Victor – Page 35 – Noise Between Stations

Blood Book

Mark Bernstein has an interesting review of Rebecca Blood’s The Weblog Handbook.

For Blood, as for many diarists, the exercise of writing is its own reward. “If you allow yourself to begin posting entries based on what you think someone else wants you to write,” she warns, “you are missing the point of having a weblog.”

to which Mark points out a bit of contradition:

More seriously, Blood’s romantic conviction deters any extensive discussion of craft. If simple authenticity is the goal of weblog writing, and if you — the Audience Of One — are the only reader that really matters, then what craft is needed?

This is a balance I sometimes struggle with. Ideally I’m crafting words others will enjoy as well, words that still propel my own ideas. Isn’t that usually the case in publishing? Or journalism?

Rebecca nails it when she says, ‘The more your weblog reflects your interests and your world view, the stronger your voice will be.‘ I’ve always thought ‘voice’ is the most significant reason I like some blogs over others.

Napple

I just taught a class to some designers visiting from Samsung Korea. As my first experience with an interpreter, I couldn’t help but laugh at the process a few times. Usually my sentence would result in a Korean sentence that was a little longer. But once in a while it was five times as long, and I had to wonder what the interpreter was really telling them. ‘This guy is saying such-and-such, but of course we know that’s wrong. Let’s just humor him.‘

I also realized that when someone is asking a question, even though he is speaking at the interpreter, he’s still talking to me and eye contact is still an important sign of respect (‘you listen with your eyes‘), even though we both acknowledge I don’t understand a word and instead I’m focusing on the interpreter.

But the more complicated social interaction didn’t distract me; the interpretation time actually allowed me additional moments in which to form my thoughts and pick clear, concise words.

Anyway, outside the classroom at Parsons were some student product design posters, including this great one about a desk that converts into a cot called Napple [pic1 | pic2 ]. It privides for both a hammack-like suspended fabric under the desk to lie on and a cover that folds down to give you privacy (inspired by Seinfeld?). The point is to allow for siestas at work instead of relying on less healthy caffiene uppers. It caught my eye because not too long ago I was having dinner with some folks discussing the secret little places we find at work to take naps.

Scient and SBI

Scient was acquired by SBI/filed for bankruptcy. I’m not sure how to read that financial transaction, how it should feel to clients, or what it means strategically for the company. I just hope folks don’t lose their jobs.

Word around town is that real estate liabilities hurt the bottom line (which means they had too many leases or buildings they couldn’t unload). We had to fix that right quick last year. I’ve always admired the mostly office-less approach of companies like Adaptive Path and Behavior for this reason, but I don’t know if that works for bigger firms that require more socialization.

Job Search at Michigan SI

Peter points to this great job search engine at Michigan’s School of Information.

BlogSpam

Spotted! Well, not exactly the BlogSpam I referred to. But crazy random posts on the topic of air-conditioning and mold appeared on Molly’s blog here and here.

Is it someone’s idea of a joke? Do you wish you thought of it first?

Hamza El Din at Lincoln Center

New York music lovers could do worse than check out Hamza El Din this Thursday at Lincoln Center.

Here’s an older piece, an excerpt from ‘Manami‘ (850K), in what amounts to late 70’s Egyptian pop music. The tempo and rhythm shifts just floor me.

Introduction to Ontologies from McGuinness

Deborah L. McGuinness, ontology goddess, released Ontologies Come of Age, a chapter to an upcoming book. A relatively gentle introduction, along the way she illustrates the difference between controlled vocabularies and ontologies: the former have implicit is-a relationships and the latter have explicit is-a relationships (e.g. in a taxonomy a Merlot is a narrower term of Red Wine, whereas in an ontology a Merlot is-a Red Wine). Expressing those relationships explicitly helps computers understand what we understand. So it’s more like knowledge representation, though it relies on the classification techniques of controlled vocabularies.

She’s done hardcore research at Rutgers, AT&T, Lucent, & Stanford and seems to be looking for wider applications of this work via Sandpiper Software.

German Reference Tools

It’s a good thing the Germans know how complex their language is. They’ve invented two powerful tools to help learn it:

The LEO English/German Dictionary can translate in either direction and the default setting is bi-directional, so you can type in either an English or German word and it’ll find the translation. This is only undesirable in the cases when a word is spelled the same in both languages but has different meanings, like bald. There’s even bookmarklets that can look up a word you’ve highlighted.
The Morphology Browser let’s you surf info like conjugated verb forms, plus other info I don’t understand yet.

Tire Swing Cartoon

If a digital design team designed a tire swing. Excellent.

Link courtesy of xblog.

Insights From LIS – Marcia Bates

Marcia Bates’ After the Dot Bomb reveals a few methods those of us without information science educations should know about. It’s a bit finger-wavey (you web design whipper snappers you!) but it’s worth reading. Also, she’s way off the mark regarding ontologies, but that’s a rant for another day.

Eric unearths a related link, The fundamentals of information science, wherein a university librarian bullet points some big ideas from that field.

Pastina

Did anyone else have an Italian grandmother that would cook them Pastina? An earliest food memory for me, I recently picked up a box in the market, along with all the ingredients in the chicken-soup-with-pastina recipe on the side. Mmmmmmm, comfort food. And good for you.

What’s the earliest food you can remember eating?

Spam-Proof?

We have email spam and IM spam. Today I received a spam text message on my mobile phone (either Sprint sold my number or the spammers haven’t even bothered to harvest numbers, simply sending them out in numerical order because it’s so inexpensive). Oh joy. Next I predict – and I probably shouldn’t say this out loud – spam in the comments section of blogs. Essentially anything we use to communicate, unless it’s a private network, is vulnerable. We’ll have to start anticipating this and designing protection in at the beginning, but I wonder if that’s even possible.

Design Early, Design Often

In the latest issue of New Architect Alan Cooper espouses his usual philosophy: ‘Simply put, there is no downside to designing before coding.’

In the same issue, a member of the Mozilla QA team advises, ‘Release early, release often, and let your customers bang on it.’

Certainly two different approaches, but both valid I think. They could be seen as compatible in a couple ways:

different approaches for different products: only some customers will tolerate being part of the QA process
different stages of the same product: you could do all the design first and then take a ‘release early, release often’ approach to development.

Although this last approach implies the dev team needs rapid feedback because sufficient cycles weren’t built into the design process. However, I could imagine a product that, even after a Cooper-style design stage, still needed to draw out tricky technology implementation issues.

Tendency to Subway

I was just trying to explain to Nick why I usually ride the subway. It’s economical, yes, that’s a big part of it. He asked, ‘The community?‘ and yes, but really no. It’s not as if people socialize down there. It is the people though, the great Walt Whitman celebration of the democratic city (‘Leaning back in their open barouches, bare-headed, impassive, Ride to-day through Manhattan.’). It’s also the freedom, different than a car but empowering also, that puts me within walking distance of somewhere else entirely, somewhere fantastic, all for pocket change, all without a license or equipment and only a glance at the map.

Update: T., whose site is in a perpetual pre-launch state, is so right: ‘I feel like I can let my mind wander and daydream when I take the subway. Maybe because I’ve taken it so often I can go on auto-pilot. However, if I take a taxi, I don’t feel more relaxed at all. In fact I feel a bit more stressed because I have to pay attention to what is going on.‘

Paul, however, reveals the limits of the subway experience.

IBM Make IT Easy 2002

The papers and presentations from IBM’s Make IT Easy conference are up. Among them are presentations by Marti Hearst, Nathan Shedroff, and Clifford Nass.

When I see reports like this wonderful study on the LCDs in the Space Shuttle, I want to abandon all this blathering web work, get my Ph.D, and be state of the art. Designing better medical device UIs might nicely combine my love of design and my idealist longings.