Author: Victor

THIS SITE’S MUSIC! A neat little algorithm available here uses your IP address to generate random midi music. The personal aspect is a bit affected when you realize your IP address isn’t really that personal; I don’t know a single soul that has selected their own, as if that was readily available. It’s a cute hook though, a reason to listen to algorithmically generated music which most poeple need!

Additionally the author(s) are accepting votes (like or dislike?) to build a database that will train their neural network. You have to wonder what cross-sections of people are looking at their site and the music these people like, and then imagine a neural network trying to reproduce that music. I can’t, and it’s wonderful that this system will evolve and produce music we can’t imagine.

Or maybe it’ll produce Top 40 hits.

Recently ordered a Strida and boy am I excited to get it. Definitely only a bike for short trips, but it looks like great fun to turn the walking part of my commute into a riding part.

I find the WebCriteria approach interesting but I’m still suspicious of it. The objective measures like load times are useful, but I’m not convinced an agent can replace usability testing, though those aren’t perfect either.

It’ll be interesting to see if in the future they spawn other agents in addition to “Max”, each modeled after particular types of users. Whereas Max tries to be Everyman and Everywoman, it might be better to have a stable of agents representing different people. Or a customizable agent you can plug demographics into.

Last weekend I went on a bike ride with the bike club I belong to. Coming down this wonderful twisty downhill I hear yelling around the corner up ahead. I brake to slow down and, turning the corner, see one of our riders on the ground. He lies unconscious on his side, but his head is turned upward, turned a little further than seems natural. His legs are scraped and bruised, and a small stream of thick blood flows from somewhere behind his helmet. His little Brompton folding bike, which I discussed with this Brit just before the ride, rests on his legs. I move the bike to the side, but all we can do is wait for the medics, not wanting to move him for fear of a spinal injury.

Later in the week I get a call from the bike club president – the rider “didn’t make it.” Some people in the group are seeking counseling, and plan to get together to talk it out. I have a emotionally removed perspective on the situation – he wasn’t riding very safely for his level of experience, several others in the group weren’t riding safely, accidents happen, death is not a bad thing but a beautiful, natural part of life – and wonder if I’m ignoring the shock of this. Victor Frankl said we like to watch death in the media because it says it is others who die, not us, helping us ignore our own terrifying mortality. I like to feel smug and think I’ve accepted my own mortality and, more so, not shocked by other’s like the rider last weekend.

A posting below rambles on about the importance of wearing a helmet while bicycling, at least if you care about protecting your head. But this guy was wearing a helmet. I didn’t hear the official cause of death, but by the sound of his breathing it sounded like he had internal injuries with blood in his lungs. So I think of this from the perspective of acceptable risk. We all accept risk and must balance it with the rewards. This went through my mind this past weekend as I went out on a solo ride near where the rider fell and was suddenly spooked. I was not only more careful but a bit afraid too.

Now reading “Now Zen” by Charlotte Joko Beck, a wonderful little pocket book, small enough to carry anywhere and even then only need a few pages to get you learning about new ways to experience life. It does seem a bit obtuse at times, but she makes several passes at each idea and one is bound to hit its target. It’s not the masterful teaching of Robert Bly, but valuable still.

Some ideas from the book and some inspired by the book:

“The world is constantly changing, and so our associations lead us astray.”

A Sufi story describes a man who is looking around the ground under a street lamp at night. A friend comes along and asks the man what he’s doing. The man replies, “looking for my keys.” “Do you remember where you were when you lost them?” asks the friend. “Yes,” replies the man, “I was across the street.” “Then why not look over there?” asks the friend. The man answers, “Because there’s more light here under the street lamp.”

Excerpt from a W.H. Auden poem:

We would rather be ruined than changed,

We would rather die in our dread

Then climb the cross of the moment

And let our illusions die

We choose relationships because they suit us, like a bowl of ice cream that is pleasant or at least not disagreeable. But relationships change because each of the participants change. And rather than run away and and start over, only to repeat the cycle, relationships can become the best reflection of ourselves, helping us to learn about ourselves through the feedback of others. Instead of running across the street where the familiar light shines, we must get on our hands and knees in the dark and explore the unfamiliar and strange and possibly dangerous. We must climb the cross and let our illusions die.

“Relationships are what we might call the slow death of the ego…A relationship is a great gift, not because it makes us happy – it often doesn’t – but because any intimate relationship, if we view it as practice, is the clearest mirror we can find.”

While cleaning up the items in my Apple Menu I discovered this new item called “Favorites” and, not immediately knowing how it worked, I used the help feature to learn more. It basically acts as a folder to store aliases of commonly used items, whether they be servers, folders, documents, whatever. Not a groundshaking concept, we’ve been doing this for years, they just made it easier to set up.

What whacked my brain is

• They called it “Favorites” – riffing on the favorites menu in Internet Explorer, which makes you wonder where Apple’s head is at these days if they’re not only borrowing from the Windows OS but also from their web browser (or maybe I just fail to realize those two are the same thing).
  
• Interesting that the conventions of the web are now influencing the operating system, whereas before it was the other way around. Again, Microsoft’s Active Desktop was way ahead there, but they didn’t have a great OS interface to begin with, so why not appropriate one from the Internet?
  
• The icon is a folder with a bookmark over it, driving home the association. And also making the association for those of us who use Navigator and know these as “bookmarks.”
  

Another note on yesterday’s search engine rant: the search sites probably got away with being so lame because they were “dancing bears” – we didn’t care they didn’t work so well ’cause the fact that we could even get to that information was amazing for the time.

I think a lot of the early, and current, search engines have mis-managed expectations of what they can deliver. They’ve offered a simple search box with a bit of instruction and imply that’s mainly what the user needs to find what they’re looking for.

Imagine if you walked into a library and had a question but didn’t know what kind of collection to start searching through. You might seek out a librarian to help you. Would you approach them and say “London weather information”? Or would you say something like, “I’ve just started a new job which will require me to travel to London at various times throughout the year and I’d like to find out what the weather is like at all of those times.” The former is what we type into a search engine query box, and the latter is how much information the search engine actually needs to give you decent results.

A site like Ask Jeeves has done a bit to correct those expectations. They’ve changed three things:

They not only accept but encourage natural language queries

By accepting natural language, a user is more apt to phrase a question more thoroughly (not scientifically proven, just my own theory)

They index documents by subject matter and not by word content and frequency

Other ways of doing this:

Encourage, by examples for example, the writing of longer queries

Use a multi-step process, a wizard perhaps, to zero in on a result.

WHEW WEEEE… We’d had an off-site meeting yesterday of a bunch of the Information Designers from Razorfish. There were so my ideas thrown around that at the end all our heads just exploded. Here’s some the the random ideas I jotted down:

Contextual site maps – instead of drawing one supermap consider drawing them according to a particular use or user.

For dynamic, modular sites, site maps may not make sense. I’m thinking of working on a combination of a screen schematic and site map, where a callout (composed of a description, module, thmb nail of an entire screen element) is used to describe how that module will morph into something else. It seems like each dynamic site will work differently and might require its own documentation solution.

Coming home today I’m walking through New York City’s West Village and at the corner of 6th and Prince there’s a fire truck and police car stopped in the intersection. There’s also a cab and on the ground in front it a bicycle and its rider. I didn’t see a helmet.

I thought back to a couple months ago when I took a nasty spill off my bike. Even with a helmet on I experienced a temporary memory loss which was scary. I’m sure I would have at least fractured my skull without the helmet.

A letter in my bike club newsletter tells of someone with the same exact fall and symptoms I had. He also had the same incredible gratefulness for his helmet. I remember writing to the helmet company (Giro) to thank them, and being oh-so-glad to lay out cash for a new one.

And this afternoon at lunch a friend at work told us his girlfiend fell off a moped on Day 2 of a vacation in Cancun. No helmets, luckily she only broke her leg and nothing more.

I’m working on creating a financial news portal and have been thinking about the information architecture of portals. It seems portals like My Yahoo! are a sophisticated set of bookmarks: you pass through your portal into a set of selected documents.

I need to invent a new term, which I’ll call a shell until I think of something hipper, that is more of an intelligent intermediary, whatching where you go and making an effort to shape the context on each page according to your selections.

Hmmmm, I misinterpreted the function of the date header, thinking it would insert after each post, when actually it only inserts at the end of each day’s posts. NOW it should work OK, with my nice little rule in between each post, noisebetweenstations style.

Yeeehaaaa. T’Works! Only thang I forgot was the time tag. That should be here this time…

This is my first post using Blogger and I’m very excited. My only concern is whether I entered all the paths correctly, I’d like to see examples along with their otherwise helpful instructions.