Bill Matthies

Defining Our Industry
December 15, 2006

“If you want to be understood, never use undefined terms to define undefined terms.” That came from Mathew Kim, my sixth grade teacher. What he meant was, don’t explain things using words people don’t understand. Mr. Kim knew what he was talking about.

Throughout my life I have seen way too many communication attempts that resulted in less, rather than more, communication. Everything from cooking instructions to plumbing how to’s. Even the daily weather reports telling me it will be 70 tomorrow (the only part I understand) because “of a high-pressure ridge out over the Pacific in part because of the absolute instability that occurs when the lapse rate of a column of air is greater than the dry adiabatic lapse rate.” All of which means, well, it will be 70 I guess.

But you know who really is bad as this sort of thing? The CE/tech industry. Almost all manufacturers, retailers and even consultants like me who work in this business, that’s who.

What kind of mumbo-jumbo pill did we take that forces us to say things like “Because 1,080p is better than i!”, “You really don’t have progressive-scan DVD?”, “Now that’s phase and amplitude distortion!” And it doesn’t stop there. No, we go all the way in our marketing these products.All the way.

As I write this, I randomly pulled a “quick start manual” (which I suppose means I will be able to quickly use the product presuming I read this 76 page document) from the book shelf above my desk. This particular one tells me how to use the DVD software on my PC. Here are just a few of the topics from the Index in the back.

• Action safe area
• Automatically aligning objects based on current theme
• Empty slide inserting
• Grid snapping to
• Media file recompression (Doesn’t this imply that I might have already “compressed” something and am now choosing to “recompress” it?Unfortunately there is no “compressing” topic.)

So I looked up “Grid snapping to” and this is what I found:

“Snapping to the grid

Once snapping is enabled, choose Snap to Grid from the Options menu to allow objects to snap to the workspace’s grid.To show or hide the grid, choose Show Grid from the Options menu.”(I think the bold stuff is important although I don’t know why and the manual doesn’t say.)

I would query Mr. Kim to determine if he felt this was vox populi but he is probably nonextant and were that not true, never countenanced purblind interrogatives regardless.

Posted by Bill Matthies on December 15, 2006 | Comments (0)