Author: Victor

Lou and I. You’ll notice he opted for the beer sampler, one of which was titled the Polar Bear. Molly and I. We talked for like, 120 seconds, but one could tell she’s a total sweetheart.

Surprisingly tough to find any, much less thoughtful, information on closed card sorts (e.g. testing an existing classification system). Donna Maurer’s Card-Based Classification Evaluation comes to the rescue, complete with pictures for people like me. Bless those nice Boxes and Arrows people.

I’m tempted to make three modifications to Donna’s method: 1. Write out the notecards in pencil to allow easier taxonomy revision and retesting, 2. Use an alternate spreadsheet format that allows straightforward charting of the results, and 3. Time each response, so I can compare response time in different taxonomies to see which is better understood and used.

Rashmi, the queen of quantitative IA research, has a shiny new firm, ‘The word Uzanto means user in Esperanto. It reflects our commitment to belief in useful, usable and accessible technology for all.‘

Yay! Thanks, Eric, for nursing her back to health.

I’m serving on jury duty now, as many Americans do in our system of judgement-by-peers. I can’t discuss the actual case, but wanted to record some pedestrian notes:

• No one is quite as bright as on Law and Order, which is not surprising as the writing there is fast, dense, and excellent. Incidentally, if you want to know what my father looks like, and what I’ll probably look like when I’m older, see Jerry Orbach.
• There is a classification system for fingerprints, the major groups of which are whirls, loops, and arches.
• Storytelling is immensely important for trial lawyers. Not just for the opening and closing arguments either. For example, one lawyer has a style of drilling witnesses with questions. The other, which to me is more successful, uses the witness to help tell his story. He moves the plot along with all the characters and details and just happens to be doing it in the form of questions.
• Because of these needed skills, and because the entire trial is a play for the benefit of the jury, a good lawyer is the difference between guilty and innocent verdicts.
• All in all, it’s an impressive system, one I’m happy with. Most Americans dread jury duty, I’m finding it fascinating.

Had a great weekend in the Hudson Valley. For miles and miles both sides of the river offer gorgeous views. We rented a car and drove first to the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park, now owned by the U.S. Park Service after the Vanderbilts failed to find a buyer for it in the late 30’s. The craftmanship throughout is astounding, though ostentatious to contemporary eyes.

We stayed at the Cromwell Inn, whose interior balanced quaint and elegant (read: not too much Victorian decoration). One of the proprietors is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America – which I must visit on my next trip to the Valley – and so breakfast was a treat, including Poached Pears

• Find the hardest pears you can
• Peal them
• Poach them in cranberry juice with a little cinnamon mixed in

The result is a steamy sultry treat eaten with knife and fork.

I’ve wanted to visit Mass MOCA ever since it opened, and felt like the recently opened Dia:Beacon would be a closer, albeit smaller, version of the industrial factory-turned-contemporary art museum. The building and grounds are beautiful and functional, including a cafe area that doubles as a free library. The art itself, like so much contemporary art, failed to move me. Nothing happy or sad or surprising in any way, no great messages sent or received. Saturday’s trip to IKEA was much more exciting.

Here’s my new RSS feed. It’s a bit of a hack, generating a Movable Type RSS file and using a server side include to pull in the Tinderbox entries, but it works (or at least it validates :).

Tomorrow, sadly, Mike Lee ends his stay in New York to return to Baltimore. Mike’s a talented, smart, thoughtful person we’ve been lucky to have around for the past few months, talking IA, admiring his gorgeous photography, and stirring up Sidekick lust. Mike, don’t forget to visit!

If you’re a regular, please note I’m migrating to a new address: victor at victorlombardi dot com. Please don’t post it on websites and such (unless you encode it as I have here), I’d like to keep the spam to a minimum. And yes, there’s a shameless ego-page at that domain.

‘Sadness sweeps through the land as NBS’s RSS feed goes silent. The dark
gloom and numbness that has enveloped my soul is only slightly touched
by the drizzle of rain that soaks my clothes and sends shivers down my
back,‘ writes James, and I’m sure you’re all suffering a similar fate. Any day now I’ll hack together a combo Tinderbox+Movable Type feed to feed you.

Does anyone know of guidelines for using ampersands vs. the word and when constructing terms in a taxonomy, like Fruits and Vegetables vs. Fruits & Vegetables?