Author: Victor

Just a reminder to stay in touch with Mark and Phil and the crew at Creative Good. Their Learning Lab was an incredibly generous event to invite others to, and they’re emphasizing partnerships and communities of companies rather than isolated competition.

I’m glad somebody critisized the new Altavista ads, because I don’t have time to do it properly. Since the dawn of search engines we’ve overpromised their abilities when we offer a single text box and imply we’ll find whatever the person has in mind (which may have nothing to do with what they type in). Now Altavista comes along and explicitly says they can serve up whatever you want when in fact they can’t. They’re really riding the advertising line between marketing and lying.

Spirit animals distributing birth control. I love it.

a big “woohoo!” to the folks at Blogger for making a darn good piece of free software even better.

testing both blogger 2.0 and my new directory

Recently I had a moment of clarity: a weblog is a cowardly way of expressing myself. I get to post thoughts and rants without dealing with issues of relevancy or with significant rebuttals.

It wasn’t always this way. I started this blog as a notepad for myself, a quick and dirty way to record thoughts that I could later access and expand. But then I grew a desire for readership, and then fame. I submitted the site to brig, then to linkwatcher and attracted poor you to this site. Go away! Stop reading blogs! Read more books, listen to more music, have more sex, do more volunteer work; there are so many better ways to spend your time.

It’s been distributed before, but this File Not Found (404) error still makes me smile:

You step in the stream,

but the water has moved on.

That page is not here.

Perceived Affordance, today’s interaction design word of the day, as defined by Donald Norman. and summarized by yours truly:


A user’s perception of relationships between herself and an object. Norman says, “What the designer cares about is whether the user perceives that some action is possible (or in the case of perceived non-affordances, not possible).”


Norman states four principles for screen interfaces that help new users understand what to do: conventional usage, labels that describe actions, metaphors, and a coherent conceptual model.

There’s a subtle difference between perceived affordance and feedback:


All screens
afford touching: only some detect the touch and are capable of responding.
But the affordance of touchability is the same in all cases. Touch sensitive
screens often make their affordance visibly perceivable by displaying a
cursor under the pointing spot. The cursor is not an affordance; it is
visual feedback.


More NYC love/hate thoughts, this time from Lane. I agree with just about all of them.

I have a love/hate relationship with New York City. Last night I was walking home and, turning onto a familiar block that borders a baseball field, I saw the entire sidewalk lined with Christmas trees and wreaths for sale. It was one entire block of that beautifully stimulating pine smell, bare light bulbs on strings, and pure love.

“Saturated” is the one word I would use to describe Las Vegas. Someone I was with there called it “a momument to man-made stuff.”

User experience as a political weapon:

Orrin Hatch: “I do disagree with John [McCain] with regard to campaign finance reform. I think true campaign
finance reform is what I’m doing. Today you can get everybody who’s donated to me on my
web page: www.orrinhatch.com or orrinhatch.org. I have to say, Governor [Bush], in contrast to
yours, it’s easy to find everything on mine. (Chuckles from audience.) It’s pretty tough to use yours! Yours
is not user friendly. But I think that’s what should be done. And I think real campaign
finance reform is disclosure, disclosure, disclosure. And I think that’s what I’m trying to do,
plus low donations.”

I’ll be away until December 5th, so the furious blogging of the past week will slow down quite a bit. My company’s management, benevolent as they are, have decided to send all 1,100 worldwide employees to Las Vegas for four days of serious bonding. Woohoo!

You are where you live! Wisdom from Claritas, who accurately told me my hometown consists of Surburban Sprawl and the town where I live now has a Bohemian Mix. I knew this could be done, but it’s still both impressive and disturbing when I see it with my own eyes. Link courtesy of lemonyellow.

Hey, my old boss is updating his weblog. He gets the award for most cleverly integrating his last name with the name of the site: Web-Seitz (yuck yuck). Check it out for uncommon links with biting sarcasm from the perspective of an intelligent IT manager.