I’ve got two more weeks of working in Delray Beach, Florida, which is halfway between Ft. Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. Any IAs down here? Wanna hang? Mail me: victor (at) victorlombardi dot com.
Category: Unfiled
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Need a Sys Admin in NJ?
A long-time friend of mine is a crack UNIX System Administrator in search of a job in the New Jersey, USA area. Resume (MS Word).
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Design & Emotions
Pieter Desmet is doing some great work in designing for and measuring emotions. I particularly like PrEmo, a visual scale of facial expressions for a user to specify an emotion they’re feeling.
James Kalbach, danke f�r den Hypertext-Link.
Keywords: marketing, brand, cartoon, face
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Java.com
Java.com is a sprightly little entry by Sun targeted at consumers. In the least we should all be thankful for a coherent way to download the software, which comes in a dizzying array of incomprehensible variations on Sun’s site.
And since the site emerged from my colleagues I feel OK poking fun at it’s obvious and stereotypical IA-then-design process roots. I can see the boxes sitting there in Visio…Download! Learn! Explore! :)
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Mirra Chair
The new Mirra Chair from Herman Miller is said to be a better fit for more body sizes, easier to adjust, more colorful, more green, and less expensive (<$800) than the Aeron. Due in stores near the end of June.
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wikilogs.com
Bill Seitz has launched wikilogs, ‘a hosting service which lets you maintain a personal wikilog, or wiki-based weblog‘ and includes his trademark wit, ‘ I’ve done some things to make wikilogs.com a bit more reader-friendly than the average wiki, and I’ll be doing more, but you’ll probably never get that Jason Kotte feeling here. So, if you’re one of those people who asked “why the heck is Julia marrying Lyle?”, you’re probably more of a weblog person.’ While I can barely create a three color palatte, I’d still like to see a user-definable wiki CSS file option. Witness the design variation possibilities at Zen Garden.
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Pix from SF
Lou and I. You’ll notice he opted for the beer sampler, one of which was titled the Polar Bear. Molly and I. We talked for like, 120 seconds, but one could tell she’s a total sweetheart.
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Closed Card Sort
Surprisingly tough to find any, much less thoughtful, information on closed card sorts (e.g. testing an existing classification system). Donna Maurer’s Card-Based Classification Evaluation comes to the rescue, complete with pictures for people like me. Bless those nice Boxes and Arrows people.
I’m tempted to make three modifications to Donna’s method: 1. Write out the notecards in pencil to allow easier taxonomy revision and retesting, 2. Use an alternate spreadsheet format that allows straightforward charting of the results, and 3. Time each response, so I can compare response time in different taxonomies to see which is better understood and used.
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Uzanto Consulting LLC
Rashmi, the queen of quantitative IA research, has a shiny new firm, ‘The word Uzanto means user in Esperanto. It reflects our commitment to belief in useful, usable and accessible technology for all.‘
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Jury Duty
I’m serving on jury duty now, as many Americans do in our system of judgement-by-peers. I can’t discuss the actual case, but wanted to record some pedestrian notes:
- No one is quite as bright as on Law and Order, which is not surprising as the writing there is fast, dense, and excellent. Incidentally, if you want to know what my father looks like, and what I’ll probably look like when I’m older, see Jerry Orbach.
- There is a classification system for fingerprints, the major groups of which are whirls, loops, and arches.
- Storytelling is immensely important for trial lawyers. Not just for the opening and closing arguments either. For example, one lawyer has a style of drilling witnesses with questions. The other, which to me is more successful, uses the witness to help tell his story. He moves the plot along with all the characters and details and just happens to be doing it in the form of questions.
- Because of these needed skills, and because the entire trial is a play for the benefit of the jury, a good lawyer is the difference between guilty and innocent verdicts.
- All in all, it’s an impressive system, one I’m happy with. Most Americans dread jury duty, I’m finding it fascinating.
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Hudson Valley Adventure
Had a great weekend in the Hudson Valley. For miles and miles both sides of the river offer gorgeous views. We rented a car and drove first to the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park, now owned by the U.S. Park Service after the Vanderbilts failed to find a buyer for it in the late 30’s. The craftmanship throughout is astounding, though ostentatious to contemporary eyes.
We stayed at the Cromwell Inn, whose interior balanced quaint and elegant (read: not too much Victorian decoration). One of the proprietors is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America – which I must visit on my next trip to the Valley – and so breakfast was a treat, including Poached Pears
- Find the hardest pears you can
- Peal them
- Poach them in cranberry juice with a little cinnamon mixed in
The result is a steamy sultry treat eaten with knife and fork.
I’ve wanted to visit Mass MOCA ever since it opened, and felt like the recently opened Dia:Beacon would be a closer, albeit smaller, version of the industrial factory-turned-contemporary art museum. The building and grounds are beautiful and functional, including a cafe area that doubles as a free library. The art itself, like so much contemporary art, failed to move me. Nothing happy or sad or surprising in any way, no great messages sent or received. Saturday’s trip to IKEA was much more exciting.
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New RSS Feed
Here’s my new RSS feed. It’s a bit of a hack, generating a Movable Type RSS file and using a server side include to pull in the Tinderbox entries, but it works (or at least it validates :).