orangebutton, a weblog by George Girton

Ease of Spill . . . . . mar 31 2003 — ob39.dat

One result from ergonomic motion studies is the finding that when you reach for something farther away, you simply speed up your motion. For single acts, the act doesn't take longer than a short reach. But there can be other consequences.

Yesterday I was doing some design work, examining a web image on two adjacent computers, each one running a different web browser. I reached for the mouse on the right, moving as quickly as a martial arts master. However, between my hand and the mouse rested a cup full of coffee, which erupted upwards under the impact, spraying sweet caffeinated brown droplets all over the Ergonomically Engineered Keyboard (EEK). Hai-Ya! Little drops inched slowly down the 'delete' key, moving toward the sensitive electronics beneath. I turned the keyboard upside down to dry out, and hoped for the best.

I have just started reading Better Thinking, Better Results [buy at amazon] . by Bob Emiliani, with David Stec, Lawrence Grasso and James Stodder. This appears to be a thorough case study of the Wiremold Company's transition to a system of business management called "Lean Management", now called "Lean" for short. The book has just won the Shingo Prize for excellence in manufacturing, named after Shigeo Shingo, one of the original contributors to the Toyota Production System. If you haven't heard of Lean, perhaps you have heard of one of its concepts: Just In Time inventory management. The book is intriguing; I'm sure I'll finish it and review it here.

Note to self: check out the W. Edwards Deming website referred to in 'Better Thinking'.

rantinggeek speaks . . . . . mar 31 2003 — ob40.dat

It's too close for comfort to April 1, to be hearing from the ranting geek (therantinggeek.com). Nonetheless, here is the missive from antieuclid...in its entirety.

"long thought dormant, TheRantingGeek.com shocked the scientific community today when it spontaneously updated and opened new forums. Let's go to Earl for the details... Well, it seems Earl has been eaten by a carp, so you'll have to find the details for yourself. — www.therantinggeek.com"

Dvorak KeyboardZ R US . . . . . mar 29 2003 — ob38.dat

For a while now I have been feeling an essay coming on: writing a little bit about my experience using a Dvorak keyboard layout. It might be kind of interesting, albeit in a rather nerdy way.

Certainly I'm qualified. I churned out tens of thousands of pages with a Dvorak layout, and that was before I even got a computer keyboard. Nowadays (young whippersnapper) you can simply select the keyboard layout in your operating system of choice, whether it's Mac OS 9, X, or any of the 14 or 15 (true!) desktop varieties of Windows now polluting -- oops I mean flooding -- the marketplace.

Back in the olden days the only way to get one of these puppies (a Dvorak keyboard) was to pull out a soldering iron and start melting an reattaching typewriter key slugs. Or worse yet, try explaining it to the local typewriter repair man. Just two words for you on that approach: Not Happening.

Stay tuned, I feel it coming. In the meantime, do I recommend the Dvorak keyboard layout? Ohhhhhh yeahhhhhh!

Little Orange Button . . . . . mar 11 2003 — bookish47.dat

I'm very proud of this: I made my little orange XML button entirely using a css style sheet, so it eats up a lot less bandwidth, but looks just the same as the huge humongous slow-loading .gif buttons everyone else uses. Help yourself!

I learned the importance of doing this from Andy King's book Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization, which I still recommend.

orange wisdom . . . . . mar 8 2003 — ob37.dat

The last time we went on the artwalk we ended up visiting some websites afterwards.

I finally got around to posting my orange story on colorcrush, a website started by Los Angeles graphic designer Emilyn Neri (476k) She also has the wonderful EverythingOrange.com

If you look carefully on colorcrush, you can see a photo of my Apple keyboard with the fortune cookie message: "A thrilling time is in your immediate future."

What a fortune cookie says is always true. For example, the message on my Windows computer keyboard says "You will be called upon to help a friend in trouble." In the case of Windows, most appropriate.

404 Mistakes . . . . . mar 3 2003 — ob36.dat

Thanks very much to dedicated web authors in Australia and Canada, who describe exactly how to handle the dreaded 404 error.

GSpot and Crazygrrl. Thanks, ladies!

Actually, if your site is running on the Apache webserver, as most are, it's pretty simple. You just add a single line to a file named '.htaccess' and on a 404 not found, it redirects the browser to that location, as follows:

ErrorDocument 404 /sorrymissing.htm

That's all there is to it!