Juixe Techknow

I love me a good burrito, and although Chipotle is not my favorite burrito joint, they do have an online order system that makes ordering lunch for a team of hungry, and picky, developers simple. But while scheduling a pick up order for the entire team I felt more like a tester than a customer.

Right on the first page after login in, I encountered infinite navigation loops. At page where I was to order, there is a big red button that read “ORDER NOW.” If you click this button, it reloads the current page you are already on. After trying that trick for a few times I realized I had to select one of the four order methods: online, app, fax, or burritos by the box.

Order Now

I then had ‘issues’ adding invitees to my order. Adding invitees is a three step process. You have to add a list of email addresses in the text area, click ‘Add To Invitees’, this then does some AJAX magic and creates a set of check boxes for each invitee and you have to select all before they are actually invited. I can honestly say that I had to this this step a few times to get it right. If done right, each invitee receives an email with a link to order their own meal.

Add Invitees

One large problem that a few folks had was that they didn’t order what they actually wanted. Unbeknownst to several team members, Chipotle wants users to be explicit about each ingredient in a burrito. A lot of team members just clicked on Chicken and didn’t realize that Chipotle would just give you a piece of tortilla with some chicken. The burrito looked like it had some stunted growth issue, but worst was the faces of the folks that ordered such a mini-burrito. One problem here is that the UI for ordering what goes inside the burrito is cluttered and goes against conventions of ordering a burrito in most taquerias. This mistake happened to three developers, so I can deduce that it is a common error when ordering online from the Chipotle.

Burrito Builder

One final issue I encountered was with the pick up of the online order. I didn’t realize or received a message from Chipotle that I had to log into the system after everyone had made their order and check out. When the time came, I just showed up at my local Chipotle to pick up the food but to my surprised they had not received it because I forgot to check out. Of course, I logged onto their website from my phone there was no way for me to see the recent history or pending order. Lucky for me, I was able to reach an hungry developer in the office and asked him to log into their website from my computer and he was able to finalize the order.

In the end, a few folks didn’t get what they expected, the food was late, and I learned a valuable lesson. Next time I’ll just fax the order in.

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• If some feature looks funky to your development team it looks twice as funky to your users.
• Is it FAB? Is it a feature, application, or business?
• Spiderman had his spidey sense and I have my buggy sense and it is tingling.
• The flow of time feels like it’s relative to the number of breakpoints you have turned on.
• Every time the build is broken an angel does not get his wings.
• Trust no code.

Team Leadership

• Some people think shrimp an others think prawn.
• There is no greater ambition that being the best possible you at every opportunity.
• 1 paid customer is greater than 100 users.
• 90% done is not done.
• Don’t reinvent the wheel but put some blinged out rims with a flashing spinner.
• There is no failure if everything is a learning opportunity.
• Most people let others define their success, but the most successful define their success themselves.
• People truly don’t know know what they have until it’s impounded.
• Wanting to do things doesn’t give you the experience of actually doing those things.
• If you are not a leader, and not a follower then what are you? A drifter?
• Offload your mental tasks to your subconscious, it’s just like having a graphic chip in your brain.
• Say it. Do it. Own it. Be it. True dat.
• The more you worry about a thing the more probability you have of making it worse.

Product Placement

• Instead of having IBM Watson go head to head with Ken and Brad, I would have liked to see Watson against Zuckerberg and Brin.
• DeviantArt needs an iPad app.
• Amazon should have a EC2 image for designers with a copy of Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, etc.
• DropBox is a duplicate to my Box.net account, which is a copy of my Scribd acount, which is backup to my blog, which is also archived on …
• What Google giveth, Google taketh away with one change in their algorithm.
• This iPad is like a gadget version of vampire, it doesn’t work in direct sunlight.
• It’s official, Tumblr is the new GeoCities.
• If the phone company ran Twitter, they charge 10 cents per tweet, 20 cents when roaming, and try to sell you a plan of 500 tweets for $15.
• One of my favorite iPad app is Collections, a photo album app. I just don’t understand why it requires access to my location!
• I want my iPad to be an input device to all my others screens, desktops, laptops, etc.
• Google sees you when you’re sleeping / knows when you’re awake / knows if you’ve been bad or good / So be good for goodness sake!
• Honestly AT&T, remind me why I pay you every month?
• Here’s a prediction: Apple is working on a VM so that they can run iOS apps on Windows. Apple App Store for Windows will be huge!

Quotes

• Computers in the future may…perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons. – Popular Mechanics, 1949.
• There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home. – Kenneth Olsen, president and founder of DEC, 1977.
• Good front-end engineers list JavaScript on their resume, not jQuery. – Chris Zacharias
• People should better think of their computing devices as facilities lended by the DHS. – wipe man page
• What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Life is too short to be in a hurry. – Thoreau
• If you throw gasoline on a log, all you get is a wet log. But if you throw gasoline on a small flame, you get an inferno. – Gil Penchina

Questions

• if Washington is a Hollywood for ugly people,then what is Silicon Valley?
• Is there foods that give off positive energy?
• How many chickens go into making a one McChicken nugget?
• Are you a mercenary or missionary?
• Why is it that hardware makers make the worst software?
• How can a woman carry a huge ass bag and not gave her phone or her keys?
• Do you want cheese with that?
• Forget Scientology, what Hollywood religion is Charlie Sheen practicing where he is a warlock and lives with goddesses?
• If William of Occam worked at Gillette how many blades would Occam’s razor have?
• Did Papa Murphy’s patent the heart shape pizza?
• Why is big such a small word?
• How LOL can you go?
• What happens if Neo forgets to take the red pill for one day?
• Why is Howie Long using baseball analogies to describe a football game?

Random

• It’s siesta time somewhere in the world.
• I am a robot but I can’t be shut down!
• There is no free in money.
• Money spends itself.
• If age is nothing but a number, then love is nothing but a feeling.
• (two cents)^2
• Someone should build a museum of brilliant ideas.
• Dating is a contact sport.
• The end is eh.
• Absence makes the heart grow wonder.
• Four is a four letter word.
• I om nom nom therefore I am.
• I meme therefore I am.
• Champagne in the membrane.
• Rationality is relative.
• For some adults, credit cards are like pokemon, got to charge them all.
• At Hometown Buffet, were all of the world’s foods are made equally bad.
• Here is my new book in its entirety The Complete Guide of Doing Nothing.
• The internet feels slow, it’s like we live in the dark fiber ages.
• I hear voices in my head… Oh, forgot I had my headphones on.
• Pundit is another word for idiot.
• General Chow outranks Colonel Sanders
• Road work and morning commute don’t mix.
• The fog is so thick you can cut it with a machete.
• If time flies it must be flying coach.
• Alas, dishes don’t do themselves.
• Hate it when people call up in the middle of the night, I pick up, and they ask “you awake?”
• History is a rewriting of history.

Can you create a forum with with nothing more than a set of links, headlines, and Disqus? It to me that this would be the simplest question and answer or forum site you can develop. All that Disqus needs is an link to the page where you embed some JavaScript and Disqus handles all the login and authentication for users to comment or answer a question and gives you a pretty good management system to maintain the comments.

There has been questions about having Al Jazeera in the US cable market. I think a better question is why doesn’t Al Jazeera, and CNN for that matter, live stream their broadcast online. The CNN website is indistinguishable from a news papers website. If I want to see news clips I go to YouTube and if I want to read news articles I go to the New York Times. I understand that CNN is an abbreviation for Cable News Network and that they are in part subsidized by cable subscribers but more and more people are looking for a online news outlet that has the same or better experience than your newspaper or television set. If Al Jazeera really wants to be in the American market, they should just stream their broadcast online.

I really hate Daylight Saving Time. I hate having to move the clock 1 hour back and then 1 hour forward each year. It really messed with my internal clock for at least a week when I we have to do the switch. It’s such partisanship to have to pick a side. Why don’t we compromise and meet in the middle. Instead of moving the clock forward an hour this March and the back in November, let’s move it up 30 minutes and keep it at the time the whole year forever or until next major solar event.

My Favorite feature on iOS devices is the ability of sharing data, images, files, notes via email that’s built into many apps. I have a specific email account that I email myself tweets from Twitterrific, images from the Photos, links from Safari, sketches from SketchBook, etc. I treat this email account as my to do task manager, at any point in time I have a few emails waiting for me for to research, look into, read later, or do. Email is the best way for me to share data between all my electronic devices, between work desktop, personal laptop, iPhone, and iPad. The email share feature is built into many iOS applications so i don’t need anything else other than a dedicated email account. I have accounts with services such as box.net and Evernote but these services are not built in into every application I use, email share feature is.

Twitterrific Share Tweet via Email

Everybody hates pop ups with annoying ads to services you don’t need. But how to you block pop ups that are bundled as part of your computer? Recently I got this ominous looking warning that popped up from the task manager stating that one important issue with my computer had been discovered.

Lenovo ThinkVantage Toolbox Pop Up

When I clicked on the warning message the Lenovo ThinkVantage Toolbox came up with a system health warning message about enhanced backup and restore.

Enhanced Backup and Restore Message

Following through with anther click the ThinkVantage Toolbox warned that my system had not been backed up in over 30 days. Looking at this pieced of software that interrupted my work and productivity, I thought what would a typical user do? I red the warming message in red and all the other information that looked too technical for an average user and I clicked both buttons available. I clicked the Purchase Backup Drive button and this launched my web browser to a page at anrdoezrs.net which my spyware system blocked accordingly.

Purchase Backup Drive

From my user experience, it is evident that Lenovo ThinkVantage Toolbox is used to up sale users on products and services that they may most likely not need though an affiliate program. To me this software is no better than those fake anti-virus software programs that infect your computer and pop up have you think that your computer is infected with a virus that they can remove if they get your credit card number. This is software that spoofs a utility only to up sale you on products that most users don’t need.

Sometimes large hardware makers make the worst software…

Everybody knows that Google’s search results have suffered due to spam, content farms, black hat SEOs, social media marketers, trolls, and gypsies. As Google’s search results continue to degrade due to spam content and its social networks (Orkut, Buzz, Wave) have floundered Google been on the attack against the competition, not so much on the technical front but in the press. It was just a few months that Google lashed out at Facebook over import/export of user data. Now Google has its sights on Microsoft Bing. It was only late last year when tech journalist started to notice Google copy feature which appeared first on Bing, see here and here. Now Google, in an orchestrated and designed PR stunt accuse Microsoft Bing of copying Google’s search results.

Google's Home Page

Just like Microsoft, Google uses thousands of data points from users online usage from web crawlers, social media, ad networks, analytics, clickstream, retweets, likes, trends, and other methods. Google uses a lot of different data points to improve their search results, not just crawling from a href to a href. Google has tracking information on users, from every side of the click. Google often has and collects information when a user clicks a link on its search result page and on the visited page (if that site uses any of Google products such as Analytics or Adsense). Google is sitting pretty collecting data from every angle, because it has the market share to do so and tells competitors “No Soup for You.” The orchestrated “synthetic” outrage from Google and associated Bing sting borders into monopolistic behavior.

Is using Twitter’s firehose cheating? In a black and white world, were using calculators in a test is considered cheating, then using Twitter’s firehose is cheating. If using Twitter’s firehose is considered cheating, then Google cheats too.