No gods, no kings, no billionaires
Yaay! We’ve booked our holiday to Rome! We’re leaving on Sunday 28th April, and staying for 7 nights at Hotel Panda. Abi stayed there in 1991, and we stayed there together when we went to Rome in 1999. It’s a small room-only hotel, but it’s right in the heard of the city, just five minutes walk away from the Piazza di Spagna. You wake up in the morning, head out, and you’re immediately surrounded by the hustle and bustle of shops and cafes.
Can’t wait!
The start of the rules and background for Edelvain are now up on the site. For now, it contains just the character creation rules, and a map of Edelvain. In the next few days I’ll be adding some history and background on the land Edelvain itself, as well as stuff on the various races. Oh, and more maps, too.
I’m quite busy trying to get the game together in the first place, so I don’t think I’ll be breaking it up into a mini-site, or making it look prettier any time soon. Once the first episode is out of the way, we’ll see. The first episode is due to be played at Julian’s place in a fortnight’s time. My working title for it is “The Wind From The South,” but this may yet change…
I like Jakob Nielsen. I like his drive and passion for great usability. But he does produce some severely dodgy statistics from time to time. This week, in his Alertbox column, he headlines with the quote:
“Software has great potential for getting better, as shown by an under-appreciated feature in Windows XP that can save users $2,000 per year.”
In the article he explains how he gets at this figure. I won’t duplicate the calculation here, but the heart of it is the assertion that a 10% increase in reading speed (by using Cleartype) results in a 10% increase in productivity.
Sorry Jakob; doesn’t follow. A 10% increase in reading speed means that you’ve got 10% more time to spend nattering with your colleagues over coffee.
A 50% increase in reading speed, now that would be useful. But I doubt very much if the productivity gain would be anywhere near that. Probably closer to 10-20%. The main reason for this is that hardly anyone spends all their time reading continuously. Most of the time you read a short chunk, then do something else. And the time it takes to go from reading to something else will swallow up 10% with ease. Joel Spolsky writes about exactly this in his article on task switching.