Simplicity Rules

My friend Dawn asked to know more about me recently, so I thought I’d share with you. For many, I’m just the simple guy. But, oh, I’m more complex than that. See for yourself:

1. I grew up on 30 acres an hour north of San Francisco. We had no animals, but we had plenty of fruit trees, a barn, a tire swing, and lots of land to play around on.
2. A donkey man lived on our property for almost a year. John Stiles was wandering the country with his two wagons (he slept in one) and a plethora of animals* when we offered him a place for the winter. It ended up being a nine month gig, and he built a third wagon during that time.
3. I once looked up gullible in the dictionary to prove a friend it was there. That is not a proud moment.



4. In college I started a radio station. As ever, it’s barely hanging on, but it’s still around. Like many things I’ve had a hand in starting, I did it because I wanted to participate, but there was nothing like it.
5. I ran a BBS in high school. This is where I earn my geek cred. I built myself a second computer, got an inbound-only phone line, and invited people to connect their computer to mine. I even wrote games for users to play and had a short-lived, but profitable, software company. The name of the BBS? Fallen Chaos, after misheard lyrics (”crawling chaos”) from a Metallica song.
6. I’ve never seen The Wizard of Oz. No, I have nothing against it, and one of these days it’s going to happen. The time just hasn’t been right yet. Don’t rush me.
7. There is a street named after my family in Windsor, CA. I was the fifth generation to live in the formerly tiny farming town. This year is the 100th anniversary of the DuVander Ranch (now mostly a Raley’s shopping center). When they created the new downtown a few years ago, they honored our family with a few hundred feet of blacktop. Bonus trivia: DuVander Lane is situated in what used to be the field where I first met the Donkey Man.
8. I have been in three bands, and each played a version of Sloop John B. I sang in all of them, played guitar in the first two, and switched to bass for the third. I even have a few MP3s hanging about here and there. The names: A.J. (Adam and Josh), The Rash, and trailBOSS.

Your turn: what don’t I know about you?

* Yes, El Guapo, I know what a plethora is. His animals, as I recall: Two mules, 18 donkeys (plus two born while he was with us, minus the two who died from bee stings), three goats, about a dozen chickens, and three or four doves.

Sometimes when I introduce myself to a group of people, I say I’m in charge of stopping feature creep. For anyone who works on the web, it should be a big part of your job.

Feature creep is when, usually a little at a time, a small project becomes a big project. Even if you aren’t a designer or programmer, you’ve probably experienced it. You know when you go on a vacation to a new city and you have a huge list of things to see that keeps growing? That’s feature creep, too.

A web company called Six Revisions has Eight Tips on How to Manage Feature Creep:

1. Accept that feature creep will happen
2. Commit enough time to requirements-gathering
3. Giving a hand might cost you your arm
4. Be the devil’s advocate when changes are requested
5. Be task-oriented, not vision-oriented
6. Shed the “Customer is Always Right” mentality
7. Research before committing
8. Realize that feature creep is a two-way street

To not combat feature creep is to let your project become too complex. If a new feature isn’t necessary, scrap it, especially if this is a new project.

Read the full article to see their explanation of these eight tips.

This is an update on my previous MetroFi review from a year ago. MetroFi is the company tapped by Portland Metro to blanket the city with free WiFi.

I recently used the service downtown and found it to be better than my previous experience. The banner ads are gone, improving Internet browsing tremendously.

The only downside is that they’ve thrown a registration page before access is granted. Not just an “I accept” page, which is somewhat commonplace, but a complete multi-step create an account process.

The good news is that they don’t get deep into personal information–telephone numbers, address. It’s still a barrier, but well worth the one time annoyance to get better service.

I suspect they are doing some serious attention data gathering. If they aren’t working with major sites (ie, search engines) to serve up relevant ads yet, they will be soon. Privacy issues aside, this should be better for the users.

MetroFi still won’t replace my own Internet provider, nor keep me from going to WiFi coffeeshops, but it’s now a viable recommendation for the average Portlander who lives very near one of MetroFi’s hotspots.

My buddy Tom from MySpace (he’s probably your buddy, too) has a message for his users who have been subject to phishing scams: it’s your fault.

Phishing is the name given to the practice of making a web site that pretends to be another site in order to gain your credentials. For years thieves have been using this for serious damage, such as getting into bank accounts. It’s a big problem, one that browsers and sites themselves have been tackling.

Lately I’ve noticed a number of my MySpace friends sending me advertisements that I wouldn’t expect them to send. Likely, they had been phished. Tom decided to take action with a call to “protect yourself from phishing!” (color choice all his):

“Phishing is a trick people use to steal your email & password. It is not a “security” flaw, and you’re not getting “hacked.” It’s entirely preventable by you, if you know what to look for. “

I appreciate his position. It must be difficult to watch millions of his users fall prey to something that can, from his perspective, be so easily avoided. Lack of user education is definitely part of the problem (knowledge makes everything simpler, says the Laws of Simplicity). But he isn’t meeting users in the middle in this post. Even his “simple” solution sounds like a lot of work and is asking users to change their normal patterns:

“This all may sound complicated, but there’s a simple way to make sure you NEVER get phished. If you are ever clicking around MySpace and you are asked to login, don’t do it! STOP. Go to the URL bar in your browser, and type in ‘myspace.com’ and then login. If you always type in myspace.com yourself, you’ll be sure that you are on our real login page, and not some fake designed to steal your login credentials.”

Especially for a site as notoriously lacking in design as MySpace, they have to accept some of the blame. They have to come up with some sort of change on their end to become more phishing proof. They can’t expect a post so long most MySpacers won’t even skim it to make a significant impact. Most of all, there needs to be less “it’s not my fault” and more it’s all my fault.

via Marshall who may not agree