Chance Bliss

• Sign up forms must die…Ahem Brother!
• Performance reviews are a big fat waste of time…Praise Jesus!
• Boomstick: A time wasting game…Hallelujah!
• Why don’t girls like ninjas?…A question for the ages?

I’m tired of all these lame men’s colognes. I don’t want to smell like Cool Water, Corduroy, Black Jeans or English Leather. As a side note, what’s with all the pant related fragrances? You’ve got a problem if you are going around a smelling people’s pants. I want to smell like thick-cut bacon,  grilled hamburger or a medium-rare rib eye steak.

I see a huge cross-selling opportunity for Drakkar and Steak-Umm.

I love the old guy’s reaction to the 2 girls.

Reminds me of my all time favorite Truth in Advertising.

A recent experience with trying to a get a quick answer about a Motorola headset got me thinking about how many companies still don’t get search.

I was looking for a simple answer on how to connect a Motorola H500 headset to my wife’s Razr. You are supposed to put the headset in “discoverable mode”, but I couldn’t remember how to do it. So I did like anyone else and went to Google and typed “motorola h500 headset discoverable mode“. I was expecting to find a direct link to a Motorola page with the instructions, but all I found was product reviews, forums and blogs and no results from Motorola. After trying a number of other searches, I gave up and went to motorola.com…big mistake. Motorola’s site is a maze of pdfs, micro-flash sites and empty navigational pages. No wondering none of their information was being indexed by Google.

A long story short, I finally found the answer when I noticed the instructions in a search results snippet from a company site that provides software for connecting Bluetooth headsets with Skype.

Here’s the snippet:
“With the headset off, hold down the Call button for 6 to 10 seconds until the light stays lit.”

Well that was easy, but why couldn’t Motorola have made finding that information just as easy?

The days of flashy brand experience sites are over. A plain old Web site with text, links and your logo in the corner will beat any 3 million dollar user-centric, agency designed site. If your homepage is burdened with embedded flash intros, DHTML drop-down menus or gigantic images of your products, you might as well be behind a mountain, down a well and under a rock. No one is going find you.

I wish more companies would follow the agile/lean approach to management. It’s amazing how little most executives trust their employees to do the right thing. Most places try to replace trust with either fear or something even worse the dreaded process.

Here are the main principles according to Ron Bieber’s article “Agile / Lean or Common Sense and Permission To Change?” :

• Trust people to do the right thing for the company
• Give them freedom and authority to work the way they want to
• Push decisions down the chain as far as possible
• Work in small batches and change things that aren’t working
• Allow those who are capable of leading to lead, no matter what their title or position is
• Put quality checks in place – whether it be test-driven development, or quality checks at each step in an assembly
• Fix problems at the core and stop the line as quickly as possible – in development this would be TDD and automated builds. Once a problem is found, find the root cause and put a test or quality check in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again
• and finally, Trust people to do the right thing for the company

I love to read about white people and now there is finally a blog for me. Stuff White People Like. Some of these hit pretty close to home, especially #63 Expensive Sandwiches. I was the king of expensive sandwiches when I worked in New York. Now I’m stuck in New Jersey. Is there anything other than Italian food up in this here state? Jesus! What I wouldn’t give for a good sandwich.

Here’s a really expensive sandwich.

E. Gary Gygax, the inventor of Dungeons & Dragons had died. Raise your 12 sided die and take a swig from your flagon of mead. See the Tribute Video.

My Character Sheet
Name: Baldorf
Race: Human
Alignment: Neutral

• STR: 10
• DEX: 15
• CON: 11
• INT: 18
• WIS: 17
• CHA: 12

Spells:

• Magic Missile
• Flesh to Stone
• Paralyze

Weapons

• Totemic Staff of Splinterskull (+1 Enhancement Bonus, Casts Summon Monster II)

I’m making a special plea to our founding fathers to rise from their graves and use their super human zombie powers to end this primary madness. What a convoluted mess!