Office Jargon v3.1

I'm trying to make time to read blogs again. Here's a recent post from Lyndonology that really made me actually LOL, and got me thinking about how great it is to be "working in the interactive Web 2.0 space" these days. His post is a derivative from BBC News Magazine's Article, 50 office-speak phrases you love to hate.

I've heard a bunch of the office phrases he lists in the post, but I haven't heard all of them before... there's a few really juicy ones in there. These days, I try use phrases like this in meetings and stuff just to see if I can get others to use them, and because they're generally empty phrases that lack any real useful substance. It's kinda fun in a twisted sort of way. Give it a try, just make sure you use these phrases with conviction, and never ever back-down or break into laughter if you're pressed into a situation where you'll need to actually explain what you mean. Just think quickly and make up another one, look at your watch and let that person know you have a meeting to get to!

Perk up those dull meetings
I used to work with a guy (he's hilarious) who made the greatest sounding "tech phrases" up and then use 'em in meetings to see how long it took to have his own phony phrases come back to him. It's just great to hear a CEO talk about the "creamy goodness" of a "web product's UI" or functionality.

In the beginning...
What about the early days? Remember when people used to want to make their web sites "sticky"? Kinda like fly paper, or maybe something you might find in a public restroom stall? Yeah, right... great. That'll make me want to bookmark you. I'm not sure you're "grokking it" though.¹ And here's a great old-style umbrella phrase that was used to describe everything but your microwave oven, "multimedia" ...it still has a certain zest to it, doesn't it?

Here's a recent one I've been hearing more frequently: "socialize". This one is really kinda growing on me — it's so upbeat and snappy! Doesn't it sound just groovy? Like we might get to dance or have drinks, and possibly even snuggle-up?

I think these phrases are great if you're just getting into the "high tech industry" or have a tough time putting several consecutive substantive and meaningful sentences together. They're great for making that flashy first impression too. They're also great to whip out in interviews, parties and even holiday get-togethers with old friends or your extended family. Go ahead, give them a whirl. Cousin Jed will think you're a real "rocket surgeon" who works on that "internet thing." Folks will think you're, "on the ball."

Here are a few more gems coupled with the reason(s) I find them interesting:

• Ah, let's revisit that again later"
  
  No, let's have a visit with it right now -- isn't that the reason we're having this forever-long meeting in the first place?



• [insert product or website name here] is getting a lot of buzz lately
  
  Dude, we're in a boardroom, you can't smoke that in here!



• Can you take that offline?
  
  We're in the parking lot, so technically we're not really "online" per se. Which leads me to this one...



• Technically speaking, blah, blah, blah...
  
  This one's very popular with engineers, folks who your frinds jobs have been outsourced to, and consultants.



• Let's continue to press on
  
  Very lively and invigorating! Um, yeah that's gonna make me type faster.

...and here's a few I hope to start circulating soon: "Yeah, I'm clickin' it..." or "ok you've got my bookmark" but maybe they need a little more post-processing?

:-|

Google Shines On With Chrome

Google just released their new "One box for everything" browser called Chrome. The name is a direct reference to the term used to describe a desktop software application's interface elements. The name also implies "shiny and new" which it definitely is. The current beta is only available for Windows users, and unfortunately the Mac and Linux versions are not out yet and it's not clear when they'll hit the street.

Do We Need Another Browser, But Why?
Google's goal and concept for Chrome was that, "spend much of our time working inside a browser" and the "web gets better with more options and innovation." They also wanted to "completely rethink the browser" and create "a modern platform for web pages and applications." Let's see what develops in the near future, but so far things are impressive.

It's Got That Creamy Goodness
All the code is open source, and they've "used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox" and under the hood they built V8, a more powerful JavaScript engine which should keep even extremely complex web apps in control. That said, Chrome is blazing FAST! It's also CSS3 capable, so users will have a better overall experience. The interface is kinda Microsoft Vista looking and very simple which makes it easy to use since there are only a limited number of features so far. Some of the features are: DNS pre-fetching, gears, phishing & malware protection, dynamic tabs, and "incognito mode" (ala Safari?). There's also a cool little feature called "Task Manager" where you type about:memory in the location bar to see the current memory usage for your browsers... Looks like Firefox is a RAM hog with all my Add-ons, extensions and plugins installed. You can see the full list of features and video explanations on their features page.

Give Google Chrome a try...
Download Google Chrome »

Geeky Stuff &mdash Get Your Geek On
Here are some fun things you can do already, remember this is just an initial beta release! I'm sure the folks at Google have lots of cool stuff on the way.

• Highlight some text or page elements and right-mouse-click and choose "Inspect element" to see a developer inspector (Firebug-like) which allows you to see the DOM and mess with it, and you can dock/un-dock to the window or view it in a tab, and do some other nifty things... [This is an awesome feature]


• Type about:memory in the location bar to see your memory use.


• Find more helpful info on GChrome here or get more GChrome developer info here.


• Type about:version in the location to get your current installed version of GChrome.


• Or, check the version "About Google Chrome" from the wrench menu, and it'll even tell you if your installed version is up to date.

Or make your Firefox new and shiny with this:
Chromifox 1.0rc2 Theme

...another blatant rip-off of another default theme from another great open source web browser! This time, the target is Google Chrome, or more specifically Chromium, the open source project behind it. The clean lines, slick layout, and compact style of Chromium were the points of inspiration for this theme. Chromifox offers a coat of Chrome for Firefox.

Cool Tool: Diagram Designer

I recently needed a free “Visio-like tool” to do some diagrams for our latest project at work, but I don't have Visio, and I don't love using it either. Like most Microsoft tools, Visio's got way too many unnecessary bells and whistles which force you to learn the tool rather than get the task at hand done quickly. I like Graffle, but someone's "borrowing" the iMac I had on my desk so that wasn't an option either.

I did some quick searching and found this little gem, Diagram Designer 1.19 by MeeSoft, on TuCows.com (TuCows Diagram Designer product review/download).

Seek and find. This is a great freeware tool to "create flowcharts, diagrams and slide shows", and other vector stuff. It's light weight at 1.28 Mb, simple and easy to use -- and makes quick work of day-to-day grunt stuff.

The downside is it's Windows only (98 / NT / 2k / Me / XP / 2003 / Vista) no Mac or Linux. Also it saves the vectors in it's ".ddd" file format which I haven't seen before. But, you can import/export your work to other formats like: WMF, EMF, BMP, JPEG, PNG, MNG, ICO, GIF and PCX. It even has user submitted template palettes. Also, Mr. Vinther has released a previous version to Open Source.

» meesoft.logicnet.dk

I got great results -- and I got the job done quickly, so I figured it makes sense to share it. Let me know what you think.

Now if I could only remember where I left my cup of coffee...

:-|