If there is one theme to the lessons of the year-plus of this blog, it is “Ask!”
Steve got tired of those heavily scented inserts that come in magazines as ads. He figured that, in this day and age, there must be a way to avoid them.
He went to the magazine’s website, clicked on some options, and lo and behold, no more perfume cards!
All he had to do was ask.
Dmitry has taught me the value of good design meeting documentation and how to really use it to move forward.
We are working with some fast-thinking researchers, who are great at talking through their design decisions. When they re-visit the decisions, they keep making use of the good notes from the previous meeting, in order to remember and pick up the thread of thinking and move forward.
I have never seen notes put to such positive use before. This is a Big Lesson for me.
Steve’s work Helpdesk asked him to reboot our household router to get his laptop to see the internet, even though he was not wireless, but wired, and the SAME wire worked perfectly in the family computer.
And it worked!
And now we both know to try this.
OK this is not really a lesson learned for me. I never thought tights were pants. OK, maybe for a few days when I was 4 or something, but really not since then.
But Kat told me about this website a long time ago and then recently Sally proposed it as a lesson, and I have to say that there are many times on the Green Line when I really would like to point out to someone (older than 4) that tights are NOT pants!
I learned how to add a button to share a post, from here, on Facebook!
When you see a post you want to share, click on Leave a Comment and you will see a new button to Share on Facebook.
You also see the button if you come into the blog and click on a calendar date.
This will put a link to the blog entry on your wall. Try it and tell me how it works and what you think. I suggest you find a favorite entry for that.
Thanks for playing along!
I learned how to make links in this blog!
I can make external links, such as this one to Sally’s blog.
I can make internal links, to an entry here in my blog such as this one with my first external link, to my fuel company.
Yay!
Tired of never knowing which renewal notices were real and which were duplicates or fake-outs (the ones that try to get you to re-up half a year in advance), I started looking for a consolidated magazine account site.
I found it on Amazon, which is where I pretty much ending up finding everything worth buying, and end up buying everything worth finding.
One by one, I will renew my magazines there, and always know the real status.
I have always been a fan of complaining, when it’s part of a move to action. I whined so much about my cold house, which was taking five hours to go up four degrees, that I heard my voice in complaint and said “Wait, that’s really not right!”
I called Putnam Fuel and they had someone over to FIX the problem, within the hour!
From Gale:
“I learned that when the temp is this cold, my garage fridge turns itself off and the food in the freezer defrosts.”
I learned that if I’m too lazy and it’s too cold to fill up my car with gas because it’s 20 degrees out, I should do it anyway because the next day I may be stuck doing it in ZERO degrees!
Jane's Lessons Learned 