Victor

  • There was an explosion in midtown Manhattan yesterday, about 4 blocks from where I was working… The New York Times reported today that New Yorkers were “unnerved” which was certainly the case on the street when it happened. With the constant reminders of terrorism the government scares the shit out of everyone (and gains support…

  • Launched!

    The first SmartEx class was taught this week and went off without a hitch. While it’s a real working course from the students’ point of view, behind the scenes I’m using it as a prototype to quickly learn better ways of doing everything schools do. I was even planning to take a hit financially in…

  • Moore’s Law is alive and well I confirmed recently while shopping for an external hard drive. You can now buy a name brand 1TB (terabyte, or 1000 gigabytes) drive for about $400. That’s 40 cents per gig. I can remember when under $10/MB was pretty good.

  • Ezra Dyer puts Ferrari’s brand-production decisions in perspective: Ferrari had 1,000 orders for the $650,000 Enzo after the car was unveiled in 2002, but the company stuck to its decision to build only 399 cars (plus one for the pope). By my math, that means it left $390,000,000 on the table in the name of…

  • Alex Kirtland interviewed me for his blog UsableMarkets about my work on Smart Experience. Here’s a highlight of me in a young turk mood… …Smart Experience students tend to be younger, technically-savvy, and willing to experiment, so we don’t have to adhere to tradition when we think another way is better. If we want to…

  • I posted the slides from my Getting Good Designs Built talk at the New York IxDA meeting earlier this week. Of course you won’t get the full experience from a deck, but there’s some useful references in there.

  • I’ve spent the Winter and a better part of the Spring planning and scheming, and I’m ready to get back into the fray in a public way. Here’s where you can catch me in the next few weeks: Getting Good Designs Built is a new session I’ve created, hosted by the New York chapter of…

  • I ventured up to “cottage country” north of Toronto this past weekend for Overlap 07, now in its second year of exploring the overlap of design and business in a small event format out in a beautiful, woodsy setting. Again, it was inspiring and useful, perhaps more so as the mix of design, business, media,…

  • My friend Austin wrote me, “I’m putting together a list of recommended books for designers interested in strategy, the business side, and jumping into entrepreneurship. Can you recommend 3-5 books you think are indispensable?” I don’t think there’s a single book that fits that description well, and I’ve wondered if a ‘business for designers’ book…

  • If you don’t have severe symptoms, use the RICE (Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevation) method to relieve pain, reduce swelling, and speed healing… Rest. Ice. Put an ice pack wrapped in a towel to the injured area for 20 minutes, four to eight times a day. Compression. Put even pressure on the injured area using…

  • My friends are doing brilliant things these days and I feel compelled to send out some props. I’ll start with Jim Kalbach, whose book Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience will be out in August, but who apparently can’t stop writing and has started a blog. We haven’t had a book on this topic…

  • Strength training is associated with muscle heads, but it’s smart for everyone. We know that muscle tissue burns calories, so strength training not only makes you stronger and look better, it helps you avoid weight gain when you’re not exercising. In general: Do total-body workouts 3 days a week, resting one day between workout days.…

  • The four-step process for delegation: Train Enable Delegate Let Go Danke to Ulrike for this one.

  • How to Run

    One thing blogging has given me is a place to put summaries of good stuff. I find books increasingly too long and boring to read through, I crave the gist. Much of what we know about fitness can be boiled down into relatively simple processes. Here’s the common formula for increasing your running endurance: Run…

  • I recently finished my first three-week session at Stacy’s Boot Camp, a calisthenics-based workout class held for one hour, three times a week, for three weeks. Sometime during the class when I was trying to avoid thinking about the pain I was in, it occured to me this is a wonderful example of a Blue…