I saw this post on a website that was sent to me that automated the note-carding process. Now i am a big fan of note carding during the planning phase of development projects. Its a great exercise to get
thoughts down an it encourages participation by even the most resistant team members. The Beauty of the process is that it gets you to think differently about the solution that you are trying to provide that solves the problem. Although this product seems worthy of praising as it saves time in digitizing the process later. I feel that in doing so, it short-circuits what the process is meant to do in the first place.

Note-carding is supposed to be a bit laborious. Its supposed to be messy and its supposed to encourage manually writing things down and pasting them up on a wall. Dis-engaging from our CPU’s to work together creatively to come up with elements to solve a problem is what the process is supposed to do. I would go as far as to make sure NO digital devices be allowed in the meeting room during this process save a figital camera to take a picture of the wall you may be stick-i-fying.

Maybe this product has applications beyond software development. But for my team, we will use the hand-spun 3M stickies so that our creative right brains get more involved in the process of what our left-brains like to dominate.

Ok, this really is getting annoying. I work for an organization that has decided to go whole-heartedly to Vista. The wisdom of this decision, i will not debate here, but i am sure that people smarter than myself have their reasons. Anyway, we are on this road to Vista. I have an employee who has only worked here for 5 weeks and today, Adobe CS3 has just stopped working. No joke, this thing has just started to crash out of the blue. Now i dare you to google “adobe cs3 crash +vista” and take a look at what people are going through. I am amazed that Microsoft can unleash this software on the unassuming assuming public. Let me explain.

The public assumes that their operating system will work. The public assumes that when they upgrade, their system will be better than the last. The public assumes that their investment in their software packages will be upheld through the upgrade. The public assumes that someone as large as MicroSoft could manage to put out something that just works. And there’s the joke! HA HA Joe Public! There you go again thinking that Microsoft has your best interest at heart!

I am not impressed by this operating system Microsoft. Its slow, its a memory pig, and now i have to deal with major downtime of one of my employees because your software has just decided to stop working with other major software vendor’s packages.

Some of you may be saying, hey! this isn’t MicroSoft’s problem! It’s Adobe’s! Wrong, wrong, wrong. I understand software development, i understand interoperability and I understand that Microsoft cannot control the 1000’s of vendors and how they implement software. But wow, i just don’t understand how this Operating System can be so unstable. How can a major piece of software JUST STOP WORKING in this day and age?

Microsoft is losing market-share, It may be a slow process, but its happening. I am so happy that i am a Macintosh user at this time because my software just works. It doesn’t crash randomly… or at all.

That being said, here ends my rant.