You can’t use your computer? Try calling IT. What? No phone? Send IT an email. What? No computer? Why did we hire you if you can’t do the most menial tasks?
By the morning of your third day you might get some software installed on your computer so you can actually do work. You’d better bring a laptop for a while, so you can actually get some things done.
Don’t expect to have access to any local servers or have an email account for a while. We’ll give you a company email address when we’re good and ready, pal. It might take two and a half days, but when it finally works, it’s glorious. You get to use Microsoft Entourage!
Once you are finally able to use your computer, you can do many fancy things with it (but not email yet). You can browse the internet. You can browse the employee intranets. You can look with awe and wonder at thousands of internal documents that are years out of date and totally and completely inaccurate.
When you look yourself up in the online employee directory, the workstation number listed for you will be at least one digit off, so no one will be able to locate you. This is handy should you be in the Witness Protection Program, but not very helpful if you are waiting for someone to, for example, come fix your phone. It would be easy enough if the workstations were laid out and numbered in a logical numeric order, because then one could assume that workstation #1163 would be next to workstation #1162, but if you squint very intently at the miniscule text on the floor map on the wall in the most darkened corridor, you’ll notice that the numbers were apportioned by a patient in a mental hospital.
Trying to see if you can fix the workstation number yourself, you’ll notice that the intranet lets you log in with your name and password, but then welcomes you with the message “Hello (none) (none),” and half the pages complain you must be logged in to view them, even if it indicates you are already logged in.
Opening a help desk ticket for this will be an interesting intelligence test, as the help desk tool appears to have no way to actually create a ticket. You’ll puzzle over this for several minutes, reading and re-reading everything on the screen, before giving up and asking your manager what you’re missing, and hoping it’s not your sanity. They’ll log in to the help desk on their own computer, wondering if they made a terrible mistake hiring you, and you’ll see a menu on the left side that you’re certain did not appear on your own screen. Back at your desk, you’ll confirm that the necessary menu isn’t there, and that your sanity is indeed intact. Several minutes later it will dawn on you that the problem is a simple one that should have occurred to you: The help desk tool doesn’t work properly in Firefox.
Getting your computer to recognize one of the nearby printers is a mysterious black art that has been lost to the mists of time. Should you need to print something on paper, you might want to weigh the efficiency of drawing it in full color by hand versus the time you will spend figuring out the Mac’s printing dialogs and walking back and forth to various printers on your floor to see if anything is happening. It’s best to look at it as good physical exercise. To connect your computer to a printer, you are expected to know the difference between Line Printer Daemon, IP printing, IPP printing, Windows, AppleTalk, Bluetooth and Bonjour printing, plus you’re expected to know how to find the IP address of the printer you want to connect to, as well as various other obscure settings. If you actually are able to print a document you will be branded a witch and may be burned at the stake.
On the afternoon of your fourth day a new phone will be delivered to you. Following the instructions that were emailed to you earlier will allow you to activate the phone. Good thing you can finally access your email account.
By the end of the week, if you’re particularly industrious, you may have:
• Scrounged a chair from an empty desk somewhere else in the building.
• Played with the phone long enough to realize it’s pointless (wasting an hour or so).
• Poked through cabinets in dark conference rooms until you found a stray network cable, so you could actually plug your laptop in and get a little work started.
• Figured out how to log in to your finally-delievered desktop computer.
• Liberated a decent mouse from another empty desk.
• Downloaded Firefox and customized it with proper settings and a bare minimum of add-ons to get some professional work started.
• Set up your Photoshop workspace, keyboard shortcuts, and preferences twice (doing it the first time surely caused the computer gods to notice that you were likely to get some actual work done soon, so they sent your computer into a kernal panic that promptly wiped out half your customizations).
• Scrounged a desk lamp from someone who wasn’t using theirs anymore and said you could have it.
Downloaded and installed enough applications to remedially customize your computer enough to actually be productive.
• Spent some time trying to comprehend some of the absurdities of corporate logic.
• Completed about five hours of actual work.
Upsides:
• The coffee’s better than it used to be.
• Biking to and from work is the best part of the day.
• It was nice to see a few people again who I really like here.
• Learned the nice Security lady’s name is Lucia.
Posted by espd at 8:02 PM |
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Thursday, February 04, 2010
Thursday Top 5
Women in the world of gaming
Interesting presentation on how women are treated by the games industry.
Boop beep boop boop
Big things have happened for Meekakitty/Tessa since the last time I listed one of her videos in the Thursday Top 5. She won $100,000 in a competition on YouTube (which she said she’ll use for college and to take her mom on a vacation to Prague) and she just recently produced this video sponsored by and featuring Google’s Nexus One.
The weekly Thursday Top 5 lists the five most notable, interesting, funny, outrageous, cool, or simply strange things of the week. It is intended for distractionary purposes only. Do not take orally. If ingested, seek a doctor’s advice. If you like it, share it with others, or check out the long list of previous entries.
“Walk Hard,” The Music Video
Aaron
Alexis
Anne
Anya
April & Matt
Ari
Bo
Brian
Bryan
Chris
Cousin Carol
Dave & Terri
Dave H.
Debby
Drue
Fibu
Four Waters
Fwegan (aka Ynnej)
Gary
Holly
Hilary
Internet Rockstar
James & Eric
Jason
Jen
Jesse
Jessica
Joey
Kansinee
Karl
Kelly
Laura
Leah
Marc
Martin
Matt
Mike
Morgan
OkayDave
Olya
Paco
Peter
Rick
Rocky
Ryan
Stellah
Tatum 
Trent
Velma
Veronica
Whiskey Media
Yuliya
Yu-Po