Victor

IBM can’t patent this, the Bible described this process a long time ago! Damn atheist engineers. Seriously, when IBM brags about having five kagillion patents, remember this one.

A little piece of brilliance at Sylloge. By mimicking the layout of Google, it (for me) draws attention to the pieces of text Google displays as summaries, and how seemingly random they are. The author here does a great job of playing on that theme with some beautiful little poetic snippets.

After a few ragingly negative Amazon customer reviews about Robert Fripp’s new album, there was this: way cool September 3, 2000 Reviewer: A 12-year old music fan from new york, new york This cd make me smile. I forget that sometimes it is hard being a kid. I also forget that sometimes it is hard…

Been listening to a lot of California Music Channel lately on RealPlayer. They’ve got an interesting rock/pop/urban mix to their playlist, and it’s the first Real stream I’ve heard that degrades elegantly when my bandwidth is near capacity, instead of simply stopping and re-buffering. I have to admit, except for K-Rock, California blows New York…

From the Society for Technical Communication: “…quicklists derived from five sets of heuristics on designing personas, Web navigation, designing comprehensible Web pages, displaying information on the Web, and collecting Web data to understand and interact with users. A summary of the introduction to the special issue is also included.”

Anthropomorphized Backpacks! The kid next to me (on his mother’s lap) on the bus this morning had one of these – very very cool.

Imagine you’re the CEO of a small company and you find out your stock price jumped up over 100% because of the actions of a teenager in his bedroom in N.J.

After many attempts at ordering a copy of Tog on Interface it finally arrived yesterday from Amazon. No backorders, no out-of-prints…amazing. I was about to break down and email Tog directly to get a copy. This first of Tog’s books is a pleasure to read, full of humor and good advice. The actual interface issues…

Y’know what? A GOMS model for mobile phones would be helpful, anyone know of one? GOMS is a analysis model for quantitatively testing an interface, and it seems that with the current small number of interface conventions on phones it’d be not-too-difficult to develop. Too bad I don’t have time.

Peter makes a similar point I was making to someone today: People HATE work. Peter refers to misguided marketing campaigns, whereas I was referring to the popular Internet strategy that says you should create self-service website to let people do the customer service themselves. What crap, the only reason people like this is because they’d…

generosity: group metalog. One of the most interesting blogs I’ve seen in a long time. different. funny. smart. a little dada, a little e.e. cummings-ish. via sylloge

Gloating over my latest stock pick, Qualcomm, which I recently picked up just as it started climbing from the high 60’s. My investing strategy has worked pretty well: only touch companies whose products you’re familiar with, and then analyze them technically, ignoring all the fundamental information. Clearstation is a great site for technical analysis.

Some raw-like-flesh-after-scraping-against-the-pavement reality from the CHI-WEB list: > They don’t like bad things. And if sites have bad things, people won’t go > there. sorry peter, but people like bad things that are useful or have brittany spears on them, and companies like bad things that are profitable and so bad things are good things.…

I had started this pretty long blog entry when my computer crashed, and it’s too late and I’m too tired to reproduce it. A summary: I found the two guys and their work that led to the Microsoft paper clip. Though most people bash the paper clip, I don’t think it’s really that annoying. I’m…

I finaly added permanent links to each entry in my blog thanks to Blogger’s handy HOW TO. I had tried it back in beta and didn’t realize they had finessed it so well. Instead of some cryptic asterisk or other symbol to denote the link, I choose the high affordance “link to this post”. Of…