Late to the Parade
newer. better?
My journalistic mentor is Jack Driscoll, former Editor-in-Chief of the Boston Globe. He recently asked me a simple question, “How does a reader respond to your blog?” It then occured to me in my efforts to design a simplified layout, I had made it entirely unclear how to post a comment as I maybe reduce-ed too much. The answer is to click on the tiny bubble below. There. With this little bit of knowledge, I have satisfied learn and simplification is now realized. Phew.
10 Responses to “Tiny Bubbles”
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I think that the problem still exists. You’ve abstracted the design so much that now you have to explain it, which, on the face of it, seems to be a bad design choice. Worse, you haven’t located the explanation at the point of need, but rather in a post that may be easily overlooked and will likely be buried within a few days or weeks.
Oh, for crying out loud! It was perfectly obvious to me. So there! We’ll call it halfsies
Hi Tom, Yeah. I’ll make it more emphatic over winter break when I have some time for pixelsmithing. And thanks Gerald for figuring it out the first time. Don’t want to lose anyone’s trust.
It’s not simple if we can’t understand it.
I think the bubble is hard to see and understand. I’d say change it to a link that says “Comment” and make the font bigger. It’s very teeny tiny right now.
(The stuff at the side is really little and hard to read, too)
Hi Mary, Thanks for the feedback. I’ll see if there’s a way to address your concerns over winter holidays. John
John
I just picked up an interesting quirk in using the apostrophe; each pasted versions exponentially adds on a series of /’s!~!! Weird
Bill
Yes I noticed that before. I’ll look for a fix someday. Thanks, John
I thought the bubble was pretty darn obvious…
ps: The slashes are being added by your php code. Do you have magic_quotes_gpc turned on? I suspect you do, or else, you are running addslashes or some version of escape_string on the user input. If you need help getting this cleaned up, I can take a look for you.
Professor Maeda,
Santa Claus brought me The Laws of Simplicity for Christmas. I have read it in the alternative mode you suggest—the first three chapters follow by the tenth. I chose this approach on the fly; by the end of chapter three, I had become so annoyed that I couldn’t bring myself to read chapters four through nine.
What’s my beef? Here’s an example.
On page 26, you write: “I stopped wearing a wristwatch many years ago as I found, like many others, that as a result I never feel that I man running out of time.” You would even banish the time display from you cell phone, if you could.
These assertions follow closely on a brief account of your traffic-dodging efforts to shave time from your commute through Boston to arrive home in the evening before your children are asleep.
Tilt!
Without a wristwatch, how do you know that you have saved any time by your self-admittedly risky driving technique? Or how can you even tell when to leave your office in order to achieve your goal. For that matter, how don’t you regularly miss meetings, movies, plays, or concerts that you are expected or wish to attend? Or how is it that you ever arrive in time for a flight, say, to Amsterdam? In a contract, what can the phrase “time is of the essence” mean to you?
I suspect that you reluctantly consult your cell phone, or the notoriously unreliable clocks that grace random walls and banks, or inconvenience those of us who wear a wristwatch by interrupting us to ask for the time. Or perhaps you have a staff of wristwatch-wearers who urge you, punctually, hither and thither.
In any case, it seems that you must compensate for your own inattention to time by others’ attention to it.
In the same vein, you may feel that your driving technique presents an acceptable risk to yourself. But have you considered the risk that your “swerving through the infamous battle field of Boston traffic” poses to pedestrians and other drivers—or what opinion they might have of your behavior?
This theme of simplifying your life at the cost to others of added complexity in theirs comes to fruition in chapter ten thus: “More appears like less simply by moving it far, far away. Yes, it may be simpler for you to use a data terminal, but doing so inevitably increases complexity for those at the other end of the wire connected to your terminal. Indeed, the main thread of your argument seems to be to disguise complexity rather than remove it.
I could continue, but I won’t—except to make two suggestions:
• In future reprints of this book, retitle it The Laws of Apparent Simplicity.
• For your next book, look for an editor beyond your circle of friends and dependent students.
Thanks for listening.
Hi Lee,
Thank you for the points you make above — they add to the dialogue in a nice way. I chuckled when I read your conjecture that “you must have some person that keeps time for you if you don’t yourself.” Since creating LOS, coincidentally I am lucky enough to have an assistant that does just that for me. BUT also because she is so good and earnest about it, and her diligence mmade me aware of my own “irresponsible” notions of time above, I now do wear a wristwatch
From the comments I have received from LOS readers worldwide, they have found ways to use it to change their lives for the better. This was always the intent of LOS. Yes, LOS can make you feel a bit LOS-T, but that is the point of the exercise of reading it (and for me, writing it).
As for concealing complexity, yes that is what a lot of LOS is about. I do bring up the deceptive nature of some of the Laws, and didn’t see it as being kept a secret. You’ve inspired me to post a note on this particular theme of deception and simplicity. I’ll do so in the coming weeks. As for renaming the book, it could have been named many things. If it is around in a few years, it may change to something else or maybe stay the same.
I take your comment on editorship as a negative expression on my own abilities, and not the abilities of those I turned to for editorial help. If I am correct on this, I am happy to receive your opinion but I don’t take to criticizing others that cannot defend themselves here (or would have no interest to do so) so I appreciate your treading lightly in this regard as you have done above. Let’s leave it at that.
Thanks again Lee, and I wish you and all your friends a wonderful 2007!
John