Archive for July, 2003

Fry’s Electronics and Returned Merchandise

Saturday, July 26th, 2003

As anyone who has ever returned an item to Fry’s Electronics knows, the returns process can be very time consuming and difficult. In general, however, the difficulty arises from the inefficient process and the fact that the people working at the returns desks don’t actually have the authority to […]

What to Tell Your Users

Friday, July 25th, 2003

Computer error messages are the source of much frustration and bitterness toward computers and computer software. One thing that the computer programming education industry often fails to teach is the principle of designing error messages.
From the code I have seen on my NoPaste site, it seems that most novice programmers […]

Spammers and Scams

Thursday, July 24th, 2003

Today we received two unsolicited faxes in addition to the usual daily dose of unsolicited e-mail. Apparently the law on unsolicited faxes is such that they are legit as long as they provide an “opt-out” number. It has long been known that most e-mail spammers use the opt-out link […]

Documentation Hell

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2003

Lately I have been writing a lot of technical documentation, and have begun to realize that Microsoft Word is not a great tool for my needs. When I’m writing documentation, I don’t need WYSIWYG capabilities, just a simple formatting language that does what it should. I suppose I don’t […]