Lynn Cherny (arnicas) Blog

Test Bundle

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 16:49:12 +0100

Testing a bundle with local image files.

Another_test

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 16:22:09 +0100

A short test of the posting system.

My Test Post

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 17:10:31 +0100

A first test post.

About Me

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

Lynn Cherny/arnicas short bio and links

New Year, New Update

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 08:58:00 +0000

Yes, still in France... This past year, I primarily worked as "AI Artist in Residence" at Google Arts & Culture in Paris. With the help of my colleague and talented front-end coder Chris Sugrue, we released a pretty set of haikus illustrated with Google AI Tools. I curated the haikus and created all the content with internal AI generative models, and she wired it all up beautifully (and did the page design). You can visit it here: Haiku Imagined.

Work and Newsletter Updates, Plus a Game and Talk

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 12:07:00 +0000

I'm still in France consulting! I have so far survived the epidemics and heat waves.

Another Year in France (Consulting Again)

Mon, 23 Dec 2019 11:59:00 +0000

It’s that time of year - time for a recap of what I’ve been up to!

Still in France, But On the Market Again!

Sun, 28 Oct 2018 08:00:00 +0000

After 2 years teaching at the business school, my classes had become very popular: hence, huge, and therefore tremendous work to grade and manage. I left that position in October and have been consulting again since. I’m still based in Lyon, but am entertaining offers of other locations and remote work! I’m currently doing NLP data science consulting for a nice client based in London (SpiritAI).

Updates and Links

Wed, 03 May 2017 05:58:00 +0000

Teaching

A few updates since last year... I am now teaching as an Assoc. Professor of Data Science in Lyon, France, at EM-Lyon Business School. The plan was 2 years and "we'll see." I finished year 1 of teaching business analytics, python and python data and text analysis. It was hard but rewarding when I had good students!

Talks / Slides

Since last year, lots of talks and slide decks! Creative first, then data sciency and visy.

Eyeo 2016: A talk on generative text, tools for creatives, and generally wonderful collaborations between humans and machines. Slides and code are here.

Eyeo 2016 – Lynn Cherny from Eyeo Festival // INSTINT on Vimeo.

I also gave a similar but earlier form of this talk at Alt-AI, a small conference organized in NYC at SFPC a month earlier. Slides here.

Dato/Turi Data Science conference, June 2016. A tutorial talk on doing NLP-like things in Elasticsearch, with python and javascript code. The code examples are here.

JSM 2016: I was on a panel organized by Hilary Parker, where I gave a talk called "Cocktail Party Horror Stories: Data Vis for Clients." For various reasons, I don't want to make the slide deck public, sorry.

Lyon Datavis Meetup: "Design for Interactive Data Vis" - an updated version of a talk I gave in Miami at a local data vis conference, delivered in Lyon at the Datavis Meetup in November 2016.

Miami 2015 Seminar in Comm Dept.: A talk I gave while I was a Knight Fellow in Miami, "Text Analysis Without Programming." Should really be updated a bit since teaching business students, too.

I also gave an NLP tutorial for Eyeo 2016 (python notebooks).

Writing / Posts

I finally opened a Medium account, and posted a well-received article on "Data Visualization 'Versus' UI and Data Science." This post explores the career options and relationships in neighboring fields.

I've started a tinyletter in a spirit similar to my Eyeo talk, "Things I Think Are Awesome." (archive) Keywords: AI, creative tech, data vis, generative text, games, occult... I'm also cross-posting them to Medium to reach a perhaps wider audience because there's virtually no feedback from a tinyletter!

Spring Semester D3 Class (take 2)

Mon, 18 Jul 2016 21:19:00 +0000

I reprised my class on interactive visualization with D3.js at University of Miami with twice as many students in the spring semester. It was successful again, but I found it noticeably more work having more students. We did not focus on UNICEF this time; instead each student explored a topic of their own interest. More on how it scaled (or didn’t) after some project highlights…

Fall Student D3.js Projects

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 12:14:00 +0000

Here’s the followup I promised on my post about teaching D3.js to journalism students: A selection from their projects! Their project goal was to produce a data story using UNICEF data (and possibly related data) about child mortality. The grading criteria were pretty rigorously spelled out as follows in Week 14 of the repo:

Teaching a Semester of D3.js

Mon, 11 Jan 2016 11:04:00 +0000

I spent last semester frantically putting together a course on D3.js for journalism students at the University of Miami at the same time as teaching it and grading it. Wow, teaching a semester course is hard. Teaching coding, especially to non-CS students, is a special challenge. I was lucky to have a small class of very patient and motivated ~~guinea pigs~~ students for the first semester.

Knight Projects for the Year

Sun, 13 Sep 2015 17:26:00 +0000

I am installed in Miami for the academic year as a Visiting Knight Chair in the Journalism department; I've been busy (frantically, insanely busy) trying to put together class materials for the semester, grade stuff, produce talks and workshops, and keep up with Twitter.

Teaching News

Sun, 08 Mar 2015 19:16:00 +0000

Overdue for a blog post, and I guess my news needs an official announcement!

A Silly Text Visualization Toy

Tue, 30 Dec 2014 20:17:00 +0000

This little text-to-image replacement toy made me laugh, so I decided to put it up in case it makes you laugh too. In my last project, I did part-of-speech tagging in Python and used that to replace nouns with other nouns (see post and demo); in this one, I did the part-of-speech tagging all in Javascript using the terrific RiTa.js library!

Visualizing Word Embeddings in Pride and Prejudice

Sat, 22 Nov 2014 18:30:00 +0000

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a weekend web hack can be a lot of work, actually. After my last blog post, I thought I'd do a fast word2vec text experiment for #NaNoGenMo. It turned into a visualization hack, not too surprisingly. The results were mixed, though they might be instructive to someone out there.

A Roundup of Recent Text Analytics and Vis Work

Sun, 26 Oct 2014 11:03:00 +0000

Some really exciting things in text analysis and visualization have crossed my Twitter feed recently; I thought I'd pull together some pointers in case you missed any of my tweetspam about one of my favorite subjects. Maybe posts like this will become a regular thing!

Data Characters in Search of An Author

Sun, 11 May 2014 15:19:00 +0000

My last post on Implied Stories was about how we fill in the blanks to create story contexts in even very short works, like Hemingway's example of "the shortest story every told": "For sale: Baby shoes, never worn." In that post, I used Pixar's 22 Rules of Storytelling and Emma Coats' talk about them at Tapestry Conference, plus some sociology, to frame my points about how audiences find implied stories.

I closed that post with some concerns about how this applies to data visualization, as we "read" the stories implied in visuals and look for causation, for example. Our brains are telling stories even when they might not be there; as a designer or journalist you might want to head them off at the pass, or face a stampede of weird conclusions. You get those with correlation plots, which everyone reads as causation (after all, you must be implying something, right?). Some great new examples of spurious correlations came up this week in a popular linkmeme, the Spurious Correlation site. I dare you not to try to create a story in your head to try to rationalize this one:

Implied Stories (and Data Vis)

Sun, 23 Mar 2014 17:15:00 +0000

At the excellent Tapestry Conference in February in Annapolis, Emma Coats (@lawnrocket) spoke about storytelling, the theme of the conference. Her talk was based on her internet-famous 22 Rules of Storytelling developed while she was at Pixar.

Lacking the video of her talk ([ETA: here it is!]), I cracked open the ebook based on her principles by Stephan Bugaj, Pixar’s 22 Rules of Story (That Aren’t Really Pixar’s) (— which, incidentally, Emma says was written without her permission and none of her involvement. Caveat Lector).

Pixar Rule 4:

Data Vis Consulting: Advice for Newbies

Sat, 16 Nov 2013 21:12:00 +0000

Every time I give a talk or introduce myself at a conference, someone gets really interested in what I do. When I think I’ve scored a potential client, it turns out they just want to know if they could do what I do. Some folks are direct: One woman at a Python Data Science conference said, “So, you know that job ad list you run for data-vis jobs? How do I get one of those jobs?”

PyData Boston 2013: More On Fiction Analysis

Thu, 15 Aug 2013 22:08:00 +0000

For PyData Boston, I did a recap of parts of my OpenVisConf talk, with some more technical details added, including an IPython notebook of some useful code.

Analysis of Fiction (My OpenvisConf Talk)

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 22:44:00 +0000

Here are the slides from my talk at OpenVisConf in Boston in May!

The Bones of a Bestseller: Visualizing Fiction from Lynn Cherny

And here is the link to the video (30 mins), which might be funnier than the slides: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f41U936WqPM.

Finally, I did put most of my visualization tool demos online, which are linked from the talk itself. (These are visualizations I threw together in D3 to make it easier to interpret the output of my machine learning and stats analysis, since I was dealing with long text -- I needed to be able to browse the results and see the text on demand, too.)

I'll update this post with those links too, later, and maybe say a few words about my process, too. I'll be giving another talk specifically on visualizing LDA Topic Analysis in July at PyData Boston, building from some of this work.

Data Visualization with Nodebox

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 17:45:00 +0000

For PyData 2013, I put together a talk on using Nodebox OpenGL for data visualization. My goal was to expose the data science audience to a flexible tool similar to Processing, but that allows one to write in Python and use Python data libraries. (The java-esqueness of Processing has always put me off reaching for it when I’m working, despite a general fondness for it. I still own every single (English) book on Processing, AFAIK.)

My Upcoming Talks, Spring 2013

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 12:13:00 +0000

I’ve got a busy few months ahead! Here’s where I’ll be speaking…

Strata NYC 2012 and PyData

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 17:24:00 +0000

A week ago, I gave a talk at Strata NYC on network visualization ("Beyond the Hairball"). The talk had many technical issues (I'm new to using a MBP and Keynote to present), but the slides seem to have had some kind of life on Twitter. So here's the rather large and slightly academic deck:

UK Bestsellers: Remash By Genre and Gender

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 19:16:00 +0000

You know how you have a giant collection of datasets saved, but you never seem to get to them? The Guardian Datablog posted one that moved me from my usual weekend lethargy. Not about some world injustice, a critical healthcare issue, or anything Genuinely Important – but UK book sales data, checking into whether Fifty Shades of Grey is really the UK’s bestselling book of all time.

I grabbed it and had a poke around. My curiosity was less about EL James (although mad props to a fanfic writer for making the big time) than about general genre and gender distributions. At a base line, when I did some hasty labeling, I saw that as expected, fiction overwhelms, and women are writing more of it:

Captain America is Getting Some (In the Fanfic)

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 18:34:00 +0000

What could be more appropriate for July 4th than Captain America?

If you've seen the movies a lot already, and you're wanting more, there's always the fan fiction. Of which there is a lot. I admit, I read it. And I got a little data curious over the weekend.* WARNING: Look away now if the idea of hot boy-on-boy superhero action makes you queasy, because there's a lot of such hotness in the fiction. (Also hot girl-on-girl, and girl-on-boy, and girl-on-boy-on-girl, and god-on-HULK-on-brother, etc, cuz it's ALL there.)

Surprisingly, the dreamy super-soldier Captain Rogers is not getting quite as much action as Tony Stark is. And there are a few other surprises in there, if you click around on this little chart.

Who's Sleeping With Whom?

Select an Avenger's bar to see who they are getting it on with in the fanfic by story count...

Count of Stories by Pair (Gray With Red)

Yes, that's right, even DEAD people are getting it on in these stories. Try clicking on Phil Coulson. If you were (like me) blind to suits over spandex, he's "Agent Phil" with the tie. His favorite bunk buddy is "Hawkeye" Clint Barton! I wasn't sure they ever even talked to each other until I rewatched Thor last night (Coulson stops Clint from shooting Thor when he #fails with the hammer in the plastic building; they seemed to be on a purely last-name basis, but what do I know!).

Thor and Loki seem to have it hot and heavy too, family issues aside -- hey, they're gods, they both make and break the rules.

I'm personally a little disappointed not to see more girls getting action here, but I am definitely down with the allure of Tony Stark and Steve Rogers. All those muscles, all that antagonism to overcome! But there is surprisingly little lesbian romance in the archive. (Hang on, is there a "no two red heads" rule? Aren't they both red heads?)

But back to Tony and Steve... I dug a little further and discovered that their sexy love stories were pouring in well before the movie, as early as 2008. With the release of the movie, some new pairs got steamy, like Tony and Bruce, who really were so adorable playing with radiation together and poking each other (snicker). And there must be something in the comics about Phil Coulson and Clint Barton? It might get expensive to look into it. Perhaps I need to visit Jer Thorp('s comics collection).

But let's go back to Tony (again). He gets all the action, even if he doesn't wear spandex and look like a Norse god. And despite that unfortunate facial hair! Captain America has no serious contender for SO apart from Stark. Tony's a reformed weapons dealer, "genius, playboy, billionaire, philanthropist," who engineered his own superheroness, without any magic, medicine, or lab incidents. It's no surprise to me that men AND women love him, and he gets the bulk of the fan fiction. He's on top of the world, so of course he's on top of Steve Rogers! Tony Stark is a self-made superhero, and that's why he gets laid the most. In one of the best Tony lines ever, scifigrl47 has him saying:

"I somehow managed to get CAPTAIN AMERICA doing the horizontal mambo. Fuck you all, I win. I win everything."

And that's pretty much a real American hero talking.

*PS. I am not telling you where the stories live. The fiction database is suffering greatly from the load of Tony's authors and fans hitting it, and it keeps falling over. All this data was collected fairly manually at weird hours, and I had to squash hard my urge to crawl it properly and verify many hypotheses. Please don't try this yourself.

Eyeo 2012: Processing My Data Vis PTSD

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 17:20:00 +0000

As an ex-researchy type, I'm used to the papers and speakers at conferences like Infovis, the academic visualization conference that meets during IEEE Visweek; but last week's Eyeo Festival was... different. In the past few years, I've been to a handful of the former-Flash-community's digital art conferences (such as Geeky By Nature and Flashbelt). They inspired me, made me think about the value of personal digital art projects; but as someone who wants to work in data visualization, Eyeo was more challenging to me. In a good way!

Who Was There

The audience was itself pretty amazing - you could tell by the Ignite-style talks on the first evening, which blew me away, including pal Jen Lowe (@datatelling)'s talk on the human in the data deluge, feisty Rachel Binx on animated gifs, Sarah Slobin (@sarahslo) from the Wall Street Journal, CSS artist Val Head (@vlh), Bryan Connor of The Why Axis, Sha Hwang's (@shashashasha) dry awesomeness... The non-speaking audience turned out to be pretty astounding as well, including Jesse Thomas of JESS3, Jeff Clark of Neoformix, Mike Bostock (@mbostock) who created D3.js, JanWillem Tulp, some dude from a strategy firm advising the British Government on technology, folks from MOMA and the NYPL and the Met, and, well, really pretty much everyone I talked to was intellectually interesting in some compelling way.

"Luck is chance that matters." (Kevin Slavin)

The chance of having a randomly interesting conversation was extremely high -- for example, it turned out that a guy I got to chatting with as we crossed the street lives in my area and had been intending to email me about his startup after hearing about a talk I did locally.

Who Wasn't There

There were not many people I associate with the academic "infovis" scene, and a couple of us wondered about that. Likewise, at the Infovis conference last year, the data artists and vis consultants of Eyeo were not present either, see my post moaning about that here. I put it down to a handful of things: the Eurovis conference was the same week (super awkward if you wanted to follow the hashtag and had bad wifi/phone as I did), and the tickets to Eyeo sold out in less than a day, so if you weren't paying attention, you weren't in that audience.

"I have not yet mentioned other people's good ideas. They exist." (Moritz Stefaner being hilarious)

Since those tickets were mostly broadcast on Twitter, if you aren't following the "artistic" infovis crowd, you weren't in the running. (Check my posts here and here about the subcommunities of infovis folks on Twitter, with thanks again to Moritz Stefaner whose hairball I picked on initially, but make sure you read his awesome Eyeo slides on networks as well.)

Since Visweek this year wants to get practitioners in the mix, I think there are some things the organizers might learn from Eyeo, given how much data visualization was there: are you spending time understanding what practitioners are inspired by, what tools they use, what they're trying to learn, what they want to work on, who they want to talk to or get advice from? Academic conferences result in papers that can be read, which hopefully contributes to the evolution of the discipline (if they are accessible afterwards -- Eurovis papers do not seem to be!), but this means it's easy to justify not attending in person if you're a practitioner. A conference must have value outside the papers for the non-academics, like provocative panels, tutorials for skill building, networking options with a great audience, drinking... otherwise, we can all just read it later.

Eyeo was definitely a conference to be AT -- not to escape to go hack in your room during sessions, and not to read about later. Watching the recorded videos will give you a flavor, but it's not a replacement for the serendipitous goodness.

The Eyeo speakers who "overlap" these two communities the most in content seemed to be Amanda Cox of the NYT Graphics team, Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, and Moritz Stefaner. Amanda Cox was capstone presenter at Visweek last year, and was a highlight of that conference for me, because of how much she made the newspaper vis problem a design problem, even confronted with a lot of data in R. (Amateur tip: Don't tell her you have a crush on her, it won't end well.)

"+1 newspaper graphics for having a conference named for a bipolar anarchist" - (Amanda Cox re Malofiej)

Viegas and Wattenberg usually review for and publish and present at Infovis, although their talk at Eyeo was much more personal and "design" focused. Moritz Stefaner cited Infovis work in his talk on network design, including Wattenberg's Pivotgraphs and Holten's hierarchical edge bundling technique, a technique used in many circular node layouts now.

These folks bridged the two conferences a little bit, but the gap still feels overly large to me. I hope to see more discussion of artistic design aesthetics and process at Infovis one of these years!

More On How the Sausage Was Made

A deeply valuable aspect of many talks was that superstars showed us how the sausage was made, with really funny commentary about the mistakes along the way. This is something I rarely get out of academic conferences, which would help me learn and would help my morale, I have to admit.

Martin and Fernanda actually showed their Java project in eclipse, used to sketch the pre-final wind flow map. Their intermediate stages were shockingly terrible ("look away if you're epileptic"), until they stumbled on the right direction with gradient arrows. So reassuring to see the guts and thought process re-enacted! The final solution is brilliant in its simplicity, but it took a while to get there.

Wind map detail (Viegas and Wattenberg)

Felton's process for his annual report design was wonderfully self-deprecating and revealing: 15 days of a mostly blank page, feeling "like a mouse in a bathtub" with no traction, until he started making structural decisions for the framing of the latest annual report. And watching him edit his slides over his shoulder before his talk was an education in itself (he uses InDesign and Illustrator).

"What are those particles? Magic dust; that's a newbie question." (Moritz Stefaner)

Moritz Stefaner showed his designs for the recent meusli project; he chose the chord diagram over the possibly-more revealing matrix design because the matrix doesn't look "tasty" and "meusli shouldn't look like fungi."

Stefaner's rejected "fungi" visual of muesli

Moritz was also very thoughtful in his explanation of why they deliberately avoided axes labels and the addition of the purely ornamental role of the particles in the Max Planck Research Networks.

A slightly random aside about one of Moritz's projects with Nand.io -- but if like me you wondered what that floating mill on the River Tyne looks like:

Tyne Floating Mill (Source of stats for the beautiful Tyne Flowmill visualization)

And here's a snap from the beautiful Tyne Flowmill project image archive:

Tyne Flowmill visualization details

You can find this same vein of honesty about process (and failures on the way) in the excellent and often funny Chartsnthings blog of the NYT Graphics team process, run by Kevin Quealey (@KevinQ). Kevin was there too and took the news of my crush on Amanda much better than she did. I was told that the NYT has no budget for travel -- yet there was a sizable contingent from their Research Labs and the Graphics Team. I guess that's the best indicator of a conference that's a successful destination event: People will pay their own way to attend.

Tool Use

Repeating yet again, I got really interested in that process stuff. So, here are some of the sketching/intermediate tools used before the final versions that I heard or inferred:

Hand-written calculations and paper highlights (Stefanie Posavec)
Java (Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas)
Processing and MySQL, pdf exported into Illustrator and InDesign (Felton)
Tableau and Excel and Gephi and Processing and Photoshop (Moritz Stefaner)
R (Amanda Cox) [I know this from the Chartsnthings blog and a previous talk; although the NYT Graphics team uses many other visual design and development tools as a group]
Processing (Ben Fry, Wes Grubbs, Jer Thorp)
Dat.GUI (Koblin)

Did I miss any, anyone know?

Worthwhile Career Risks

It's risky enough to be an independent consultant these days without sophisticated insurance, but it's even riskier to try to do artistic information visualization that is stays honest and solidly grounded in the data -- there are only so many gigs with Wired or GE or Popular Science out there. The people I admire seem to have them pretty well covered. Getting a business informatics gig is a lot easier, given the millions of startups and companies rolling in data right now.

"Here Are Some Words; We Hope You Find Something (and if you do, would you mind tweeting about it)" (Amanda Cox)

Even more risky is trying to limit your work to visualizing "data for good," the motto of Periscopic (represented at the conference by Kim Rees (@krees) and Dino Citraro), echoed by Jake Porway with his new DataKind project and Code for America, represented by the very articulate Jennifer Pahlka. As Jer Thorp asked of the panel he organized, "How do you do this kind of socially conscious work, and still pay rent in New York?"

Luckily we're not all in NYC, but the same question holds in some form for most independents: turning down work based on ethical questions about the client or the data message is a luxury not all of us can afford. When "brands" come knocking, it's tough to say no, especially if they're rich and you're not. Jake, at least, suggested a path to being involved as a part-time volunteer (see his "I'm a data scientist" signup page). Incidentally, Porway's example of a visualization that "does good" was the animated timeline that illustrated the spread of London Riot rumors--and their corrections--from the Guardian:

London Riot Rumors on Twitter from the Guardian

I found this theme of "doing good with data" an inspiring reminder, and I'm glad to see it playing a part in this kind of high-touch, high-concept conference. Enormous thanks to the organizers for this, and to the Ford Foundation sponsorship for enabling them.

Insecurity Admitted, Hilariously (and Inspiringly)

Why were so many of the speakers so funny? No one is funny at academic conferences, unless they've had a lot to drink and you're no threat to their tenure process. Robert Hodgin (@flight404) is basically an artistic standup comedian. Or a comedian who does digital art, I'm not sure. And he's like that every time I see him, with whatever material, so it's not like this was super-practiced.

I almost hurt myself laughing when Jer Thorp described some of the weirder Avengers from his massive comic collection (Whizzer, Starfox who "stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain" and was therefore brought up on charges for sexual harassment at one point?!).

Google "pugs in costume," it'll change your life. (Wes Grubbs)

And you too can enjoy Ben Fry's recap of the critic who accused him of having a Degree in Useless Plots from Superficial Analysis School in his "I Think Somebody Needs a Hug" post. But I'm still waiting for the post of the very funny Famous Writers drinking saga by Ben's colleague at Fathom.

There was a lot of wry humility, too -- Wes Grubbs recounted how proud they were of the spread of their Wired piece for 311 calls, and then found out that it was in an issue with cleavage on the front. Regardless, Tim O'Reilly used it in a TedX talk and it got a slot in the MOMA Talk To Me exhibit, so I think it had legs even without the cover boobs.

Pitch Interactive for Wired

Speaking of humility, a few days after the conference, Robert Hodgin posted his astounding talk code on Github with an awesome, hilarious, apologetic README that should be required reading for anyone trying to learn creative coding without a computer science degree:

I recognize that I can make some great looking work, and I am proud of this fact. But as soon as I am engaged in a code-related conversation with someone who knows C++, someone who knows proper code design, someone who knows how to explain the difference between a pointer and a reference, someone who polymorphs without hesitation, the bloom falls from the rose and I end up looking like an idiot. Or even worse, a fraud.

If Robert Hodgin and Jer Thorp can feel like hacks or frauds, then maybe it's okay if I have imposter syndrome too; and if I want to make an interactive vis project of Avengers' penis sizes for charity, I should probably just own that desire and run with it. And if you made it this far and now you don't want to hire me for anything, so be it! Everyone needs to pursue their dreams.

My Most Influential One Pixel Line

Sun, 13 May 2012 14:47:00 +0000

I thought I'd contribute one story to the "telling stories with data" genre, even if it's a silly one. It's silly 'cuz it features such a silly graph, which I shoved into an appendix of a presentation for a client a few years ago. Here's an anonymized version:

I put that animation with the arrow in there on purpose, because when I presented it, I had to point out the skinny line on the top. More graphs than you'd expect come with a "performance" part and in some contexts, I think this is just fine. Afterwards, one exec at the company referred to it often as "that chart with the one pixel line." (Okay, technically it had about 2 or 3 pixels. Not as punchy if you refer to it as "that chart with the 3 pixel line" or "that chart with the thin red line.")

Digging Into NetworkX and D3

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 22:06:00 +0000

For Boston's Predictive Analytics Meetup in February, I gave a short talk on using the python library NetworkX to analyze social network link data, illustrated with some simple D3.js visuals of the results. I've since spruced up the slides to stand on their own a bit better, extended a few of the examples, and moved it all online.

A Kindle Fire Review (from a Media Fan)

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 16:06:00 +0000

I'm a Kindle fan, and an Amazon fan. I really like their media content: I buy Amazon music, Amazon Kindle books, TV shows, Android apps. So when my Kindle Fire came, it was pretty much pre-loaded, and that was really nice. All my stuff is sitting there with a little "download to device" arrow, which rocks.

I got this thing because of upcoming travel over the holidays (I don't own an iPad, I think they're too big). I was never intending to take the Fire instead of my reading Kindle, and after 5 days, I still wouldn't. Partly that's battery-life-related; I adore my reading Kindle for the everlasting, never-needing-to-charge-it, one-handed reading wonder that it is. The Kindle Fire battery supposedly lasts about 8 hours, and that may not be true with video watching and wifi on (I haven't tested that part yet).

So, this is not a Kindle-killer, anymore than it's an iPad killer, 'nuff said there.

More specifically, I got the Fire for video watching, web browsing/email/twitter, PDF reading, and light app use (Solitaire, Angry Birds, etc), in about that order of priority. So let's hit those, with some UI observations along the way, because that's where the chance for the Fire's improvements really lies. Then I'll finish up with a few comments on major navigational issues, e.g., scrolling, selecting, typing, which permeate the product.

Video Watching and Disk Space

The Fire seems to want you to mostly stream, which doesn't surprise me. The 8GB drive, and the free Amazon Prime (streaming only) support this. Netflix and Hulu Plus work on it (install their free apps from the store). If you have ever paid for a TV show ep (I sure have!) from Amazon, THOSE can be downloaded to your device. (Browse to a show you have bought episodes for, and they tell you they're still yours, and you can download to your device now!)

Why does this matter? If you're wanting to use it on an airplane, or in iffy hotels off the grid, which I do, you need to download to your device. And if you want to load video you already have, I did the research: It only recognizes MP4, so you need to convert stuff. (I'm using AVS Video Converter; my version does only one file at a time, which is proving to be a giant slow babysitting process.)

You can load videos (or PDFs, or mobi files, or anything else) when you attach your device by USB cable. Drag them into the Videos folder.

But don't expect them to show up in the Videos section of the UI, reachable by the top tabs! They will be found in the rather hidden pre-installed "Gallery" app, which is where your photos and videos live. And then you may be surprised by how poor the UI is for the videos (I am praying they fix this, it's un-manageable!) They appear as a tiny thumbnail with no text; you must select, and then choose "Properties," in order to figure out which one is which. This will get old fast, not just because selection is so funky on this device (more on that later). Here's the videos display with 2 videos:

A short season of one show could run just over 3GB. The actual disk space available to you is not 8GB, because of the OS etc; it's really 6GBish. To find out what you're using, you need to hunt a bit. There is no disk meter in the top accessory bar where Wifi, battery, and other settings live. Tap that bar, and you'll see options like volume. (Yes, it says "Lynn's 5th Kindle," I don't want to talk about it.)

You need to hit "More" and then click into "Device" to see the disk usage. That's really annoying for a device with such a small drive. I wouldn't be hoarding content on it, but for non-wifi situations, having downloaded content seems pretty important to me. I'm really befuddled by this one.

This said, my MP4 videos do look and sound nice. I'll be spending the evening getting ready for that trip.

Web Browsing, Email, Twitter, Etc.

I am guardedly pleased with this so far. I had some issues getting the built-in email app to recognize a Verizon Yahoo address, but the Yahoo mail app worked fine. Tweetcaster works nicely, and I even get a tiny cute beep in the notifications bar when someone @ mentions me, which is nice (same cute beep for email I receive).

The web browser does support tabs, which is great; but the favorites/bookmarks have one major issue: There seems to be no way to delete one. Huh? So it came built in with ESPN.com and a few others I never use, and I can't remove them. If this was a UI design mistake, it's shocking; if it was policy for some payment by partners -- unlike Amazon in so many ways, who are usually all about the customer.

Please fix this, Amazon.

Web pages also allow you to remember passwords, which - thank goodness. Typing is such a damn pain (see below).

Since web pages look good, and play video (including flash), this is a real plus on the device. Selection of links is funky, and I sometimes don't know if the selection problems I am having are due to the OS, touchscreen, or some web loading/processing issue.

PDF Files

PDFs on the e-ink "reading" Kindles are terrible - when they took away the text reflowing option for PDF docs, it becomes impossible to really read them, requiring too much zooming, scrolling, etc, and any images take forever to load and are, of course, B&W.

Most of this is awesome on the Kindle Fire! Definitely a reasonable PDF reader. The documents look great, and my only issue is the weird scroll-down, then to the right, for navigating a large document. It would be nice to have an option for "just scroll down" to get through a PDF document, instead of trying to use the book/paper metaphor of flipping pages. Here is how pretty PDFs look (yes, this is fanfiction, deal with it; of course I tested academic articles too).

Here's a page in portrait, with arrows suggesting how I need to scroll (down to get to bottom of the page, then flick to the right to "flip" to next page).

Thumbs up on PDF reading. They appear in your Documents folder as you would expect, and you don't need to send them to your device for conversion, they just "work." There isn't a Kindle Fire Instapaper app, but since you can save the site in your bookmarks and read text only, or download as Mobi files, you are all set there.

App Use: Angry Birds

Angry Birds is great. So is Solitaire. I haven't tried to install any apps that aren't in the Amazon app store, although you can (instructions abound on this). Note: I installed these on my Android phone and can't use them on it, screen is too small to really do it right. This form-factor is just fine for games that need a wider field of vision, or for people who are getting older and blinder.

I also installed a drawing app, but I don't much want to draw with my finger, so.

I like, and have always liked, the Amazon Android Apps store experience. In some ways, it's better than Google's app store. I'd expect that from Amazon UI, but it's nice to see on Amazon's first dedicated Android device.

Typing, Scrolling, Selecting, Turning the Page

The use of the touch screen is my biggest peeve. It's just buggy! If it's software, I expect a fix update -- Amazon is always good about updating Kindle software. If it's hardware, it's just a damn shame, and I'm kind of shocked it shipped this way.

Typing: The on-screen keyboard behaves very badly in portrait mode. My space bar and the letter "c" seem to be hyperactive for any key I pick on the right side of the keyboard. It's so bad, I will just switch to landscape for anything I ever need to type. The typing issues make the device less fun for email/twitter than I hoped. I am very sad about this.

Scrolling and Selecting: I have had so much trouble trying to scroll vs. selecting what's under my finger that I even looked it up in the help, and watched some demo videos online to see if they were doing it differently. It's not obvious. I have similar problems on my Android phone, which either means the OS itself is to blame, or making good touch screens is really really hard and Amazon's hardware providers failed. I spend a lot of time hitting the "back" button to undo a selection I didn't mean to make while I tried to scroll, especially in Tweetcaster or email.

If I were creating an Android app, I might consider making a dedicated scroll bar, just because it would offer some (admittedly old-school) way around this crappiness in the UI.

Incidentally, scrolling is very important in the apps that Amazon built for showing your bookshelf, your music, your videos... so this problem is quite profound.

Turn the Page: For books, without the e-ink hardware buttons, you need to flick or tap to turn the page. It's a slightly delicate maneuver, since it's easy to hit too hard and bring up the menu bars etc. Also, I am not so convinced this is a read-with-one-hand device. I'm not convinced by the reviews of the Amazon Touch either; if you're holding it in your left hand, tapping on the left side goes to the previous page. This is another surprising gaff on the UI side, for me. I'm not left handed, but I read left-handed about half the time.

Summary

I am very pleased by the PDF experience, and mostly like the apps and Web experience. I didn't buy this to replace my reading Kindle, so no real comment on that side.

I am shocked by these things, and expect software updates to fix some, if not all:

Lack of a disk usage meter on the top info bar. Related to having very little storage on the device -- I admit, I wondered how hard it would be to crack it open and install a larger hard drive. We all did that with our first TiVos for years...
Touch screen badness - for typing, selecting, scrolling... If this is hardware, we're rather screwed, I bet.
Inability to delete web bookmarks (sheesh, seriously, Amazon?)
Better UI for seeing your installed videos on the device. Option to see what the darn video is, without having to select it and go into "properties" first. Which is hard because of the touch screen issues.
Possible option to just use a down-scroll on PDF docs, rather than flick-right to turn the page.

My quibbles aside, I do like it, especially for PDFs and apps. I'm looking forward to the Fire evolution and expect to see software updates (or at least good apps) addressing some of these problems very soon.

A Personal Take on Infovis 2011

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 14:30:00 +0000

I haven’t had time to go thru the papers I liked and didn’t like yet, but I have been musing on some other aspects of Infovis that I thought I’d recap. To situate this, I usually go every other year to Infovis, and have been doing so since mid-2000’s, I guess.

Combing Through the Infovis Twitter Network Hairball

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 21:50:00 +0000

A month or two ago, Moritz Stefaner posted this image of “infovis” folks on twitter, with nodes sized by number of followers (“in-degree”):

PyCon 2011 - Data, Men, and Me

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 17:12:00 +0000

In the past couple years, I’ve switched from sending myself to research conferences (like CHI) to more down-and-dirty developery conferences. I’m looking for skills development and tools I can use day-to-day. This spring I went to PyCon in Atlanta, since I’ve been using Python more and more for data analysis problems. (Complete talk videos are here on blip.tv.)

The initial draw was the tutorials. I aimed for cloud data and machine learning. Olivier Grisel’s tutorial Applied Machine Learning in Python with scikit-learn was a definite high point of the conference for me. His talk on text analysis was very good as well -slides here, and video here. His French accent was very nice, but I kept mishearing “scikit-learn” as “psychic learn.” :-) I also really enjoyed the talk on Genetic Algorithms by Eric Floehr, a fellow who seems to do weather prediction consulting. His slides and a bunch of other interesting supporting material (including code) are up on his site.

Fan Video Editing Community and Copyright

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 17:37:00 +0000

In April, I gave a talk at UIUC’s HCI department on fan video remix artists, or “vidders,” as they are known within the fan media community. To build the talk, I drew on several years of LiveJournal network data, and a large 2-part survey I did in the spring of 2010 to document current attitudes, trends, and self-reported demographics of the community. Afterwards, I made my slides available in an annotated deck for the vidders themselves, as I had promised I would – there were some interesting comments, including disagreement with certain aspects of the technical commentary (whether meta-data is really useful and available for management of clip collections) and whether the quote I pulled about “political correctness” as a dampener on some fans’ “fun” was fair and balanced as a critique of the recent years’ vidding discussions on issues of race and gender in vids. I haven’t updated the annotations or the deck – I’m posting it as I posted it to them; if someone is interested in hearing more about the community discussion, I’m happy to reply in comments or email.

My Take on Big Company Suckage

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 19:30:00 +0000

Scott Berkun wrote a good post on Why Big Companies Suck, at popular request on his site. It made me think about my own experiences at small, medium, and large companies over the past 20 years. I’m assuming Scott and his readers were mostly talking about “why it often sucks to WORK at a big company,” rather than why big companies suck from the outside looking in.

Tips and Tidbits from the UI14 Conference

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:01:00 +0000

Back to blogging after a long hiatus of work and travel… UI14 in Boston had some good stuff for designers and managers! I heard a lot about techniques for creativity and design generation before winnowing; good reminders to generate multiple approaches before “settling.”

Recent Consulting Links

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:22:00 +0000

A few articles on consulting in the current economic climate, thanks to the Freelancers Union newsletter:

Cheap and Interesting Travel Resources

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 19:28:00 +0000

Since I’ve been busy vacationing, I haven’t been busy blogging much - so I thought maybe I’d update with some references for travel sites and lists I use. A few friends have asked me for tips, so here is the collected recent lot.

In Defense of Hard Skills for Designers

Fri, 08 May 2009 12:58:00 +0000

The other day I was in a meeting in which evaluation criteria for developers came up; nice concrete stuff, like writing code that other people can read and modify, putting in comments, resulting bugs, etc. It made me pause and admire the local weather of that strange country. In my experience, it’s vanishingly rare for an interaction designer, usability specialist, or User Experience professional to have such nice hard criteria applied in evaluation of their work. Far too often, we’re judged on mushy subjective factors like whether some team likes working with us, or feels we’re doing something valuable–often outside their expertise or range of view to make this judgment, but that rarely stops anyone. I have some stories about this subjective mushiness in my article in HCI Remixed, titled “Designing ‘Up’ in the Software Industry.”

Why Failure Isn't Working for Me

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 14:19:00 +0000

A response to a number of posts and talks on failure recently, particularly this one by Michael Krigsman, Five Reasons to Discuss Project Failure, linked from Scott Berkun's blog.

CHI 09 Panel: Moving UX Into Strategic Importance

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:34:00 +0000

At CHI 2009, I took a lot of notes at the panel “Figuring Out the ‘One Thing’ That Will Move UX Into a Position of Strategic Importance." This is a rather random summary of it; see a similar topic in my post on User Experience Organizations discussed at BostonCHI a couple years ago.

So You Need to Do a Usability Test... But the Product So Obviously Sucks.

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 11:31:00 +0000

Most of us in interaction design jobs have been asked to do a usability test on something that we don’t think is ready for prime time. You think it needs some design work before it even gets to users. The usual scenario is that your company or client is unwilling to listen to another stakeholder with design opinions (yours, or your team’s), but will believe it coming from users. Either that, or they don’t know what design is yet, but do have an idea that usability testing is a good idea.

R, for Open Source Data Goodness

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 19:11:00 +0000

After I left The MathWorks, I stopped being able to afford MATLAB for stats, and switched to the open source R. Recently, there have been a few articles on how R is being used at companies like Google and Facebook (here and here). I thought I’d post some names of books and sites to help out those new to R.

CAD is Just a Tool: SolidWorks World 2009

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:11:00 +0000

The guest speakers at SolidWorks World 2009 really brought home to me how wonderful a rigorous design process can be - driving the product development, rather than struggling to catch up! There were 3 guest speakers that hammered on this: Sir Richard Branson of Virgin, and design managers from New Balance and Sony Ericsson.

Brainstorming Doesn't Necessarily Help

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 10:06:00 +0000

At my last permanent job, an expert on brainstorming techniques came in to give a talk to the design and development managers. See, we had a phase of our dev process we optimistically called “brainstorming,” the tiny moment in which ideas should be generated–regardless of plausibility and regardless of source–for the problems we wanted to address in the release. I think I invited this fellow in to talk to us all about tricks for doing this well.

Why Consulting Might Be For You

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:37:00 +0000

Last week Greg Raiz and I did a half day version of our workshop on being a design consultant, which we call “Getting Started in Consulting: Being the Best Boss You Ever Had.” In this economic climate, I wasn’t entirely sure we should be recommending striking out on your own, but there are still some themes that work whatever the current job market.

Animated Drawings (and Meta There-upon)

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 22:48:00 +0000

Today I ran across a whole class of items that are oddly similar, in different places: drawings animated, in not your usual way.

My (Renewed) Love Affair With Amazon: Video and Kindle Books

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 13:25:00 +0000

I remember when people sniffed at the idea of Amazon being more than books. When Jeff Bezos reinvested all his profit into opening up other shops, people said, “Diluting the brand?” and other naive things–I might have been one of them.

Jobs for a Stressed Economy: Smashing Stuff, and Psychics

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 13:54:00 +0000

What do you do when you’re stressed? You can pay to throw things, at Sarah’s SmashShack in San Diego. Sarah’s site says you can come alone or in groups, and throw crockery and other nice breakables in her special smashing rooms. Along with whatever soundtrack you prefer.

Women in Computer Science and Tech Jobs: It's Getting Worse

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 10:20:00 +0000

Two recent reports of women in tech careers that are not encouraging. First a link to a NY Times article, “What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?” (Thanks to @joandimicco from IBM Research for the link via twitter!) Women have actively declined in computer science programs over the last few years, shown in their chart:

UI13 and 'Don't Build a Department' for Design

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 19:29:00 +0000

UIE’s UI13 conference was fun, even for a volunteer up at 5am every day. A few of the talks really got the adrenaline flowing, including Peter Merholz’s “16 (Mostly) Difficult Steps to Becoming a Customer-Experience-Based Organization”, and Scott Berkun’s talk on “Why Designers Fail”.

Pixar on Successful Creative Teams

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 13:33:00 +0000

I’ve seen this on a number of sites now, but it’s rich enough to keep passing on. Requiring payment from HBR, the article is How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity, by Ed Catmull. Some of his points are business management truisms or even cliches, but as with most management-related things, it’s not the concept that’s tough, it’s execution that’s tough. Especially in a creative environment.

My Twitter on the VP Debate

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 22:46:00 +0000

I couldn’t watch it all, and made a mistake in not having my twitter in front of me while I did. But here’s, in a glance, a big reason I love twitter. There’s a slim chance that 2 of these people know each other, but I don’t think the others do, although I bet they’d like each other if they met. (Assuming they won’t mind: tingilinde whom I know from Bell Labs/AT&T, Nancy Baym from grad school mentorship days, Jared Spool from being, well, Jared, and Greg Raiz, a colleague from Boston.)

Otters in the Peak District

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:32:00 +0000

Otters at the Chestnut Centre for Otters and Owls, in the Peak District, UK:

Task Failure in a Digital Frame Design

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 22:05:00 +0000

I shouldn’t look a gift digital frame in the interface, but it contributed to a badly spent Labor Day, so I will: the Philips 7FF2M4. In February I posted a link to David Pogue’s review of other digital frame designs that mostly got it all wrong; consider this a detailed sequel from yours truly.

Google Earth: Stone Circles, Crop Circles, White Horses

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 11:36:00 +0000

Whilst planning a trip to the UK, I turned on satellite view to find myself a nice green village in the midlands for an overnight - and spotted the remains of a hill fort or stone age earthworks in a field. Nice!

Good UX from Happy Employees?

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 19:13:00 +0000

More on creating good user experience from good organizations: a short blog post by Adam Richardson at CNET entitled “Good user experience comes from good employee experience.” He points out comments from airlines with happy employees who convey happiness to their customers, like SouthWest and JetBlue, as opposed to American and other airlines with rather surly, unhappy employees.

Staffing for User Experience: What Can Go Wrong

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 15:05:00 +0000

You decided to hire a bunch of interaction designers and “user experience” people to improve your product, service, or general business from a customer-focused design perspective. You were lucky enough to find some experienced folks, who’ve proven their worth at other companies.

Wordle on Ghostweather

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 10:17:00 +0000

Playing with Jonathan Feinberg’s artistic tag cloud generator Wordle, I plugged myself in (of course) and got this one (this is the “ghostly” color scheme):

Some Fun Entries in the Create the Future Design Contest

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 10:49:00 +0000

Now that the Create the Future Design Contest is open and collecting entries, it’s time to point out some of the reasons I love this contest. Before I do, I should say that although I help with the site design and administration, I have nothing whatever to do with judging, which is done by a panel of engineering and research experts recruited by NASA Tech Briefs. And my opinions won’t mean anything to them!

Designing the Stop Sign (the Agency Experience)

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 11:52:00 +0000

Having just given a workshop on setting yourself up as a consultant with some warnings about client types, this video is especially apropos. What if a corporation asked you to design a stop sign?

Cognitive Daily Roundup: Reputation, Gossip, Educating Children in Math

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 10:39:00 +0000

I’ve been subscribed to Cognitive Daily via the Kindle, and it’s been a great feed on that device. [Secrets to a good Kindle feed: Full text that’s well-written, not too many links because following links is slow via Whispernet, and regular updates. Ars Technica used to be a great Kindle read, until they changed their Kindle format to just a capsule intro plus link to “more.” Me and a zillion others unsubbed and gave it a bad Amazon review for this. I hope it comes back as it was.]

Puffins!

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:57:00 +0000

From a recent trip to Maine (gallery now posted here)…

Let Your Designers Design!

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 14:11:00 +0000

We all know now that good design is a crucial element in a crowded market. But just because people in your company have strong feelings about design, doesn’t make them good at it. Some of their ideas may be good, but that doesn’t make them good at executing either. In the worst cases, they both think they have good ideas and think they can execute, and they can do neither. (Remember, incompetent people don’t know they are incompetent.)

Photos of Venice, April 08

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 23:24:00 +0000

I am finally getting these together - a sample from the week in Venice in April. There are a few unusual or creepy ones, because Venice can be rather weird, as well as the more typically touristy shots.

Consulting References (How-To and Advice)

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 09:34:00 +0000

Having just finished a talk at the Boston MiniUPA conference on setting up as a consultant (an honest tell-all), I have collected a handful of references I wanted to share here. They’re not necessarily the obvious books/links on consulting, but they informed me in one way or another.

Mandatory Post on Twitter: A new form of MUDding?

Sat, 31 May 2008 23:21:00 +0000

Everyone else is doing it, so I’m posting about Twitter too. I admit I’ve been enjoying it, probably more so since I have less time than I used to for blogging, Bloglines, and keeping up with friends on LiveJournal.

CHI 2008 Conf: Usability Considered Harmful

Sun, 18 May 2008 17:23:00 +0000

The premier human-computer interaction conference, aka CHI 2008 (pronounced “kai” not “chee”) was in Florence, Italy this year. After missing last year’s in Silicon Valley, I went despite the ruinous exchange rate. (Other local colleagues went to Italy for the conference, but blew it off to go skiing instead!) One of the more interesting and crowd-drawing sessions was the paper by Saul Greenberg and Bill Buxton, “Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful… Some of the Time.” Following it was commentary by Bonnie John, Tom Rodden, Dan Olsen and the ever-sharp CHI attending audience. Here’s Saul and Bill listening to the commentary:

Mini-UPA conference in Boston

Tue, 06 May 2008 10:10:00 +0000

Boston’s mini-Usability conference is coming up on May 28 at Bentley. This is a reasonably priced one-day event that attracts quite a local crowd, and not a few non-locals. I had a good time at this last year, when I was a speaker on online community design. This year I am speaking about life as a consultant, and mistakes I made in my first year. Here’s my abstract:

NASA Tech Briefs: Create the Future Contest Awards in NYC

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 18:20:00 +0000

New York City, April 2008: In New York last week, the Create the Future Contest award winners were honored in a nice ceremony. The awards were presented over a swanky dinner and drinks at the Water Club in NYC. (Good thing I changed when I got there: a classic NYC taxi driver let me off early saying, “I can’t turn right here. You have to cross there and go under that overpass, past the helicopter landing, and then it’s on your left.”)

Punitive Luxury at the Marriott Marquis

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:51:00 +0000

I just got back from an overnight work trip to NYC, where I was booked into the Marriott Marquis at Times Square. I disliked this experience, in oh so many ways.

Open Source vs. Organizational Code

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:59:00 +0000

An interesting, free article from Harvard Business School working papers: Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures: A Test of the Mirroring Hypothesis (scroll down for PDF link). From the abstract:

Microscopic? Or Jelly?

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 19:27:00 +0000

The latter… from my new membership to the New England Aquarium, I think this is a kind of Japanese jellyfish. You can see everything it does, inside and out.

Business Week Top 50 is Out; Autodesk at TED

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 17:06:00 +0000

The “best performers of 2008” (already?) are up in a list at BusinessWeek Online. Despite what many (including BW) would call a recession, there were some healthy net incomes. Their interactive chart (sortable) is kind of fun; but in an interesting discrepancy, the sector identified for each company does not agree with their print mag’s reporting, and this makes me a little suspicious of their rankings which were tied closely to sector identity. Apple (#6 this year) is called a hardware company in print, but IT online.

Netflix Contest and Recommender Systems (short history)

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 13:06:00 +0000

I’m fascinated by the Netflix challenge: Netflix is offering one million dollars for an algorithm to improve recommendations based on movie ratings. Along with this go intermediate “progress” prizes of $50,000 per year the contest runs. The prize leaderboard is interesting reading, in that you can see who is entering teams, their results, and sometimes a bit about the team. Team Bellkor is a group of researchers from AT&T Labs, my first employer out of grad school. (I don’t know these particular folks.) Netflix provides an interesting example of one company “funding” research at another company. The research lab folks are getting papers out of it, of course, probably the most important thing they need to do in a research lab (money comes second; although these days, proof that their work can impact a real business domain may beat everything else).

Singles Ad Humor

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:20:00 +0000

Trying to ignore a sucky day, here are three coincidentally discovered items on dating that had me snickering this weekend. The first is the oldie but goodie by the very funny Joel Friesen, “WHY YOU SHOULD CONTINUE TO DATE ME; A SERIES OF CHARTS AND GRAPHS.” For wacky uses of charts, it does not get much better. (Apparently she just concluded he was weird.)

2007 Usability Salary Study

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 18:22:00 +0000

The results from the 2007 Usability Professionals Assoc. salary survey are now available to UPA members. I am one, so I’m posting some highlights plus some new charts I made from their numeric data. Sadly, I can’t get the raw data to try anything very interesting.

Brain Cloud

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 13:13:00 +0000

Kyle Gabler’s home page charms me as much as his simple but fun and well-executed word association game: Human Brain Cloud. You play by typing in words you associate with other words, and he grows the network of associations on the fly. The graphs are pretty to watch, easy to explore, with great motion effects; and his page of stats on players is suprisingly extensive.

Colbert Bump for Books

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 23:19:00 +0000

I love this type of real world data analysis: Juice Analytics has done some data mining on book sales following author appearances on the Colbert Report, and finds that the more liberal folks get a bigger sales bump! Surprise!

Two Weird Videos: Geckos and Remote Viewing

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 19:11:00 +0000

Here are two quick strange items for the long weekend:

Consumer Design is Easy?

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 21:42:00 +0000

Steve at tingilinde sent me a link to David Pogue’s NYT piece on design flaws in digital picture frames. From the intro section:

Genetics and Environment: Are You Depressed?

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:36:00 +0000

A good, clear article on the role of genetic predisposition vs. upbringing and occurrence of depression lives at Psychology Today in The Identity Dance. Although there are genes that may suggest a higher chance of developing certain mental illnesses, including depression, your upbringing has a lot to do with how likely you are to succumb during trigger events.

Spoon Bending Parties

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 22:21:00 +0000

I had no idea people were still bending spoons with their minds, but apparently so-! Uri Geller was famous for this in the 1970ies, and is generally believed to have been a fraud. But now there is a new craze for this activity, with a lot of people claiming you too can bend your cutlery into very weird shapes with the power of concentration – ideally, in a party atmosphere.

Theo Jansen's Strandbeests

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 20:42:00 +0000

One of the excellent presentation’s at SolidWorks World 2008 was the keynote by Theo Jansen, maker of strange tube sculpture creatures that walk on the sand, powered by wind. The man is brilliantly mad, and his obsession and philosophy are very interesting to see – apparently for much of the geek world, given his press coverage in recent years (see Wikipedia links).

A Look Inside SolidWorks

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:57:00 +0000

SolidWorks World, the annual user convention for SolidWorks CAD users, is going on now in San Diego. I’m consulting with the company, and have been doing usability research out here. (Rather strangely, I appeared in a photo posted by one of our blogger users here. The gentleman I am talking too was just made extremely happy by a brief chat with the founder of SolidWorks, who remembers his name every time he sees him.)

Tips for Solo Travelers

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 21:31:00 +0000

An unsolicited link sent to me by another blogger, thinking it might be of interest, and it was-! Don’t you love the Internet? Here are 40+ Safety Tips for the Solo Traveler, with special ones for women travelers. I admit to not having thought of or heard of some of these myself. For instance, don’t hang the sign outside your hotel door ordering a breakfast for one at 7am; this may advertise to unsavories that you’re in your room alone and willing to answer the door at that hour without checking who’s there.

2007 in Review

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 19:41:00 +0000

One year ago this week, I quit my job and (after a bit of interviewing and thought) decided to consult for a while. It’s been a good year! Some of the things I’m pleased with:

Fate Mag Online: Browse the Weirdness!

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 10:43:00 +0000

Fate Magazine (“True Reports of the Strange and Unknown”) has a sample issue up online (it’s a big but fast loading PDF). I went in to look at the werewolf folklore article, but ended up reading most of it, because it’s just so fun.

Southwest Gets Design

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 11:20:00 +0000

I just booked a flight on Southwest, and had a wonderful experience. Skipping past the booking part, I got a nice email receipt, which was easy to read. It’s nice to get something that’s easy to read. I especially liked their large friendly confirmation codes that are actually visible, colorful, short, and at the top!

Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 21:20:00 +0000

I find from Steve at tingilinde that the Journal of Improbable Research is now online!

Focusing for Self-Portraits

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 20:44:00 +0000

Consultants need to provide photos of themselves that look professional for speaking events and publications from time to time. Blogs and social networking sites also benefit from author photos; and if you’re in the online dating game, you need to make your self-portrait a serious piece of work.

Designing Your Home Page

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 10:50:00 +0000

Kicking this one off, here’s a good article by Joel Spolsky about the design of the product home page for FogBugz, which nicely spotlights the badness of committee decision-making in design. They tried to achieve too many things with too much input, the results frayed, and finally they [he] had to make the tough decision to start over and stick to a single unified vision with fewer “votes” on the matter. You can track this in the mockup screenshots.

Food for Brains

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 19:57:00 +0000

It’s been a tough week - minor road accidents in snow, encounters with consultants that earn $2500 for a few hours of phone time [I don’t earn this!] - so here’s venty post on something that bugs me: People with bad memories. I don’t mean bad in the sense of “I lost my keys again,” more in the sense of “Weren’t you going to schedule that meeting?” No, you were, you said you would! Why do I suddenly feel so defensive, when I did nothing wrong??

Fan Videos, Redux or Three

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 11:04:00 +0000

There’s been a sudden spurt of press about fan video creators recently, specifically New York Magazine’s profiling of Luminosity, in Online Videos 2007. Henry Jenkins has a short writeup here, suggesting he nominated her work. And here’s a coincidentally timed article in the Japan Times on anime fan music video, pointed to by a vidder friend of mine.

Compelling Travel Slide Shows

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 10:52:00 +0000

A link for my family, and anyone else in this situation: You’ve come back from the vacation of your life, and you want to share. Your vacation photos should leave them wanting more, not less, and definitely not caffeine. Read “The Ultimate Guide to Memorable Travel Slideshows.”

Cayman Island Critters

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 11:28:00 +0000

I went to Grand Cayman for snorkeling, and while it was excellent, I saw a lot of unexpectedly interesting animals.

Adventure Travel

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 08:47:00 +0000

I’ve been delinquent in blogging, due to travel (Cayman Islands for water, pics coming) and a whole lot of work. Speaking of travel, National Geographic’s Adventure Travel magazine site has a tool that offers reviews of adventure travel companies. Pretty cool. I’d spend all my time on these trips if it weren’t for the money, of course.

Fast Company: ebay, and Business in Siberia

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 23:11:00 +0000

I caught up on the latest print version of Fast Company on a flight, and I have to admit I’m loving it via print. I read almost ever word, while on the site I just browse occasionally. And now I can point to fun stuff, since the mag is all online.

October Roundup: Owls, UFOs, Ghosts

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 16:31:00 +0000

I've been busy on non-work related activities, for once!

Owls:

Saw-whet migration is upon us. The local birders with Mass Audubon were caught off-guard by how many of the little owls are on the move south from Canada this year. Record numbers on some nights, and earlier than usual. These are tiny, adorable owls, who seem to like people and hang out for a bit. They even like being petted, which makes them a great ambassador for birdkind.

Search Engine Poetry Generator

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 21:52:00 +0000

I’ve always liked random poetry generators (I could dig up some of my favorites, but I’ll save it for another day) – so I wrote one based on an idea I saw on someone else’s blog. (I admit their idea is more interesting, but I had a simple goal to start with: practice with SQL and PHP on my hosting server.)

Randy Pausch and Collaboration

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 21:19:00 +0000

I thought I had blogged about Randy Pausch’s opening plenary talk at CHI in 2005, but apparently I didn’t, and now I can’t find his handout on teamwork. I know it’s floating somewhere. But there are a couple of sites with notes: Usability News and the CHI 2005 conference website (the Conference on Human Computer Interaction, spelled CHI so it’s pronouncable, hah).

Visual Personality Tests

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 21:47:00 +0000

Random personality tests of recent discovery: tests that rely only on visuals. Or, kind of.

Stats on Remote Viewing Tests

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 08:44:00 +0000

There are lots of bogus stats studies on parapsychology tests, but this looks more promising: UC Davis statistician analyzes validity of paranormal predictions. Pity it’s in something called “The California Aggie.”

BostonCHI Panel: User Experience Organizations

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 18:13:00 +0000

There was a good cross-company discussion of organizational models for User Experience (UX) teams at Boston CHI on Sept 11 (check that link for full bios on the speakers).

Companies represented by managers, directors, and VPs of UX: EMC, Oracle, Symantec, and Fidelity (with Sun and others in the audience).

Infovis at Yahoo

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 09:15:00 +0000

Apparently infovis is the new design black – except design always had black, so that’s not quite right. In any case, the new Yahoo Design Innovation Team site features more infovis displays than actual design work. By this I mean it features projects that display nice visuals of data, usually over time, in the form of movies. There is a lot of rhetoric in the intros about “unexpected patterns,” but I must admit to finding a lot of them a little opaque. Only one of the projects is interactive, a cute but not very compelling “design a plant” flash application.

Pavel's Puzzles

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 21:18:00 +0000

Thank goodness, just when I was dreading starting my post about strategy and tactics, Pavel Curtis gave me a good excuse to avoid it: he’s launched an online puzzle shop! Since I’m currently reading the slightly evil yet fascinating The 4 Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich which describes many such businesses, I’ll be fascinated to watch his progress. (Updated to add: Here’s his announcement post about it, on his regular blog.)

Classic Software Mistakes: Steve McConnell

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 08:49:00 +0000

Steve McConnell’s blog is advertising a survey on the prevalence and severity of software management mistakes. It’s worth taking it, just to see the long list of possible disasters. I don’t think it’s a wonderful survey as surveys go (they are very hard to do well), but it might make you feel slightly better about your current development environment when you see all the things that can go wrong. Or, not.

Moon in Rigging, Salem, MA

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 13:29:00 +0000

Create the Future Design Contest: My Press Release

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 08:39:00 +0000

I am very pleased to be able to make my own press release for a project I’ve worked on the last few months, the NASA Tech Briefs Create the Future Design Contest website. The contest this year is co-sponsored by SolidWorks, a great company and my current client. The contest is open to all inventors regardless of their software choice, however!

Dream Jobs and the Test Drive

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 11:28:00 +0000

I had a brief exchange with someone about creative burnout recently, moving this post topic to the top (under bras). The fact is, sometimes burnout is more serious than just a temporary task malaise and means you should think hard about what you’re doing for a living, not just the current task or current boss.

Victoria's Secret Market Research? Or not.

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 10:31:00 +0000

From my huge backlog of things to post, today I choose Victoria’s Secret’s online survey – because I’ll be tickled by the effect on my web logs.

Waterfire Photos

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 20:51:00 +0000

On Saturday, I visited Providence’s town-wide art installation, Waterfire. Picture a huge number of bonfires in the middle of the river and a large crowd of fire watchers, some lucky gondola riders with glasses of wine in hand, fire volunteers in black boats with logs, and eerie music. Very pagan. You can smell the smoke and wood from the river banks.

Asshole-Driven Development on Berkun

Sun, 29 Jul 2007 22:09:00 +0000

Time for my weekly post on assholes in corporations, I guess; this is a few weeks behind, but I needed to space out the AH stuff, and I was busy.

Zen Error Dialog and Flash Victim

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 20:32:00 +0000

I especially like the title bar on this guy:

User Experience 2007 Survey Report

Sat, 21 Jul 2007 13:26:00 +0000

The Usability and User Experience Report 2007 from e-consultancy costs money, but the sample data are interesting enough to post about. There were 756 respondents to the survey that fed this report. (Hopefully it represents more than just the UK, where the consultancy that did the survey is based.)

Sutton's Weird Ideas

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 20:34:00 +0000

I’ve been reading Robert Sutton’s Weird Ideas That Work, which is Yet Another Book on Innovation. I like his Assholes bookand Evidence-Based Management, and this one is entertaining and provoking too.

Travel Need: Can someone help?

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 10:05:00 +0000

I’m a frustrated impulse traveler. It takes way too long to search through even existing ajax-rich travel websites for deals that meet my criteria. I’m on travel deal mailing lists (BookingBuddy, for one) but haven’t found what I need. I know it’s possible today, and it’s a business that might already exist:

Declassified Defense Research and Archaeological Mysteries

Sat, 07 Jul 2007 19:46:00 +0000

Wired online has had a couple recent pieces on defense research on ESP, paranormal, remote viewing, homing pigeons, etc. – there are a bunch of abstracts now visible in the Scientific and Technical Information Network (a .mil site). Note: It is, in fact, extremely hard to use. Good luck.

CEOs Who Work Too Much

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 09:47:00 +0000

A great article in the Huffington Post on CEOs who neglect their families but get written up in Fortune for it. Low-income fathers who work too much get critizied, but Fortune blithely praises it in executives. Towards the end there’s a nice bit on the long hours phenomenon more generally:

Dutch Near Death Experiences

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 20:55:00 +0000

A fascinating Lancet article (pdf) on a study of NDEs (near death experiences):

Angry Bluebird, Happy Bunny

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 12:21:00 +0000

Both of these fellows were seen at Drumlin Farm, an Audubon site in Lincoln, MA.

UX Boston -- I'm Speaking June 26

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 08:34:00 +0000

The newly created UX Boston group is having their first meeting. I’ve been asked to give my talk on designing online community; I’ll be updating it with a few more concrete examples of interaction design for community and sample metrics.

Stephen King on Writing -- And Design

Sun, 17 Jun 2007 10:55:00 +0000

I like this no-nonsense essay by Stephen King, Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully - in Ten Minutes. I think it applies to doing good design as well.

Berkun on Innovation Myths

Sat, 09 Jun 2007 15:00:00 +0000

Another book recommendation: Scott Berkun’s new Myths of Innovation. I’m a big fan of Scott’s earlier book, Art of Project Management, and his new one does not disappoint. I think it stands apart from other books by consultants and design agencies on building innovative organizations. (They’re now a dime a dozen.) It’s short but still condenses a huge amount of material from both business lit and historical research in a way that even someone who once wrote a dissertation can be amazed at. (Note: I was not as successful as Scott was at this trick.)

Hiring the Smart and Effective: Joel

Sat, 09 Jun 2007 14:19:00 +0000

Joel Spolsky has just published a short, concise book on his hiring principles, summarized by the excellent “Hire Smart People Who Get Things Done.” His book is Smart and Gets Things Done. I’ve blogged about his hiring guidelines and other interviewing issues: My 20 Observations on Coporate Design touches on this, as does the post about “Joel on Interviewing, Me on Performance” and the one about “Past and Current Employees and Your Reputation.”

Followup on Assholes at Work

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 11:45:00 +0000

Following up on my previous post on this... On Sutton's blog, he has a No Asshole Rule Roundup of comments he's gotten. One is quite well-taken: the subtle asshole is just as bad or worse than the flamingly obvious asshole, in their effect on morale. Sutton agrees: "Indeed, these more subtle assholes actually can often get away with doing more damage than their more 'over the top' and less politically skilled counterparts."

LiveJournal in the Blogosphere

Wed, 30 May 2007 21:45:00 +0000

Work by Matthew Hurst on mapping the blogosphere has been blogged around recently, particularly because of his cool hyperbolic graphs of the huge data set of linkages, one shown above. I post here because I've got friends reading on LiveJournal -- I know LJ folks occasionally wonder why the press about social networking sites rarely mentions LJ, favoring MySpace and others. One reason may be that LiveJournal is a fairly close-knit and separate community site, with a lot of internal links via friends lists, and not a lot of other blogging post cross-over or linkage in. (I don't know how he handled syndication on LJ friends lists, if at all.)

Goat Mockery

Tue, 29 May 2007 21:54:00 +0000

From a nice day at Drumlin Farm, in Lincoln, MA:

Design for Online Community: Past the Hype

Mon, 28 May 2007 15:14:00 +0000

I’ve posted my slides (PDF) from a recent “mini” Usability Professionals Conference talk about online community design. The talk was well-attended! Thank you if you came.

Funny Networks

Sat, 26 May 2007 09:12:00 +0000

I really appreciate a sense of humor in a network diagram. Here are two unusual ones found on visualcomplexity’s feed, introduced with such sober and boring description that I was saddened for the VC readers who are probably missing the fun here.

Digg Labs Infovis

Sun, 20 May 2007 10:14:00 +0000

I’ve been enjoying the latest infovis apps from Digg Labs, co-created by Stamen Design (I want to be them when I grow up) and funded by Intel.

Design and Risk and Innovation (and CEO Pay)

Fri, 18 May 2007 18:54:00 +0000

Over on NussbaumOnDesign, there's an interesting thread on the role of designers in innovation. Designers thrive on risk, learn from it, and move on from it, so they're useful as models for innovation processes at companies. That's is the gist of a piece by IDEO folks summarized here on BusinessWire. Given this, design as a process reduces corporate risk during innovation, Nussbaum recaps:

Wow: Lotus Blossom

Mon, 14 May 2007 08:24:00 +0000

This is fast (no load time waits and a genuinely frenetic pace), simple (text and music – turn it on because you need it), and even better, genuinely funny: Lotus Blossom.

Mathematica Graphs and Other Demos

Sun, 13 May 2007 18:15:00 +0000

More fun stuff for people who like pictures, but don’t necessarily follow all the math: Wolfram has a downloadable viewer and a bunch of fun interactive demos that let you play with sliders and manipulate pictures to generate fun stuff. There are a whole bunch of categories, including “unsolved problems” that might really pique the interest of the math folks. I personally like the graph theory demo section, because of the issues I have with making sense of social network visualizations.

Swiss Farms in the Spring

Sun, 13 May 2007 17:33:00 +0000

It was early, and the mist was burning off the valleys, so these look a bit like watercolors.

The Asshole Test

Mon, 07 May 2007 22:50:00 +0000

Surprisingly apropos of recent posts on management, there’s another popular book going around now: The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t, by Robert Sutton, one of the authors of the well-cited and enjoyable Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management.

Swiss Bunnies

Sat, 05 May 2007 14:52:00 +0000

I’ve been away for a week and a half, looking at green hills and mountains, tinkling cows (their bells, not relieving themselves), and other cute animals. These are Swiss checkered rabbits, who are good friends. They live in Ballenberg, an outdoor folklife museum.

Workaholics in Consulting and Engineering

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 03:19:00 +0000

Really more about type-A personalities, or at least very driven people: An article in Fast Company on Boston Consulting group trying to get a grip on employees who work too many hours.

Fractal Art

Sun, 22 Apr 2007 14:31:00 +0000

I’ve been playing with 2 fractal-generating applications recently, and recommend them for different reasons. If you’d like to quickly generate random beautiful 2d images, of often breath-taking beauty, use Apophysis.

12 Breeds of Client

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 22:56:00 +0000

Freelance Switch, a site for freelancers of all types, has a nice post about different types of client personalities and how to handle them. It’s applicable whether you’re a genuine freelancer or working in a consultative role inside a large organization – I recognized a lot of it from traditional dealings with consumers of interface design and usability, including previous managers. Some of my favorites, in the “recognizable but not so nice” category:

Crazy Bosses Hall of Fame

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 09:06:00 +0000

An entertaining read at CNET: the Crazy Boss Hall of Fame, featuring stories of swearing CEOs and bathroom reading that’s circulated daily. Weird stuff in there, it might make you feel better if you work for a nutcase. I don’t like the suggestion that I always get in these articles that because they’re aggressive and nasty they succeeded in business (maybe I read it in, but it’s caused by close juxtaposition of wacky antisocial story with glory story of million dollar business win).

Logos of Web 2.0

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 13:48:00 +0000

In case you haven’t seen this – at FontFeed, there was a nice deconstruction of the look of web 2.0 company logos. (Thanks to a graphic designer I worked with recently for the link. Same could be done on the websites with probably similar results; I feel like I’ve seen the 37signals look all over the place in the last couple years.)

Adorable Monsters

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 15:14:00 +0000

Two cute monster-related items for early April:

Daily Monster, an online growth of cool monster art. It's Stefan Bucher's site (thanks Steve):

Passionate About Your Job? Your Career? Your Company?

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 11:23:00 +0000

A while ago, Creating Passionate Users had a post about employees who are passionate about their employer versus passionate about their work. The gist was that people who are passionate for their company are like this:

Visualizing Poetry

Sat, 31 Mar 2007 10:06:00 +0000

April may be the cruelest month, but it’s also the month of poetry, and Knopf does an annual poem-a-day mailing list, which I highly recommend. Thanks to my friend Tina in Seattle, I’ve been on this list for the last 3 years and loved every day of April.

Engineering Rewrites and Old Code

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 19:39:00 +0000

Closely related to my Balls o’ Mud post about old code bases, the latest Silicon Valley Product Group blog posting is about the necessity of engineering “headroom” for code maintenance during product lifecycles. And about inevitable rewrites to scale, perform, and I’d say, accommodate design of new features, although the article doesn’t focus on that issue per se.

Owl and Bear

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 10:53:00 +0000

At the Worcester Ecotarium they have some nice animals. I especially enjoyed the polar bear and the porcupine. Unfortunately, the latter was hard to photograph as he was very busy running in and out of his cubby hole. (But there is a very relaxed and lazy one sleeping on a tree in my animal photos from Nova Scotia here.)

Web Infovis: Crispyshop.com review

Sat, 24 Mar 2007 09:43:00 +0000

Found on Information Aesthetics, a regular read for me…

Crispyshop.com is a fascinating blend of data and shopping results that, sadly, doesn't quite work for me on grounds of overall design usability. I love to play with it, but I can't figure out how to use it to pick the GPS device I'm looking for. It has some very basic issues, which in this era of "user experience" shouldn't be happening! (Hey, I know, hire me to consult for you, guys!)

Past and Current Employees and Your Reputation

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 18:45:00 +0000

As my current contract winds down, and a friend quits a job I once quit too, I’ve been thinking about how employees can affect your company “word of mouth.” Just in time, Scott Berkun posted about why you should treat your contractors and temps well :-) Not that I have in any way had a bad time of any contract, but that’s relevant to the overall topic here. Manage your reputation by taking care with your own staff.

Icy Whiskers

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 14:24:00 +0000

Organizing for Product Design and Production

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 21:49:00 +0000

I had an interesting chat yesterday with a manager in a large international company that is restructuring to support better innovative product creation. He asked my opinion on a number of topics, relevant to their effort:

Pretty Visual Generators

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 11:30:00 +0000

I’ve been looking at online generators for the last few days (a recurrent interest) and was reminded of these pretty visual ones. Worth checking out.

Test Your Psychic Powers

Sun, 04 Mar 2007 21:14:00 +0000

Participate in an online study of psychic powers run at Psi Experiments. Their first experiment is up, and all you have to do is guess (or divine) which cup the ring is hidden under. No, it's not a street hustle. You can sign up for the results, too.

Product Idea Generator

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 19:56:00 +0000

This is addictive, like any good generator. It's especially well-done. Too bad the reload link is so tiny, but you won't miss it.

Samples I got:

Web Log Analysis: Site Flow Charts

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 18:17:00 +0000

I've been working a bit on web log analysis recently (see my contracting info), and while I didn't deliver this for a client, I did spend a little time seeing if it would be worthwhile to do in the future. After doing the usual freqencies of referrers and requests and such, I also looked at median page views per visitor.

Big Ball o' Mud: Code Tangles and Organizations

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 22:02:00 +0000

A friend pointed me to this a month ago, and I’m only getting around to this now: Foote and Yoder’s Big Ball of Mud, on legacy code that no one can understand or modify without risk to, well, sanity and schedule.

Social Networks of Video Editors on LiveJournal

Sun, 25 Feb 2007 11:46:00 +0000

A few months ago, I did a talk at IBM Research in Cambridge on video (or “vid”) editors and their online and offline communities. I made a few social network images, which I thought would be interesting to folks here, and I know I have readers on LiveJournal.

A Postcard to Windhouse

Sun, 18 Feb 2007 11:02:00 +0000

Since my last update a month ago on the haunted Windhouse stories, I received email from a reader in Stirling, Scotland, whose family lived in the house in Shetland at the turn of the (last) century. Even then the house was known to be haunted, well before it turned into a picturesque ruin on the hill. Justine scanned and sent me a copy of a postcard her great-grandmother's sister Katie received referring to the ghost.

I updated the essay again, and posted some more photos and links to the family history. They're at the bottom: my Windhouse story.

Mayan Art

Sat, 17 Feb 2007 09:49:00 +0000

From Chichen Itza this January. The eagle is eating a heart.

Owls in Massachusetts

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 15:11:00 +0000

Last weekend was an “owl festival” at my local Audubon nature preserve. First was a great presentation on snowy owls at Logan Airport (not given there, about owls who hang out there) by Norm Smith of the Blue Hills Audubon nature preserve. Yes, there are snowy owls all over Logan’s landing strips. No, this is not good for the airplanes. Yes, they are hard to spot if you’re flying out from there, as I discovered a day later– white could mean snow, trash, or owl.

New Moon and the Stock Market

Sat, 03 Feb 2007 23:04:00 +0000

I’ve been quite busy recently, and am getting a backlog of post material. Here’s on oldie I never got around to blogging, which is weird and short: there is evidence that the lunar phase affects stock market performance.

Windhouse Haunting Updated

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 11:00:00 +0000

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve updated my article about the haunted Windhouse in Scotland, based on a very interesting reader story I just received. I’ve added his account at the end as a postscript with a few more photos; and below that I added the Shetland online forum stories I found that appeared after I posted the original piece last January. (I got “seems to be the best researched” in the forum citation :-)

MultiTouch Display

Sat, 27 Jan 2007 12:42:00 +0000

I guess it’s a Tipping Point phenomenon, but I wonder who the cool kids are, everytime this happens. The iPhone demo features a multitouch display, and Jeff Han’s demo of this functionality on YouTube has been getting a lot of blognoise; but this idea has been around in the research community for a while. What makes something finally get out of R&D “interesting idea” and into “must have innovation wow” in a product seen as widely as the iPhone? It was even around at Apple, and ignored for years. What does it take to get visibility and get on a product development and business radar? Some links:

Democratizing Data Insight

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 11:41:00 +0000

It’s an exciting world right now… i-Stuff and the spread of “design” as a buzzword aside, I’m thrilled by the spread of data and graphs into the public world.

Mexican village kids

Sun, 21 Jan 2007 15:29:00 +0000

Annual Site Stats and Changes

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 15:21:00 +0000

I don’t have time to do real stats on my server logs, but I offer the annual impressionistic ones, at least, as well as some updates on the site.

Powerpoint Hilarity

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 16:24:00 +0000

Le Grand Content by Clemens Kogler is an animated riff on powerpoint presentations of data and Big Questions (mostly those found in bad teenage poetry). It’s very funny. Go and click on “view movie” and giggle.

Ancient Curses

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 11:32:00 +0000

A 1700 year old tablet with a curse on it was recently unearthed in Leicester (UK). This one immortalizes some guy who stole a coat. It’s amazing the things we leave behind us for posterity.

Puzzles and Mysteries

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 18:54:00 +0000

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a great piece in the New Yorker: OPEN SECRETS: Enron, intelligence, and the perils of too much information. It’s being blogged all over, but since I’m still thinking about it 12 hours after reading, I’m posting too.

Joel's Quality of Software Teams; and Design

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 11:20:00 +0000

I'm a Joel Lover like many techies folks, and his job board is really tickling me. I just cruised the engineering ads (no, I'm not looking for a development job :-) and saw the the little questionnaire at the bottom of the page that measures the quality of the team hiring. Apparently people posting ads are answering honestly, which is excellent! And even more excellently, usability testing makes his list.

Giveaway of the Day

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 20:53:00 +0000

I’ve been tracking Giveaway of the Day for a little while now, and I’ve liked some of what I’ve found on it. If nothing else, it’s a way to find out about smaller utility programs and new tools you don’t know about, and you can’t beat “free” when you want to try one. The hook here is that you only get a window of 24 hours to install and activate each one, so you have to keep up with the site if you want to catch something you want. And then they hope you tell other people so they get sales by word of mouth. I like the model.

America's Stonehenge

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 14:02:00 +0000

Yesterday a friend and I went to see the site in Salem NH called “America’s Stonehenge.” (No, really, that’s what the tourist name of it is.) Having crawled all over farmer’s fields in Europe looking for passage graves, dolmens, and standing stones; visited Newgrange and other related sites; seen early archaeological sites in Orkney and Shetland… well, this was still pretty damn good.

Demotivation and Burnout

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 21:12:00 +0000

Picture from Creating Passionate Users

Innovation 1000: Companies Profiting from R&D

Wed, 27 Dec 2006 20:50:00 +0000

An excellent study of companies spending money on R&D over the last five years, and their payoff (or not): Smart Spenders: The Global Innovation 1000.

Twenty About Design

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 20:03:00 +0000

I seem to update this one once a year. I wrote it when I was frustrated about the invisibility of design as a process and a skill at one company, and I’ve updated it to moderate it and expand and then contract it over the last 18 months. The latest update focuses more on hiring (a perpetual issue), teamwork, and recognizes management as both a problem and a solution in corporate culture.

Morocco Photo Selection

Sat, 23 Dec 2006 00:01:00 +0000

I haven’t had the time to do this carefully, so this is rather hasty – but here’s a selection of the photos I took in Morocco this summer.

Atlas Mountains Town

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 21:03:00 +0000

This is where they filmed the slave town in Africa for Gladiator – they added a fake Hollywood gate to the front of this place for the movie.

Google Patents Sketches

Sat, 16 Dec 2006 16:59:00 +0000

If you like sketches of product designs, and things people patent (often very odd), I recommend Google Patents search. For the product designer, these sketches are often educational as effective communication tools.

Dennis Frailey: A Day in the Life

Sat, 16 Dec 2006 16:12:00 +0000

Last week I was lucky enough to be in a 3-day training course on project management. I was not entirely sure this course was a good idea for timing and content reasons, despite having a great interest in the topic myself– but the instructor proved me wrong.

VPs as Indicators of Problems

Sat, 09 Dec 2006 14:40:00 +0000

Scott Berkun has a nice snarky post about VPs of Innovation; if you’ve got one, you’re probably in trouble on that front, and it’s not likely they’re going to help.

A collection of professional essays...

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 20:00:00 +0000

The more involved in management I am, the less I feel I am doing things that I can point to and say "I did that." (Also, the less I work for companies that make consumer or well-known products, but that's a different issue and a weird trend I noticed a few years ago...) But I got the good news today that an essay of mine will appear in a book accepted by MIT Press for 2007 publication along with many others by names that I know from my field: luminaries, old friends, and former research colleagues. Most of the other authors are probably wondering who I am in this list; I feel honored to be there and to have been invited to submit something to it. Here's the info on the current Table of Contents: HCI Remixed: Essays on Works that have Influenced the HCI Community. (This book must be 500 pages long!)

Alligator

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 15:09:00 +0000

Data and Infovis and Art

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 14:00:00 +0000

I’ve been thinking about data a lot, since the Infovis 2006 symposium. At this conference was a strange mix of scientists, mathematicians, and a few artists, or those with an artistic bent.

Moroccan carpet seller

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 20:24:00 +0000

In Morocco. (It’s tough to pick which ones to post – I’ve got so many.)

Social Drinkers Earn More Money

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 10:10:00 +0000

Somewhat disturbing, but ringing true in a bunch of dimensions… This study shows that social drinkers earn more money than non-drinkers, and claims it’s because of the increase in social capital gained by knocking one back with colleagues.

E3: Effective, Efficient, Elegant

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 22:50:00 +0000

Hi, my name is Lynn and I work all the time. Too much to post much these days.

10 most real life ghost photos (sic)

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 18:34:00 +0000

Ah, Pravda. It never fails to appear on the Anomalist. Here is a sample of photos of ghosts from the Russian online paper: 10 most real life ghost photos - Pravda.Ru.

Atlas Mountains at Sunset

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 10:28:00 +0000

One of my vacation nights involved a hike into the mountains.

The Powerset Blogstorm

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 15:10:00 +0000

Can anyone beat Google? Well, the natural language processing community is having a go at it. I got back from 2 weeks of vacation to discover that an old friend and mentor from grad school days is now at startup Powerset, co-founded by Barney Pell, whom I knew as a grad student in Cambridge years before. There’ve been a rash of articles in the blogosphere about their announcements, as Barney summarises:

Park near my house in Natick

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 22:46:00 +0000

Wetlands

Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 11:21:00 +0000

I have long been fascinated (and disgusted) by the lack of government, union, or HR care for the abuse of workers in the software industry. During the dot com era, I actually heard it touted as an intentional strategy by some Silicon Valley managers to hire young programmers right out of school who would work long hours for little pay and were considered “disposable.” Mostly, they were disposed of, by burn out.

Birds at the Ren Faire in Carver, MA

Sun, 10 Sep 2006 12:24:00 +0000

Archimedes looking intense. RenFaire, MA, 06

Cheap Tickets

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 22:33:00 +0000

Over the weekend I caught up on Lifehacker, and found a bunch of posts and comment posts related to finding cheap airline tickets. Some were quite surprising to me – like shop between 12 and 1am on Wed morning when companies update their records.

A fluffy photo post: Rabbits and Flickr Stuff

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 22:16:00 +0000

A friend sent me this link to some hilarious rabbit photos: My Rabbit Disapproves.

Youth Hostel, Nantucket.

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 20:50:00 +0000

It’s a good thing I’m not too old for youth hostels yet, or I would have missed this pretty building on the south side of the island.

Rusty Bench

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 20:49:00 +0000

Nantucket, MA

More on Skunk Works

Sun, 20 Aug 2006 11:02:00 +0000

Following up on yesterday’s post, and pointed to some stuff by Steve C: some radically different skunk works innovation stories, with huge business success.

Secrets of Great Teams

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 17:00:00 +0000

There are some nice short articles on teamwork in business at CNN’s site for Fortune.

Excel Tricks

Sun, 13 Aug 2006 09:22:00 +0000

Gotten off Information Aesthetics, and making my weekend a thing of beauty (well, also the good weather helps): Lightweight data exploration in Excel, from Juice Analytics.

Graves in the North End, Boston

Sat, 05 Aug 2006 18:53:00 +0000

Joanna Grant, Copps Hill, Boston

Here Lyeth

The Anomalist Roundup

Sat, 29 Jul 2006 22:17:00 +0000

Every weekend I love catching up on The Anomalist. Here are some picks from last weekend (that I never had time to post):

Puffin Pics Album

Sun, 16 Jul 2006 01:04:00 +0000

Finally, after about 15 years of missing the puffin season everywhere I travel (Scotland, Maine, UK…), I went on a special puffin trip to Nova Scotia. I got a few good pictures, although not many of them in flight, the classic silly puffin shot. Surprisingly, I like the water ones best!

Social Isolation Growing in U.S.

Sat, 15 Jul 2006 19:05:00 +0000

A much blogged social networking article: Social Isolation Growing in U.S., Study Says. Putnam’s famous Bowling Alone was on this topic, and things have only gotten worse, apparently.

Reforming Project Management

Sun, 09 Jul 2006 20:21:00 +0000

This is an excellent blog on project management and development: Reforming Project Management. It also, coincidentally, happens to be written by someone who works in the AEC industry (architecture, engineering, construction), which might interest some people I work with.

Simple Names and the Stock Market

Sun, 09 Jul 2006 12:33:00 +0000

Not a result that will please some businessmen, but it seems that there is statistical evidence that companies with simpler names and/or companies with simple stock ticker symbols perform better on the market. Human processing may be the reason. Note, however, that it’s not a sole predictor – TiVO would have done better long term if it were, sigh.

Nova Scotia Animals Pics

Sat, 08 Jul 2006 15:54:00 +0000

A bunch of animal photos are up on this gallery.

This owl could be...

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 23:54:00 +0000

This owl could be a muppet, but he’s not – he’s real and he’s just hot. I’m trying to get my pics from my recent vacation online in a web gallery, but it’s taking the usual too-much-work…

Despair.com and Demotivation

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 10:24:00 +0000

I’m a big fan of despair.com. But handing out their posters could potentially get managers fired at the wrong companies– maybe for the best! They’ve got other good products, including a funny book ("The Art of Demotivation"). I can think of a few people who need the pessimist’s mug.

Top ten tips for preventing innovation -Tyner Blain

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 11:34:00 +0000

Apropos the bad mood I have about innovation rhetoric: Top ten tips for preventing innovation by Tyner Blain. Gotten off Scott Berkun.

Business Innovation & Design on BusinessWeek

Sun, 18 Jun 2006 20:43:00 +0000

There’s a new portal site with articles on Business Innovation and Design at BusinessWeek Online.

Daily Hassles

Sun, 18 Jun 2006 10:56:00 +0000

I’ve been tracking my time, in part because we were asked to (for budgeting better on the next release cycle) and in part because I just love the data-centered view of the world. Buried in the details of everyday life, we don’t see the big picture, and this kind of time tracking exercise helps. (God forbid I do it for my non-work life, that would provide a level of big picture insight I don’t feel prepared for right now.)

I found a turtle...

Sat, 17 Jun 2006 18:29:00 +0000

I found a turtle in my backyard today! He scurried away, slowly.

Critical dragonfly, Garden in...

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 21:40:00 +0000

Critical dragonfly, Garden in the Woods, Framingham MA

Jobs on BayCHI

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 18:22:00 +0000

This weekend, Don Ahrens announced that he wouldn’t be posting the BayCHI job list anymore. This important job listing is on hiatus till another owner can be found and trained.

From the founder of Motek

Sun, 04 Jun 2006 16:33:00 +0000

A couple of months ago I posted about Motek, a woman-owned company offering sufficient vacation days to let employees come back to work enthusiastic, practicing enlightened management policies that secure quality of life on the job, not just despite the job, like most companies.

Design Success Factors

Sat, 03 Jun 2006 03:07:00 +0000

About six months ago I was interviewed as a followup to a survey I had answered about factors that influence successful adoption of design and usability practices in the corporate world. The survey ended with a writein box asking for the most important factor, and I was unable to write just one. The phone interviewer wanted me to pick a single response from my two, and I still can’t; in fact, I’d add a third.

Peopleware

Mon, 29 May 2006 13:03:00 +0000

Kevin Kelly’s excellent Cool Tools email reminded me of the classic Peopleware, by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister. I think my copy is at the office (a foolish place for it), so I have to quote from Kevin today.

Cryptid Hunting: What to Bring Along? at Cryptomundo.com

Sun, 28 May 2006 18:14:00 +0000

It’s that time of year again: Bigfoot season. Cryptomundo.com posts an article about what extras to bring along on your hunt, to ensure proper scientific, nay, forensic, attention to the evidence. In Cryptid Hunting: What to Bring Along? we are told that today’s Bigfoot hunter needs to pack:

UFO Maps

Sun, 21 May 2006 15:44:00 +0000

Alright, this really tickles me: UFO Maps, brought to you by a mash up of Google maps and the National UFO Reporting Center.

Joel on Being in Control

Fri, 19 May 2006 10:32:00 +0000

Excellent post by Joel Spolsky on the latest release of his bug tracking software, with a lot of design observations: FogBugz 4½ and Subjective Well-Being - Joel on Software. Complete with management advice, tying back to the theme that management is design too.

Mt Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge...

Mon, 15 May 2006 22:29:00 +0000

Mt Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge MA.

Management, Design, Evidence

Sat, 13 May 2006 11:51:00 +0000

Another one on Kawasaki’s blog impressed me today – I’m just in the mood for thinking about management, as someone trying to hire now. Kawasaki posted Ten Questions with Bill Sutton, author of Hard Fact, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management.

PersonalDNA

Sat, 13 May 2006 11:25:00 +0000

There are personality quizzes all over the net, spread as memes via sites like LiveJournal where memes have a long life. PersonalDNA is a next-generation personality quiz, with high quality widgetry that the respondent has to manipulate to set their answers. While fun to take, I am not so sure that all that gadgetry entirely supports the problem at hand and it probably detracts a bit. I found it hard to figure out where in a quadrant of 4 my “dot” should live in a case like this.

The Top Ten Lies of Engineers

Mon, 08 May 2006 08:45:00 +0000

Another good one from Steve at tingilinde, this made me laugh in my coffee: Guy Kawasaki: The Top Ten Lies of Engineers. I already posted Scott Berkun’s Things VP’s Never Say, and this makes a great complement. Things lots of engineers say… whether intentionally lies or not. A sample:

Watercolor Angel, Mt Auburn...

Sat, 06 May 2006 20:22:00 +0000

Watercolor Angel, Mt Auburn Cemetery.

Mt. Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge,...

Sat, 06 May 2006 20:16:00 +0000

Mt. Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, MA.

Cloaking Device

Sat, 06 May 2006 19:42:00 +0000

Guardian Unlimited: Now you see it, now you don’t: cloaking device is not just sci-fi:

NY Times' market graph toy

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 14:54:00 +0000

I’m only calling it a toy because it’s fun. All infovis should be fun, frankly. This is another one off Information Aesthetics: the Sector Snapshot.

Montreal, treetop and lamp.

Sat, 29 Apr 2006 14:13:00 +0000

Montreal, treetop and lamp.

Old Montreal 2006.

Sat, 29 Apr 2006 13:56:00 +0000

Old Montreal 2006.

LiveJournal Social Networks

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 22:46:00 +0000

A year ago I did a survey on memes on LiveJournal that garnered a whole lot more responses than I anticipated. I presented some data from that survey at an informal workshop last year at the CHI conference, and revisited the same data again a year later (this week). Here are two pictures I generated of the friends’ lists of 222 people, with the same 2 people highlighted in red in 2005 and in 2006.

April is Poetry Month

Sat, 15 Apr 2006 18:18:00 +0000

Endicott Studio is celebrating Poetry Month nicely with a new illustrated poem every day. If you like fairy tales and poetry, this is the place for you. Featuring writers like Delia Sherman, Ellen Kushner, Holly Black, Jane Yolen…

Berkun blog » Vista and Victimization and More

Sat, 15 Apr 2006 10:27:00 +0000

I’ve been catching up on some of my favorite reading after being away and then swamped at work – today it’s Scott Berkun.

Ten things VPs never say

Sat, 15 Apr 2006 09:18:00 +0000

Scott Berkun posts about Ten things VPs never say, including: “Team A is more important than Team B,” “the CEO and I disagree” (Leaders fear showing dissention, despite signs for those paying attention), “My morale is low,” “I’m ending project X and here’s why,” “No, I don’t want to be on the cover of Time.” (To want to be a VP requires an ego. No person in the history of the corporation has been forced, at gunpoint, into executive status.)

plusminus design: flashbag

Sat, 15 Apr 2006 09:01:00 +0000

This is one of those brilliant and simple ideas, that also happens to be funny. A USB device that “fills up” visibly until it’s ready to explode, at which point the drive is full: plusminus design: flashbag. (Off Information Aesthetics, where else?)

You Make Your Own Luck

Sun, 09 Apr 2006 12:31:00 +0000

A nice (positive!) story off one of my favorite blogs, Mind Hacks. You Make Your Own Luck is a summary of the book by Richard Wiseman, The Luck Factor. Wiseman’s analysis says that being “lucky” comes down largely to personality attributes, such as being open-minded, optimistic, experimental, and aware of opportunities when they come up.

Greyfriar's detail, Edinburgh.

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 22:41:00 +0000

Greyfriar’s detail, Edinburgh.

Closeup of the Edinburgh...

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 23:19:00 +0000

Closeup of the Edinburgh Castle in snow.

Edinburgh Castle in the...

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 23:17:00 +0000

Edinburgh Castle in the snow.

I Am Hiring

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 14:57:00 +0000

Are you or do you know a senior interaction designer? I am looking for a couple such folks. I want smart people, with a good understanding of data analysis and problem solving skills, with some humility about their design work and willingness to change it based on input. Depth of design experience, ideally on desktop software, is required for these positions, as is attention to detail and willingness to drive issues through implementation.

St Giles from Greyfriar's...

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 21:47:00 +0000

St Giles from Greyfriar’s Kirkyard, Edinburgh.

The Physics of Friendship

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 21:45:00 +0000

Another interesting (and successful) paper on modeling of social networks by physicists: A System of Mobile Agents to Model Social Networks (pdf), by Gonzalez, Lind, and Hermann. I recommend the more accessible writeup here.

Google Romance

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 13:26:00 +0000

I nearly fell for one April Fool’s post today (Cool Tools, I got too excited by the radio gum), but here’s one I didn’t (quite) fall for: Google Romance. It’s very probable Google is going to be in this space. The storyboard of the two attractive users getting together surrounded by Google community products is obviously a work of realist fiction.

Wardrop's court in the...

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 11:38:00 +0000

Wardrop’s court in the snow.

Wardrop's Court in the...

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 11:38:00 +0000

Wardrop’s Court in the sun. Edinburgh.

Google Finance.

Mon, 27 Mar 2006 09:10:00 +0000

This is an new vis tool for showing stock performance correlated with news events: Google Finance (I pre-loaded my own company’s data here). You can adjust the window you’re seeing by size and location, and see the related stories associated with peaks and dips. It’s kind of fun, although I wish they’d laid the page out a little nicer.

Greyfriar's Kirkyard, Edinburgh.

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 22:39:00 +0000

Greyfriar’s Kirkyard, Edinburgh.

Deacon Brodie's on the...

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 22:38:00 +0000

Deacon Brodie’s on the Royal Mile, Edinburgh

Why Don't We Choose What Makes Us Happy?

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 09:37:00 +0000

People are flawed. But it’s rarely so well summarized as it is in the paper “Decision and Experience: Why Don’t We Choose What Makes Us Happy?” (Hsee and Hastie 2006). The authors recap the many experiments in the literature of behavioral-decision theory that show that people don’t choose outcomes that maximize their happiness, due to a number of failures in the human psychological makeup.

Glasgow, The Magic Tea...

Sat, 25 Mar 2006 11:36:00 +0000

Glasgow, “The Magic Tea Rooms” (I assume all these juxtaposed colors are no accident–?)

Glasgow Railings, West End.

Sat, 25 Mar 2006 11:33:00 +0000

Glasgow Railings, West End.

architecture and hygiene

Fri, 24 Mar 2006 08:08:00 +0000

A friend at work pointed out this amusing site, found after he googled “architecture, hygene” late at night (Google fixed his spelling): architecture and hygiene.

Motek, A Very Strange Software Company

Wed, 22 Mar 2006 22:32:00 +0000

I just read this article in the in-flight magazine on my way home from a short trip to Scotland: American Way Magazine: The Best Company to Work for in the World-Period.

Projects: Succeeded, Challenged, Failed

Sun, 12 Mar 2006 14:18:00 +0000

The Standish Group have done numerous studies of software project success and failure rates over the last 10 years. They’ve observed some trends in project management suggesting things are marginally improving out there.

Sleep on it for complex decisions.

Sun, 05 Mar 2006 13:17:00 +0000

Complex decisions are made better after a night’s sleep, according to BBC NEWS: Sleep on it. It looks like simple decisions are better made consciously than unconsciously, though. (Now, how can you tell the two apart? And why does the alert brain seem so limited– is this another “7 plus or minus 2” result?)

Secret Passages, Ruse and Escalade

Sat, 04 Mar 2006 13:24:00 +0000

Off steve: HiddenPassageway.com, an architectural folly company offering you built-in secrete passages and hidden niches appropriate to store guns in, according to one of their animations. The videos and small 3d animations are very cute.

Office Networks in Business Week

Sun, 26 Feb 2006 19:16:00 +0000

I’ve been catching up on some social network blogs, and have pointers to 2 short pieces I enjoyed in Business Week Online: IBM: Untangling Office Connections and The Office Chart That Really Counts.

Houston St., New York...

Sat, 25 Feb 2006 14:08:00 +0000

Houston St., New York City.

Broken glass in New...

Sat, 25 Feb 2006 14:07:00 +0000

Broken glass in New York City.

Is Your Boss a Psychopath?

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 19:26:00 +0000

At the risk of my boss reading this, here’s an oldie but a goodie: Is Your Boss a Psychopath?

The Dumpster (Happy Valentine's Day!)

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 23:59:00 +0000

Off Information Aesthetics, the Dumpster is a visualization of breakups described on blogs in 2005, with sample color commentary from the posts. It’s very pretty, and of course it was made in processing.

Joel on Interviewing, Me on Performance.

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 10:56:00 +0000

Joel Spolsky’s latest post is on interviewing interns for Fog Creek. I love how seriously he takes this, but with the same caveats he quotes as getting from other people. Bravo that last year’s interns wrote their fastest growing business product almost by themselves. That’s a good use of interns! (And in an industry full of big software companies that just acquire existing products and can’t build them from scratch anymore, it’s refreshing.)

TopCoder's Programming Contest

Sat, 11 Feb 2006 15:52:00 +0000

The WSJ has an article on the recent Topcoder programming contest. And Fast Company did an article on the 2004 winner.

Davos Quotes on Creativity

Sat, 11 Feb 2006 13:10:00 +0000

Fast Company Now blogged about events at the World Economic Forum at Davos, especially the themes on creativity and innovation. The pieces are all quite short, but a couple are relevant to my last post on the NSF workshop on creativity tools.

Creativity Support Tools

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 22:19:00 +0000

Ben Shneiderman has posted the individual papers and extensive summary of the NSF-sponsored Workshop on Creativity Support Tools that took place in June 2005.

So, no change there then.

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 20:29:00 +0000

Oursin posted a pointer to a sad but pretty piece in the Guardian: So, no change there then. What happens when February comes and we realize there was no way we were to make those New Years Resolutions and we aren’t going to turn into a princess after all? There aren’t enough stories about how small changes can take so much work.

Tips for Frequent Flyers

Sun, 05 Feb 2006 13:25:00 +0000

I was just booking an international flight, and faced with a lot of flights by many carriers in the same price range, I decided comfort was my primary goal. It was surprisingly hard to find a good resource that spelled out which airline and which equipment offered the best seats for this. Nevertheless, here’s one article, more focused on users of laptops than on people with legs: Mobile Computing: Tips for Frequent Flyers.

Waterfall 2006

Thu, 02 Feb 2006 11:22:00 +0000

The best laugh I’ve had in, well, at least a week (the pornographic car design conversation at my corporate beer bash was pretty good): Waterfall 2006 - International Conference on Sequential Development.

The Snapshirts Blog Tag Cloud Meme

Thu, 02 Feb 2006 10:09:00 +0000

I don’t know if 3 people count as meme-spreaders, but I got the Snapshirt blog cloud link off Jeff Mather who got it off someone else. I also wouldn’t order the T-Shirt, but I like the cloud of terms it got off my site, so here it is.

French Wall Art Photos by Me.

Mon, 30 Jan 2006 21:33:00 +0000

Man, have I blown a lot of time on this: French Wall Art photos I took this last spring. Just the tip of the iceberg of stuff I never posted last year, especially the ones from Paris which I quite liked, for once.

Ice Photos and Photo Blogging Wishlist

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 15:41:00 +0000

My referrer logs suggest I’m not keeping up with the needs of depressed teens on Xanga and MSN Spaces for bleak winter photos to illustrate their poetry. So here’s a few recent ones of ice in Massachusetts.

Illusion of Explanatory Depth

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 14:05:00 +0000

Fantastic post here: Mixing Memory: The Intellectual Teeth of the Mind. Chris is writing about the Illusion of Explanatory Depth, a cognitive science observation that people often think they know how things work when in fact they don’t know.

More Adobe: After Effects Tour

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 22:21:00 +0000

Whilst avoiding blogging about irritation-provoking topics (e.g. the science article claiming men like women who laugh at their jokes but don’t care if women are funny– thanks, steve!), I happened on some good news: A video demo showing off some new features in the new release of Adobe After Effects.

Printing with Photoshop

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 16:07:00 +0000

When I was working on UI design for color management at Adobe (for CS2), one of the things that made our cut for “must fixes” was the print options in Photoshop. They looked like this, if you recall:

Map Things of Interest

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 20:09:00 +0000

Not the post I was intending to make tonight, but I’ve just freed myself from an accidental click on the Canadian Cartographers web blog that somehow ended up in my Bloglines reading list. A bunch of it was fun stuff, if you like maps.

Fair Isle Travel Tales

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 23:01:00 +0000

Despite what it looks like from these pictures, everything on Fair Isle is not blue and red. Some of it is green, but there are red birds. There might be blue birds too, but I didn’t see any. There are definitely a lot of cliffs and weather and some very nice people with telescopes.

Donner Party, pigs, maps, mayans...

Sat, 14 Jan 2006 16:15:00 +0000

Apparently, the Donner Party cannibalism legends remain unproven.

Do we really need glow-in-the-dark green pigs? Apparently we do, and these ones are better because they are entirely green, not just patchy green like the previous attempts.

Fred Brooks and Late Projects

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 21:08:00 +0000

Scott Berkun, rapidly becoming one of my favorite reads in the internet for his sagacity about software projects, points to an interview with the legendary Fred Brooks in Fortune magazine.Fred is of course famous for The Mythical Man Month, in which he argues Brooks’s Law: “Adding people to a late software project makes it later.”

Shadowland in Beta

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 21:21:00 +0000

A day late and an OS short… Adobe’s first new (internal, from scratch) product in yonks is finally out in early beta: Lightroom. Only for Mac, alas. No, it’s not a response to Aperture, as everyone thinks on first hearing about it; it’s been in development forever, even when I was there.

Popping In On PopCap Games.

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 23:05:00 +0000

I got this nice article off Amy Jo Kim’s blog. Gamasutra on PopCap: “James Gwertzman On Casual Growth” describes the process of game development of “casual games” like Bejeweled, which is one of my favorite Palm Pilot games.

Usability Research References

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 22:41:00 +0000

Human Factors International (a well-known consulting firm) does end-of-year summaries of important usability research findings in bite-size bullet pieces. The items are useful for designers and researchers working on any UI topic, but there’s a definite focus on web design (for obvious reasons). The review is titled Yeah but can you give me a reference?

The Office 12 Blog

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 13:52:00 +0000

If you’re wanting to catch up on the hullabaloo about the Office 12 redesign, Jensen Harris has just reorganized his links and provided good access to summary articles on his blog. See An Office User Interface Blog.

My Site Traffic (an Unscientific Report)

Mon, 02 Jan 2006 21:48:00 +0000

In the last year, I’ve browsed my traffic logs on and off, and noticed a bunch of things get visited a lot. I haven’t tracked it carefully or with real numbers, but it looks like these guys are winners:

Sand Game

Mon, 02 Jan 2006 16:28:00 +0000

Steve didn’t really do this sand game justice when he rec’d it. It’s beautiful and surprising.

Nerd A.D.D.

Sat, 31 Dec 2005 11:32:00 +0000

This post is dedicated to my brother… another nerd who thinks he has ADD. I myself recognize the symptoms all too well, especially after a week at my sister’s house where it was not ok to sit with a latop all the time. (The question on my mind today is: can I go to a party tonight and take along a book, my ipod-wannabe, and a palm pilot, in case I need more than conversation and drink to make it through?)

New Scientist 2005 Roundup

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 19:34:00 +0000

Two good NS pieces: NewScientist.com’s top 10 news stories of 2005, ranging from 13 Things That Do Not Make Sense (blogged here before) to the Pentagon’s rejected sex weapon designed to make enemy soldiers fall in love.

In the future... Sam's comics.

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 12:23:00 +0000

In the future we will all be connected by a network. 37Signals’ weblog Signalvs.Noise is hosting some great comics by artist Sam Brown. He is illustrating “in the future” sentences supplied by readers in the comments. It makes reading the comments really fun and kinda Zen.

form doesn't follow function-- in architecture.

Thu, 29 Dec 2005 12:15:00 +0000

In biology, the fact that form and function are closely related is proved over and over, especially with respect to protein shape and behavior. As a newbie to architecture, I wasn’t surprised to hear that architects also believe in the mantra that form follows function. Building shape should reflect and reinforce what it’s for, more or less.

Salem.

Thu, 29 Dec 2005 12:02:00 +0000

Salem.

Flora's paw.

Thu, 29 Dec 2005 12:01:00 +0000

Flora’s paw.

DTV's TiVo vs. Replacement DVR

Sun, 25 Dec 2005 23:09:00 +0000

Weaknees has a side by side proper comparison of the sadly no-longer-offered DirecTV-branded TiVo vs. the newer DVR they are now promoting, the R15.

Fashion Meets Processing

Sun, 25 Dec 2005 10:01:00 +0000

A beautiful collaboration between fashion photographer Clayton Cubitt and and Processing generative artist Tom Carden: Metropop’s denim issue.

Best of Best of 2005 Lists

Fri, 23 Dec 2005 11:16:00 +0000

Off Cluefairy, the long list of 2005 summary lists on Fimoculous.

My favorite list titles, content aside: Top 10 Most Confusing (Yet Widely Used) High Tech Buzzwords from Global Language Monitor, Bad Sex In Fiction Shortlist from The Guardian, Ten 2005 Ads America Won't See from Ad Age, 10 Most Pathetic Media Meltdowns from Ad Age, Cheap Toy Roundup from The Onion A/V Club, Top 25 Military-Friendly Companies from GI Jobs (!), 25 Britons Who Wield Influence In America from The Times of London, Weirdest Tech from ZDNet.com, Top Reality TV Whores from Reality Blurred, Top Cryptozoology Books from Loren Coleman, 50 Photos Of People Smiling from LowCulture, Top 10 Kitchen Utensils Of This Year from Utter Wonder, Top 40 Weather Days from WXnation.com.

Getting it Right (or Wrong, at Blink)

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 22:15:00 +0000

An interesting post-failure analysis of why social bookmarking site Blink failed while del.ico.us has succeeded. Ari blames product design, although in the comments some people blame the development decisions, the growth of the company, the loss of focus, the ad and registration burdens… in short, all the dot com era fools are to blame.

Microsoft hires user interface guru

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 13:58:00 +0000

This just in from steve: Microsoft hires user interface guru Bill Buxton, formerly of Alias Wavefront and long HCI history. He’s being hired by MS Research, of course, and will work on ubiquitous computing (“ubicomp”), as so many people do these days.

FAQ on Usability Testing in Progress

Sat, 17 Dec 2005 19:52:00 +0000

I am writing an FAQ on usability testing for my new team. I want to do a real one, not a marketing-style intro level one that establishes that testing your software is like eating Mom’s apple pie. (Wait, that’s a weird metaphor.) What I am after is the common objections, the issues people really have about topics like potentially poor recruiting, validity of testing with small numbers, the value of qualitative data at all, the variability and difficulty of analysis of the results, the biases that may go into defining tasks for the test, etc.

Ching's Visual Dictionary of Architecture

Sat, 17 Dec 2005 19:19:00 +0000

This is a wonderful book. I mean, wonderful like Tufte and Bringhurst and Christopher Alexander and Scott McCloud… a book you open and can’t put down because you get drawn into the beauty and details.

Good Experience Games online

Sat, 17 Dec 2005 11:24:00 +0000

A nice list of online, well-designed Good Experience Games pointed to by steve on tingilinde. I am deliberately not going there till I am on my holiday break, and even then I have a long list of stuff to do…. eeee. Tempting examples include a great-looking online Set puzzle (surely I can make one stab at this without losing the day), Samorost 2 (gorgeous!), a Scott Kim game or two, a bird feeding game called Pyoro (I think I will have to go see this, despite their warning it’s “hypnotic”…)

Sanibel Island Beach Regurgitation

Sat, 17 Dec 2005 10:21:00 +0000

Bird vomit? Anyone have any explanations? (It may not be pretty, but it was a “lucky shot” so I’m making you admire it too.)

Bird scratching in Sanibel...

Sat, 17 Dec 2005 10:18:00 +0000

Bird scratching in Sanibel Island, Florida (November)

Bumblebees Recognize People

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 23:00:00 +0000

This article explains that bumblebees trained with photos can remember faces. Does that mean bees could be used to assassinate people who are allergic? I go to the positive immediately…

Motif #1, a red shack in Rockport.

Sat, 10 Dec 2005 14:05:00 +0000

This is “Motif #1” in Rockport MA. I was here a few weeks ago with my brother and sister-in-law. We recognized it immediately from a description in the guidebook, and then we said it as often as possible: “That’s nothing like Motif #1.” “Here’s a house that could be Motif #2.” “Maybe they have postcards of Motif #1.”

Your Breakfast Toast is Talking...

Sat, 10 Dec 2005 13:32:00 +0000

I assumed this was a joke project when I read the very serious BBC Online article about it, but it’s not – your toast might tell you the weather report, if you let this kid at Brunel University toast the bread for you.

Tabs Gone to Hell

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 14:09:00 +0000

Everyone knows by now that multiple rows of tabs aren’t such a good idea – or do they? Here’s an egregious example from my new Thinkpad. This has more than a few tab-related problems: there’s some kind of duplication between resources and allocation (2 tabs for each overlapping concept); many of them seem to be empty anyway; there are so many that’s it’s actually hard to go through them all, even with the counting option, because there’s so much shifting around as you click on them (making it hard to tell what you’ve seen already).

The Beauty of Simplicity

Sat, 03 Dec 2005 11:54:00 +0000

Fast Company has a nice article on the tension between simple design and sufficient design. (That’s characterization of the problem, not the author’s). The Beauty of Simplicity gets into some useful case studies after the lead-in on Google’s home page.

Jelly at the NE...

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 11:36:00 +0000

Jelly at the NE Aquarium.

justcurio.us // strangers helping strangers

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 10:30:00 +0000

This is cool – you have to answer a question from a stranger, which could be about anything at all, before posting your own. I posted my own question, the first thing that occurred to me after a hard week of conference partying, and now I can track the answers here.

TiVo Conference call follow up

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 10:33:00 +0000

Notes from the latest TiVo quarterly conference call.

Some discussion of the Comcast deal, of the impact of advertising spots, HD issues...

Showering penguin at the...

Sat, 26 Nov 2005 22:59:00 +0000

Showering penguin at the Aquarium.

Penguin at the New...

Sat, 26 Nov 2005 22:57:00 +0000

Penguin at the New England Aquarium

Number Factoids

Thu, 24 Nov 2005 13:30:00 +0000

Another break in the Thanksgiving cooking. Check out tingilinde: take a number …. I’m far from a mathematician (and was even when I dated one), but I find this list of number facts magical and opaque. These are my favorite of the inscrutable, OCD, and sometimes just silly observations:

Paris seen from a Ferrari's bumper

Thu, 24 Nov 2005 11:31:00 +0000

I got this one off Steve’s tingilinde which I’m catching up on after a couple week’s of distraction with a new job…

Fairies Stop Building Plans

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 22:39:00 +0000

Yes, this happened recently in Scotland. I’m sadder about the plan to move the stone and carve the development name into it than I am about the fairies who live under it being disturbed, but then I don’t live near them.

MATLAB Programming Contest

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 10:36:00 +0000

The MATLAB programming contest just gets bigger and better. Here are Matt Simoneau’s charts and graphs of the evolution of the submissions and scores over time. What could be cooler than this contest??

Bird head, Sanibel, Florida.

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 23:36:00 +0000

Bird head, Sanibel, Florida.

Reasons ease of use doesn't happen

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 23:31:00 +0000

Martha Stewart has her 10 Rules for running a business, and Scott Berkun has 14 reasons Why Ease of Use Doesn’t Happen on Engineering Projects. I wanted to cheer out loud as I reread this. Maybe it’s just because I’ve lived through so many of them and some so recently.

The Stone Balls of Costa Rica

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 17:35:00 +0000

While looking for information on a fellow UI designer at Autodesk whom I heard about at the Group05 conference, I tripped over this article: The Stone Balls of Costa Rica.

Review of the DirecTV TiVo replacement

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 23:32:00 +0000

As you probably know, DTV ended their deal with TiVo and their offer of a TiVo unit for their subscribers, and have now developed their own ripoff. I say “ripoff” because it sure looks like a close copy in the review and screenshots this guy has up here: A Review of the R15.

Birds in Ding Darling Preserve, Sanibel Florida

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 19:09:00 +0000

Bird ballet…

Ballet 2:

Stats on LiveJournal

Wed, 09 Nov 2005 16:58:00 +0000

Some friends helped me out with a short panel talk I gave on LiveJournal today at a conference, so I thought I’d share a couple pictures and stats. One person on LJ asked me about the demographics of LiveJournal usage. LJ admin posts regular automatically generated stats on their stats page. I collected some in March this year, and then again this month for this talk, and they showed this pattern.

Shropshire, Tree Art.

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 19:56:00 +0000

[Note for RSS readers: This is an old post, on which the comment spam had gotten out of control. I’ve removed and republished disallowing comments.]

Why Free Software usability tends to suck

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 12:05:00 +0000

Matt Thomas, a Mozilla contributor, has some interesting observations about design on free software projects. If you’re a fan of evolutionary design by accretion and multitudes, you might want to check out his concerns in Why Free Software usability tends to suck. (It was picked up by a number of people including Joel back in the day.)

Beyond Salmon

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 10:43:00 +0000

A friend of mine, Helen Rennie, once entertained me and several work colleagues on the subject of fish for a good half hour. We were on a work trip (to Disney, but that’s another story) and we were sitting beside a fake pond; she told us an awful lot about different kinds of fish with suspicious enthusiasm. I hadn’t known her very long, and I thought, “Wow, this is almost weird.”

Ohio Ghosts Like Golf

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 18:24:00 +0000

An unusual article: a detailed look at Ohio golf course ghost stories. Read about them at GolfStyles : Ohio.

Scott Berkun on Train Wrecks

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 12:25:00 +0000

A week or so ago, I went with a couple colleagues to hear Scott Berkun talk on software project train wrecks. It was entertaining, albeit rather painful, for people who have been victims or occasionally contributors to such disasters.

Networked Governance: Network & Teams

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 20:50:00 +0000

Harvard University has a Program on Networked Governance, on whose site I found some nice links on networks and teams. I thoroughly enjoyed the literature review in their first article link, Building Effective Intra-Organizational Networks: The Role of Teams (pdf). The starting observation is that there hasn’t been a lot of research cross-over between people studying social network analysis (SNA) and effective teamwork in organizations.

TextArc's text displays

Sun, 16 Oct 2005 21:58:00 +0000

TextArc is a rather stunning thing – I can’t tell how useful it is, but it sure is pretty to play with. To encourage you, here’s the view of “Alice in Wonderland” as it’s being crunched and cruised by me.

isometricblocks, by ben fry

Sun, 16 Oct 2005 21:31:00 +0000

isometricblocks is a genome comparison visualization applet by Ben Fry, who is currently working local to me at the Broad Institute following his MIT PhD. He does wonderful, artistic visualizations. His Processingtoolkit for infovis apps, which I’ve blogged about before, just won an award at Ars Electronica.

Data Visualization: Best in Show

Sun, 16 Oct 2005 20:12:00 +0000

DMReview had a contest for best infovis application, and Jock Mackinlay’s submission won. The scenario and data were not prescribed. The winning solution was a display of video game advertising strategies.

Signage in Shrewsbury

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 23:54:00 +0000

Textile designers.

Lyon’s Tea sign on the back wall of an old Shrewsbury building.

Funfurde: oops. revisit.

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 23:46:00 +0000

Aren’t we circularly referential today! The other day I blogged about Funfurde and the “bad table,” Pavel commented about a similar designer in my comments, the Funfurde author searched and hit my post and Pavel’s comment, and has now blogged Pavel’s reference for him/herself. Check out the blogosphere in action on this post on Funfurde.

Psst--wanna see Photoshop 15?

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 11:57:00 +0000

John Nack was the product manager on Photoshop who worried the most about the encrusted menus and overload of expert features in Photoshop, as it went into it’s millionth release cycle. It’s a software industry problem, as he points out in more angst in this blog article.

Pix: Oak beam carving in Shropshire.

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 13:00:00 +0000

Jacobean carving, Ludlow (The Feathers).

Carving on gatehouse of Stokesay Castle, Shropshire:

Funfurde's latest: Phone Modes, Bad Tables, DNA art

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 10:18:00 +0000

Funfurde’s wacky furniture/design pointers continue to amuse me.

Right now they've got a cool-looking plastic phone with a bunch of big plastic "pages" you turn to switch modes on the phone -- the "phonebook." And a peeing table, which you have to see to understand ("Bad Table"):

Winners of the Ig Nobel Prize

Sat, 08 Oct 2005 20:06:00 +0000

The 2005 winners were presented at Harvard last Thursday. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

pixelfest

Sat, 08 Oct 2005 10:33:00 +0000

Another one that made me think, sometimes surprising things. The principle of the experiment is “can a bunch of random people, by changing one pixel at a time on a canvas, create something?” Pixels can be overwritten. Is it art, garbage, or just an online experience?

Negative Network Ties

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 21:37:00 +0000

This is an unusual article (a pdf): an examination of negative relationships in social networks, particularly in organizations. The bulk of social networks studies and community studies are about the positive – benefits acrued, capital, positive reciprocity, sharing of resources, emotional feeling and trust – but humans do have negative feelings and interactions and groups exhibit negative behaviors both by individuals and collectively.

So what do you have to do to find happiness?

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 20:52:00 +0000

There’s some coverage of the increasing study of what makes people happy in the Sunday Times Online. Some sample quotes in an excellent article:

Killer Dolphins, a History

Wed, 05 Oct 2005 12:54:00 +0000

The Independent has jumped on the killer dolphins bandwagon, and some of you will have noticed that the original Observer story even got coverage on the Daily Show this week! This Independent article has some (I think) unintentionally hilarious sections towards the end:

Preschoolers Drive Flu Epidemics

Mon, 03 Oct 2005 21:30:00 +0000

Surveillance Data Suggest That Preschoolers Drive Flu Epidemics. I found this linked off a social network analysis blog, bemoaning the lack of SNA in the study. I would have thought epidemiology was all up on social networks as a mechanism of disease spread. At least on TV the CDC are – even if it’s just a masked doctor asking who the carrier had contact with in the last 2 days, and then sweating and hissing, “It’s getting out of control, shut down O’Hare and then LAX!!”

The Ig Nobel Awards

Mon, 03 Oct 2005 20:39:00 +0000

The IgNobel Awards are this Thursday at Harvard. Based on Steve Crandall’s recommendation, I impulse-purchased a ticket today. If anyone else local is going, it would be fun to meet up for a drink before or after.

Pull and Post pix.

Sat, 01 Oct 2005 22:02:00 +0000

Pull. Croft Castle bell.

Postbox outside cottage in Shropshire:

Physical Models of Virtual Spaces

Sat, 01 Oct 2005 21:58:00 +0000

Tom Vollaro has an interesting item on his website: A visualization of the virtual contents of a MUD, which is a virtual chatspace with a user-expandable geography. He did a site map of the rooms of BayMOO, and then built a model showing what it looks like.

Strange church decorations in Shropshire

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 19:51:00 +0000

Middleton church pottery display, Shropshire.

Pottery detail.

Pavel's Second Life

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 11:16:00 +0000

Pavel recommends checking out Second Life.

They have a few features that make them sound destined for financial and usage success: a simple programming model, rights to intellectual property remain with the user creators, an internal economy that does real business for users, and a rate structure based on pay for creation rights.

Armed and dangerous dolphins are missing.

Sun, 25 Sep 2005 13:30:00 +0000

According to the Observer, dolphins trained to shoot darts at underwater terrorists in wetsuits are missing from their training ponds in the aftermath of Katrina.

The illuminated continent

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 19:26:00 +0000

On the Official Google Blog: The illuminated continent. Data layers on Google Earth showing links to National Geographic stories and images, even a webcam. It’s all hyperlinks in the end, but the experience seems different!

'Bride' Made with dSLR

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 19:19:00 +0000

This is a nice technical article on the making of the Corpse Bride using digital still cameras (the Canon EOS-1D Mark II) and Final Cut Pro. There’s even a bit about custom Python scripting in here.

Another owl at Ray's...

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 18:04:00 +0000

Another owl at Ray’s Farm. (Since Pavel liked the first one!)

Shropshire hillside, UK.

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 10:22:00 +0000

Shropshire hillside, UK.

The Nag's Head Ghosts

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 08:22:00 +0000

From Shropshire Walks with Ghosts and Legends, p. 46:

About halfway up the hill you will see the Nag’s Head pub on your right which has a most unusual haunting. Look up at the little window on the top floor. Within this room there is a cupboard and within the cupboard is a painting – and it is actually the painting that is haunted. The painting is of an old prophet and it’s said that anyone who looks at it will be driven mad. Certainly, there have been three occasions in the past when people, perfectly sane and seemingly perfectly happy, have stayed in that room and then, for no apparent reason, committed suicide. One was a man who had just been promoted, another was a young girl looking forward to getting married and the third was a First World War soldier who had just returned from the front. Not surprisingly, the cupboard is always kept locked so that no one can inadvertently see the painting these days.

Dawn in Shropshire, taken...

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 23:01:00 +0000

Dawn in Shropshire, taken from my B&B window.

Owl at Ray's Farm...

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 22:56:00 +0000

Owl at Ray’s Farm in Shropshire, UK.

Boston Harbor take 2.

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 21:54:00 +0000

Boston Harbor take 2.

Boston Harbor, Labor Day,...

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 19:44:00 +0000

Boston Harbor, Labor Day, at dusk.

Children develop cynicism at an early age

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 20:06:00 +0000

How sad: Children develop cynicism at an early age.

In the second part of the study the children were asked how self-interest might lead someone to make an incorrect statement. Children were provided with three choices: intentional deception, unintentional bias, or pure mistake. They rarely endorsed bias as the best possible explanation for being incorrect. The youngest children were more likely to think the characters were lying. ... "It is not until sixth grade that children begin to endorse lies and biases as equally plausible explanations for self-interested incorrect statements," Mills said. "Adults are clearly sensitive to all three sources of inaccuracy. How children begin to understand what it means to be biased is an open question."

Alice in Wonderland by Annie Leibovitz

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 13:15:00 +0000

I haven’t blogged about photography in a while, and this is a good excuse: Annie Leibovitz has photos of Alice in Wonderland fashion scenes, staring the designers and the characters and some really weird dresses. I don’t recommend it for the fashion as much as for the surreality and the facial expressions. She’s got the right feel for the story.

Silicon Valley Network Analysis

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 20:20:00 +0000

“Saxenian (1994) presented a systematic argument that network structure in Silicon Valley was quite different from that in the Route 128 corridor of the Boston metropolitan area, for a variety of historical, economic, and cultural reasons, and that this difference translated into what she called, in her book’s title, a distinct “regional advantage” for the Valley." One of the reasons for the difference is the dense social network linkages in Silicon Valley, the high mobility of employees, and the sharing of knowledge at sidewalk cafes – impossible in a cold, secretive Defense-funded climate like Boston’s.

Physicists vs. Sociologists, oh my.

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 19:52:00 +0000

Apparently there’s been a bit of bad blood over the fact that physicists are doing social network analysis. An account of some of the “hmph, why don’t they cite us” is over at Crooked Timber.

Ghostweather: The HP Scanner Dialog

Mon, 29 Aug 2005 21:47:00 +0000

I found a UI so bad last week that I’ve been jumping up and down trying to find time to post about it. Finally, here it is:

Hyssop addict in my...

Sat, 27 Aug 2005 20:15:00 +0000

Hyssop addict in my backyard.

Red Dragonfly, Broadmoor.

Sat, 27 Aug 2005 20:13:00 +0000

Red Dragonfly, Broadmoor.

History of Social Networks Analysis

Sat, 27 Aug 2005 14:19:00 +0000

Here’s a review of The Development of Social Network Analysis, which looks like an entertaining history.

TiVo's investor call

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 17:32:00 +0000

I’ve been afraid to read the news since the end of the DirecTV deal, but the news in yesterday’s call with TiVo is actually not bad at all. For the first quarter, they made a profit! And the Comcast deal is coming along.

Haunted Korean Airplane

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 13:07:00 +0000

This story details a number of weird experiences on an airplane after a woman hanged herself in the bathroom (the mind boggles – are Korean airplanes outfitted with bigger bathrooms?). Possibly the oddest aspect of this story is that a Buddhist monk travels by first class. Check it out.

Crossing the canal in...

Sun, 21 Aug 2005 20:05:00 +0000

Crossing the canal in Honfleur.

French bulls.

Sun, 21 Aug 2005 20:05:00 +0000

French bulls.

danah boyd: the biases of links

Wed, 17 Aug 2005 12:19:00 +0000

danah boyd has a bunch of observations about blogrolls and linking in an essay here: Many-to-Many: the biases of links.

Levitated | Jared Tarbell

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 18:30:00 +0000

Here’s more interactive art from Jared Tarbell, of Complexification: Levitated.

Seriously, go now, and play. Try the walking insect generation or the walking things that change when you click on them or the gorgeous 3-d text space (I just wish it were infinite).

Color Words and Color Products

Sun, 14 Aug 2005 10:56:00 +0000

Two things made me think of each other today:

Martin Wattenberg has a fascinating look at the colors that lie behind the lexicon in his Color Code: A Color Portrait of the English Language. It's really fun to browse and mouse around, like most of Martin's work.

Complexification

Sat, 13 Aug 2005 16:09:00 +0000

Complexification’s Gallery is an awesome, hypnotic site. This is Jared Tarbell’s art created by algorithms, and it can be drawn in real-time in front of you. As an unusual bonus, you can see the applet source code for the non-Flash ones. The software tool used to create the applets is
Processing, an open-source visual and audio art programming language (which I will download after I finish playing with Tarbell’s animations).

Folding T-shirts

Sat, 13 Aug 2005 13:50:00 +0000

Pavel Curtis has geek cred defined: with a history working on Smalltalk, Lisp, and Scheme, and then creating internet community before it got cool via the famous LambdaMOO at Xerox PARC, then founding a startup, Placeware, which was finally (ahem) purchased by Microsoft… well, bottom line is, he’s got a lot of T-shirts, as anyone in the computer industry does. He has more than most people, in fact.

Whose Fish?

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 22:21:00 +0000

This is a brainteaser logic puzzle attributed to Einstein.

Whose fish is it?:

Honfleur old harbor, Normandy,...

Sun, 07 Aug 2005 20:52:00 +0000

Honfleur old harbor, Normandy, 2005

Quantum information can be negative

Sat, 06 Aug 2005 11:40:00 +0000

According to this article, Quantum information can be negative. Science reporting is often iffy. I especially liked this section:

Rob's Amazing Poem Generator

Sat, 06 Aug 2005 11:23:00 +0000

I love semi-random text generation, and especially like it when you can seed it with a good starting sample. Here’s an example: Rob’s Amazing Poem Generator.

Groups and Teams and Growing Pains

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 20:15:00 +0000

I’ve linked before to Big Dog’s Leadership page, which summarizes the stages of team development described in Tuckman’s classic “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups.”

Next-Gen Tools in Global Software Development

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 10:06:00 +0000

Another link from Barney’s: Barney Pell’s Weblog: VC Taskforce on Next-Gen Tools in Global Software Development. The topics covered with Barney’s great notes are the risks of outsourcing, getting requirements wrong (a costly problem made worse in distributed development), and investing in software tools.

The March of Pies: Gallery of Data Visualization

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 13:18:00 +0000

The Gallery of Data Visualization offers examples of good and bad statistical displays. The Have Something to Say category is especially amusing:

Faster Browsing: Browster and SNAP UltraSearch

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 10:31:00 +0000

My old pal Barney is working (in a VCish way) on the evolution of search. Here’s a post of his about 2 new search engine concepts, all about previewing the hits without requiring you to load pages to check them out.

Francis Crick and the Claustrum

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 10:07:00 +0000

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the blog on Mind Hacks. It’s one of the blogs I read right away and don’t let pile up, unlike many others these days. One of their latest posts is on the late Francis Crick’s attempt to explain consciousness in his final paper (co-authored with Christof Koch). The claustrum is a thin sheet of grey matter: “Crick and Koch argue that the claustrum is probably connected to all of the cortex, and has a significant role in emotion, suggesting it may be involved in the ‘binding’ of emotion and the senses into a single conscious experience."

City Creator

Sun, 31 Jul 2005 22:38:00 +0000

This is fun, for adults and kids. City Creator lets you design a cityscape on your computer (not your dinnertable) in a Flash UI (UPDATE after reading their FAQ: “The pages use HTML and CSS with GIF graphics. The drag-and-drop interface was built using ECMAScript (Javascript) and the DOM (Document Object Model). The back end uses PHP and MySQL”).

Funfurde on the Morphescape

Sun, 31 Jul 2005 22:26:00 +0000

Funfurde had a post on a bunch of dinnerware that got me giggling. Less for the dinnerware than the post itself, I quote:

Framingham, Farm Pond, lilypad...

Sun, 31 Jul 2005 22:19:00 +0000

Framingham, Farm Pond, lilypad buds.

Normandy, France, 2005.

Thu, 28 Jul 2005 20:24:00 +0000

Normandy, France, 2005.

Major Tivo Withdrawals

Wed, 27 Jul 2005 22:57:00 +0000

One of the tragedies of TiVo is that it invented a porsche while everyone was still walking; now the cheaper horse-drawn carts are looking ok to people, because they don’t know what a difference a porsche actually makes in getting around. They’ll want porsches in a couple years, but it may be too late by then.

Moodgrapher: The London bombings

Sun, 24 Jul 2005 21:00:00 +0000

Livejournal lets users select a “mood” when they post an entry. While it’s rarely very interesting at an individual post level, in aggregate, it becomes much more interesting. Check out the Moodgrapher: The London bombings, work by students at the University of Amsterdam.

Wordlock

Sun, 24 Jul 2005 15:41:00 +0000

This has shown up a number of places (I got it off MetaEfficient), but it’s such a “why oh why wasn’t this invented earlier” thing that I have to post it: The Wordlock. A combination lock that uses letters to form words you are more likely to remember, and can be reset to another word at any time.

Some Philosophy Behind Good UI Design

Sun, 24 Jul 2005 12:22:00 +0000

I’ve had a number of conversations about interface design recently in which it was suggested that excellent design doesn’t really matter, and that as a designer I have some kind of extreme bias towards quality that amounted to, well, anal fluffiness. My friends seemed to be sold on the concept of usability, which is, after all, a wholesome sounding term (except in France where it doesn’t exist), but the relationship of usability to good design was non-obvious to them. While avoiding a homework assignment, I dug up a few relevant pointers.

SketchUp

Sat, 23 Jul 2005 13:51:00 +0000

This SketchUp product for 3-d drawing got rave reviews on Cool Tools. The reviewers praised its excellent, intuitive design and feature set. Since I’ve always been tempted by the idea of designing 3-d Victorian mansions, castle ruins, and haunted houses, yet can’t believe this could ever be easy, I watched the movie demos on their site.

The Futile (?) Pursuit of Happiness

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 09:59:00 +0000

In a comment on my previous post Erik reminded me about this chestnut article from the NYTimes magazine: “The Futile Pursuit of Happiness.”

Intelligence is irrelevant to a happy old age

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 23:12:00 +0000

Huh. I was once on a lunch date with 2 female university professors who are friends of mine, and I asked idly if they’d like to be smarter. You know, to be able to do something really great, like cure cancer, or invent a new method of collecting lint off black clothes. Of course I would, so I was surprised when they said no! Their reasons were largely about social integration, I gathered. (I did wonder if men would have responded the same way to the same question.)

Sexual Conflict

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 22:59:00 +0000

How important is sexual conflict? A special issue of the American Naturalist is dedicated to discussing it.

Bummer. The free and...

Sun, 17 Jul 2005 13:12:00 +0000

Bummer. The free and easy Snaplog for my photoblog has finally been overwhelmed by my photos or volume or something; I’m no longer able to easily update over there. I’m going to have to look for a new solution, so photo blog is on hold for a while.

Edinburgh Ghost Hunting Experiments

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 10:17:00 +0000

My friend Angus (whom I first met at Edinburgh U as an undergraduate) sent me a link to a story on an Edinburgh ghost hunter’s experiments with local haunting sites. He has done experiments in two Edinburgh sites that show that naive visitors respond differently to ghost-infested spots than they do in unhaunted sites of a similar nature.

Alcohol-induced blackouts

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 22:36:00 +0000

After a debauched weekend, during which I drank enough to achieve actual gaps in my memory, I did a little reading on the impact of alcohol on the brain. Luckily for me, it doesn’t look like it’s clear that neurons are killed or permanently damaged, but nerve transmission is certainly impaired. Memory loss is a possible side effect, along with other neurological and physical responses most of us know about from experience.

Context Free Art

Thu, 07 Jul 2005 21:36:00 +0000

I’m entranced by this thing – it’s a context free grammar language and rendering environment for fractal-style art. It was inspired by the fake CS paper generator that used a small CFG (SCIgen) which was well-blogged. It’s downright ingenious; I’ve been around context free grammars and text generation since my baby linguist days, but never seen them applied to making visuals.

Tilghman Island, Maryland, at...

Wed, 06 Jul 2005 16:04:00 +0000

Tilghman Island, Maryland, at dusk.

Creative or Nuts?

Wed, 06 Jul 2005 12:36:00 +0000

In the Psychiatric Times: Are Genius and Madness Related? Contemporary Answers to an Ancient Question .

40,000-year-old footprint

Wed, 06 Jul 2005 12:25:00 +0000

More wonderful archaeology: Apparently 40K years ago, size eight feet walked beside a Mexican volcanic lake. This is unexpected news in various dimensions: Telegraph | News | 40,000-year-old footprint of first Americans.

Eastern Shore of Maryland,...

Tue, 05 Jul 2005 23:25:00 +0000

Eastern Shore of Maryland, Tilghman Island heron.

Vertical Leap Conference on Search

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 21:24:00 +0000

My friend Barney has been blogging some detailed (albeit raw) notes from panel sessions at Vertical Leap. Here are his most recent notes, and you should check a few days behind this as well: Investing in Vertical Search.

Smell Research

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 23:17:00 +0000

Like most people, I think aromatherapy is kind of hooey, except that I do really like perfume and different aromatic oils. It turns out interesting research has been done on the physiological impact of different scents, leading to some neat conclusions. Most of this comes from the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation, ltd., and published reports of the research of one Alan Hirsch.

Roswell -- Another Explanation

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 12:57:00 +0000

This just broke last week, and is getting a lot of discussion among UFO trackers and bloggers. Nick Redfern has a book out theorizing that the Roswell coverup was aimed at keeping post-war human subject and military experimentation a secret, using UFOs as the cover story. Here’s one link to a capsule summary: COAST TO COAST AM WITH GEORGE NOORY: Roswell Secrets.

GotPsi? Try the Boundary Institute

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 19:24:00 +0000

The Boundary Institute has online psi tests, with automatic scoring. You can do various card prediction games, remote viewing, guessing lottery numbers, etc. It’s a bit of a time sink, once you start playing. It has “meme” written all over it, too. And the research articles on the results are fascinating, although old now. (Most interesting factoid was that 2 scorers did outrageously well, until they discovered that the trials were not “random” enough; and after making the tests more random, their scores normalized again. The theory is that some individuals are supernaturally good at subconsciously learning patterns in data. Which is a pretty good psi skill if you ask me…)

Source of Stonehenge Stone

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 17:31:00 +0000

Fascinating find: in the Welsh news, icWales - Archaeologists figure out mystery of Stonehenge bluestones.

Recent Graffiti from France (photos)

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 12:06:00 +0000

Pictures of French graffiti on the Photo blog. (I am having some kind of trouble updating the RSS feed, though.)

Educating UI Designers

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 21:55:00 +0000

In 2004, I gave a talk at UW about user interface design which consisted of a long wish-list for the education of future generations of UI designer colleagues. Some of it was based on conversations with junior colleagues at Adobe, including things they wished they’d been told or taught before getting into the field. Other items were based on my own cross-over from research to practice, and the sad gulf I see between the two. A few were based on my growing belief that design skill is the important frontier for education, hard though that may be to conquer.

The PaxFan

Wed, 22 Jun 2005 14:50:00 +0000

From MetaEfficient: The PaxFan: An Innovative Spiral Form.

A spiral fan was created by Pax Scientific, based on observations of natural fluid dynamics. I have a friend who needs one of these.

Children in Paris (most...

Sun, 19 Jun 2005 15:40:00 +0000

Children in Paris (most of them featuring these cool boats) on the Photo Blog (June 19).

Birds in Luxembourg Gardens....

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 19:53:00 +0000

Birds in Luxembourg Gardens. More nice Birds in France on the 2005 photo blog. (I think this is a really nice set.)

Dolphins with Sponges on Their Noses

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 10:50:00 +0000

This is a really cute story, which also happens to have some very unintentionally funny sections… It seems female dolphins in one bay are using sponges as tools to help them catch fish better. The boys are too busy chasing the women to learn tool use, but the mothers are passing the method on to their daughters.

Europe's Oldest Civilization

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 12:15:00 +0000

This news story in the Independent describes another major archaeological find: evidence of the remains of massive constructions created by a major civilization in central Europe, dating to well before Stonhenge and the pyramids.

Results of the MATLAB Contest

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 11:04:00 +0000

Matt Simoneau has produced some cool stats and graphs about the MATLAB contest winners and how the algorithms changed over time.

Bar du Marche, St...

Sat, 11 Jun 2005 12:05:00 +0000

Bar du Marche, St Germain, Paris 2005. More photos of People Selling Things in Paris on the 2005 Photoblog (June 11).

MissTic and Troy in Paris

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 19:13:00 +0000

A couple of days before leaving for France, I posted about a street artist named MissTic. I not only found a few more MissTic pieces in Montmartre, but we also found a gallery right next to them showcasing her work. It was Galerie W on rue LePic.

Vedic Architecture

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 18:49:00 +0000

I’m fascinated: This odd building called Tower II is being constructed in my home town, Rockville, MD. (As in, “don’t go back to.”) Here’s a quote from their online brochure about it: “All measurements of Tower II, interior and exterior, are proportionally designed to mirror the geometry, or architecture, of the universe. In addition, Tower II has a Brahmasthan (highlighted in gold)—a silent core or nucleus—at the center of the building."

chemical trust and love with oxytocin

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 10:18:00 +0000

From Steve on tingilinde: “chemical trust and love with oxytocin.” Wouldn’t it be interesting if, along with depression, anxiety, and high cholesterol, antisocial behavior and international conflicts could be fixed with prescription drugs?

Yahoo's User Experience and Design: The Postscript

Sat, 28 May 2005 10:39:00 +0000

A month or two ago I blogged about Yahoo’s job ad for their VP of UX and Design position. At the CHI conference, I heard that someone had been appointed, but not who, because it hadn’t been officially announced yet (I had no alcohol handy with which to loosen up my former Excite colleagues now at Yahoo).

Paris Graffiti

Fri, 27 May 2005 22:26:00 +0000

Boing_boing blogged about the Good Graffiti site today, which hosts a very nice-looking collection of artistic photos of urban graffiti. It’s a bit underpopulated right now, but San Francisco, Paris, and Budapest have fair-sized representations. Wolverhampton, UK, has only one photo.

Artistic Visualizations by Amber Frid-Jimenez

Thu, 26 May 2005 20:01:00 +0000

Tom Erickson just pointed me at the beautiful work of Media Lab student Amber Frid-Jimenez, a visual designer doing interactive visualizations and art projects (she’s also a print-based fine arts designer).

Players Who Suit MUDs

Wed, 25 May 2005 19:49:00 +0000

Martin Wattenberg gave a wonderful talk at my company today about information visualizations he’s produced in recent years. He cited this old goldie, which warmed my heart: Richard A. Bartle: Players Who Suit MUDs.

Tokyo Picturesque

Mon, 23 May 2005 19:21:00 +0000

Wow, is this cool. It’s another notch in the evolution of location-based photo apps; this time it comes with sound effects, too. (Gotten off Steve Cisler who got it off Steve Crandall.)

Rue Jeanne d'Arc, where...

Sun, 22 May 2005 17:15:00 +0000

Rue Jeanne d’Arc, where I lived in Paris in 2001-2002. In honor of my impending vacation there, I’ve reposted a piece I wrote at the time about a visit to a Turkish Hammam. It was, well, strange.

Writerbo: I'm Such a Hack.

Sat, 21 May 2005 08:53:00 +0000

Inspired by the Aibo robotic dog and wannabe writers everywhere, this is quite hilarious: a couple of ad flyers for a robotic author/whiner, with seven distinct self-loathing modes.

The Value of the UI/Functional Spec

Tue, 17 May 2005 22:11:00 +0000

A few months ago, I posted an essay on why I think UI specs are important, and then I broke the link to it accidentally. This past 2 weeks I’ve been living through UI freeze hell on a bunch of products that feature complicated interfaces, many moving parts, and multiple developers; and no one is happy. I’ve updated the spec essay and reposted, adding the principle of Team Harmony to the reasons why you should bother to create specs when you build large interfaces.

MATLAB Programming Contest

Tue, 17 May 2005 09:40:00 +0000

If I’d been properly tracking the excitement at my own company, I’d have posted a link to this before it started. Here are the mid-contest highlights of the MATLAB programming contest. This year’s topic is a nice one: ant colonies and sugar. Alife simulations are always interesting.

Oddball Critters

Fri, 13 May 2005 10:13:00 +0000

A bunch of strange furry animal stories I’ve had on my mind. This morning I read about a new rat, being sold for food in Laos. By “new” I mean scientists didn’t know about them, although human carnivores apparently did.

Garage Cinema

Thu, 12 May 2005 17:19:00 +0000

I just had a strange blast from the past: a message from the admin for Marc Davis at UC Berkeley SIMS asking if I’d like to attend the Master’s Students’ final project presentations from his Garage Cinema research group. It took me a little while to understand the connection! And then it all came flooding back, as they say.

dodgeball and google

Wed, 11 May 2005 22:04:00 +0000

Another notch on Google’s belt… Dodgeball, a Clay Shirky-lauded company, has “joined forces” with Google. Dodgeball combines mobile, social networking, dating, and alerts in one package, so how can it fail to attract lots of press these days? Here’s their press page: dodgeball.com– mobile social software. Their home page flash illustration of the service they provide is worth watching if you don’t know about them.

Creswell rock art, oldest in the UK

Mon, 09 May 2005 10:40:00 +0000

It’s notoriously difficult to date prehistoric rock remains, because rock itself lacks organic material, required for radiocarbon dating methods. Stone megaliths and tombs often have organic remains in or near them, but there’s no way of knowing when they were left, relative to the site’s creation. It’s not uncommon to find layered remains suggesting eras of use and re-use at such sites. Hence the frustrating, unresolved speculation about why all the standing stones were erected.

My Summer in Siberia

Sun, 08 May 2005 17:58:00 +0000

In 2003 I had an adventure in Siberia. I spruced up the story for this site and linked it off a new index page of essays. Eventually I will get the entire site in shape, but it’s taking me a long time.

Adobe Creative Suite 2

Thu, 05 May 2005 20:44:00 +0000

Adobe Creative Suite 2 is out now. I was a UI designer in mid-stream on this when I quit and moved east to Massachusetts. It’s been interesting to see their marketing collateral, animated demos, and read the press so far, after all this time (1 calendar year now).

Bennett Robot Works

Wed, 04 May 2005 22:27:00 +0000

These were on Boing_Boing, but it’s worth saying “take a look” here too: Bennett Robot Works. They’re little robot sculptures. I want one or a half dozen.

InfoVis 2005 Contest

Mon, 02 May 2005 10:25:00 +0000

I’m impressed by InfoVis’s contest. To encourage new visualisation techniques, they’ve got a contest challenge, complete with data set and questions to try to answer with your product solution. (This reminds me of the early days of speech and NLP research – when shared datasets and competitive efforts combined with standard evaluation methods made for evolution in the field. You can’t progress in a problem domain until you put some stakes in the ground, and get a lot of people working on precisely the same issue at the same time. And then evaluate those proposed solutions, by agreed upon criteria.)

Visualizing Friendster

Mon, 02 May 2005 10:09:00 +0000

I’ve linked to the prefuse project a few times already. Danah Boyd and Jeffrey Heer have a paper they submitted to InfoViz (the conference) on using prefuse to build a network vis tool for Friendster users, and some frank evaluation of it. It includes a lot of nice screen shots.

A crop circle google...

Sat, 30 Apr 2005 23:52:00 +0000

A crop circle google montage, from Montage-a-Google again.

Montage-a-Google

Sat, 30 Apr 2005 23:38:00 +0000

Gotten off tingilinde, the Montage-a-Google and the game based on it are pretty sweet.

A Web Design Process Animation

Sat, 30 Apr 2005 14:30:00 +0000

If you haven’t seen this, it’s strangely compelling: a guy captured stages of his design of a web page from start to end, and animated it, so you can see the process at many checkpoints. His explanation is at MBoffin.com, A Design Timeline. His animation is here.

Mirror Neurons

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 16:16:00 +0000

Apparently some scientists say humans can read minds:

"Mirror neurons suggest that we pretend to be in another person's mental shoes," says Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine. "In fact, with mirror neurons we do not have to pretend, we practically are in another person's mind."

Networks and Creativity

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 00:24:00 +0000

A link from Boing_boing on the value of fresh perspectives in creative endeavors, studied from a social network perspective: Dream teams thrive on mix of old and new blood.

Twenty Things about Software Design

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 22:04:00 +0000

I’ve been thinking a lot about previous jobs and about the interaction design class I’m putting together. These are a few conclusions I’ve reached over the past few years, from working on different products in different domains at altogether too many companies: Here are Twenty Things I Think about Software Design.

Exploring Enron Email

Sun, 24 Apr 2005 19:24:00 +0000

This is how I found Mark Newman’s stuff and it well deserves linking to in its own right. Jeffrey Heer, the main author of the prefuse network visualization toolkit that I linked to a few weeks ago, has this cool paper: Exploring Enron, visualizing social networks from the Enron email corpus at UC Berkeley.

Mark Newman is Hot

Sun, 24 Apr 2005 19:06:00 +0000

I found Mark Newman’s web page while tracking down some references on social network graphing algorithms, and was wowed by his list of pubs. I scanned through a bunch before finding the home page, noted he is quite cute, boggled he is in a Physics dept., and then saw he was one of the characters responsible for the widely linked to blue & red election results maps of the country.

Impress your social circle: rentagerman.de

Sun, 24 Apr 2005 10:20:00 +0000

I got this one from Danah Boyd’s site: Rent a German.

London's Abandoned Tube Stations

Sat, 23 Apr 2005 19:22:00 +0000

If you’re a fan of the underground, or the Underground, this is an interesting collection of trivia and old photos: London’s Abandoned Tube Stations. (Scroll down past the cartoon to the content links.)

WorldChanging: Stories of wallpapers

Sat, 23 Apr 2005 11:20:00 +0000

There are enough cool technology pieces out there to draw on for decades of product innovation; what we need now is for designers to come up with clever ways to combine them in artistic and provocative ways… Here’s another set of fun idea aggregations: some very cool wallpaper evolutions posted on Worldchanging in Stories of wallpapers:

Democratizing Innovation

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 22:18:00 +0000

Released under CC license and on MIT Press 2005, here’s Eric Von Hippel’s manuscript for Democratizing Innovation, which argues that we should be paying attention to “lead users” to see what they do with our products. Lead users “are defined as members of a user population having two distinguishing characteristics: (1) They are at the leading edge of an important market trend(s), and so are currently experiencing needs that will later be experienced by many users in that market. (2) They anticipate relatively high benefits from obtaining a solution to their needs, and so may innovate.

Journal of the H.M.S. Endeavour, 1768-1771

Wed, 20 Apr 2005 21:13:00 +0000

Captain Cook’s journal is scanned and online from the National Library of Australia. The part I dipped into seemed to be full of recipes, and I later gathered this was the doctor’s section on the effects of portable soup and port on scurvy.

Life's top 10 greatest inventions

Sat, 16 Apr 2005 20:07:00 +0000

A good article in New Scientist on the best inventions of evolution, from brains to death to sex to parasites. It’s readable, and fun if you know any biology (apparently I really am learning some!): New Scientist– Life’s top 10 greatest inventions.

Trends in Terms for MMORPGs

Sat, 16 Apr 2005 18:36:00 +0000

At brunch last weekend some friends and I were trying to talk about MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online roleplaying games) and couldn’t figure out what to call them or how to pronounce it. Ken suggested “MUD” was the best pronunciation. Out of curiosity, I tried that Blogpulse Trends mapper on the terms MUD, MOO, and MMORPG and got this (look, MUDs and MOOs aren’t dead, Ned):

ajax & web applications

Sat, 16 Apr 2005 18:26:00 +0000

Wondering how the latest cool web stuff works? Doesn’t it seem like things suddenly got a lot better out there? Look at the ajax explanation for a bunch of Google technologies and A9, the yellow pages app on Amazon. Then go try Google Suggest if you haven’t yet. It’s like they combined a random text search engine and directory listings in one UI – amazingly useful due to low interaction overhead and very simple in concept. (Although note that it piggybacks on a UI/IE feature from which many users may expect different behavior – which worries me a tiny bit.)

BlogPulse Trends, Memes, Trackers

Sat, 16 Apr 2005 11:03:00 +0000

Infoseek’s BlogPulse has some tools to watch the memes and activity on the blogosphere. There are a handful that are of direct interest to me, in my attempt to analyse meme spread on LiveJournal.

So tonight I spied on Area 51

Sat, 16 Apr 2005 10:35:00 +0000

If you haven’t seen Google’s satellite photo addition, this is a fun way to get introduced: some guy goes looking for Area 51 and posts pics (and directions) for where he thinks it is, complete with landing fields and bunkers.

Longmire does Romance Novels

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 21:16:00 +0000

Here’s great LOL-inducing set of spoof romance covers, pointed out by Ellen Kushner on LiveJournal: Longmire does Romance Novels.

More googlemania: If this was the future....

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 22:51:00 +0000

A very amusing wish for Google that happens to tie right into some current (BUZZWORD ALERT) ubicomp ideas: If Matt typed in “where are my car keys?” into Google: blackcustard LJ post: if it was the future already….

One of Jill's squirrels.

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 19:46:00 +0000

One of Jill’s squirrels.

Blogs and Old Friends

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 19:39:00 +0000

While I was at CHI, and emptying out my woefully small stack of business cards, I kept thinking, “Well, yeah I want your card too, but what I really want is your blog URL.” I suspect the same was going on in reverse. Over dinner, one researcher suggested I blog about a recent book published by a former grad school friend of mine vs. my book (the real one, not the edited collection), and that I ought to point out the similarity in the social phenomena we were describing in different mediated communication situations. I don’t expect she knew I had a blog at all that this would work on, and whether it would really “work” in the sense of getting the conversation “out there” from here, is entirely another question – but still! It’s interesting as a meta-comment on research chitchat these days. People really do suggest blogging as a way of talking to each other in research land, not just in poptechculture land. (Well, of course they do. I just haven’t found all their blogs yet, darn it.)

Pivot Points in Network Diagrams

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 16:12:00 +0000

Blogging this fast so I can come back to it later from home (eek), this guy has some nice pictures of big networks showing meta information about them, including pivot points in social networks:

Koi in the Chinese...

Tue, 12 Apr 2005 15:07:00 +0000

Koi in the Chinese Garden, Portland, OR. More pictures on the photo blog from the garden.

Can Usability Scale Up?

Sun, 10 Apr 2005 23:10:00 +0000

At last week’s CHI conference, there was a panel “debate” on usability that I didn’t think entirely effective, in that it was Jared Spool being provocative and little interesting disagreement from Eric Schaffer of Human Factors International. But I did find it challenging and thought-provoking to hear Jared complain (yet again) about this stuff, so I’m recapping here.

SNIF: Social Networking in Fur

Sat, 09 Apr 2005 23:16:00 +0000

The SNIF paper from MIT caused some consternation at the CHI conference in Portland this past week. It’s a proposed design (or thought experiment, or classroom project) for smart leashes and collars which detect and react to other pets with smart leashes and collars and then save information about the pets’ interactions. Two of the authors presented photos of leash prototypes attached to stuffed toys lying flat on the carpet, and cardboard mockups of dogs with pointy ears. It got a lot of giggles, but some people just left the room.

image landscapes

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 15:03:00 +0000

Noah Fields of the Media Lab theorises some interesting applications for tagged photos, if I’m reading his site rightly. On image landscapes, he shows off potential spatial and temporal displays including photos embedded in other photos, photos organized along continua like urban-rural (overlaid on a photo background montage of buildings and trees), and photos in temporal and narrative order (photos taken at the same time tend to be “about” the same topic and therefore may imply stories).

The Very Secret Diaries

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 01:21:00 +0000

If you missed these, they’re a wonderful parody of the Lord of the Rings films, by a woman who has just sold her first book! In Cassandra Claire’s honor, a revisit of The Very Secret Diaries. Here are some classic excerpts from Legolas’s diary:

prefuse: an interactive visualization toolkit

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 21:30:00 +0000

I saw a paper about this today, and wow, did it look cool. It’s an open source toolkit for data visualizations written by Jeffrey Heer, with supporting publications co-authored by Stu Card and James Landay. The CHI paper today claimed it takes small numbers of lines of code to produce well-known network-style plots in the HCI literature. The toolkit sounds like it offers an API to a bunch of UI drawing functions, basically, with a kind of ad hoc programming language on top of it. They also claim a weakness with data handling (for i/o), but coincidentally I work with company that has that down pretty well plus having a pretty cool language of its own. I can’t wait to see if I can get Matlab to talk to Prefuse functions.

Jotspot

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 23:03:00 +0000

A funny coincidence: I just heard from a friend at Yahoo who was at Excite@Home with me that the former founders of Excite started this new company for Wiki apps. It was also mentioned in a workshop I was in Sunday by Martin Wattenberg, who is interested in wikis right now too.

Yahoo! 360 and Already a Great Parody

Sun, 03 Apr 2005 22:09:00 +0000

I posted about this the other day in one of the “whoa look at Yahoo now” posts: Yahoo! 360, their community posting beta (which I haven’t see the inside of yet). Look at that page, and then go look at this parody site immediately afterwards:

BoringBoring, Best Laugh of the Week

Sat, 02 Apr 2005 07:54:00 +0000

Maybe the best laugh of longer than a week, but I can’t remember that far back anymore. Check out the April Fool’s version of BoingBoing, aka BoringBoring, right on the money. I definitely LOLed a lot and fruitlessly clicked on their RSS link, wanting to keep the joke going for as long as I have to put up with boingboing in order to feel cool.

GUI Developer Position

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 15:06:00 +0000

I’m pointing this opening out to folks of the Java and UI programming persuasion. It’s a great team and a great product, and absolutely cutting edge stuff. The UI challenges are only getting more fun as it evolves (no, I really mean it – there’s a big “whoa, cool!” factor with every other functionality addition). I’d do it myself if I had any serious Java under my belt.

Invisible Work, a Short Essay

Wed, 30 Mar 2005 20:18:00 +0000

Talking to a colleague yesterday about design and usability work, I used the phrase “invisible work” a few times and he said he wasn’t familiar with it. I gave a short not-very-political explanation, and now I’m delving into it a bit further. Consider this an infomercial or something.

How Yahoo Got Its Mojo Back

Mon, 28 Mar 2005 23:14:00 +0000

I don’t know if the mojo is back or never actually left. I’m always distrustful of hype over substance, because in only 15 years I’ve already seen things come and go that were in or out with the press on alternate days; but here’s someone claiming Yahoo is back and looking cool to us again. (Hey: I posted about Yahoo’s UED jobs and VP of UED before that flickr buyout happened. I’d like to say I saw something coming from the pulse.)

Top Ten Picks for Solo Travel

Sun, 27 Mar 2005 18:38:00 +0000

As a woman who likes to travel and often prefers to do it alone, I’m always worrying a bit about the types of places I go – will they be difficult or downright dangerous for a woman alone? Here’s a nice list of places that are not bad for solo travelers. I wasn’t too excited when I saw the cruises at the bottom (I’d never do a cruise, not even when I’m retired), but when I read closer and saw they were sail-powered or river cruises, I got interested again.

Jacob Wirth, Boston, Easter.

Sun, 27 Mar 2005 16:43:00 +0000

Jacob Wirth, Boston, Easter.

Amphibious Human of the Caspian

Sat, 26 Mar 2005 22:42:00 +0000

Pravda reports a strange merman creature sighted in the Caspian Sea: Mysterious amphibious creature of the Caspian. There are other such sightings from the former Soviet Union:

13 things that do not make sense

Sat, 26 Mar 2005 17:29:00 +0000

I think this has circulated a bit, but in case you missed it, it’s a fascinating read: New Scientist’s “13 things that do not make sense”, a list of thus-far unexplained phenomena in science that you want to be goofs or hoaxes, but apparently you don’t get your way. They include homeopathy, cold fusion (I didn’t realize it was real), the placebo effect, dark matter, dark energy, bursts of energy from space, tetraneutrons, the 10th planet, methane on Mars, the rapid expansion of the universe.

Statistically Improbable Phrases

Sat, 26 Mar 2005 12:19:00 +0000

I’ve just had a personal encounter on Amazon with their “SIPs” feature. This is a listing of phrases that appear in the book that are statistically unusual, based on the databases of all scanned contents of books on the site. Needless to say, they’re sometimes quite funny, as things automatically detected as deviant often are…

Nest Box Cams

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 23:17:00 +0000

Since wild critters are always interesting, here are some live webcams for nesting birds, including barn owls: The Birdhouse Network: Nest Box Cam. And a bunch more birdcam links.

Apartment Therapy on Happiness

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 19:55:00 +0000

I love Apartment Therapy. This is one of those blogs/sites that always amuses me and surprises me when I dip in. Today I caught up and got a suggestion for a keyboard cleaner I’m going to order for a friend at work. I might have it delivered anonymously– I just want him to have it and don’t want funny looks.

A strange bird on...

Wed, 23 Mar 2005 23:00:00 +0000

A strange bird on the Photo Blog.

The Memory Championships

Wed, 23 Mar 2005 21:06:00 +0000

This article on the awesome feats of the memory champions (“Forget Me Not - How to win the U.S. memory championship”) reminded me of one of my favorite novels from my younger days – Little, Big by John Crowley. In it is a massive tangled house, full of memories, and in it is a character who uses the trick used by the memory champions to remember things: building a landscape–like a house–in your head, and adding details to the house to trigger memories you want to retain.

Yahoo's UED Jobs

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 19:07:00 +0000

I keep tabs on jobs in my field as a way of feeling the pulse of the industry. They tell you a lot about the corporate situation and the company vision; and sometimes, if you read between the lines, you can tell how healthy their internal design and usability efforts are. Most of the hot industry jobs right now are interaction design or information architecture; there aren’t that many strictly “usability evaluation” jobs now (this has been noted on a contracting mailing list I’m on as well). Except at Yahoo. They’ve got 36 jobs open in their User Experience Design category, which encompasses interaction design, visual design, web programming, and user research, which they are now calling “Design Research.” I like this title, in that it focuses better on the deliverables and end-goal of research in usability.

Interested in Sleep? Try Circadiana.

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 11:00:00 +0000

I’ve been really enjoying this blog on the biological study of sleep and sleep disorders. Here’s an excellent post taking stock of “what the blog is all about,” a mission statement that describes what I’ve enjoyed about the site: occasional science tidbits accessible to lay people, still research-oriented –not bleached into pop science writing, educationally oriented (in that it’s actually useful for students of biology), full of good references to other work in the field.

MIT OpenCourseWare

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 13:55:00 +0000

I was cruising around for some online courses (so I won’t get stuck in any more blizzards whilst trying to educate myself), and I hit the OpenCourseWare files at MIT. Here is the list of courses with online materials for browsing: MIT OpenCourseWare | Master Course List. The list includes a nice set of architecture classes, bio and biotech (some requiring MATLAB and including the M-files they use!), Sloan School courses, and economics. There’s also mathematics, so maybe I can ditch my newly purchased Calculus for Dummies. However, the lecture notes aren’t always self-explanatory; there’s no substitute for being there, of course.

biodiversity comes and goes

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 20:24:00 +0000

This is a tiny bit odd: “A detailed and extensive new analysis of the fossil records of marine animals over the past 542 million years [says that] biodiversity appears to rise and fall in mysterious cycles of 62 million years for which science has no satisfactory explanation."

Touchgraphing LiveJournal Friends

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 21:34:00 +0000

This is a Touchgraph of some LJ friends networks, showing a cross-linkage I wouldn’t have suspected. Mostly it’s a mess, and I arbitrarily picked nodes to expand; but it showed a few interesting things fairly quickly, at least to someone who knew something about the clusters. If you want to try it yourself, you can download it here: Touchgraph’s LJ browser.

CiteULike

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 21:16:00 +0000

This is a nice tool for keeping track of bibliographic references and looking at social linking to academic (i.e., scholarly, peer-reviewed, as opposed to just blogosphere-reviewed) articles. It has some interesting UI attributes, including a display of tags (natch) for the articles, and a graph view of related articles using TouchGraph’s cool tools. Unfortunately, in the Touchgraph, I couldn’t figure out how to “go to” an article node I wanted to pursue. If anyone else figures it out, please drop me a note.

My sister's cat Omar.

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 19:51:00 +0000

My sister’s cat Omar.

Exprimental Gameplay

Sat, 12 Mar 2005 13:52:00 +0000

For years I have swallowed the myth espoused by the game industry that it’s not possible to make commercial fun anymore without a huge stable of developers and cutting edge machines and graphics cards. But as I play with different simulation tools on the job, without the high-end machinery around them, I’m revising my thinking slowly but surely.

Curse of the Cursing Stone

Tue, 08 Mar 2005 10:38:00 +0000

This has gotten a lot of press, and it tickles me: an artistic sculpture carved with the world’s longest known curse in Carlisle is being blamed with the town’s misfortunes in past years. There’s a vote on as to whether the town should pay for it to be destroyed to rid them of their bad luck. One story is at BBC - Cumbria: Curse of the Cursing Stone.

Fast Company's Creativity Issue

Sun, 06 Mar 2005 16:35:00 +0000

This is a few month’s old, but still worth linking to, I think.

Some strangely sinister snow...

Sun, 06 Mar 2005 11:33:00 +0000

Some strangely sinister snow pictures from a walk yesterday are up on my photoblog.

Are these for real? Safe In The City ...

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 20:27:00 +0000

Through a weird route on Amazon (looking up lock picking, something I always wanted to learn), I ended up in Street Survivalist land.

TiVo's Patents

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 10:02:00 +0000

TiVo finally got some new patents issued, which help protect the things that make TiVo what it is. Among them:

Who's who in publishing on LJ

Wed, 02 Mar 2005 13:01:00 +0000

An interesting thread naming at a lot of writers and publishing industry folks hanging out on LiveJournal (it’s just growing and growing):

A Talking Yahoo Directory in a MUD

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 09:04:00 +0000

My friend Ken did a cool MUD hack – he made a MUD character who delivers directory information using a published Yahoo API.

'inside the bathroom' competition

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 22:49:00 +0000

After designboom’s “Kitchen of the Future” competition winners, I was afraid to look at the Bathroom results. They are scary. The Winner isn’t so bad, although I had to squint a lot at the picture and text: it’s the Fizzy Bubble, a unit combining bath and shower and lighting in a kind of space capsule that seats 3! Not bad, as long as you can open the hatch from inside and there’s air available too!

Butterflies playing tag.

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 16:38:00 +0000

Butterflies playing tag.

Stone's Public House

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 17:23:00 +0000

This is why I love Massachusetts. I went looking for a place to sit and have a drink whilst doing my biology homework and ended up at a pub the next town over. Just inside the door was a sign announcing a “Haunted Happenings” Investigation Dinner tonight (pre-reservation only, alas). I later overheard another patron in the bar explaining that it had been featured on the SciFi channel for being infested with ghosts.

The Seven Myths of Being a Travel Writer

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 15:10:00 +0000

And in the “crushing another dream” category for today, The Seven Myths of Being a Travel Writer. Apparently they don’t get all expense-paid trips or make enough to live on, and most editors don’t care about their gastrointestinal travails either. Ok, maybe I suspected all this…

Shkin's Pics

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 13:49:00 +0000

In the “I wish I were him” category, this guy’s photos of NYC always blow me away. His LJ is full of Russian text interspersed with really striking photos.

A Rape in Cyberspace

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 13:13:00 +0000

While I’m on memory lane, and while I’m worrying about people reading my old stuff, here’s something better written and more interesting that meant a lot to a lot of people for a few years: A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society, by Julian Dibbell. This Village Voice piece kind of started it all off, in a lot of ways. (Julian has gone on to do and write about many interesting things since, including making a living–or trying to–off selling stuff in multiuser games. Also, he’s not just a good writer into cool stuff, he’s really hot. :-)

My Old Papers

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 12:58:00 +0000

Still sick, and wanting to do some housecleaning or work. Can’t, so it’s site cleaning. Here’s a trip down memory lane for some folks, including me. Here are my old MUD papers and one AT&T paper, finally on a site I actually run: The Ghostweather Papers.

Set Theory With Genome Databases

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 10:12:00 +0000

This is old, but I’m late getting there, so… It’s a good illustration of how large cross-species datasets, good questions, and computational power can help answer questions in genetics. It’s all about narrowing down your search, from motivated assumptions. Easy to read version here: SetTheory With Databases on Corante’s Living Code. Citation to still easy but more bio article here: bio.com’s Gene Maps of Simpler Lifeforms…

Inventables

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 11:58:00 +0000

I’m home sick, but still capable of posting, so I’m dangerous today. I just checked in on the list of folks speaking at the conference I’d most like to attend some day (TED), and the guys who created this concept are on the list. It’s like a mail-order entertainment kit for creative adults with spare time. A single “issue” is only $399! (cough)

Conversation and market research

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 11:05:00 +0000

Amy Jo Kim linked to a couple interesting pieces on market research and talking to customers.

iPod Photo

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 09:38:00 +0000

It’s been a long time coming… a really practical sounding solution to how to download photos from your camera while on the road, without needing a full laptop. Yes, there’ve been expensive portable hard drive solutions out there, but they never sounded quite right to me. Now here’s something that will finally make me get an iPod. (Pointer sent to me by Angus originally.)

Flickr Social Network Maps

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 09:31:00 +0000

Ned sent me this cool link last night, directly relevant to anyone mapping networks on any social networking tool like LiveJournal: FlickrCentral: Visualizing the Flickr Social Network.

Working statues in Soho,...

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 22:51:00 +0000

Working statues in Soho, last weekend.

APOD: Voyage of an Antarctic Iceberg

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 12:46:00 +0000

The Astronomy Picture of the Day (Apod) is one of my favorite feeds, partly because of their gorgeous-beyond-belief photos of interstellar phenomena, and the other “partly” for their sometimes really weird subject matter (like last month’s digression on the Voynich manuscript hoax). Today’s post shows an animation of the famous iceberg in Antarctica, the size of Long Island, hitting the coast: APOD: 2005 February 23 - Voyage of an Antarctic Iceberg

HICSS: Persistent Conversation CFP

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 10:32:00 +0000

Some old colleagues and friends of mine run this annual conference mini-track in Hawaii at the New Year. The overall conference used to have a “boondoggle” kind of reputation but this has (I think) gradually changed as more and more good people got on the boondoggle bandwagon. This conference mini-track run by a linguist (Susan Herring) and a system designer (Tom Erickson) is a good example. Some of the more interesting work in what used to be called “computer-mediated communication” (design and data analysis) has shown up here over the years. I was once an invited discussant, and found it a good time all around, and that was when it was on Maui; it looks like it’s only been improving over the years. (I might even submit something about LiveJournal, since I seem to have data from that survey now.)

Few Pictures from Weekend Visit to NYC

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 16:42:00 +0000

A few pictures from the weekend visit to NYC on the Photo blog.

deviantART: Grid Game

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 12:37:00 +0000

A little flash game pointed out by Doug Orleans: deviantART: Grid Game by ~Fam. This is a cascading response grid game, in which tiles will interact if they are in the right configuration, and their motion will set off chain reactions as they get into proper configuration with other adjacent tiles. It’s interesting to me in that it feels very “biological” and is hypnotic to watch as it self-organizes.

Browse Flickr from your TiVo

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 12:24:00 +0000

The Home Media Engine release from TiVo has resulted in a number of interesting apps already: here’s a link to a feature that lets you browse Flickr from your TiVo, on PVRblog. Maybe I should finally get one of the newfangled TiVos myself.

Northumberland Rock Art

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 20:32:00 +0000

Here is a fascinating site for a couple of reasons: the content, if you like prehistoric rock art, like I do; and the weirdly difficult-to-use design, which looks at first glance like it should be really usable, but on inspection proves to be so flexible you can barely get anywhere– at least not without a thousand clicks you don’t entirely understand. Or I couldn’t, anyway. I finally picked this as a good way to look at the massively tagged contents: Northumberland Rock Art - Browse by Art Motifs – if you want spirals, here’s where you can find them.

Rainy Night in Brittany, France, 2003

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 19:46:00 +0000

I thought of this picture as I passed a local bar in the rain on the way home tonight. Two years ago at this time of year I was the crazy American woman (who allowed everyone to believe she was English, since she’s a coward) staying in a farmhouse apartment in Brittany for a week. I’d just finished a European tour getting feedback on my product of the time, which hadn’t gone so well. I was a bit depressed; and at night I thought someone or something was moving boxes around in the room overhead – which was locked and seemed to be just a crowded storeroom when I finally peeked through the keyhole during the day. Muscular squirrels?

Software programs for social network analysis

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 10:04:00 +0000

I’m starting off on tools research for my workshop paper. It’s been a couple of years (er, 10?) since I looked seriously into social network diagramming tools, and here’s a nice looking list! In case you share the interest: Software programs for social network analysis.

TiVo DVD burner review: Humax DRT-800

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 19:33:00 +0000

As some of you know, I used to work for TiVo. I follow their news on various sites (and occasionally get gossip from friends there), but I try to keep myself at a little bit of a safe emotional distance from it all these days. Here, I could post all day about TiVo if I wanted to really go to town, but I try to keep the restraints on. Nevertheless, I’m posting one good long review of the TiVo DVD burner from Humax, with lots of screen shots and detailed description of behavior and functionality. Since I was contracting while they were tuning this UI design, I was pleased to see how it turned out.

That way sanity lies

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 10:59:00 +0000

From a friend on LJ, a nice piece in the Observer about a guy who is writing about what it means to be sane, instead of screwed up. I’m not a huge fan of psychotherapy, myself, so this one resonated: “He may well be the most sceptical psychoanalysts practising today, and has famously said that, ‘for me, psychoanalysis is only one among many things you might do if you’re feeling unwell - you might also try aromatherapy, knitting, hang-gliding. There are lots of things you can do with your distress."

Help Me Do Some Research: a Survey

Sun, 13 Feb 2005 17:38:00 +0000

I am preparing a conference workshop paper, and I need a little bit of fresh data on blogging and LiveJournal usage. It should only take about 15 minutes max.

The old photo blog...

Sat, 12 Feb 2005 23:49:00 +0000

The old photo blog was taking too long to update, so I’ve broken off a new one for 2005. I duplicated the Jan posts for safe overlap. The new one is just like the old, only at http://www.ghostweather.com/Pics/Photoblog2005/.

Music behind the DNA

Sat, 12 Feb 2005 17:21:00 +0000

Found via boing_boing, Carl Frederick in Analog SF has an article describing how he converted fruit fly DNA to music. It’s not bad, if you like tinkly tunes that don’t quite deliver a punchline. But you can hear repetitions and patterns in it pretty well. (Note: My Bio class has made his procedure below sound almost sensible. Maybe I’ll propose it as a lab to the teacher.)

Shutterfly job: UI Designer

Fri, 11 Feb 2005 19:08:00 +0000

My former manager at TiVo is looking for a senior Interaction Designer in Redwood City. It’s probably a good job, based on what she says and the job ad. Pass it on if you know anyone local to it who’s looking: Shutterfly | Career opportunities: Senior Interaction Designer.

L'Anti-Americain

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 12:36:00 +0000

Here’s the cover of the new tabloid in France, the Anti-American. Sigh.

MetroShed

Wed, 09 Feb 2005 16:59:00 +0000

Not sure what I make of this – at first I flashed back on the old “Two Sheds” Monty Python sketch– but anyway: the MetroShed is a shed that you can use for another room, wherever you want to put it. The pictures feature it in a yard or park. It looks neat, if you want a shed in your yard that people can see into while you’re writing the great American Novel or watching TV.

Joel's Advice for Computer Science Students

Wed, 09 Feb 2005 11:25:00 +0000

I liked Joel’s advice to students in Computer Science, especially the “work on big projects” and “learn to write” items. Not so sure that microeconomics is useful unless you want to run a company, but it’s probably helpful to have that exposure so you can better understand the weather around you (and to prevent you from getting too bitter when customers don’t automatically think your product is worth a million dollars and you deserve to retire at age 30). The bit about sticking out the boring classes is especially good advice; lots of jobs have boring parts that have to be done anyway when you’re starting at the ground level, and it’s a good character builder to learn to do well at that stuff even when you don’t enjoy it.

TiVo & The Big Game!

Wed, 09 Feb 2005 09:45:00 +0000

For the most part I was playing with LEGOs instead of watching the game, but here are TiVo’s stats on what commercials got watched during the Superbowl and what got ff’ed through: TiVo & The Big Game!. Guess what, it’s all about flashes of skin.

How Much Does a SF/F Writer Make?

Mon, 07 Feb 2005 15:54:00 +0000

Off Tobias Buckell’s site, survey results from 74 writers: How Much Does a Science Fiction or Fantasy Writer Make?.

designboom: folding chairs through the ages

Sun, 06 Feb 2005 11:13:00 +0000

Another cool designboom item, this time an illustrated history of folding chairs. They go back to Egyptian times.

the kitchen is the heart of the home, the competition

Sun, 06 Feb 2005 10:53:00 +0000

But the heart is a little sterile looking, in the design competition winners from designboom. I love looking at these anyway, since this type of design is so far from anything I do daily. The entries feature concept mockups in gorgeous detail, philosophical position statements, and detail illustrations of the idea at work.

UFOs in the Secret Files

Sat, 05 Feb 2005 17:10:00 +0000

More on the Freedom of Info Act files in the UK, this time 5 UFO sightings in west counties, and 88 total. Apparently the MoD’s secret UFO department is called the S4F. I love the UK bureaucracy, when I don’t live there.

Social Science Simulations

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 20:49:00 +0000

I’m enchanted. I followed up a book reference on a game theory result on cooperative behavior to this: Robert Axelrod’s Home Page. This fellow is an advocate of the use of simulation in social science research, and he’s a lucid, intelligent writer. His “Advancing the Art of Simulation in the Social Sciences” discusses the issues of the “field’s” dispersion across disciplines and research forums, lack of shared vocabulary, model description and replication difficulties, challenges in reporting of results; and it ends by describing some well-known social science models for the newbies among us.

Britain's 10 best-kept secrets

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 12:39:00 +0000

Entertaining mostly for the sheer silliness of calling some of them state secrets, and the annotations on the files– including “the less said about this one the better” and “as the USA are always so reluctant to part with any of our criminals, let them keep this one” – here is the BBC NEWS on Britain’s 10 best-kept secrets, found in the files following the new Freedom of Information Act.

A9 Yellow Pages: A Photo Bug

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 18:04:00 +0000

Er, on the other hand, they seem to have a few bugs in their GPS data or database retrieval or something – this fence is not Applewood 2 Go in Menlo Park, as I remember it: Amazon.com: Yellow Pages: Applewood 2 Go. It’s kind of cool that you can simulate walking along it by moving your mouse over the sequential thumbnails, though.

Picture-full Yellow Pages

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 17:57:00 +0000

It looks like the thing the French did with their online yellow pages is now available on Amazon’s yellow pages: Photos of the site you’re looking up! It’s only live in some cities, but everywhere I care about revisiting since living there is up (SF and Bay area, Seattle, NYC…) And I see they’re using a technique I blogged before from intrepid Germans and South Africans: driving around with GPS and digital cameras.

Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 10:39:00 +0000

My friend Angus sent me this book, the cover of which had me howling this morning. I figure that makes it worth a pointer here, and it’s well in the travel theme. The bios of the authors include this guy, whom many of us have met:

White tree in Maine....

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 21:37:00 +0000

White tree in Maine. Taken on a non-skiing ski trip that did feature plenty of apres ski, nonetheless. A few more on the photo blog too, although none of anyone you know…

The Tyranny of Structurelessness

Sun, 30 Jan 2005 22:25:00 +0000

From a friend on LJ, an article from the women’s lib days on how structureless groups have their own informal rules and roles: The Tyranny of Structurelessness:

The Sexual Network Of An Entire High School

Sun, 30 Jan 2005 22:20:00 +0000

Off BB, one of my favorite topics, social networks plus pics: Researchers Map The Sexual Network Of An Entire High School.

Guide to Public Restrooms

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:39:00 +0000

Boston Online’s Wicked Good Guide to Public Restrooms. Rated by number of toilet paper rolls.

The Flyer in St. Croix.

Wed, 26 Jan 2005 19:31:00 +0000

This is a boat with a history…

The Medium Psychic

Mon, 24 Jan 2005 19:49:00 +0000

When I watched ep. 1 of “Medium,” I was annoyed by how perfect she was. It would’ve been fun to have her battle a little more confusion and doubt, like Dead Zone gives us. That’s how “real mediums” are supposed to be – and this article on the real Allison Dubois backs that up, while also talking about the difficulty of testing someone who isn’t always 100% right and speaks in generalities about handsome men and black dogs.

Dead Microbiologist roll-call

Mon, 24 Jan 2005 13:33:00 +0000

Sarah Weinman posted about this, and it’s not a mystery novel. Apparently some folks (Steve Quayle anyway) think that the rate of mortality for microbiologists is a little too high, and it might mean something about future bio warfare.

LED floodlights

Sun, 23 Jan 2005 18:19:00 +0000

I’m strangely fascinated by LEDs. Possibly it was the talk at Ubicomp 2003 about how to hack one to detect light as well as emit light. Via MetaEfficient and Treehugger, here’s a bunch of LED-powered super-efficient floodlights using LEDs. They even come in colors!

My cat Salem watched...

Sun, 23 Jan 2005 15:40:00 +0000

My cat Salem watched the blizzard this morning in the kitchen window. More cold birds on the photo blog.

Aliens, Global Warming, and Climatologists

Sat, 22 Jan 2005 21:28:00 +0000

It’s snowing, and they expect up to a foot or more. So I’m reading about global warming. Here’s Realclimate.org’s post on Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, a scientific rebuttal of bad popular science writing, in their opinion.

20 Questions: Does it exist in another dimension?

Sat, 22 Jan 2005 19:14:00 +0000

Hey, this is fun. Play 20 questions with an expert system that learns from the game. From the post-game responses you get (see mine below for “lemon”), I think people might be telling it lies, though.

Stone in Framingham Cemetery.

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 20:46:00 +0000

Stone in Framingham Cemetery.

Wristwatch of the Future

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 20:32:00 +0000

A bunch of folks from HP Bristol put together a really fun brainstorm design document: The Wristwatch of the Future, a series of concept sketches and descriptions of possible arm-accessories we could build 10 minutes into the future. Some of my favorites: the Webcam wristwatch (so I can see my cats and house from anywhere), the Landmark Reminders wristwatch, based perhaps on David Allen principles that to-do items belong in places as well as lists, and the Mood wristwatch. Imagine how useful it would be if everyone wore a mood indicator: the next meeting wouldn’t require advance notice that so-and-so is in a lousy mood so you’d better not pitch that new idea or tug his/her chain today.

Complexity in Design 2005

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 20:02:00 +0000

I saw this once before and thought it interesting, but now that I’ve read it again (weeks later, after a glass of wine), I find it heart-rending. Here’s an entire conference dedicated to both the customers of my company, and the employees at my company, many of whom used to be customers and now have to support other customers in their new role as software engineers: CiD: Complexity in Design 2005. Too bad it’s in Glasgow in March (what were they thinking?).

2 Lists of Books

Mon, 17 Jan 2005 21:49:00 +0000

This has a few that sound worth looking into: Business Week’s Pick Of This Year’s Crop Of Books. For instance, the provocative title The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations and Emanuel Derman’s My Life As a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance.

Being French in America: Bridging Oceans of Differences

Mon, 17 Jan 2005 21:34:00 +0000

An American who has spent several years abroad in other countries, I never felt more “American” than I did when I lived in France. I felt it was a culture of polite indirection, circuitous discourse, and ephemeral business values and goals at odds with what I had learned in Silicon Valley. I’ll never forget the bid my company lost with Euro Disney, an American company employing international staff. My boss’s explanation for why they should have taken our proposal despite our pricetag and my understanding of why they didn’t were 180 degrees divergent. A few years later, I’m still trying to understand my 18 months there. (And, it must be said, I feel a bit foreign in the US much of the time, especially around election time.)

Gigapxl again: Balboa Park Reflecting Pool

Mon, 17 Jan 2005 17:13:00 +0000

I am following myself up with a different picture from the previous site: Balboa Park Reflecting Pool, off Gigapxl. This one is interesting because of the people in it. What people, you say? Scroll down to see all the blowups magnifying bits of the scene till you get to the couple sitting on the bench.

Petroglyphs of Newspaper Rock

Mon, 17 Jan 2005 15:34:00 +0000

I discovered a new obsession this past year: petroglyphs.

This single rock in Utah has enough detail to last me for months, in a very high resolution picture. Look at the 1% zoom and see how crisp it is! From Roy's Blog: Newspaper Rock on Gigapixl Project.

The Eclipse Project

Sun, 16 Jan 2005 14:14:00 +0000

If you’re interested in well-thought-out and cool dev platforms with wide open plug-in archictectures, a serious Java development evironment as the first proof-of-concept, a non-superficial attitude towards UI, and open source, check out the slides explaining the philosophy of the Eclipse Project. Also see their Project Page.

Robot Quilts

Sun, 16 Jan 2005 11:13:00 +0000

Off BoingBoing, but nevertheless domestically applicable, it’s Robot Quilts! Here, “The Robot Visits the West.”

More backyard birds I...

Sat, 15 Jan 2005 20:12:00 +0000

More backyard birds I can’t indentify on the Photo Blog.

More stones in a...

Sat, 15 Jan 2005 14:22:00 +0000

More stones in a Framingham cemetery.

Englishtown

Sat, 15 Jan 2005 14:08:00 +0000

An interesting teaching concept: an English-speaking “immersion” town in Spain for English-learners, offering a scenario that could be a setup for a cool Agatha-Christie-style novel or a very nice holiday if you speak English.

The Rotundus Rolling Robot

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 21:04:00 +0000

According to robots.net, there’s a new ball-shaped rolling robot in town: The Rotundus Rolling Robot. They say,

Framingham, Mass, cemetery stone.

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 20:41:00 +0000

Framingham, Mass, cemetery stone.

big heads

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 16:20:00 +0000

Via interconnected.org, this fellow noticed an odd trend on Yahoo news stories: pictures of giant heads behind some smaller foreground figure. His collection of thumbnails from 2004 giant heads is at “big heads.”

Watchr and Watcher: watching RSS feeds for pics

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 10:04:00 +0000

Two friends of mine challenged each other to make popup notifiers for photos posted on RSS feeds, and they produced these:

Howard Zinn & Noam Chomsky: LOTR Commentary

Wed, 12 Jan 2005 09:57:00 +0000

My brother sent me this and it got me giggling in the middle of pretty lousy weather: McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Unused Audio Commentary By Howard Zinn & Noam Chomsky, Recorded Summer 2002, for The Fellowship of the Ring Platinum Series Extended Edition DVD, Part One.

The last few St...

Tue, 11 Jan 2005 22:51:00 +0000

The last few St Croix pictures are on the Photo Blog: surf, salt flats, restaurants, ruins, old streets. (Navigate backwards by using the “prev” button.)

WebCams of the World, united!

Tue, 11 Jan 2005 10:54:00 +0000

Via BoingBoing, this is a page of random thumbnails from random webcams with IP addresses. If you mouse over the thumbnail, it will tell you what country it’s from (or more). My first random page had 2 from Cambridge (I’m trying to identify the college and failing, they all look alike now), one from my ugliest alma mater (I’m not telling which one), and a bunch from Sweden. Those Swedes seem to enjoy showing off their snow. The Dutch one had the prettiest picture.

Rorschach Audio: EVP

Mon, 10 Jan 2005 15:00:00 +0000

A UK Telegraph piece on the new movie “White Noise,” about electronic voice phenomena (aka “phone calls from the dead”): “They’re heeeaaaring things…"

TiVo's new announcements

Sun, 09 Jan 2005 19:18:00 +0000

From CES (the annual consumer electronics show), a blogger reports on the latest showing from TiVo: TiVo To Go, handheld media devices, and opening up the engine to developers for other content types. Reporting from CES: Going Deeper into TiVo’s announcements | PVRblog

Villa on St Croix....

Sat, 08 Jan 2005 10:32:00 +0000

Villa on St Croix. More pictures on the blog from the trip…

Human Universals

Sat, 08 Jan 2005 10:30:00 +0000

Apologies to those of you who got this from me elsewhere: an interesting list of proposed universals about human behavior and thought. Good for designing alien cultures, if you’re into that kind of thing.

The Templars in Hertfordshire and Mary Magdalene in France

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 12:56:00 +0000

Apparently Hertford is where the legendary Templars went to ground, complete with secret tunnels underneath the post office. (I’m a sucker for secret tunnel stories.) Guardian Unlimited:Hertford, home of the Holy Grail:

Clay Food. You too can etc.

Sun, 02 Jan 2005 16:37:00 +0000

Now this is a specialty book. Making Miniature Food and Market Stalls, out of polymer clay. There are 7 glowing user reviews! I mean, check this out:

Roadfood

Sun, 02 Jan 2005 12:40:00 +0000

Since I have a friend or two who like to see the country by driving, here’s a site worth checking out beforehand (or even for your local homecooked options – I like the MA options!): Roadfood.com.

17 King Street.

Sat, 01 Jan 2005 21:25:00 +0000

5 details of 17 King Street, Frederiksted, St Croix. Keep hitting “prev."

The ESP Game: Labeling the Web

Sat, 01 Jan 2005 17:06:00 +0000

Here’s another “wow” already, but for a different reason. It may be old now (it’s a CMU CS student project), but it’s just so cool. I could play this for hours. What’s killer, and makes a good recipe mix for a school project? Online games, multiplayer, anonymous, guessing (but timed and with a pretense at “developing your ESP” for grins), viewing random pictures off the web, scores and rankings. And then making it fun to do something useful, in the end. (Although being asked to provide keywords for tiny gifs on random webpages is a bit, uh, “challenging.”)

Zoomquilt

Sat, 01 Jan 2005 16:27:00 +0000

Wow, is this cool. Go for Flash if you can; after it loads, click and drag your mouse to start crawling through the weird universe in a neverending zoom. Backing out again at high speed is amazing too.

Pelican Pics from St Croix

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 13:01:00 +0000

Today I’m posting a lot of St Croix pelicans (and other birds). The 12x zoom did come in handy. For these pics, you’ll want to start on this one and keep hitting “prev” to go backwards.

Arthur C Clarke is still alive.

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 08:17:00 +0000

Roger Ebert once again proves his scifi geek roots. He wrote to Arthur in Sri Lanka to check if he was still ok. In email back, Clarke describes some of the devestation and suggests some charity organizations to help Sri Lanka.

Photos from my trip...

Thu, 30 Dec 2004 22:48:00 +0000

Photos from my trip to St. Croix, being put up a handful a day on my photo blog. You can expect a lot of rundown textured buildings, some pelicans and lizards, and people lounging.

Club Med: An escape from hell?

Wed, 22 Dec 2004 22:49:00 +0000

The last time I was in the Caribbean was 1996, I think. It was sometime around when I finished my dissertation; a friend who needed a vacation then talked me into a hastily-chosen Club Med getaway for singles on Turks and Caicos. I didn’t love it, because it was basically summer camp for adults. They kept hassling us into party games and get-to-know-you activities of the type I loathe. I eyed the empty beaches at the other resorts hungrily the whole time. Now I see on their website that T&C is rated closer to the “most active” end of the scale, rather than the “most serene.” Uh huh.

A camera that knows where it is

Tue, 21 Dec 2004 21:59:00 +0000

I followed this link from Photography Blog, and expected to hear there was finally a camera for sale in the US that does this in one unit. Instead, it’s an article in the Register-Guard from Eugene talking about a German guy’s vacation photos, and not giving his website. I dug it up: On the Road in Northwest Scotland.

Bill's Self Interview

Tue, 21 Dec 2004 20:56:00 +0000

Since everyone needs a laugh this time of year, and this made me cackle madly: Sarah Weinman linked to Bill Crider (a writer whose work I haven’t read) interviewing himself on his own blog.

Kudzu Covered Houses

Mon, 20 Dec 2004 18:01:00 +0000

I got this off Fodor’s travel blog page… a collection of creepy pictures of abandonned houses in Georgia and South Carolina being eaten by something called a “kudzu.” It’s a vine, I guess. Or a green leafy alien invasion.

Bird Snaps

Mon, 20 Dec 2004 09:49:00 +0000

Birds in snow… I’ve been having a good time with a new Lumix camera and my bird feeders. Here’s a few on the photo blog in the snow storm this morning.

Refined Beauty, for hire.

Sun, 19 Dec 2004 23:20:00 +0000

I have that paranoid worry that I’m the last to know about this, but I have no idea why. Check out this and tell me if you think it’s for real:

The curious side of the travel biz...

Sun, 19 Dec 2004 16:49:00 +0000

Gotten off Sarah Weinman’s blog, an odd travel blog from the New Haven Register website, by Karen Olson (also now a mystery writer, according to Sarah). Her blog is frankly one I wish I wrote for: weird visits to places like prisons, the Mike Weaver Drain Tile Museum, and a 2.5hour tour of Paris for fans of the Da Vinci Code. (The Paris tour has to be far more fun than reading the book itself.)

Software Functional Specifications: What's the Point?

Sat, 18 Dec 2004 23:49:00 +0000

Well, I’ve become pretty opinionated on this one recently. It’s been on my mind as I think about what constitutes good design, the role of usability, and the process of team problem solving.

Life Does Imitate Art: Ebert's Answerman

Sat, 18 Dec 2004 14:51:00 +0000

An odd story, about a guy inspired by Before Sunrise, who meets a woman on a train and ends up kicked out of law school because of it. Who says real life isn’t interesting?

Windhouse in Shetland, from...

Fri, 17 Dec 2004 23:31:00 +0000

Windhouse in Shetland, from the other side.

Windhouse on Yell, Shetland...

Fri, 17 Dec 2004 22:51:00 +0000

Windhouse on Yell, Shetland – 2002.

The Most Haunted House in Scotland (on Yell)

Fri, 17 Dec 2004 22:41:00 +0000

I’ve just hit an article in the BBC News about the sale of the most haunted house in Britain, Windhouse on Yell in Shetland. I visited the site myself in 2002 whilst staying in Shetland for a week; I took enough notes and did enough research to write a mag article. Here’s what I wrote up at the time, right after my visit:

Teamwork and Teams

Fri, 17 Dec 2004 19:58:00 +0000

One of my favorite reads of last year was Teamwork: What Must Go Right/What Can Go Wrong. In a nutshell, they found that effective teams share the same characteristics:

Robot workshop

Fri, 17 Dec 2004 19:35:00 +0000

This Robot Workshop in Sweden sounds like a lot of fun. Which means of course Lars Erik Holmquist, an attendee of the long-ago games workshop I co-organized at CHI, is one of the instigators. He’s involved in everything that’s cool right now.

PC Mag Picks of 2004: Digital Imaging

Thu, 16 Dec 2004 19:09:00 +0000

This list had a few things I hadn’t heard about and can’t personally vouch for – like a fairly cheap DVD slideshow authoring tool from Arcsoft (anyone who’s done this knows you could benefit from a dedicated piece of software); their video editing pick was Adobe’s suite (yay!), but surprisingly, the High-End Effects pick was not After Effects, but Apple Motion (what?!); and DVD authoring pick was MyDVD Studio 6 (I’ve heard nothing about this, but I stopped investigating after finding DVD Lab a year ago).

Photos by Location: Stanford Project

Thu, 16 Dec 2004 11:53:00 +0000

As I keep telling everyone I know, I proposed this as a research project once (to a lab in Seattle that shall remain unidentified); but at the time there was only one camera I could find that really integrated GPS data with the picture’s metadata (and it was only for sale in Japan). Stanford apparently has a research project looking at display software for photos like this. I guess I’ll look into this further, when/if I ever get a camera that’s location-aware.

Earthsea in Clorox, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Thu, 16 Dec 2004 10:43:00 +0000

Ursala speaks about the abominable SciFi version of her books. (I just shook my head all the way through the 4 hours. Why did I keep watching, I have no idea. Maybe because there’s not enough new SF on right now?)

Tree-hugging Topics

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 18:58:00 +0000

I was accused of being a tree-hugger today, and then someone else told me squirrel and oak tree stories, so I’m digging up a bunch of related stuff. (Plus I’m avoiding writing my Xmas cards that have to be done.)

Info Visualizations

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 15:28:00 +0000

A bunch of cool tools for doing visualizations of net stuff that I ripped out of Christina Wodtke’s presentation on the importance of Information Architecture:

thermotiles on designboom

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 13:01:00 +0000

This is really cool, and a good example of how materials can be slightly smarter without being “smart” with circuitry and brains. These thermal tiles won 2nd in a design competition sponsored by designboom.

Micro Robot

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 10:20:00 +0000

(Gotten from Core77.com) The sequel to Monsieur, which was a handheld little robot from Epson, this model flies. It looks like a small helicopter or a large bloated dragonfly. The video shows it sitting in the palm of someone’s hand. And then a Japanese model eyes it warily as it flutters near her (but the video doesn’t really show it doing anything intelligent).

The Paris Review - Interviews

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 09:57:00 +0000

Thanks to Erik for the news, the Paris Review is putting its author interviews online. We’re still in the 1950ies, but it’s got Capote, Isak Dinesen, TS Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Parker… well, the luminaries.

Fox Valley, Wisconsin: HAUNTED!

Tue, 14 Dec 2004 12:58:00 +0000

This was pretty amusing: a book on Wisconsin hauntings turned up so much on Fox Valley that they’re doing a second volume. But most of the people interviewed for the article about it claimed to have no idea about these ghosts.

Remote Viewing in India

Tue, 14 Dec 2004 11:32:00 +0000

From the Anomalist, where I went to patch up a bad day: The India Daily report on using remote viewing techniques for counterintelligence. (Note: The English is a little interesting in places.)

Ken Perlin's homepage

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 20:07:00 +0000

It’s worth exploring the applets for his character animations, in the grid at the bottom of Ken Perlin’s homepage. Too much fun.

Random Images

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 19:45:00 +0000

Keith Handy has been making pictures with random functions, as part of an effort to visualize music.

Smart and Dumb Furniture

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 19:24:00 +0000

I’m not even sure how I got here, but I was intrigued by the need Adam Greenfield had to rant that dumb furniture might be a better idea than “smart” furniture. In the dumb furniture manifesto, he recaps previous folks saying that “smart furniture” is “that which uses information processing to significantly change its properties and affordances: objects that react and adapt in real time to the demands of their environments and users."

Update on Dee thefts: Elizabethan Artefacts Stolen

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 09:35:00 +0000

Thanks again to my friend oursin’s LJ, the latest on the Dee thefts: Elizabethan Artefacts Stolen From London Science Museum.

Egad: no-tech culture usability experiment

Sun, 12 Dec 2004 14:08:00 +0000

I’m appalled. Found on Digital Photography Blog, an article in the Seattle Times: Digital world set to invade no-tech culture.

A gift shop in...

Sun, 12 Dec 2004 12:35:00 +0000

A gift shop in Concord, MA. The Puritan ethic conflicts with the holiday spirit a little? A few other recent pics on the photo blog.

John Dee's Stolen Stuff and the Voynich Hoax

Sun, 12 Dec 2004 11:19:00 +0000

Posted (locked) by oursin on LiveJournal, a report in the online Scotsman on the theft of a scrying crystal of John Dee’s and some of his papers from the Science Museum in London.

Ten Questions with TiVo's Director of User Experience

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 19:50:00 +0000

Just AFTER I did a talk on TiVo and quality at work, this appears in my blog reading list: The PVRBlog Interview: Ten Questions with TiVo’s Director of User Experience, Margret Schmidt.

How Creatives Work

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 19:42:00 +0000

This is a very entertaining list to dip into: a bunch of short pieces on creatives at work, and their methods/kinks/tips/oddities: rodcorp: How we work. Includes folks like Francis Bacon, Scott McNealy, Virginia Woolf… many others.

The Economics of Happiness

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 18:54:00 +0000

After a lunch conversation about topics like the old gem finding that “incompetent people don’t know they’re incompetent” (here’s the link to the full journal report: “Unskilled and Unaware of It”), I went looking for the article that came out a year ago about a study illustrating human inability to predict (or act intelligently on) what will make us happy or unhappy over the long-term.

More from Will Shetterly: The honorable hack

Sun, 05 Dec 2004 14:21:00 +0000

Will S follows up with another post on writing, this time on being an honorable hack producing good stories for money, or “commercial art.” Go read “The honorable hack, my proposal, and why I blog”.

Confess in LA traffic?

Sun, 05 Dec 2004 14:10:00 +0000

It’s probably a joke art piece, but maybe not. From we-make-money-not-art.com:

Clutax, a Drug for Cleaning House.

Sun, 05 Dec 2004 13:57:00 +0000

Oh GOD, I wish I had this. It’s the one drug my mother needs most.

Will Shetterly on Characterization

Sat, 04 Dec 2004 13:38:00 +0000

Erik reminded me that I hadn’t looked at Will Shetterly’s blog recently, and on it I found this cool post about characterization and Philip Pullman. Also, it makes me want to read books about girls’ boarding schools.

Ebert on Life and Movies

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 13:28:00 +0000

Roger Ebert’s reviews have always been important to me. He lets himself be moved by science fiction and silly comedies when they’re good – and when he’s unhappy with something, you can usually understand if it’s just him having some overwhelming bias or something fundamentally wrong with the film. He’s a clear writer, full stop. But that doesn’t really capture all of why I enjoy him; he’s a real, solid, unpretentious guy, someone I think I would kind of like. He’s not usually very flowery, but he often moves me anyway, just from his simple accounts of how something made him think hard or feel differently. He makes me think about entertainment and how it relates to life. In a personal essay about this last year, during which he went through major surgery and radiation treatment, he muses on work, movies, and mortality. It’s very worth a read.

Sandro's Portrait Photography

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 20:47:00 +0000

An interview with Sandro, on NikonNet. I have no idea how to shoot people, but he sure does. “I always try to light the subject and frame the image so that I draw the viewer into the eyes, into the soul, of the people I photograph,” Sandro says. “I want the viewer to see where that person has been, or where that person is going." Legends BBehind the Lens: Sandro give and take.

Our Tuareg Guide...

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 20:16:00 +0000

My friend Ellen went camping in the Sahara for Thanksgiving. It seems to be impossible to take a bad photo in the Sahara. This looks so romantic, despite the lack of toilets, privacy, or water. See her stream on flickr: Our Tuareg guide in the desert

Berkeley's Lego Class

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 12:40:00 +0000

Found on BB, but followed up to a specific page: Lab Notes: Lego My Robot, a course in programming Lego robots using “leJOS, an open source bit of firmware that that enables the Lego Mindstorms robots to be programmed with Java.”

Alleys and Byways of London, a survey.

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 20:32:00 +0000

A Guide to the Alleys, Courts, Passages, and Yards of Central London. The navigation links are on the left frame. Under “Additional Alleys” at the end, I learned they have Dunkin Donuts (mispelled) in London, which I hadn’t realized.

Twisty Little Passages

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 20:00:00 +0000

A book review: Twisty Little Passages, a book on interactive fiction, from the old Adventure and Infocom days to the more recent, including the IF archive and their annual contest. The author is a true fan of the form, and this sounds like a really fun read.

Digital Forgery Detection

Mon, 29 Nov 2004 16:33:00 +0000

I wish this article were more detailed about how they’re doing this, but it’s cool to see my company in such a sound-bitey article: Digital Forgery Detection Reaches Art Museum.

Why Good Design Comes from Bad Design

Mon, 29 Nov 2004 13:36:00 +0000

I’ve been looking for materials to help an internal team understand a design point I’ve been unable to articulate well, and taking interesting detours that will help me give a talk next week about why TiVo did design well. Here’s Scott Berkun of MS on the process of good design, not in terms of deliverables, but in terms of thought evolution. Why Good Design Comes from Bad Design.

Biophilia & Emotional Well-Being

Sat, 27 Nov 2004 20:20:00 +0000

In honor of tree-huggers and the end of the green seasons, I’ve bought a pine tree for my living room and ferns for my bathroom. Here’s an interesting article on Biophilia, the term coined by biologist Edward Wilson for the genetic memory of greenery. An interesting paragraph:

Marblehead Nature Log

Sat, 27 Nov 2004 12:17:00 +0000

I’m getting antsy because I haven’t taken a photo in weeks. Here’s a pretty site with photos from northeast Mass: Marblehead Nature Log. This fellow is doing an ebook on photographing wildflowers, which I’d like to get when it comes out.

COLORSTROLOGY !!!

Fri, 26 Nov 2004 20:18:00 +0000

Another item from Josh Rubin: COLORSTROLOGY, in which you find out the Pantone color code for your birthday and what it says about you. I’m supposed to be a Moonlite Mauve, Curious, Intelligent, Impressive. I don’t really like mauve, so I don’t know about the rest either. But as a former color management UI person, I’m kind of tickled by this Pantone flash gimmick.

Ambient Weather Forecast Beacon

Fri, 26 Nov 2004 20:06:00 +0000

Josh Rubin’s site reminded me of this today: the AmbientDevices’ Ambient Weather Forecast Beacon, a block sculpture that glows the wireless weather forecast. It can be tuned to show you the pollen count.
Christmas lists this year should be all about the beautiful, clever, and gadgety, the well-designed ubicomp. This is on mine. It’s almost a pity I’m skipping the whole thing to go snorkeling instead!

Bara Hack, the Village of Voices

Fri, 26 Nov 2004 13:47:00 +0000

I tried to find the turn-off for the famous “village of voices” in Pomfret yesterday, but it was too dark.

Shugborough Code Competition

Fri, 26 Nov 2004 10:34:00 +0000

It was on BB, but it’s too cool to not post again in case you missed it there: Bletchley Park’s code competition for the garden monument at the Staffordshire estate.
“Knights Templar Academicals head up the League and provide what Bletchley Park’s codebreakers believe to be the most rigorous attack on the mysterious message’s defences. The analysis is a dissertation, passed to Bletchley Park’s Director Christine Large following some esoteric historical research. The work was done in the mid-1990’s by an American hobbyist based in the UK. It bears the mark of a codebreaking professional. The author, whose identity at present cannot be revealed, begins with an extensive and academically disciplined review of the monument’s historical background, comprising almost all the themes subsequently researched by other would-be codebreakers. A thorough cipher analysis is then undertaken. Letter frequencies are done, decryption matrices tested to “bring out” the solution, indeed, all the conventional ways that key could be combined with plain (uncoded) text to form a cipher. The author then makes a number of assumptions about the Shugborough message, works out the matrices that would need to be anagrammed for possible plain text and decides to take a more specific approach, involving a shortcut. “
They’re promising a site with more details of the mysterious “dissertation” and code breaking tips.

Bed Bath & Beyond Product

Wed, 24 Nov 2004 10:57:00 +0000

I was aghast at parts of the Bed, Bath and Beyond circular aimed at holiday gifts – apparently men get alcoholic, gambling, and smoking accessories for the holidays, while women just need to destress with a million massage and home spa options– but this remote controlled airplane with digital camera is something I actually want. The small print says it “comes with the following accessories: missile, paper glider and paratrooper."
Will the paratrooper take photos for me, or do I have to control the camera from the ground?

The difficulty of hiring well: Google Labs Aptitude Test (GLAT) & Joe Kraus

Mon, 22 Nov 2004 17:12:00 +0000

One of my favorite of the Excite founders, Joe Kraus, has a post on his blog about the perils of hiring badly: No False Positives. He comes down strongly in favor of Microsoft’s puzzle interview practice (at least, it sounds like it), which I’m not so sure about myself. (Not because I ever suffered through one, despite 2 interviews there at very different times, but because I’ve heard plenty about them from people I consider top notch. I should also point out we were not all turned down by MS, either.) One problem at MS is that if they’ve got anyone on the hiring committee who isn’t as smart or lateral-thinking as the interviewee, they just can’t do a good assessment. But I guess that’s where “fit” comes in – and when the old “B people hire C people” issue comes in. They may not even know they’re already rotten, and worse, they may not ever be able to hire anyone who can help them fix things, or take a fresh view on their practices and processes.

things magazine - all the things I like.

Sun, 21 Nov 2004 11:01:00 +0000

This is one of the more entertaining link-collections-with-editorial-comment that I read occasionally (it’s where I got Notes from the Road, and I see they have the Delft photo up now too): things magazine - all things big and small. Their latest entry covers mini-spy cameras, the Milgram experiment and crop circles fakers, an interactive news mosaic, a blog on MP3 player developments.

Notes from the Road

Sun, 21 Nov 2004 10:54:00 +0000

This is a beautiful site: Notes from the Road - Travels in City and Country. High quality images and pretty text. It’s just slightly hard to navigate in places. Also, he’s got some nice merchandise for travelers linked off the footer on the home page, which turns out to be part of a side-site that’s also slightly hard to navigate at the moment. I have high hopes, though.

Connecticut Cairns in the News

Sun, 21 Nov 2004 10:44:00 +0000

When I moved to New England, I was excited about the number of unexplained stone monuments and carvings here. Here’s a recent story on some cairn-like structures in a Killingworth CT proposed housing development. There’s a video to go with it, from the news story on TV.

An angel from a...

Sat, 20 Nov 2004 23:23:00 +0000

An angel from a Framingham cemetery. On my Photo Blog.

Pendant for Airplane Sewers

Sat, 20 Nov 2004 17:23:00 +0000

My version of a cool tool: the Thread Cutting Pendant. In my quilting class this morning, this was shown to us in the “notions” section of class, where they demo cool tools for making sewing fun and not tediously and horribly difficult. (Can you tell I am a failed quilter? After an accident with my cutter last night…) This pretty pendant looks like jewelery, but there is a fine blade inside the notched edges that will cut thread. “You’ll be able to get it on an airplane so you can sew there, they’ll never know it’s a blade.”

How to make a gigapixel picture

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 13:39:00 +0000

These Dutch scientists, after a lunchtime bet, built the world’s biggest panorama shot out of 600 single shots of Delft. I’m still trying to load it. (Updated: Got their site, but could they have picked an uglier city angle? I don’t think so. Now why didn’t the Parisians do this?)

MAGPIX Pocket Photo Album

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 12:43:00 +0000

While I’m on photos: I really like this idea, but don’t like the form factor. One of the issues with having gone digital is how hard it is to flip through my photos. Yeah, stuff like Photoshop Album help, but I have to be at my desk (or build some kind of portable PDF and go through hoops, probably). People like looking at snapshots, but most albums are are for larger than a tiny palm size. Why not use a bigger screen? And the price is still too high; I want a bunch of digital albums lying around, so I don’t have to do laborious searches to find just the trip or category I want.

43 Folders: writers block

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 11:23:00 +0000

Found on Boing_boing, I liked the flavor of this advice, especially the turn-off-the-network-connection-you-moron stuff: 43 Folders: Hack your way out of writer’s block.

Another Google: Local

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 09:38:00 +0000

I got this off Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools list: Google Local. I tried “Italian restaurants” and my home town and got a nice, usable looking list with distances and a map. “Stained glass” also hit the things it was supposed to and a bit more.

Nobel Taboos

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 12:42:00 +0000

I found this on the Anomalist site, one of my favorites for stories of weird science. I wish this piece was twice as long and more detailed, but I blog it because of these great quotes: “Giaever delivered a particularly unwelcome message to the students regarding the esoteric nature of theoretical physics. He argued that there is no fundamental theory left in physics that could possibly have any application. He advised students to forget theory and become inventors. “That was not a very popular view,” Elteto said. “Another 1973 laureate, Brian Josephson, bemoaned the taboo that has tarnished certain topics in scientific circles. “He wants to find a quantum mechanical reason for telepathy,” Elteto said. “As you can imagine, the scientific establishment does not look kindly upon such endeavors.”' Graduate student meets Nobel laureates in Lindau

Google's Academic Search Tool

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 10:10:00 +0000

Interesting: Google Introduces New Research Tool. “‘Google has benefited a lot from scholarly research, so this is one way we are giving back to the scholarly community,” said Anurag Acharya, a Google engineer who helped develop the new search tools. “Although Google already had been indexing the reams of academic research online, the company hadn’t been able to separate the scholarly content from commercial Web sites. “By focusing on the citations contained in academic papers, Google also engineered its new system to provide a list of potentially helpful material available at libraries and other offline sources.”

Checkboxes vs. Radio Buttons (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 10:06:00 +0000

Kind of classic Nielsen (style-wise), but he makes some good points I’ve been trying to articulate to people recently (like, if a design with a single checkbox option isn’t going to be clear, consider using radio buttons that show what both checked and unchecked would mean): Checkboxes vs. Radio Buttons (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

Ryan McGinness: Everything You Like

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 09:50:00 +0000

Linked from Cool Hunting, this shirt has now sold out. I laughed. Ryan McGinness’s “Everything You Like I Liked Five Years Ago” T-Shirt - $29.00 : Krudmart.com

Getting Educated: Sf fans at Oxford

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 17:22:00 +0000

Dave Langford, famous fanboy, on SF and other things at Oxford: Getting Educated. (Injoke-filled in the tradition of fans everywhere.)

Photoshop Elements 3 Digital Photography Review

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 20:44:00 +0000

This is an early beta review, but it looks like a pretty nice summary. Having been there and knowing how much work had to go into this level of UI change, I’m in awe that they even tried this. I’ll probably get it, unless my friend who’s visiting this week says it’s buggy as all get out :-) Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 Review: 1. Operation: Digital Photography Review

axance.com's Bibliography

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 20:29:00 +0000

While I’m on a roll through my history, I hit this page of bibliographic references at my old company (yes, it has my books, for no good reason): axance.com > ressources >Bibliographie. The page was last updated in 2001, I see.

Chapters 6-7 of my book

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 20:23:00 +0000

While I’m on the topic, someone at Berkeley had to read my book and did a fair short summary of the last couple chapters. I wish I’d written them this briefly. I can’t even make it through the summary with any attention span and it’s only 2 pages. ICY’re curious: cherny-6-7

The Lost Library of MOO

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 20:21:00 +0000

Someone put this sucker back online. I just asked him if he wants my papers back up somewhere he can link to (they’ve been gone from the net for years now). It all seems so long ago now…. The Lost Library of MOO

Wave Pillow

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 19:00:00 +0000

Also found on Apartment Therapy’s site, this pillow is hooked up to your serial port and tells you if it’s worth getting up for the surf or not. Good grief. What else would you want to hook up to: traffic on the highway? Weather? As I kid I would’ve wanted a way to know school was cancelled from snow, but I lived in Maryland where this was a regular occurrence. The Wave Pillow.

Apartment Therapy: Temporary Wallpaper

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 18:56:00 +0000

If you’re living in an apartment, but would like to decorate the walls without getting in trouble: Temporary Wallpaper at ‘Apartment Therapy’.

Ectoplastic stories from Paris

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 15:05:00 +0000

An entertaining mixed bag of news from Paris, ghost-story focused: Ectoplasm Aint What it Used to Be. “Called Photography and the Occult, the exhibition at the Maison Europeenne de la Photo celebrates the fantastic in a series of montages and double-exposure prints.” The Maison’s website with some photos on the sidebar: Special Events: The Third Eye.. Sponsored in part by the Met in NYC, but I can’t see any info on their website.

We've definitely found Atlantis.

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 14:49:00 +0000

A story I somehow missed till now, and another unintentionally funny quote: We’ve definitely found Atlantis 15/11/2004. ABC News Online. “‘To understand the enigma of Atlantis you have to have good knowledge of ancient history, Biblical references, the Sumerian culture and their tablets and so on.’”

Disorder, a French blog

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 09:51:00 +0000

This site is interesting and challenging: D’esordre. I especially like some of the photo pastiche work; scroll down the home page to the little photo of the stormy road on the left side, labelled “Dernieres pages du site (10 octobre).” It’s a fascinating collection of photos taken from car windows on journeys. Lots of us have done this, but this is a really nice delivery format for them.

Blue Collar Computing?

Mon, 15 Nov 2004 20:18:00 +0000

Blue Collar Computing This makes me irritable. I heard about this from a meeting at work today – a manager had just gotten back from SuperComputing 2004, where we unveiled a distributed computing product. It went over well (yay!), but I was irked by the name of this keynote speech.

(Untimely) Critiques

Mon, 15 Nov 2004 17:07:00 +0000

…for a Red Feminism. And untimely mocking by me. I scanned and realized I no longer can read this type of academicese, if I ever could. My favorite, unintentionally funny quotes:

How 'Dungeons' changed the world.

Mon, 15 Nov 2004 16:11:00 +0000

Boston is so cute sometimes. This is an editorial on how D&D made kids all over more imaginative, not devil worshippers. And the same could be said for MUDs, of course. Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Opinion / Op-ed / How ‘Dungeons’ changed the world

Panic - Extras - The True Story of Audion

Sun, 14 Nov 2004 18:41:00 +0000

This is a good, entertaining product dev story, even if it ends up with the retirement of the product instead of a mansion in Hawaii. Audion was basically closed out by iTunes, despite having been very successful and having talks with AOL and Apple.

View from my backyard...

Sun, 14 Nov 2004 12:08:00 +0000

View from my backyard yesterday afternoon. The reservoir has never been visible during the summer – now I can see it glittering in the early evening through the trees.

Common Ground - Community Mapping

Sun, 14 Nov 2004 11:55:00 +0000

Interesting article on community mapping, for eco-consciousness reasons. After all the election map variants, this was a welcome change of pace.

Creepy old houses in...

Sat, 14 Aug 2004 20:24:00 +0000

Creepy old houses in Brunswick, Maine.