Apparently, my dad is getting better

Since the radiation therapy and radio-sensitizing chemo, my dad has seemed to be pretty full on dying. Temporary cognative issues, breathing troubles, lots of loss of energy. But today, after some scheduling issues which drove my mom nuts, they finally got in and saw the results of the scans. Much better. One brain tumor is gone, the other is much smaller, and the lung tumor is regressing a lot also. So, why is he feeling bad? Because of the monkey-stomping the tumors are taking. There's scar tissue, some bleeding, etc. That's where the effects are coming from. So, they'll get better over time. No, it's not totally cured yet. Probably looking at the gamma knife, and some similar spot treatments. Will update when more is known.

Seriously? That's your excuse?

So, if you use Netflix at all, you might have heard about this insane plan to eliminate profiles. They were neat, a way to organize lists, like one for movies, one for series. Or one for each family member. I needed it because Netflix also has a limit of 500 disks per queue, and I am over that limit. So, the other day they announced that these would be eliminated. Completely. With no migration. They just disappear in two months. Check out this particular reason, though. Yeah, all the usual, but also:

...keeping our service as simple and as easy to use as possible. Too many members found the feature difficult to understand and cumbersome, having to consistently log in and out of the website. Continuing to maintain the profiles feature for the passionate few who use it (including myself) distracts us from the mission of presenting to all our members the easiest way to find the best titles for them...

Okay, the system was somewhat cumbersome. They assumed each was a person, so you had to have a different email (username) and password, and it did some other odd stuff like the first profile is the account owner, so when signed onto another you cannot get to account details stuff. But they are claiming that this poor design means that the whole function is worthless. What? This is a terrible way to use design to justify product features. How about a redesign? How about labeling and marketing it correctly, so more than 2% of users can find it. BTW, I think that's a pretty good use rate for such a poorly-communicated service. To clarify, I am not totally talking out of my ass here. I have designed a few profile-based account management systems, mostly for much, much larger organizations than Netflix. It's not that hard, and it's extremely a better idea to fix than discard. Oh, and the users who employ such systems in detail are the good customers. For an MRC based industry, it's always true that churn is expensive; why annoy these folks. I for one have been a pleased (evangelistic) customer for over 7 years, yet I am willing to consider other options now. Okay, I did participate in turning off a system once. At Sprint we were required once to give the ability to customize the account management screen. People could close portlets and move them around. I had poor hopes, but we worked as hard as possible to make it easy. And it tested okay, so no design issues to speak of. And... it was used at appallingly low rates. One year post launch, while working the next release, we checked and found about 5,000 people had ever customized it. We had 7-8 million customers at the time, and maybe 3 million regular users of the web account management system. That's (appx) 0.0016%. This we tossed without regret. 2%? We'd have kept it for that use rate.

I never get threatened over the internet!

I am so proud. Got this just this morning:

1. comments = Steven: I have requested twice, via this e-mail section of your website that you remove the old version of the Alphapointe website that you currently have posted at the following address: http://www.donttouchme.com/web/sites/alphapointe/products/products0.html Alison called me and I explained to her that we have a new corporate website, and I think that having this website available is potentially confusing to our customers. If you wish to use our company website as part of your online resume, then you are free to do so in the form of "screenshots" as long as it is clearly marked as such, and is not part of a working website. Please note that you are not authorized to use our company name online without consent from Alphapointe management. As such, we ask that you comply immediately with the above request. Failure to do so will result in legal action. If you wish to discuss this, I can be reached at (816) [redacted]. Ragards, [redacted] Chief information Officer

This is about my interactive design sample page. I post all sorts of source code for designs I did, as well as live site links for some. Sure, I took it down, partly because I don't care. It's old as hell, and not that good a design. I am not sure what a "screenshot" is, but I am not switching any of these to screenshots, cause that is lame as hell; I generally disregard samples from resumes submitted to me that are only screenshots. For web design, I want to see how it works in a real browser, and how it was coded. But seriously. I legitimately worked on it. We had no NDA that covered "don't tell anyone you worked on this" and it was like 12 years ago anyway. And how would /anyone/ get confused and think this was their website? I hope no one is confused by the old version of their website on the wayback machine. Someday I hope to have the money to hire lawyers so I can go ahead and ignore things like this. Oh, and the first email I got I ... never got. Email, not a good way to give legal threats. Number 2 I got while living out of a tent in the woods for a week. No real chance to do anything about it then (cannot ftp in from any old place, especially over very high latency cellmodems).

One thing I have been up to

Yeah, too busy lately to blog. Or at least, personally. Somehow, too many of my thoughts are work-related, so I spend time blogging for littlesprings. Aside from the published, I have 4 drafts. Gotta work on those. Anyway, I also spent the last week in the mud of middle-of-nowhere Oklahoma. I got up at 0500 Saturday to get dressed in my muddy tent, then spend half the day riding around in the back of a well-restored 1943 Taylorcraft L2 spotter plane. Oddly enough, I was actually spotting from it. As an extension of a paid training thing, I helped out the Allied side for the weirdly enormous Oklahoma D-Day paintball event. Over 3,000 players. I'd never heard of it before I went, though. Riding in the plane, spotting nazi wannabes, and talking to my base was pretty fun. For anyone wondering what the little plane is like: "windy." Terrifying if you are prone to aircraft-induced terror, I suspect, but I am not. I almost fell asleep on a return-to-airport leg. Here's a video of the a/c landing. It starts somewhere on the downwind leg over the airport: http://shoobe01.homeunix.net/~shoobe01/movies/L2-landing.mp4