Language hacking – changing the choice of words we use

Have you ever talked to someone who continues to use the same word over and over again?  Then you find that many people you chat with end up using the same choice of words quite frequently.  My wife and I see this quite often, usually with the word ‘Amazing’, ‘cool’, and ‘hope’.

• Are these words necessary in conversation?
• Do these words we choose lose value due to overuse?
• Are we communicating effectively?
• Do others who are jaded by these words associate other meanings or intentions to the words we use?

Lets focus on the word “hope”.  There are many places where hope is appropriate, but I find that most people misuse the word.  For example:

I hope to show up at yoga on Saturday

I heard this sentence and wonder:

• do you want to show up to yoga on Saturday?
• are you saying this to make me feel good?
• are there other things preventing you from committing to yoga on Saturday?

What could be said is:

I am planning to show up at yoga on Saturday

or:

I have a lot of things going on, if all goes well I will show up at yoga on Saturday

or:

I don’t want to hurt your feelings by saying no, so to make you feel good I will be non committal about showing up to yoga on Saturday even though I have no intentions.

There are many ways to replace the word “hope”, and all of them achieve a clearer communication between two people.

Now with that said, what am I hacking?  For the last few months I have been reducing (almost removing) the words ‘awesome’, ‘amazing’, ‘hate’, and ‘hope’ from my vocabulary.

Why am I writing about this?  I might as well be in the open about this and invite others to join me in being deliberate about how we speak.  Once a month I will post a new word, feel free to join me in this effort and see how thinking about what you say and how you say it impacts your communications.

Also please leave comments on this post about specific words that you feel are overused – I could use suggestions of words.

update March 28, 2015 – this post has been translated:

Пост доступен на сайте softdroid.net: Язык взлома – изменение выбора используемых слов.

Two failed attempts with technology today, just one of those days

Today I experienced two WTF moments while trying to use computers:

1) BrowserID ended up being a total failure for me

2) Accessing people.mozilla.org is next to impossible when trying to share files across computers

I have heard great things about BrowserID, and today was my first real chance at it.  I had an account on builder.addons.mozilla.org, and this was with my <me>@mozilla.com email address.  It has been a few months since I had been on there and now it uses BrowserID for all access.  Great!!  I had signed up with BrowserID with my <me>@gmail.com address, but that failed to log me in.  So I clicked the ‘add another email address’, and got a verification email in my inbox.  Trying to verify was impossible with some cryptic error messages.  10 minutes later after trying to log in, I finally found my way to #identity and was told to try it again.  It magically worked.  OK, let me log in to my addons account, no luck.  After 15 more minutes of poking around, I found that my @mozilla.com email address worked with BrowserID just fine by testing it on another site, but it still failed on addons.

Here is my take of the problem:

• BrowserID is supposed to make logging in easier, 30 minutes of debugging and I still cannot login.
• There are no useful error and help messages on the BrowserID site, nor AMO.  How could my mom figure this out?
• Where in the world is my ‘I forgot my username/password’ link?  Honestly I could have signed up on AMO with a totally random email address and could have been wasting a lot of time.
• I found it easier to signup as a new user with a different BrowserID email, than to figure out how to login with my normal account.

My next problem occurs with accessing people.mozilla.org.  I have been using this for 3.5 years on a regular basis.  I put log files up there for people to read, zip files when I want to share some code or an build, and sometimes I create a webpage to outline data.  I depend on this as a workflow since I know of no other file server at mozilla that I can just scp files up to.  Just this past weekend, some work was done on the server and the permissions got messed up.  This was fixed, then it wasn’t, it was fixed and now it isn’t.  I can detect patterns and that is a pretty easy pattern to detect.  What really gets me is this message when I log in:

Last login: Thu May 17 18:41:20 2012 from zlb1.dmz.scl3.mozilla.com
All files stored on this server are subject to automated scans.
You shouldn’t store sensitive information on this server, and you should
avoid having production services depend on data stored here.
Files in ~/public_html may be seen by anyone on the Internet.
[jmaher@people1.dmz.scl3 ~]$

Who in their right mind would think that putting files in a folder called ‘public_html’ would not be seen by anyone on the Internet?  I expect tomorrow I will have to sign a NDA to access my people.mozilla.org account.

The big problem here is that I wasted 20 minutes doing a task that I normally do in 2 minutes and delayed getting a perma red test fixed because I couldn’t find a place to upload a fixed talos.zip to.

Enough complaining and ranting and back to work on reftests for android native!

My new MacBook Pro has reflection problems

A couple weeks ago I traded out my old MacBook Pro for a newer one!  Very cool.  The problem is when I spent a week copying data and setting up my new computer it was rainy and cloudy (in Miami) so I never got a chance to experience the reflection.

This week brought a lot of sunshine and a lot of glare.  My back faces the windows which get a lot of sunlight (especially in the morning.)  This isn’t ideal for a lot of things, but I keep my blinds down and have had success for the last year and a half with my old MBP.  I found that the screen in general is very reflective, especially the non screen part of the display panel.  Here is my $0.01 solution to reducing the majority of my glare:

Apple, please design products for people to use in locations other than Seattle!

Stair climbing as a sport

This post deviates from my slew of Mozilla automation related posts, but feel free to read along. After moving to a high rise condo building a year ago I started taking the stairs (to the 39th floor) instead of the elevator a few times per week. As time went on this became enjoyable and I could make it to the top without falling on the floor with shaky legs, gasping for air and on the verge of needing life support (just ask my wife about my earlier climbs.)

Time to step it up (pardon the pun). I became involved in some of the online groups, and noticed a lot of other people getting into the sport. It seems like the last couple years has seen an explosion of participants, elite competitors (ones who actually run up the stairs), and events in cities all over the world. Earlier this month I took the plunge and signed up for my first race. This is small in comparison to the Sears tower or the CN tower, but you have to start somewhere.

Wish me luck in 4 weeks and consider climbing up the stairs next time you are waiting for the elevator, it really is fun.