December 2000

There’s more and more layoffs in the digital consulting industry. I feel grateful that Razorfish only had to layoff 5% of our folks. The Scient situation particularly makes sense. They grew at a simply unbelievable rate (almost 2,000 employees in 3 years, it took Razorfish over 5 years to get to that point). Any of…

The amazing English language. Funny when a word has two meanings that seem incompatible: neologism \nee-AH-luh-jih-zum\ (noun) *1 : a new word, usage, or expression 2 : a meaningless word coined by a psychotic

Interesting quote from Jef Raskin, of the early Macintosh interface team: “…even when a better design — if unfamiliar — is shown to developers or experienced users, they tend to reject it.”

Patterns of Hypertext Interesting reading, and could help fill a void in our vocabulary as information architects. Though he uses the term “pattern language” I think these may fall short of actual patterns. I don’t expect them to be in “Alexandrian” form, but I think they should include the introduction, a discussion of something observed,…

The web design rumor mill starts churning…Peterme just left Epinions, and travels to Ann Arbor, home of Argus Associates. Hmmmmm…

MP3.com Resurrects Online Music Service. Seems by sellling its soul to the music companies mp3.com adopted their fear of distributing digital music too. Now their model rests on the ability to store your CDs on the Internet in the form of mp3s so you can access them anywhere. Woohoo!! Who cares? I can do this…

Christopher Alexander in the NY Times. No revelations here, just interesting voyeristic reading.

We’re doing some e-commerce consulting for a non-profit organization.Their merchant bank informed them that Visa will soon be requiring all online vendors to verify transactions in real-time. Right now what our client does is securely accept credit card information online and store it in a text file, which a human then processes in a batch…

Reading about fiber optic Internet connections in the recent tech edition of The New Yorker, I predict two situations that’ll impact us in the world of interface design using very high speed connections: There will never be enough bandwidth to do what we want. Even when we have virtual reality we’ll desire enhanced reality. We…

About 3/4 of the way across the Tappan Zee Bridge my car stalled last night. Trying not to panic, I attempted to restart it while rolling, no luck. I coasted a while more and stopped with a hundred yards left to go to the toll booth. Got out and pushed and after a minute another…

Just looked through my web log reports and for the first time my paper on Music Censorship is more popular than my blog. Turns out it gets fairly high ranking from Google. What amazes me now is the quality of writing I was capable of back in college when I wrote that. I think my…

Shit, I just realized World AIDS Day just pasted and I neglected to black out my blog. I did spend most of the day working hard on a web site that teaches tolerance, so I think that more than makes up for it.

“I can’t hide the emotion I feel upon seeing an unbiased judge apply the law. Chileans are not afraid to judge a dictator.”

I just finished doing some usability testing on a web site that had some disturbing news content from around the U.S. I was bothered by the amount of people who didn’t care much about it because it’s ‘not in my back yard.’ Even in this age of speedy communications and travel people still think horrifying…

A badly designed site associated with a master of architecture, Christopher Alexander. But sometimes I like to abandon thoughts of usability and just wander among sites like this, giving myself up to the novel whims of the creator.