I'd use them to bury the meddling fuckers who ask for this shit.
So I was showing the design to this client who always wanted to modify things, and he said he doesn't like the orange a lot and if we can tweak it. I had a red layer, and a yellow layer over it with opacity, so I clicked on the yellow layer, and started pressing random numbers on the numpad (pressing numbers changes the value of the layer's opacity) so the colors were jumping randomly from red to orange to yellow and the hues in between, finally I settled back on the exact value that was before, and that seemed to satisfy the client. The color was now perfect.
If we take this at face value, she could have asked more nicely, and he could also have followed the "F you, pay me" principle, and just quoted her a figure.
Had he said, "I'd be happy to make you a poster for your cat. I will be able to do it with an hour's work, for which I will bill you $80", he would not have wasted her time, and she could have made something herself in her word processor. (Or, she'd have said, "Awesome, here's eighty bucks".)
> Q: Are your articles (like Missing Missy), real emails?
> A: The email articles are verbatim ...
Even if his pieces are meant to be satire, IMO it's not particularly good satire. To each his own, I guess.
[1] http://live.washingtonpost.com/david-thorne-internet-is-a-pl...
(Not that I really care to know; this is getting way off-topic.)
"Could you make the design pop a bit more?"
> I also don't know how to design websites based on someone else's feelings.
That's what design is, so if you're not doing that then you're probably not a designer.
The word design literally means 'fate', i.e. the absence of free will. Shaping behavior is the point, making studied choices is only the means to the end.
C.f. Robert Frost's poem Design:
Early in my life, I programmed synths in a studio - and I practiced a variation on this. I would listen to what sound they wanted, then I would play them something that was likely pretty close. They they would complain about it not being quite right, so I would play 3 or 4 different sounds that I knew were completely wrong, then return to the first sound. To which they would invariably say "yeah that one - that's perfect!"
There is nothing that can describe the mixture of confusion, shame, and artistic/technical self-doubt that you feel upon realising that the compressor you just spent half an hour lovingly tweaking, to seemingly great effect, is bypassed.
There are, but equally, there are tales of real genius among record company bosses too. Here's an awesome example, which I read in soundonsound a few years ago. From an interview with Giorgio Moroder on how he created the disco single "Love To Love You Baby", and the instrumental role of record boss Neil Bogart:
> This then provided us with a four‑minute, metronomic beat that had a kind of groove going on, and that really was the origin of drum machines, and the thing that enabled us to stretch it to a 16‑minute version, kept in perfect time, when Neil Bogart requested it.”
> According to Moroder, it was on a Friday that Bogart called him, at about three o'clock in the morning LA time, ecstatic over the number and insisting that it should be extended to cover the entire side of an album. Bellotte fills in the details...
> "Bogart was having an orgy at his house, there was a lot of coke going on and, to use his own language, they were all 'f*cking to this track' and the crowd there had him replay the song over and over again. Suddenly, a 'Eureka' thought hit Bogart; he recalled 'In‑A‑Gadda‑Da‑Vida' by Iron Butterfly, which had taken up a whole side. In a flash he came up with the idea of doing the same with 'Love To Love You Baby' and he needed it within a week. So we just proceeded to get down to it on that weekend, and since things always went very fast back then, within the week he had what he wanted.”
....
> The last song on the album, recorded in two to three hours and designed to transport listeners into the future, 'I Feel Love' would quickly become a gay anthem, not least because of Neil Bogart's astute marketing, while topping the UK singles chart and climbing to number six on the Billboard Hot 100. However, it was considered to be nothing more than a filler when the record was finished.
>"We never thought of it as a stand-out track, we just thought it part of a good album,” Bellotte comments. "However, when we sent the album off to LA, Neil Bogart called back straight away and said, 'The single is 'I Feel Love', it needs three edits and these are the edits.' Doing these immediately improved the fluidity of the track no end. He was that kind of a record man. And, of course, those edits no longer exist, because they would have been sliced from the quarter‑inch master and simply thrown on the floor. That's how it was then. If you ever did any editing, the floor was cluttered with all the stuff you didn't use. We never saved anything, it was just discarded. However, because of his uncanny feel for the music, Bogart knew exactly where the track should be edited and, of course, the improvement was fantastic.”
Crazy story, isn't it?
Source: learned during my employee training at The Museum of Flight. http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/boeing-vc-137b-707-12...
No, he wasn't. It was intentionally put in place to deceive him, and the deception worked.
> "people think that a Vice President can't get temperature adjusted to his liking"
Most VPs could get the temperature adjusted to their liking. Johnson was a special kind of control freak. He liked to make people uncomfortable by making it extra hot, extra cold, walking around naked (it's why he replaced some of the solid bulkheads with transparent plexiglas), raising the hydraulic table and his hydraulic chair so high that people at the table looked like children who could barely reach, and so on.
The Air Force crew got sick of his being in the cockpit, and they didn't much care for those antics, so they gave him the fake temperature control. No, he didn't know how it worked, and no, they didn't make it as hot or as cold as he wanted it to be, they just went along enough to keep him from making trouble for them.
> "not being fully respectful of those in power"
How many Air Force Colonels do you know? They'll give a guy the respect he earns, but they're not known for their willingness to defer to LBJ-style bullshit.
[One of our volunteers was the plane's crew chief for most of a decade. We got a lot of interesting inside stories on slow days.]
https://books.google.com/books?id=qtCRa7bCz3oC&pg=PA13&lpg=P...
However as another commenter pointed out the "phony" switch worked.
Plus according the the above book not only did the crewman adjust the temperature when he saw the light flash, but Johnson felt the temperature was adjusted.
The idea here is not whether or not Johnson understood the technology. But I find it hard to believe that a man who is vice President of the United States is so easily duped. He asked for a switch to adjust temperature and he got a switch that could adjust temperature.
Despite the fact that "one of our volunteers was the plane's crew chief" do you think that it's at all possible that the story was somewhat embellished for effect? (Not saying it was but we are not talking about sworn court testimony when someone relates something that happened many years prior, right?)
You don't think highly-ranked Air Force officials can pull off a deceptive trick like this? They couldn't give the VP a switch, lie to him about what it did, and then manually mimic what he was trying to do but to a lesser degree? (They would also sometimes start with a large effect and then slowly return the temperature to normal.)
> "do you think that it's at all possible that the story was somewhat embellished"
We had multiple sources for this particular story.
The wily engineer directs them towards a large and important looking knob, telling them that they are free to dial in as much "pop" as they think the track needs.
Of course, they screw up their faces and make minute adjustments, and eventually announce that the sound is now perfect. You all know the punchline.
The twist is that every sound engineer also has stories of doing the same thing to themselves by accident.