Ending a presentation with an 'any questions' slide

Ending a presentation with an 'any questions' slidePro: Engages conversation with the audienceCons:Should have answered questions when making presentation - because know audience and presentation was geared to their needsShould stop and take questions at any time - if don't do this people will forget questions or miss something else while writing the questions down so they don't forg...

Wanna be like Mike?

Here's Michael Jordan's move on the golf course: Some guy in the group asks if Jordan wants to play for money, Jordan says of course, the guy asks how much, and Jordan says, "Whatever makes you nervous." Works all the time, seeing as how most people buckle when standing over, say, a $5,000 putt, except, of course, when one of the guys in the group has at least as much money as Jordan and more game...

iPhone Day

Today is iPhone day. Well the day they become available in the US.Enough has been said about the iPhone to fill an awful lot of somethings, but I'm going to use the opportunity to talk about Safari.When Safari for Windows was announced there was lots of speculation about why Apple would do this.While there is an argument for it being a way to show Windows users what Apple products are like and maybe...

Name badges

I'm a big fan of name badges, so this is very exciting:Check out these conference badges!You may provide as much or as little information as you like. Your badge will be more interesting the more information you provide.They were very receptive to our experimenting with integrating Pathable's social matching service into the event bad...

Some random quotes

"People need uninterrupted time to get things done. 37signals is spread out over four cities and eight time zones. From Provo, Utah to Copenhagen, Denmark, the five of us are eight hours apart. One positive side effect of this eight hour difference is alone time. There are only about 4-5 hours during the day that we’re all up and working together. At other times, the US team is sleeping while David,...

Missing help file

Rather than a message like this, it would be better for the program to detect that the help file was missing and not even provide the option to launch he...

Checking database permissions in SQL Server 2000

I recently had to write a script to confirm that correct database permissions had been set on a database. Here's how I did it. Hopefully the comments will make it clear what's going on.--- This uses the syspermissions.actadd column. --- This is an undocumented column and is not guaranteed to work in future versions of SQL Server.SELECT 'ATTENTION:' AS Type, 'Any entries below have not been granted...

Software out of date

This could be better:It could report version numbers/dates so it is clear what is wrong.It could say what needs to be done to allow the program to run.It could say where to go/who to contact to find out how to get the program to run.Can the program be changed/updated? or is a completely new version...

What on earth does this mean?

There has to be a better way of saying whatever this message is trying to tell ...

Misleading execution times

After restoring a database I was surprised that SQL Server was reporting that it only took 1 second. It definitely felt like longer to me.It did take longer. Look at the bottom of the screen, it actually took 33 seconds. So why report that it only took 1? And what only took 1 second? This message...

How many new items

I like Google reader but there is a definite usability issue in the indication of how many items are in the 'All items' group. It could be 101 or 10000001 for all I can tell. The reason this is bad is that I get an exact figure up to 100 and then suddenly all I get is an approximation with no indication...

Bad Error message

I've built up quite a collection of bad coding/message examples.This is a bad message as it comes from a program that I'm not able to debug. As an end user I shouldn't even be given the opportunity to debug anyw...

Some thoughts on support

I recently made some notes on customer service/support. Thought I'd share them here too.The Customer Service function is a public face for the company. Customers need to contact the company when they have a problem that is stopping them from doing their job. At this time the customer will get to see...