I wrote my latest Techsource post while sweltering in my skivvies in my tiny office… I took on pretty much every major technology peeve I have. Well, I probably have a few more. Do you?
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Staff who want the latest greatest software/hardware for status or other reasons when they never figured out how to use the technology they already had. We had an assistant director for whom we purchased Perfect Office who 3 months later when MS Office was released wanted to switch which we did and then Perfect Office was upgraded and he wanted to switch back….in the meantime he was still using DOS WordStar on his computer.
Libraries that block instant messaging/gaming/Flickr/YouTube and so forth because computers should be used for serious purposes. Have you ever browsed your new-book shelves? Danielle Steele, Jan Karon… let a thousand flowers bloom, but don’t kid yourselves that you have an intellectual renaissance going on over in the stacks.
Interspersed as it was amongst my stack of news stories about DOPA this morning, this was SO refreshing and timely. Thank you, thank you.
One of my pet peeves is bloat, especially website bloat (aka too damn complicated for the users). If I can’t find our Internet usage policy because it’s buried on some obscure page that’s different from the other obscure page, both of which link from different places on the site, then how do we expect our users to find it? (This peeve started as a complaint about Target.com’s “six more clicks and you’re there” sizing charts nonsense. There will be a blog post today.)
My other pet peeve is insisting that virtual reference can only be done through a commercial product such as LivePerson or 24/7. Yes, please, let’s make it more technologically challenging for our users to find us. What is wrong with IM? (Our library’s instituting IM service, btw, so this is a past peeve.)
I’ll stop before I start hyperventilating.
Cascading Bug faults. One of those situations where there is more than one bug in a system or group of systems and they together in a way to drive you totally bonkers. Say, a flaw in the linking of two remote databases only fails in case x. But if you could do y it wouldn’t be a problem. But doing y causes a indeterminate glitch in place z. DDL/Dependency Heck (to use polite words) tend to be a wonderful example of this problem.
Ummm, maybe this is too specific of a gripe 😉
Realizing only after posting a comment that several missing words, misspellings, and poor grammer makes you sound like you are a border-line illiterate. Hmmm, that might be a personal problem of mine though and not technology ;).
Seriously though, I really like Kris’s comments. I recently gone bonkers on a page for a business where I was just trying to locate their address. So I could actually go and make a purchase. Ya know, pay money. It was nearly impossible to find the address info.
I’m hoping some better IM technology will come as people adapt some of the work done with apps like jabber and make commerical products that work without all the hassle. Can you imagine having an im setup where it appeared to be just a generic account (LibrarianAtDesk) but actually had a couple of people who could answer different conversations?