Virtual Thought

Okay, no, not really. But in that funny and scathing way of his Joel says no to agile development practices.

So let me try on the Joel hat for a while. In the example he gives, Speedy doesn’t actually have a customer on site and doesn’t actually produce any stories about the user experience. Which agile method, exactly, proposes starting out by coding without talking to the user? If he was truly agile, Speedy wouldn’t go off and code in the weeds for three weeks. He’d have gathered some user input, generated user stories, defined some basic models and mock-ups… y’know, everything that an agile software developer would do.

And I’m glad Mr. Rogers at WellTemperedSoft had such a positive experience… unfortunately for him, though, he appears to have stopped talking to the user during those three weeks of development and has suffered from some requirements drift. Too bad Mr. Rogers wasn’t talking with his customer or else he could have noticed that drift. And, y’know, too bad Mr. Rogers has a disconnected relationship with his managers or else the managers would be more understanding when Mr. Rogers has to adjust the end product to meet his changing requirements.

To be fair, I don’t like searching for silver bullets and holy grails and I’m not a fan of zealotry. But I do think that the argument should be fairly represented, at least.

The Telecrapper 2000 will answer your phone line whenever it detects either calls that are blocking their caller ID or calls on a specified blacklist. It will then play a series of wave files back to the caller in series and record the conversation for your later enjoyment.

Seems like someone once described to me this crazy idea about letting a group of people “tag” up webpages with comments.

And now it seems like these guys had the same idea. It also looks like I came late to this party… used to be on Greasemonkey, now it’s on Ruby… which, y’know, is cool. ( =

This is great. I’ve always wanted to be able to compare before and afters in photo session retouches… since media promotes the idea that celebrity is akin to the godhead it’s nice to see something that might be reality amidst the glam. ( =

Found this really weird set of Flash games that are surreal and strangely engaging.

Found it by going here (this guy hates the Kubrick theme… design your own, he says) which led me here and here (love the design on that last one) which finally led me to Eyezmaze.

Frickin’ cool.

In the “Heartless Yet Funny Sons of Bitches” category we have Katrina: The Gathering. Fan-fucking-tastic and totally deplorable. Right.

As a side note, they used this cool program to make the cards. Sweet!

A while back I posted about Dan Hoyt’s penchant for exposing himself to people on the New York subway. Because I am vain, I went on Technorati and found out that this person pointed to my article in relation to Dog-shit-girl. Apparently the story is pretty famous: this woman was walking her dog and didn’t pick up its poop. When she was pressed to pick it up she told the pressers to fuck off. Someone took her picture and posted it on the web, villifying her. Somewhere along the way this small-time persecution turned into full-blown witch hunt: people found out where she lived, who her family was, where she was attending university and, basically, went after her.

So we have these two stories, both with a similar theme: we’re entering a new, incredibly fluid era of new, democratic media and clearly have no idea how to critique its narrative. As much as Flickr might feel like a corkboard for posting photos, it’s not. As much as blogging feels like writing an open letter to one’s friends, it’s not. By adding to these great big sticky gloms of new media we’re making waves that we can’t see that are overturning boats we don’t know about and lapping on far distant shores just over the horizon. And other people are using these waves against us already and we’re not ready. In short: do you know how to create a viral idea? Because other people do.

One of the great aspects of our fluid new media is detournement. Another is culture jamming. I think these two stories illustrate a more troubling aspect, however: we’re tapping into something very big and there’s not enough serious discussion in popular media about the effects here.

In the end, I’m not upset that the flasher was caught. I’m also not happy that a girl’s life was made hellish because she didn’t pick up dog poop and told someone to fuck off. But I do think that we’re not looking in the right places for solutions to these witch hunts and ripples.

BTW, this quote earns my vote for Scariest Thing I’ve Heard This Week:

“Thanks to technology, we are able to build a better society in which citizens are the police, prosecutors, and judges.”

Ever heard of the tyranny of the majority, pal? Doesn’t sound like a better society to me.

This page is a great recount of Dog-shit-girl’s trials and is the inspiration for this post. Thanks!