Author: 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 not being

a kid. I’m just kidding. The songs on this cd remind me of

space music from mars. (That’s good.)

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 away when it comes to great radio stations. K-Rock exudes attitude, they’ll play heavy metal, rap, anything with friction.

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 he addresses are old and hardly worth debating anymore, but the processes he uses to get the answers are enlightening. He shows the puzzlement designers experience creating Macintosh interfaces and how to solve these 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 rather get the job done themselves quickly then deal with poorly run customer service systems.

This genius suffers from incorrect customer service information, a representative who couldn’t take a message and follow up, and a wait of hours. He concludes, “In an imperfect world of customer service, most customers prefer to cut to the chase and help themselves.” While that’s true, what I think people REALLY prefer is customer service that works. The web shouldn’t be a crutch you pick up when you’ve given up on an internal process.

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.

Unfortunate of course, but for me it’s a challenge to work that much harder to improve user interfaces, people, and the whole damn world.

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 trying to relax and learn to love the paper clip. She’s just trying to help me, right?

The paper clip is probably usable, and its reputation as annoying probably stems from factors farther flung and more interesting than usability…I’m betting socialogy.

That’s all. Good night.

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 course I have to test it…check out the birth of my thoughts on Extreme User Interface Design