Perchance to Dream

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come...

Cute little Chuggy

You Think I'm Kidding

Actual notes from today's Web Design Team Meeting. Seriously. I couldn't make this up if I tried.

• 1:30 - Demotivational posters
• 1:33 - Trying to figure out acronyms for campus committees
• 1:34 - Talking trash about the administration
• 1:36 - Complaining about meetings
• 1:40 - Talking about the home page as a metaphor
• 1:44 - "Bells and whistles"
• 1:51 - Six degrees of separation metaphor
• 1:55 - "Globalness"
• 1:57 - Pop-up books
• 1:58 - Google Earth
• 2:00 - Silence!!
  
• 2:02 - Metaphors again
• 2:05 - Branding - Sierra Nevada Brewery
• 2:06 - The Visual Thesaurus
  
• 2:09 - Tag clouds
• 2:10 - Google maps
• 2:11 - Pedicabs, fixies, beach cruisers
• 2:12 - Pop-up books again
• 2:13 - Easter eggs
• 2:14 - Gratuitous animation
• 2:15 - Pop-up books yet again
• 2:17 - Team lead says: "I can't think!"
• 2:21 - Meeting adjourned

That, literally, was our meeting. I kid you not. Now do you understand?

Nominate Us!

Ooo...ooo! You could nominate us for an award!! Riches and fame could be ours!!!

Karine Joly actually recommends people nominate us... we're not sure what's wrong with her.

Or you can do directly to the eduStyle Web site and nominate us there.

Only thing is that today is the last day to nominate blogs. As usual, we're right on top of things here at TFRL!

So won't you please vote for us??

Oh, and forward this to all your friends! Bill S. of Nashville forwarded this post to 10 of his friends and a week later he won the lottery, got a new job and inherited $100,000 from an uncle he didn't know he had! Sarah D. failed to forward this to any of her friends, and two weeks later all of her hair fell out, her boyfriend dumped her, and her home got foreclosed.

Just sayin'.

Groundhog Day

Sadly, it's getting harder and harder to do this cartoon. Our redesign process has become so bizarrely dysfunctional that it's virtually impossible to write something that members of our team won't recognize as real and get offended by. And reality is so much stranger than fiction that there is nothing I can invent that could match what we deal with on a daily basis.

Anyway, this cartoon isn't all that funny. However, I can say that - like Bash Brannigan (look it up) - I've actually lived it.

Twitterholicism - The Silent Killer

OK, so it's turns out that my own life is the best source of new stories.

This actually happened this morning, though I changed a few names to protect the guilty (why I would want to protect them, I'm not sure). When I ran our crappy accessibility checker, the crappy site I was scanning started to throw a butt load of error messages - to the tune of 24Gb in the Web server log file - almost filling the partition! Sweet! I felt like a hacker, bringin' down the man's Web site. Sadly, I was clueless as to what I'd done until Prophead informed me. /sigh

I got nuthin'

OK, so I'm no Scott Adams. I'm out of ideas right now.

So here's you chance to get your worst Web development stories told in TFRL!!

I don't promise to use your story. I don't promise that if I use your story that I won't mangle it beyond all recognition. I don't promise that I'll change your name so that you don't get fired when your boss reads the cartoon (I don't think my boss has discovered TFRL yet).

As is fitting for TFRL, I'm looking for stories of incredible ignorance or incompetence (preferably both!!!) in the world of higher education web development. We seem to be having a slight shortage of both here right now... must be the tight economy.

Add a comment that you have a story and I'll contact you. Not gonna put my work email in a TFRL post, no way.

Torches and Pitchforks

"Jack Jefferson" (@JackJefferson) has gotten off way too easy lately. Time to fix that.

As far as I know, he's still barricaded in there.