Author: Victor

hmmmmm, michael, whose dog wants to be on the radio, doesn’t read this site in the morning but waits ’til later in the day. I wonder if it’s because of my new goth design with the metallicky background images and all? Maybe it’s like eating Chinese food for breakfast?

The design is really rather darker than I am as a person, I was just experimenting to try and simulate the look of light-on-metal on a computer screen.

My amateur graphic design analysis went something like this:
Looking at metal stuff, it has essentially a monochromatic color makeup. The perception of metal is basically a glint of white that fades to gradually darker shades of grey. When trying to reproduce this as a web page background, I didn’t want to use some massive image that would cover the entire background. Enlarging a smaller image using an HTML tag destroyed the subtle glint. So repeating the image was what I ended up with.

Then when I attempted to place text over images that consisted of alternating black and white I found that neither light nor dark text could be read – a major flaw in the design. So I had to darken the images to make the white text readable, causing the images to look like plastic or curtains or metal painted black. Good thing no one is paying me for this!

It seems every organization on earth has decided to produce some sort of millenium exhibition. The only one I’ve bothered to visit so far is the Letters to Future Generations developed by UNESCO. Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Keep Poetry Alive! is particularly moving.

Megnut’s chants for everyday life (see November 16) embody an inspired perspective on life.

My notes-so-far on the general structure of the patterns in A Pattern Language:

They are hierarchical, starting from the most general and working down toward the most specific.

More specific patterns are dependent on the corresponding general “parent” patterns (my term). More general patterns rely on the implementation of the more specific “children” patterns.

The patterns are inherently practical, addressing problems with solutions.

As the word “patterns” suggests, these are repetitive fixes that recurring problems.

Patterns include a repetitive problem and its solution.

Patterns are expressed in the following format:

1. picture
   
2. introduction
   
3. headline
   
4. body, consisting of some background info, evidence for validity, and range of occurances.
   
5. the solution, consisting of the physical and social relationships necessary. Itakes the form of an instruction. The solution must fix the “invariant property common” to every instance of the problem.
   
6. This pattern’s relationship to other patterns
   

Re-reading that, it sounds a bit dry (or maybe I’m just really tired), but it’s just enough structure to build a communicable language without so much restriction that hinders it’s flexibility for creating other languages.

With regard to interaction design, much work has been done: The Interaction Design Patterns Page

Currently reading A Pattern Language : Towns, Buildings, Construction. It’s amazing the authors thought only within the confines of architecture, since the language is so organic and naturally re-usable.

And at times the ideas reach the realm of the beautiful, like this Tao Te Ching-meets-gospel of Thomas passage:

“this is a fundamental view of the world…when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it…”

Rafe at rc3.org linked to an article about how Oregonians aren’t allowed to pump their own gas. The article also mentions that my home state of New Jersey is the only other state with this archaic law. I believe it was put into practice a long time ago so that senior citizens would never have to face a situation where self-serve was the only option when they’ve run out of gas and in the middle of foul weather (the obvious rebuttal here is that anyone incapable of pumping their own gas probably isn’t fit to drive, and I’d agree).

I honestly don’t mind the restriction. Gas is relatively cheap in NJ compared to say NY or CT, so the few extra pennies for full-serve doesn’t hurt. Besides, when all you’ve ever known is some other poor soul hustling through the cold winter weather to pump your gas, you don’t exactly become incredibly eager to strike down this law.

Sirs, I have tested your machine. It adds new terror to life and makes death a long felt want.

– Sir Herbert Robert Beerbolm Tree on examining a gramophone

From the book Open Here: The Art of Instructional Design. It can be used for instruction, but it leans more towards a really great coffee table book.

Watched this amazing episode of New York: A Documentary Film on PBS last night. The most gripping part of it was the account of a famous fire at a textile sweatshop:

1911 – 146 people — mostly young, immigrant girls — are killed in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. A crowd of helpless bystanders watches in horror as some of the victims jump to their deaths in a vain effort to escape the heat and flames. The owners are tried for manslaughter for having locked their employees in the building but are acquitted.

I realized this building is only a few blocks out of my way to work, so I stopped by this morning. It’s now part of New York University. There’s a plaque on the building telling of the fire and of the building’s national historic status. Looking up at the 8th and 9th floors I imagined what it must have been like to lean out the window trying to avoid the flames and then eventually jumping to certain death. Thousands of onlookers stood below helpless, the ladders too short and the nets broken. The documentary included accounts from the scene, journalists describing the thud of women hitting the ground and dying instantly, one after another.

I don’t think I could work on those floors, knowing it was where the dead women were piled up, dead from smoke inhalation or burning, just outside the doors that were locked from the outside.

Do we have a social responsibility to not write about certain things? I keep seeing stories about a particular phenonena all over, from Wired to The New York Times, that I just dislike. It’s not evil enough to deserve criticism, it’s just widespread stupidity. But I don’t want to mention it here for the fear of my 2 or 3 readers continuing the thought process, making me a collaborator in the creation of a Stupid Meme. Stupid Memes suck.

We’ve just been named the 2nd of 50 smart companies. Yeehaa.

ahhhh, jonesin’ for peterme was justified, as he posted a link to a user experience-centered blog from creative good, goodexperience.com

I can see on linkwatcher that peterme updated his blog, but his site isn’t coming up for some reason, and I’m bummed. How pathetic is that? I need my fix!


Woh, there it goes. Whew.

Our IS dept as work just started wearing these bright red one-piece jumpsuits. On the back it says,

TEAMTECH

I don’t know karate, but I do know crazy.

I think I first read a Walt Whitman poem in high school, and that wasn’t one of Walt’s really passionate ones, it was the one about the spider. It wasn’t until I was in college that a friend turned me on to the whole of Leaves of Grass. There are a few authors I don’t think my friends should go through life without knowing about, and Walt is one of them.

Another is J.D. Salinger. A link on Robot Wisdom just lead to this free early chapter of The Catcher in the Rye.

…I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy. I mean that’s all I told D.B. about, and he’s my brother and all. He’s in Hollywood. That isn’t too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every week end. He’s going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe. He just got a Jaguar. One of those little English jobs that can do around two hundred miles an hour. It cost him damn near four thousand bucks. He’s got a lot of dough, now. He didn’t use to. He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home. He wrote this terrific book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you never heard of him. The best one in it was “The Secret Goldfish.” It was about this little kid that wouldn’t let anybody look at his goldfish because he’d bought it with his own money. It killed me. Now he’s out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me….

Interface design sage Don Norman gets knocked off his high horse. It’s becoming an occasional but regular event on the CHI-WEB list.