Month: November 1999

Compulsive Multitasking When one of my web-newbie friends begins to get the hang of surfing web sites, I start to give them more colloquial tips like, “Ya know, you can have more than one browser window open at a time and look at a second page while the first is loading.”

Now I realize this habit is not just wisely utilizing my time and modem bandwidth, it’s an Addiction. Just now I was happily reading a fascinating page and noticed the other browser window wasn’t earning its keep, so I had to make it go somewhere, do something, just to keep those little lights flashing in my eyes.

Do DHTML layers compound the usual can’t-bookmark-it problem of frames? For example, this post was going to wonder what the atmosphere is like in the New Jersey office of Sapient, since being in the center of a metropolitan area (New York in this case) seems intrinsic to creating a new media company that attracts hard-to-find employees, and yet they manage to maintain offices on both sides of the Hudson river (literally just across the river from each other).

But when I tried to grab the link to that particular page I couldn’t, because it’s a DHTML layer activated via a JavaScript link (maybe there’s another way to do this, but it probably ain’t worth my time). So I can’t link to that page and must instead tell you, the emburdened reader, to first click on “Offices” then on “New York” if seeing how just close together their NJ and NY offices are is that important to you.

Why Web Desingers Hate Their Jobs is an interesting article. It actually focuses on visual designers; we information designers don’t have said gripes. I feel more justified in lobbying for version 3 browser support for certain mass market web sites.

It seems entirely possible for Americans to go through the rituals of Thanksgiving without actually giving thanks.

What’s been bugging me lately is Christians celebrating Christmas without considering how Jesus would want it celebrated. Somehow I don’t think a man of compassion, poverty, and service to others would say, “Spend a great deal of time shopping and then on my birthday give each other presents while stuffing yourselves full of food and liquor.” While the “Keep Christ in Christmas” people endeavor to keep Jesus in mind during all this revelry, I’m ranting because I think the whole holiday is misguided.

As a member of a religion that doesn’t expect any faith or ritual of me, I’m more likely to celebrate the influence of Jesus’s philosophy by doing some volunteer work. I feel obligated because normally I sit on my ass designing digital stuff, not nursing people to health or teaching autistic kids as my sisters do. They’re living the volunteer work and deserve the day off.

Fun word of the day:


chin-wag \CHIN-wag\ (noun)

slang : conversation, chat



Example sentence:

“Few things in life are better than a good chin-wag over a cup of
tea,”
my aunt often said, and I have fond memories of our many teatime chats.

Courtesy of Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day

I continue the slide into yuppie scuminess with the purchase of a mobile phone. I was going to rationalize/justify the purchase by replacing my landline with the only marginally more expensive PCS service, but alas the quality of service is not there yet.

Ironically, even though there’s a PCS relay right in my town, I have trouble getting a digital connection inside my apartment. Maybe it’s the plaster walls in this old house blocking the signal. When I step out the front door the signal wakes right up.

Thanksgiving Day. I’m tempted to divide the world into two types of people: those who question authority and those who don’t.

More notes on A Pattern Language (also see November 19th below).

• Patterns make up a living language that should evolve with use.
  
• “The Timeless Way of Building” says that every society, and even every individual, will have its own pattern language, shared but distinct. So our effort should not be to find the best language for a particular field but the best language for our own work.
  
• Our present language is framented and brutal, hindering our communication and design process.
  
• Though in use the user will follow a sequence of larger (more general) to smaller (more specific) patterns, the language itself is a network, with many connections in all directions.
  
• Patterns can be combined with more or less density as we would a spoken language, creating design more like prose or more like poetry.
  

New York as puree. An interview with Spalding Gray is one of the many treasures resulting from PBS’s documentary on New York City.

The documentary inspires me to tears, the beauty of the effort of so many to build so much – museums, skyscrapers, bridges, jobs, lives. It also makes me wonder if, now that most things that can be built are built, if we can continue the effort or just coast on a great momentum.

For example, it amazes me that California, Texas, Massachusetts, even Atlanta and Virginia have all embraced the technology economy and culture while New York continues to concentrate on bagels and clothes. We can wield some high power new media offices like Razorfish, iXL, and Sapient but only because the proximity to Wall Street is attractive to the financial community. I’m afraid we’ll get to a point where technology is not only a dominant force in the economy but THE dominant force and New York will become a has-been city that didn’t adjust to the 21st century way of conducting business.

Someone at work brought one of the new Sega Dreamcast consoles into work last week. While the new games, like Soul Calibur and Power Stone certainly have graphics that are visually stunning for a home computer, these games lack a certain amount of direct manipulation that I consider vital to the gaming experience. I like to move the control and see a perfect corresponding movement on the screen, and you don’t get that with these games. I think it’s possible, but it seems that the hardware itself (“3 million polygons per second…128-bit 3D processing power…”) as well as the game design emphasize visuals over interactivity.

I’ll rather play the older, less flashy Marathon any day.

I had a fanciful idea last night to think only good, Zenful thoughts and blog accordingly. Oh well…

The goodexperience folks think Yahoo should modify their search results to get in line with their marketing promotions, but I disagree. I think search results should be based on more objective, quantitative measures and not a tool for marketing types.

The Yahoo search engine is valuable because it provides a service. We have a certain expectation of that service – that it aggregates links to web sites and intelligently lets us search through those links. If you mix what is commonly understood as content with what is commonly understood as advertising you deceive readers and end up creating one big advertisement, thereby diluting the value of the service and decreasing loyalty in the long term.

A team of Razorfish NYC Information Designers were chosen to be one of four groups to participate in a live, timed design challenge at CHI2000 at The Hague. Go team!

Looks like Amazon is learning from epinions. At the end of each of their reader-contributed product reviews is now a line that reads, “Was this review helpful to you? [Yes] [No]”. I guess they’re experimenting with ways to promote the helpful reviews and demote the sucky ones.

Falling into a rut? Try some neurobic excercises. (yes, I know that sounds silly, but it’s scientifically sound and fun too).

The rest of the book is worth a read as well. The first few chapters summarize the fascinating recent neulogical research, and the rest of the book consists of neurobic excercises to leverage that research.