Victor – Page 67 – Noise Between Stations

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I was just elected to participate in a new management/leadership/skills/personal development program at work called Catapult. What’s particularly surprising is all the people here that voted for me. I often feel like I make people’s lives hell by challenging everyone on everything (aka bitching about everything, like I do in this weblog). Turns out people think I’m “positive” and a good mentor. Gosh, I feel like Jimmy Stewart at the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Sniff.

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Little other-people magnets. I love that.

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Phil just added a review of a Ferrari. You would think he’s a serious materialist Yuppie scum if it wasn’t for all those free classes he teaches, the books he writes and gives away, and the ArsDigita contest for young programmers.

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Weapons-grade PlayStation 2. My first reaction is that they should make an exception for a game console so that Sony can be competitive. But then I think of the possibly consequences of this technology put to evil means and think we can go without yet another game console.

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Hmmmm, seems like something interesting is going on at vizbang, but the advantage of this way of visualization isn’t immediately apparent to me (I haven’t taken the time to investigate yet, but if the whole purpose is to enable better information visualization then I expect to be to understand it fairly quickly). My manager’s name is mentioned on the homepage though, it’s nice to see us reaching out beyond our corporate boundaries.

And they have a weblog, very cool.

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Any substantial spare scrap of time this weekend has been spent working on one piece of client work which is due tomorrow. I just realized the reason it’s so complicated is because I lost (gave up, really) an argument weeks ago about how complex we should make this document. Now I’m paying the price while Spring is raging outside :(

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Riding home on the train last evening there was a young woman sitting ahead of me that was writing in a notebook, “If can exist in a hierarchy, it’s a content type.” Ugh, I feel like I caught a glimpse of myself; scribling esoteric little ideas about information archtecture to myself that seem so profound and important. So that’s what I look like, not all that glamerous.

Later I noticed another woman sitting across from me with a Rare Medium bag (which are much cooler than our Razorfish bags). I feel like there’s a whole army of us doing this stuff, like the Gold Rush. Once most companies come up to speed getting web sites and the such, will the vast majority of us be out of work?

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I imagine there are millions hitting the U.S. IRS site tonight looking for tax forms to file before the deadline, yet the only link to forms is a small text link at the very bottom. Ugh.

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I used to own the 3rd Worst Car of the Millennium. And my brother used to own the 5th worst.

Actually, I didn’t think the Pinto was that bad. It rode the cusp between bigger 70’s cars and 80’s plastic Japanese compacts, so it still has some nice touches like a carpeted center console and real metal on the dash. The seating position was more laid back, like in a muscle car. After a while the 4th cylinder irrepairably lost compression and I drove it on 3 cylinders for a while.

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Finally, a good picture of Razorfish

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Mark’s customer experience vs. information architecture comments on goodexperience.com have made me think the industry could use some better ways to communicate user experience. Perhaps using prototypes, mood boards, or showing one entire path of the experience.