Lauren Caitlin Upton is an idiot

Apparently Lauren Upton is one of the 20% of Americans who don’t own maps. Or something. From the Miss Teen USA Pageant (24 August 2007): “Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?” Miss South Carolina, Lauren Caitlin Upton: “I personally …

Moving? Here’s where to change your address

I moved last year, and I had to change my address everywhere. As I did this, I kept track of where, hoping to make the process easier next time. Forgetting organizations is annoying. The list I’ve compiled is below the jump. Where possible, I’ve included a link to the web page where you can make …

Best recruiter story. Ever.

Tony is a UI engineer. He gets a lot of recruiter spam. Usually it’s related to his skillset. This time, however, the recruiter was looking for a filesystems engineer. They had this hilarious exchange: Recruiter: We’re looking for somebody with 7-10 years of experience writing filesystems.Me: The only person I know with that level of …

Speaking at WWDC: Bug Reporting Best Practices

At this year’s Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, I’m giving version 2.0 of my Bug Reporting Best Practices talk. The official blurb: Bug reports that are complete and reproducible help to isolate known issues in system and application software, making a solution much more likely. Learn the bug reporting best practices that Apple has developed in …

MoveOn’s mail merge could use a little help

On March 23, 2007, I received an email from MoveOn titled “Rep. Pelosi does the right thing on Iraq.” It began like this: Dear MoveOn member, We’re one step closer in the fight to end the war. Today the Iraq Accountability Act passed Congress. For the first time, Congress passed a real deadline to end …

Understanding user needs…in Africa

Jakob Nielsen, look out. Parker Mitchell has a few things to say about the importance of understanding user needs: In particular, we will propose that the efforts of people in this room ensure that technology development efforts better incorporate the functional, economic and social/culture realities of prospective users. In my case the “users” are rural …

Address Book AppleScript example

Here’s a simple AppleScript that exports all of the email addresses in your Mac OS X address book as a comma-separated list: tell application “Address Book” set emailList to {} set peopleCount to (count every person) repeat with i from 1 to peopleCount set emailList to emailList & (get value of every email of person …