Why yes, I am a geek

Comparing tech book series

Kathy Sierra wrote a post on How to come up with Breakthrough Ideas, in which she wrote about "EQ" — using an audio equalizer model to help brainstorm new ideas:

In our EQ model, when all the sliders are in the zero/middle position, this represents "the norm" for whatever that product, service, industry typically does. In other words, a slider turned down to -4 means that it's way below the norm, and a slider at 4 means way above the norm. But the slider says nothing about the actual absolute value of whatever that slider is for.

In that post, she covers how the Head First books compare to your average tech books, and at the end, invites her readers to create their own versions. I can't pass up something like that, so here's what I ended up with:

A few things of note:

• The ratings for the Head First books are the ones that Kathy herself gave. Personally, I would have rated them higher on the Technical Quality, Writing Quality, and Author Reputation categories, but that's my opinion.

• I added the Price category in there, because I think that the tech book market is extremely price sensitive; in fact, I think that this is one of the main reasons for Amazon's success.

• I know that Kathy's challenge was to add new sliders, and this doesn't do that. That's not because I missed the point; it's because I'm still thinking about that and wanted to see how the regular sliders compare first.

No Internet Wednesday

If you're in California, be very, very careful between now and midnight Wednesday night. That time is the deadline for online applications to be submitted for the University of California schools, and given what we're currently going through, I suspect that there are a lot of extremely frustrated people out there.

Right now, the Web site appears to be somewhere between dead and dying. And that's with us saying, "Hey, we're getting it in 24 hours before the deadline — yay us!" I suspect I'm going to be spending most of the next 24 hours reloading this damn Web page and crossing my fingers that my credit card doesn't get charged multiple times.

Anyhow, if you're on the Internet, and you don't need to be, could you please go do something else until Wednesday night? The bandwidth you don't use could be just what we need.

And if you're someone working on the ucop Web site, okay, sure, it's only one day a year, but couldn't you have expected that you'd get slammed like this and gotten a few more hamsters together in advance?

Update: the application was finally successfully submitted at 1:00 am Wednesday, leaving 23 hours to spare. The problem seems to be triggered when you find something in the application that's incorrect and needs to be changed. You can go back and can change things just fine, but you then can't get any further in the application than you were when you found the mistake. The solution (for us at least): try again in a new browser. Three computers and seven browsers later, we had a pass that didn't require any changes and were able to complete the process to the end.

What do people do who don't have multiple computers, each with multiple browsers? I don't know, but you still might want to avoid crossing the paths of any high school seniors today. And definitely avoid their parents. Or at least don't let either catch you using up precious Internet bandwidth.

For You, Half Price

This hilarious article in the New York Times details the history of con men and scam artists selling the Brooklyn Bridge: For You, Half Price. And after you read and enjoy the article, could we interest you in buying the Internet? We'll make you such a deal...