You? You’ve got eight business hours and twenty-four working hours to run all the tests and find all the bugs.

Game on.

Scream at the boss? Snap at a colleague? Throw your cell phone into your @#$%%&* computer monitor? If so, you may find yourself headed to anger-management classes, which have become an all-purpose antidote for fit-throwing celebrities, chair-throwing coaches, vandals, road ragers, delinquent teens, disruptive airline passengers, and obstreperous employees.

Demand for such programs is coming from courts seeking alternatives to jail sentences and companies hoping to avoid lawsuits and office blowups. Aware that high-pressure jobs can make for hot tempers, some professions offer pre-emptive anger management. A few state bar associations now require “civility” training for lawyers renewing their licenses. And as of last year, hospitals must have programs for “disruptive” physicians as a condition of accreditation.

Programs run the gamut from $300-an-hour private therapists to one-day intensive seminars, weekly group sessions or online courses with no human interaction. Many advertise that they satisfy court requirements—even if all they offer is six CDs and a certificate of completion.

It’s not clear if the programs work, as few studies have analyzed their effectiveness. There are no licensing requirements for anger-management trainers—anyone can open a business. And since participants don’t usually sign up voluntarily, trainers say it’s possible to complete a program without actually changing one’s behavior.

Part of the problem is that professionals can’t agree whether a pattern of angry outbursts signals a mental illness or simply a behavior issue. As a result, people who need psychiatric help may instead get shunted into a short-term anger-management course. Employers and courts may not adequately evaluate people before sending them for anger interventions, nor provide sufficient follow-up.

No, you cannot call the mindset of QA an illness and hope it can be cured.

Unlike previous medical devices, the latest generation can be controlled automatically or remotely over the Internet. The benefits are obvious–they allow patients much greater mobility and the need for daily trips to a doctor’s office are obviated. In addition, these devices can dramatically lower health care costs, guaranteeing their wider user and acceptance moving forward.

…

While nobody worried about the 6 Million Dollar Man being hacked, the time has come to seriously consider the security protocols, or lack thereof, of today’s modern medical devices. As the story below indicates, the integration of technology into the human body has created opportunities for newer and more serious forms computer crime and hacking. In the past, a hacker might have been able to illegally enter a desktop computer system, read a targets personal data or even gain control of another person’s financial accounts. In comparison to the potential threat from Internet-based medical devices, the threats from “old-school” hacking seem mild by comparison.

This goes pretty much for any critical infrastructure. You, there, testing embedded devices, manufacturing controls, transformers, and so on. Seriously, isn’t it worth a little effort (okay, a lot of extra effort) to put that on a secure, dedicated network to make sure that some punk in Montreal doesn’t kill someone with your product?

Although, personally speaking, I think I’m more short track speed skating with the devil and getting disqualified for tripping him in the final turn.

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I have to say: it was an effective subject line since it caused me to open the mail and to load the images to make sure they spelled it right in the e-mail, which they did.

You can test the e-mails’ HTML all you want, but you really need someone with an eye for quality to look at the friendlies, too. (The friendlies, for those of you not in the e-mail campaign world, are test e-mails sent through the bulk e-mail sender to a small list of internal people for final approval.)

(Link seen on The Zeray Gazette.)

By focusing solely on social media’s features, Owyang continues to perpetuate the pervasive illusion that, if we choose the right tools, our customers will converse with us, talk about us, and share our content.

You know. The “hyperbole, artifical branding, and pro-corporate content” most of our websites still feature.

The relevancy of our corporate websites is not dependent whatsoever on which social media widgets have been deployed throughout the site. Its relevancy is driven by our site content, no matter who is creating it. And that content requires as much, if not more, strategic planning and consistent oversight as do our social media initiatives.

The goal of any site development is not to provide quality, usable, and relevant content for users on behalf of the client. The goal of any contract work is to separate the client from its budget, as much as possible and as easily as possible. And grafting in a Twitter feed dependent upon a site that fails daily? Easy and expensive.

(Link seen on the Twitterverse.)

Just remember: Coffee improves your throttling grip.

Last night, in an embarrassing glitch for Facebook that raises questions about privacy on the site, some users of the social-networking service began getting hundreds of personal messages that weren’t intended for them.

A WSJ.com editor, Zach Seward, tipped Digits off to the apparent glitch after his Facebook inbox was flooded with messages ranging from the mundane to the truly private.

“I am sorry for letting my jealousy and worry get the best of me,” reads one of the emails.

Oh, boy, Facebook is really in the race to obsolescence here. Misdirected personal messages? That’s going to undermine user trust and confidence.

And once one of the other up-and-coming social networking solutions hits a tipping point, Facebook is going to lose users in droves. You can’t keep burning people with poor quality and expect to be an ongoing concern no matter how many Farmville players you have.