Noise Between Stations

Category: Kitchen Table

The phrase comes from Owen, who once compared the conversation among blogs to chatting around the kitchen table.

  • SF New Media Scene

    Despite having found a wonderful community of like minds in New York, I’m always envious of the vibrant new media scene in San Francisco. Last night I crashed a post-seminar drinkfest held by Adaptive Path and finally, randomly, met (in person) Veen, Berry, Steenson, and Blood, among other fine folks. Hopefully Merlin will post his pics. Rebecca commented that I’m younger and more attractive than she imagined, which leads me to think my blog persona is a grumpy crank.

    I left the tapas and sangria early to fly home, away from the sun, descending through the clouds into the rain soaked, cursing, cold, Jamaica Bay.

  • Cities

  • Photos from Vacation in Hamburg

    Some curiosities seen in Hamburg, Germany:


    The U.S. Customs Services erected a kiosk to receive comments and suggestions…


    …but after booting up it awaits a password


    What new office buildings look like


    My First Sony. I love the three progressively bigger green buttons to adjust the volume. Oddly, the arrows on the rewind button point to the right instead of the left. This is because the tape winds to the left, but I wonder if anyone actually uses that little window to judge how much tape has played, especially 3 year olds? This is aggravated by how the tape goes in “upside-down,” tape first, which fooled some people using it. There’s a little icon and arrow to the right that tries to help with that. In spite of these little faults, a neat little way to bring music to children.


    In the bookstore in the mall, two shelves devoted to books about tieing knots. Notice the supplied red and blue rope.


    The apartment we stayed in had these little water heaters underneath each sink instead of using one big, centrally located heater. A small challenge to my notion of what infrastructure in a house should be centralized. Unlike most German appliances, they worked weakly and inconsistently.


    In New York’s JFK airport, the Brooklyn Beer Garden. And we wonder why U.S.-German relations are strained.

  • Car Free

    Finally sold my Beetle. Sniff. I didn’t realize how much I’d miss her until a week before the sale. Still, it’s good to be a carfree city dweller.

    Tom tracked me down using the Internet. He flew in from Wyoming to get the car. He works as a coal miner, and his wife teaches. They have four daughters. We had a drink at the hotel bar, signed some papers, and talked about how cold it’s been this winter and his drive home. Then I walked across the street to the airport and rode the monorail (which has a voice like Data’s from Star Trek) to the Airtrain (which has a logo designed by Pentagram) to the subway (wherein a man chewed potato chips in such a way that many fell out of his mouth) which brought me to 3/4 of a block from my apartment. I walked up the steps to street level and peered straight through the clear sky to the brilliant moon and stars.

  • The Quietest Place in Central Park

    I’ve tried to determine the quietest place in Central Park, which I think is in the northwest corner, about a block east of 103rd St and Central Park West in a hilly, wooded section. I hadn’t thought of this question in terms of time, but on Christmas night almost the entire park was silent, with a heavy snowfall continuing late into the night. The Pinetum was magical, which I just discovered is by design…Evergreens played an important role in the original design of the Park. Olmsted and Vaux created a “Winter Drive” along the western carriage road from 102nd to 72nd Streets. Groupings of pines, spruces, and firs added color to the winter landscape and provided a backdrop for deciduous shrubs and oak, ash, and maple trees.

  • Travels

  • ASIS&T 2002 Philadelphia

    This weekend I’m heading to Philly for the ASIS&T Annual conference. You too? See you at the hotel bar on Saturday, 7:30.

  • A Day in the Sun

    Homeless man sits and reads newspaper behind Metropolitan Museum of Art

    Descriptions of beautiful day in New York.

    Museum patrons don’t seem to notice.

    How rear of museum borders Central Park.

    A giant grid of modernist glass forms backdrop.

    Just inside, figures and busts from Romans and Greeks.

  • No More Conferences

    “There is an assumption about meetings and gatherings that’s so old it’s almost genetic. Conferences ask people to come as passive information gatherers. We’re drawn by big name speakers and then sit and wait for information to flow downwards. Yet when you ask people where they learned and contributed the most, they’ll inevitably say it was dinner with Tom or a passionate discussion over drinks with Katie and Jack. We need to re-evaluate how we create large group events to take advantage of the way we’re beginning to see, create and connect the world today. Our old style hierarchical models just aren’t as effective anymore, and current conferences are still based on them.”

    New Underground Gatherings: No More Conferences

  • Cisco.com 2002

    Cisco just posted a demo of the new Cisco.com site that will launch soon. It’s a good little overview of what customers will notice in the redesign.

    I was lucky enough to spend time with some of the design team a few months ago. The site will be a fascinating study for several reasons, including semantic metadata-generated pages and navigation, navigation that allows access to any one of hundreds of thousands of pages within five clicks, and enterprise-wide GUI standards.

    Cisco.com has been pounded in the past for its poor site. For such a large company that is the result of many merged companies, the redesign is a huge achievement. I look forward to seeing the final work.

    Update: the site went live yesterday.

  • Networking

    Notes from a talk by Bob Lord:

    Ultimately, you are helping people.

    Hopefully, this results in something for you too.

    Research the situation ahead of time.

    Look for opportunities to “reconnect” – to get back to them with something that will help them.

    Respond with ATM – Answer Transition Message. Answer positively, transition away from negative ideas, state your message.

  • Mr. Tree

    HerIM: …the second thing is your IA findings focus on the intranet,


    which is a good suggestion…but what do you think about the Internet?


    MeIM: oh, that


    MeIM: that Internet thing


    MeIM: i’ll do more there


    HerIM: that would be cool. you can use 2 pages if you need to


    MeIM: but that would hurt Mr. Tree


    HerIM: what is mr tree?


    MeIM: Mrs. Tree’s husband


    MeIM: shattering their family


    HerIM: i’m going to ignore you now


    MeIM: fatherless kids


    HerIM: when can you send me your updates?


    MeIM: oh, the horror


    MeIM: in 5 minutes


    HerIM: word

  • Pixel Charmer

    As much as we write, filter, embellish, design, decorate, and publish, we rarely capture our rich human personalities on the web. The best writers I know come close, but it’s a life’s work pushing their craft to that level. And yet I’ve found simple correspondence can often push it to the next level, revealing so much more of us. Perhaps the difference is the tone we take when speaking to a friend instead of an anonymous audience, perhaps we let our guard down. Perhaps it’s the personalized message possible when we know the other’s interests. Whichever, the people I have met – both in person and through email – come across in technicolor compared to their published selves.

    Such is the case with T.R., whose site was finally outed through her work with A List Apart. I’m lucky enough to claim her as a friend and neighbor. Her blog is certainly worth a read, but as usual only hints at the person within.

    Do you have a neighbor on the web? The person within might be only an email away!

  • Two or Three Degrees of Bloggers

    Adam recently hooked me up with a friend of his that was tight with all the beatniks I used to hang out with at Rutgers University. We re-lived days of hosting bad radio shows, writing dubious poetry, and playing self-confessional folk music. And yesterday, Michael and I discover we’re from the same town and know people in common, one of which was a childhood friend of his and a high school buddy of mine. At one point Michael and I were living a couple blocks from each other.

    The real life connections are still more exciting than the virtual ones.

  • Undressed Typography

    Pushing aside the cobwebs in the Razorfish archives I found a couple interesting specimens. They still hold up, all while reminding us of that period when frames helped us navigate and people took animated gifs seriously. Though they look old, you can simultaneously see how new they were when they were new.

    Undressed – a Dutch catalog of underthings


    typoGRAPHIC – self-explanatory