If you’re a regular, please note I’m migrating to a new address: victor at victorlombardi dot com. Please don’t post it on websites and such (unless you encode it as I have here), I’d like to keep the spam to a minimum. And yes, there’s a shameless ego-page at that domain.

‘Sadness sweeps through the land as NBS’s RSS feed goes silent. The dark
gloom and numbness that has enveloped my soul is only slightly touched
by the drizzle of rain that soaks my clothes and sends shivers down my
back,‘ writes James, and I’m sure you’re all suffering a similar fate. Any day now I’ll hack together a combo Tinderbox+Movable Type feed to feed you.

Does anyone know of guidelines for using ampersands vs. the word and when constructing terms in a taxonomy, like Fruits and Vegetables vs. Fruits & Vegetables?

Bend It Like Beckham…fucking brilliant.

I’m doing a lot of heavy taxonomy lifting these days. Because it involves working with existing systems, what I find more useful than LIS knowledge is IS knowledge, being able to talk to DBAs and read database tables, talking to the people who have to implement this stuff. In this case I’m reverse engineering and then designing, rather than starting with pure data or knowledge and classifying it.

I didn’t completely get the utility of those new little USB pen drives until I saw them in action as the new sneakernet. In a world where removable disks are more rare but everyone has USB, they are the new floppy disk for exchanging files quickly, no networking needed.

Excuse my lack of blogging/email/other, I’m away on business and frantically trying to keep up with everything. More contact and blogging will ensue in a week or two.

Finally had a chance to take a serious look at Bob Baxley’s book Making the Web Work: Designing Effective Web Applications. It’s an overview of designing for applications – not just pages – on the web. Especially for beginning and intermediate students, it’s a solid set of lessons.

Matt pens some thoughts on easier programming, interesting to me is anything Andy Hertzfeld has to say. After struggling with Pascal and C in college I decided to put my braincells to full time work on the human interface design side instead. I think easy programming simply becomes part of the interface; like recordable actions in Photoshop. Normal programming stays hard (by becoming more advanced) and in the domain of people who dedicate themselves to it. I don’t plan to change my ways anytime soon.

Jeffrey Veen has some nifty glossary terms gleaned from a consulting gig. I especially like Framejack: v. to move a user horizontally through an architecture, switching the interface to another vertical, in the context of a single task. “If a user clicks on My Account while in the Checking vertical, they get framejacked to the Document Center.”

Just sat in a Life chair in the Knoll showroom. I dare say it’s as comfortable as the Aeron, and manages this feat while avoiding the cyborg appearance. I guessed a simpler look would equal a lower price, but alas it starts at US $800. The array of fabric and color options might be worth the expense though, there’s enough variety there to change the look significantly.

The Moonlighters’ Blue and Black Eyed. They sing to you.

Heads up courtesy Toby and Derek.

…and leaving the technology at home. See you in about a week.

The best thing I’ve read lately – and possibly the best summary of interaction design I’ve seen – is Marc Rettig’s Interaction Design History in a Teeny Little Nutshell (PDF slideshow). On how computers should work for us instead of vice-versa: ‘I like to listen to “Morning Edition” on the radio in the mornings. Why shouldn¹t the broadcast follow me from bathroom to bedroom to kitchen, then into the car?‘ Link courtesy Peter Bogaards.

Matt exclaims, ‘From Dorelle Rabinowitz’ notes on the panel, at B&A comes the memebullet, for which I stop only short of using the blink tag to emphasise:
“We talk about navigating when we mean understanding.”

This is resonating so powerfully for me that my teeth are on edge.‘