Congratulations to the parents of Ava Marie, one child who will never hunger for lack of website knowledge.
Author: Victor
VoIP and personal SLAs
Last night my wife and I realized we both had conference calls from home at the same time. My group wanted to use Skype, so she was free to use our landline, a Vonage (VoIP) connection. This means we were using two different devices to push and pull audio down the same cable modem connection. Theoretically it’s pretty neat. In practice the poor Motorola VoIP adapter supplied by Vonage couldn’t keep up and dropped both of the connections, twice.
So far the home broadband suppliers haven’t had to provide rigorous minimum bandwidth, but when more of us start using the connection for synchronous communication we’ll want bandwidth like water: as much pressure as we need, whenever we need it, cheaply. Service level agreements for the home user could be in our future.
The Postal Service, explained
A lot of bloggers are getting hip to The Postal Service (iTunes), the band behind the infectious electronic The District Sleeps Alone and others from the album “Give Up”. Most don’t seem to know the mind behind the songs is Ben Gibbard, front man of Death Cab for Cutie. To explore Death Cab, I’d recommend starting with We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes, although all of their albums are very good. If you like lo-fi, sweet adolescent songs you might also like his early solo album “All-Time Quarterback”, like the track Rules Broken.
Inter-cultural communication
Brian Van der Horst’s essay on Edward T. Hall, a “Great-Grandfather of Neuro Linguistic Programming,” helps clear up some of the confusion I’ve experienced abroad. The below example of inter-cultural communication resembles how I met my wife in Germany, who must have thought I was over-sexed:
In both the British and American cultures, there are, let’s say 20 distinct steps in the ritual of courtship — between the first hello and going to bed. One step that occurs in both cultures is “the kiss on the lips.”
In America, this is about step number three. It’s something you do to establish intimacy. But in England, this is around step 18. It’s about the last thing you do before engaging in sexual intercourse.
So imagine a U.S. soldier on a date with an English girl. To get the relationship going in the right direction, to warm it up a little, the guy gives the gal a kiss on the lips. Just like in the (Hollywood) movies.
The lady in question now has a difficult choice to make. First, she thinks the guy is definitly over-sexed. After all, she hardly knows the fellow, and she’s just been cheated out of 15 steps. So either she walks off the scene immediately — in which case the Yankee says, “She is obviously over-sexed and hysterical — all I did was give her a kiss on the lips.”
Her other choice is to start preparing to go to bed. After, all the guy just yanked her action chain, and she is only a step or two away from the main event. If she follows this course, the American says, “Boy, is she over-sexed! She’s taking off her clothes, and all I did was give her a kiss on the lips.”
E-Myth
I just read The E-Myth Revisited after it having been recommended to me several times. In it Michael Gerber addresses the most prevalent problems of small businesses (e stands for entrepreneur) along with his solutions. It’s a breezy read, and, although a little too preachy at times, it’s a worthwhile read.
A few notes worth remembering:
- The Fatal Assumption: if you understand the technical work of a business, you understand a business that does the technical work
- Whereas before starting the business you were The Technician, now you must also be The Entrepreneur and The Manager
- The technician will manage by abdication whereas the manager will manage by delegation
- Tom Watson of IBM had a very clear vision of what the company would look like when it was done. “I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there… At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference.“
- Your business is not your life
All the news that fits on the head of a pin
I like that an online journal of nanotechnology has named itself Small Times.
First Fridays, now in NYC
You’re invited to the first monthly social meeting of First Fridays in NYC for the User Experience Design community.
It should be a good evening of simply meeting with peers to talk, network, relax, and engage.
Fri, Oct 1st, 6:30p till 8:30 at
Hell
59 Gansevoort St at Washington St (Meatpacking District)
(Between 12th & 13th Streets, West of 9th Avenue/Hudson Street)
212-727-1666
Subway: A,C,E and 1239 to 14th Street or L to 8th Ave
For more information send e-mail to: info (at) nyc.htmhell.com
For a list of other UX events in the NYC area you can also go to http://nyc.htmhell.com/
This is a UXnet event and was organized through the coordinated efforts and resources of AIfIA, AIGA, IxDG, NYC CHI, STC and UPA. If you represent an organization that you feel should also be part of future event coordination, please contact info (at) nyc.htmhell.com.
An egg laying, wool-milk-pig
That’s the literal translation of this great German phrase, die eierlegende Wollmilchsau which literally translates to a pig that lays eggs, grows wool, and gives milk. As when a company is looking for someone with Java, IA, graphic design, project management, and creative writing skills.
IA innies becoming outies?
Lou Rosenfeld requests your participation in a short survey to “detect past and future trends regarding where information architects work, and how much of their work is dedicated to IA.” I’m going to guess that after the crash when a lot of consultants went in-house they have yet to go back to consulting, considering myself an exception.
The Flamenco store
Juan Sebastian gives me a heads up to es flamenco, a storefront crafted with care and content. Once spare time returns to my life I plan to study some Flamenco guitar, instead of the pigeon technique I have now.
Terminal 5
Oh yes, we youngins finally get to see the inside of Terminal 5, Eero Saarinen’s gorgeous sculpture of a building at JFK airport in New York. And if that wasn’t enough, there will be — inside the terminal — an exhibition featuring “major artists responding to the site with works reflecting on the transitory nature of travel, architecture and contemporary art.” October 1 through January 31, 2005 (Tues-Sat, 12-6, voluntary donation).
Link courtesy of MUG.
Design management consulting in IHT
Sharon Reier’s piece on design management consulting tunes into what I’m working on these days…
These firms operate quite differently from traditional strategy consulting firms like McKinsey and Bain, which work mainly with top management and use the concepts and techniques inculcated at top business schools. At the design firms, there is a “richer engagement that designers have as a starting point,” Seidel [a lecturer at the Said Business School at Oxford University] said, “because they have worked on projects together with different parts of the company and they know their capabilities.” What’s more, the designer’s visual capability gives “the capacity to expand rather than just reflect,” he added.
Design for Execs
The specific objective of the seminar is to assist participants to “see” the visual world more insightfully and to speak about it more articulately. By paving the way to design literacy, Design 101 prepares managers to lead energetically, articulately, and effectively in the dynamic dialogue now taking place at the intersection of management and design.
JPG Magazine
From Heather and Derek: “JPG Magazine is for people who love imagemaking without attitude. It’s about the kind of photography you get when you love the moment more than the camera. It’s for photographers who, like us, have found themselves online, sharing their work, and would like to see that work in print.”
Parodies of office life
I tried watching The Office but not only didn’t find it funny, it was a little painful. I mean, office life, particularly in big companies, is actually like that, why go home and watch more of it?
On the other hand, I was happy to find Netflix carries The Newsroom, a parady that understands you need to go to lengths of realistic absurdity to be funny. This series, from the CBC, made an unfortunately short trip through public television a few years back, but is one of my personal favorites.