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July 11, 2004
Random premises
Ellen Isaacs and Alan Walendowski wrote Designing From Both Sides of the Screen, which I'm reading to counterbalance a book Stu lent me called The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Franzen seems first to have contacted, then to have dated, and finally to have moved in with the same muse that tortures Luke's nightmares, descendant from hrönir of whatever killed the Elder Race, and whose telepathic control beyond time caused the Thule Society to look mistakely to the North, leading them away from Lovecraft's Antarctic Atlantis. (Barjavel found it, too.)
Ellen and Alan start with the premise that you "Understand users' needs." That sent me back to Jonathan, where Chip with salmon melting in his pants listened to Doug considering purchase of an alternate personality, even to our Jonathan and his robots. Jonathan, stubble rather than ponytail, engendered embarrassment which led me, as though holding in a sneeze, to refrain from seeing Ellen and Alan's reverse-brainstorming-envisioned starting point as Antithesis before yet another synthetic, foreshortened, vignette Chomskyesque pre-cognizant, early-morning flash critique of the Entire System (aka Black Iron Prison) under which the lure of stock options and the weight of our furniture prevent nearly all of us from true software development.
Logicians say that "From False Premises Come False Conclusions." The statement implies a belief in effect from cause, in the possibility of tying the two together through logical argument.
The best we could do under the circumstances of the second law of thermodynamics coincided with delivery of 3000 pages in words and pictures, with artifacts such as nsslapd-autosize-cache: "This performance tuning related attribute is turned off by default. It specifies the percentage of free memory to use for all the combined caches." Users of course have issues, needs, and concerns of their own, just like Iraqi children.
To abuse the is of identity: The universe is not malicious. It's random.
Posted by Mark at July 11, 2004 09:15 AM