A good friend sent me a link to a wonderful article called Am I Ugly – the harrowing article discussed a new social media trend, namely young girls who go to Youtube and post videos asking whether they are pretty or ugly. To see this in action, head over to Youtube and search “Am I Ugly”. If you don’t want to take the time to search Youtube, do yourself a favour and watch this video.

Before you dismiss this as another teen girl social media trend (remember the moronic haul videos?), consider the introduction to this video:

“Hey guys, umm, I just wanted to make a random video, oh yeah this is a koala hat, um, yeah I just wanted to make a random video to see if I’m like ugly or not because a lot of people call me ugly and I think I am ugly. I think I’m ugly and fat.”
(keep reading…)

On the quest for an image, I checked out Flickr and found this gem by Scott Mills. Titled ‘Barracade’, I think this angle is extremely interesting.

Confession time – I have never seen “The King’s Speech” and I highly doubt that I ever will. You see, as a child, I was a stutterer and to this day I cringe when I hear people stutter or stammer. The feeling of having a word get stuck as it passes over your tongue is unlike anything I have ever experienced. The sense of shame, combined with the claustrophobic feeling stuttering causes is absolutely horrible.

The worst part of stuttering is the social ostracism that results. As a child, I picked up many wonderful nicknames. “Retarded little baby” was one of the most common barbs fired my direction. “Faggot” was another incredibly popular one. I think the last one shows a whole lot about the intelligence of bullies. I can’t for the life of me imagine how stuttering made the bright bulbs think I was gay. For the love of the gene pool, don’t reproduce bullies!

(keep reading…)

I’m into quality assurance and user experience. Really into them, to the point that I find myself looking at websites in terms of personas and obsessively running tests in jMeter, to the point that it looks like my IP has been used to DOS…my own website. So now, take a look at the picture to the right, specifically the first sentence:

Please don’t hesitate to use the form to the right to contact me at any time.

Not a bad sentence except for one critical problem. That is in the right column and the contact form is to the left. I am 34 years old, I consider myself reasonably intelligent/well read, and I screwed up left versus right. Pretty embarrassing, to the point that, if I were really concerned about my personal brand, I would change it and delete all evidence of my little screw-up.

But, I won’t do that, rather I am going to use this mistake to make a very important point. It does not matter how good your process is, or how good your tools are. You need an outsider (or hopefully outsiders) to QA your sites before you put them online!!