Categories
Debated

What If There’s Bears?

I am a huge, huge fan of Atlassian’s tools, and I’ve worked pretty hard to make them a part of culture at my office. They’ve just started a series of blog posts on using a wiki for technical writing, and I loved this bit:

Do you feel nervous at the thought of customers adding angry comments on your documentation wiki? Spammers running riot? Here’s the flipside for you to consider: customers answering other customers’ questions in the wiki, external developers adding code samples to help flesh out your document, partners volunteering to write new documentation.

I think that when it comes to implementing any new technology (especially from being inside IT), there’s a lot of fear and belief that someone, somewhere, is going to misuse/abuse it. But we often lose site of the advantages that will come from the tool and clever use by your community.

“But what if…?” is the common thing I hear when talking about new technology, and my tongue-in-cheek response is now going to be “What if there’s bears?”, in due deference to this old Will Hines video:

Stop planning for doomsday. Pre-empt the obvious abuses, and handle the subtleties as they come.

Categories
Debated

Arguing With Friends About Gaming For Fun And Profit

About 10 years ago, when I was wearing the very unique hat of “Mac gaming journalist”, I got to meet a lot of remarkable people. One such person was Corey Tamas, who I met just as he was taking over Mike Dixon’s much beloved Mac Gamer’s Ledge and transitioning it into MacGamer.com, which recently relaunched after a few years of hiatus. Corey is a family man with a huge heart, a big Doctor Who fan (like bow ties, Doctor Who fans are cool), and one of the people that I will forever consider part and parcel of “Mac gaming”. He’s good people.

That said, sometimes he writes things I just can’t agree with, which brings us to today’s “10 Reasons Gamers Should Choose a Mac Over an iPhone/iPad“. Besides being a weird apples vs. oranges comparison – why not have both? – the ten reasons range from shaky to silly to flat-out wrong. Corey has authorized me to do my worst, so as a general survey of what’s going on with iOS gaming, here’s 10 Reasons Corey Tamas Is Wrong.

Categories
Debated

Blinders

A random musing:

Yesterday, we were at MoCCA Festival 2010. After ducking into the last panel of the day, I found Katie sitting in the hallway with a few more bags. She showed me that she had picked up Volumes 1 and 2 of Cat and Girl, both signed by Dorothy Gambrell.

I suddenly panicked: I hadn’t seen a Cat and Girl comic in some large length of time, to the point where I had completely forgotten it even existed. After checking my feed reader this morning, I confirmed that it had been a year and a half. How could something I loved just drift out of my field of view, without me noticing?

But wait: this happens all the time. We forget about what used to be our favorite bands when they get filtered off our playlists or don’t come up on shuffle. We lose track of the friends we used to stay up late talking to because they’re not on our social network of choice. We stop enjoying the works of great writers or artists because they change websites, or their feeds break, or our bookmarks get corrupt.

I’m not complaining, and this certainly isn’t a screed about being dependent on technology. But it’s curious how the frequency that something is in my field of view correlates to my interest in it.