June 2000

To everyone in the US, happy Independence Day

Just returned from my second-ever trip to the San Francisco/Silicon Valley area, the first being just a few weeks ago. Interesting how everyone, from the client to the cabbies, lament the suburban/corporate sprawl that obliterates the orchards and other open space. I just saw the revival of Sam Shepard’s True West, originally written in the…

Celebrity sighting! I saw Joy Mountford in the San Francisco airport coming off the plane I was getting on. But by the time I realized who it was she had walked away. I heard a speech she and Brenda Laurel gave at NYU in 1993 and it got me all excited about human computer interaction,…

There’s a great thread on usability testing on the CHI-WEB list. In the middle of it Jared Spool inserts this funny jab: [I don’t want to get into a discussion of whether this is the difference between customer experience and usability. I personally think the current “customer experience” movement is a crock of shit. I…

Question: Does anybody know of good examples of functionality that satifies similar user needs as a search, but has no actual “text-box” search? Answer: You could think of this as a balance between the number of categories you have and the amount of text you have. If you don’t have much text each chunk could…

More on The Capeman: Police reports and photos of the dead, from Revolutionary Worker Online comes a thoughtful examination of the play, the media, politics, and art, some of the original reviews, and the official Salvador Agron web site.

With all the bad reviews of Paul Simon’s 1998 musical The Capeman, I never really heard the soundtrack. After listening to more of his mind-blowing previous album, Rhythm of the Saints, I decided to pick up The Capeman. I’m stunned again, so much beauty, so much great pop music composition, sophisticated lyrics, all revolving around…

If you play guitar you might be happy to learn there’s new tabulature at the “OLGA” database. This was closed a while ago for copyright infringement (not unlike the current furor over Napster). Apparently now they’re getting around that by simply linking to tab on other servers; it’ll be tough for the Harry Fox agency…

Julia Butterfly, what a beautiful experience – living your life with a tree in order to save it, and making an ecological difference. I don’t know if she practices any particular religion (her father used to be a minister), but it seems like she is living the philosophy of love (from Jesus, MLK Jr., et…

Funny email from a recruiter (start from the bottom). The point I made to her is that if she uses offensive techniques to find employees it just may work, and poor iXL will end up with a bunch of employees who think spamming is a healthy use of the Internet. From: Victor Lombardi Sent: Monday,…

David’s netWert Ideapad (which is an interesting blog in it’s own right) linked to EOD and this wonderful piece on alphabits. Reminds me of the kind of philosophical-view-of-the-everyday that Tom Robbins does so well.

I love you. Yes you. You Irish information architects, you lonely graphic designers, you mindless spiders indexing me at 4 a.m.

I just noticed Yahoo! Mail doesn’t have a way to set the priority of a mail message. I wonder how many other web-based mailers leave out standard SMTP/POP fields? I’m sure by not providing this field to the hundreds of thousands of people using Yahoo! Mail they’ll learn to email without ever using the feature,…

“One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will…

Looking through Amazon’s best seller lists, iXL is reading books like “True Professionalism : The Courage to Care About Your People, Your Clients, and Your Career”, “The Deadline : A Novel About Project Management”, “The Rational Unified Process”, while Sapient is reading “The Creative Priority : Driving Innovative Business in the Real World”, “The Art…