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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.