How many books showed up in my search?  None.  Only video games, and really expensive ones too.  Maybe the people getting rid of the books don’t like to read, and the people getting rid of the games don’t play very much.  It reminded me of trying to put the negative sides of two magnets together.  Granted, this could be a completely isolated instance, but it was intriguing.

We could call it “indirect friend requests.”

What do you think?  This could be useful if you’re putting someone in touch with a contact a company to which they are applying, or if I’m interested in Latvian Folk Music and you happen to have a Latvian friend, etc.

We are SO LinkedIn.  I think we should start a new site called NowWhat?

I wish I could say that I’ve used this site to connect with relevant professionals around the globe, but unfortuantely, I haven’t gotten anything but spam.  Not to say this service will be useless for everyone, but so far, it’s been useless for me.

Maybe that’s becuase I already have  a job.  I imagine the correlation is strong between decrease in income and number of logins to LinkedIn.

What’s the point?  It grabs my attention so much that I become completely unattentive.

Unfortunately, it’s been imported into iTunes and will soon go on the iPod, which means the CD will be tossed somewhere in my room never to be seen again.  Even romantics like me would prefer a digital download, I guess.

For all production support which involves an interaction between consultant and user, excluding a classroom setting, there should be a 20 minute rule between the question and the answer.  Basically, the user should have:

1. 20 minutes to figure out a solution on their own
2. The ability to close their own ticket
3. Just a tiny bit of patience

For instance, if I get a request for some help on SAP, I’ll wait 20 minutes before calling them back.  I couldn’t confidently give a statistic of how many times the ticket will be closed when I check again after 20 minutes, but I’m guessing it could save some painful phone/email/research time.  Why 20 minutes?  It’s enough time for the user to use a learn-by-doing approach to solve their own problem without perceiving the helpdesk as unresponsive.

Often times, users do a knee-jerkreaction when they encounter an error.  We tell the user what to click without attaching meaning to the clicking.  (Why would we?  That’s what training is for.)  Then, when the error returns, they call us back.  More time, more money.

Question, for another post:  Is classroom training effective?  For who?

If I would have seen this type of thing today, I probably would have laughed it off.  Kids play video games.  Reading about them, especially after you know the ending, seems silly.  As a 6 year old, though, it was the greatest possible discovery.  I took the book home and finished it the same day.  I re-read it a good number of times until it finally got lost somewhere in the clutter.

Excited by the release of Megaman 9 on WiiWare, I started googling info about the Megaman series to create a sense of nostalgia.  And I remembered the book and googled it.  The author is FX Nine, and after some googling, I discovered that FX Nine is actually a pseudeonym for Seth Godin, the popular marketing/business writer.  He used “Nine” as a surname so that we’d find him in the NINeTENDO section.  Clever.

I read Seth’s blog religiously and I’ve bought most of his books.  He’s always coming up with interesting ideas and isn’t afraid to take chances.  I wonder if writing a book based on an 8bit video game falls into the category of “taking a chance.”  Probably.

Thanks for providing excellent reading material, Seth.

Sure, you’ve got all your typical reasons for procrastination, but I think that there’s most likely a correlation between the more functional tools and the amount of work that is produced by the people who use those tools.  Call me crazy.

For instance, I work in production support, which involves a ticketing system for helpdesk calls.  I’d clear out the tickets much more frequently if the site we manage our tickets on weren’t mind numbingly slow.  That’s obvious to you and me, so surely it’s obvious to the people who made the ticketing site.  Right?

Then, Facebook integrated with all of the other web 2.0 units, and I can now twitter from Facebook.  Except, I can’t.  That functionality is broken, too.  I’m not venturing to the main site to make my updates.  Since I tweet when my fingers are itchy and I don’t have much time, I don’t mind just using Status updates on Facebook.

But that makes me ask myself:  for those of us who enjoy status updates, what value does Twitter add if all of our friends are on Facebook anyway?  Off the top of my head: an organized list of one line journal entries - Facebook’s status updates get covered in a bunch of Web static.  Nonetheless, would I have asked myself that question if I could’ve updated Twitter and Facebook simulataneoeously?

Broken down functionality gives just enough pause to question whether or not I need the system.  Surely that’s bad news for Twitter.  As it is, most of my friends that have tried the service didn’t get it.

If the task looks too simple or too complex, then it loses credibility or it gets shrugged off.  But simplicity seems to work pretty well for Timbaland, and the iPhone’s complexity is what makes it more versatile than the Razr because the iPhone’s extra features aren’t silly gimmicks.

The argument may be that Lotus Notes wasn’t supposed to be a simple email client, and that the Razr was only supposed to primarily be a mobile phone.  But how useful is an all-around collaborative package when the web has better free tools?  For someone who likes to carry all of their data in one device, how useful is the Razr’s gimmicky MP3 and internet functionality?

Yes, we could’ve thought of that, and we probably did at some point.  And I don’t know about you, but most of my thoughts go whizzing by into oblivion unless I make a record somehow.  And maybe that’s the solution to “I-could’ve-thought-of-that.”  A pen and paper (notecards, textfile, basecamp, etc.)