At last - freedom for four days!
I’m sitting in on the CHI 2007 conference in San Jose (thank you SNOCAP!) This is my third year in a row at the conference, and I’ve had a good run here. And it’s an opportunity to catch up with some very close friends and colleagues. Sweet!
No promises, but I’ll do my best to blog the conference as the next few days unfold (or, at the very least, link to people that are!).
Time to check out Bill Moggridge from IDEO…
Sometimes, it’s the little things.
Today, I noticed that my local corner grocery store now sells cold Coca-Cola in glass bottles - not the classic 16-ouncers of yore, but not those tiny 10-ounce Christmas ones either. No, these were perfectly acceptable, drinkable, ice-cold 12-ounce recyclable glass Cokes.
I’m not really the nostalgic type, but it’s puzzling to me that these are so hard to find these days - after all, they simply taste better (and no, it’s not the placebo effect - try blindfolding yourself and take a taste test sometime. Pour Cokes from a glass bottle, aluminum can, and plastic bottle into three glasses and see for yourself. Taste is subjective I suppose, but they each definitely have distinctively different flavor).
I’m sure it all comes down to money (doesn’t everything these days?). And convenience - glass weighs more, probably costs more to make (and ship), and the stores have to deal with those pesky returnables - who has time for that, right?
I’m just glad I finally found some tasty, cold, glass-bottle Coca-Cola. It just tastes better, dammit.
Whoa. That was quite a ride.
After three months of blog silence, it looks like we MIGHT have finally emerged from the other end of the wormhole.
So what happened?
It’s pretty simple, really. A large chunk of my time these days is devoted to my job (interaction designer for SNOCAP). SNOCAP is involved in several interesting things these days, and needless to say, the design team’s work is moving along at a pretty brisk pace.
For those not familiar with the company I work for, SNOCAP is probably best known at the moment for a system that allows musicians to create, manage, distribute and share these things (warning to feed-readers - the flash movie below may or may not display in rss aggregators):
As designers at almost any web company will tell you, it’s problematic trying to maintain a blog when half of your time is spent two miles underground in a secure bunker devising top-secret web strategies intended to spark a complete paradigm shift in the way people experience (insert whatever business model your company has here).
In other words, I’m not at liberty to talk about what I consider to be the most “interesting” stuff (since whatever I happen to be working on at any given time isn’t live on the web yet), and things move so quickly that by the time our designs are live, they’re not as interesting to me anymore (since by then I’ve usually moved on to some other uber-cool project). So you see my dilemma.
But good news is here, folks:
In the meantime, it’s a lovely day outside. I think I’ll go for a walk.
So, I’ve made a quick trip back to the “scene of the crime,” so to speak - the place I spent most of the last 13 years of my life until July of this year. It’s a quick, frantic trip, filled with quick visits of people I’d rather spend a little more time with. But so far it’s still been fun seeing everyone.
However… it’s a little creepy too. After living in the Bay Area the past few months, starting a “real” job with Snocap, making money and feeling somewhat “important,” I feel a bit odd that so little has changed here. Granted, I’ve only been gone five months, but so much has happened to me since then that it feels like a year or more…
The weirdest part, quite frankly, has been seeing my “non-school” friends (the “townies,” if you will). It’s been dawning on me that many/most of my friends will probably spend most of their lives in or near this little town, whether they realize it or not. And there’s nothing wrong with that - Bloomington is a bit of an oasis in the state of Indiana. But I definitely feel like I’ve outgrown it, and I wonder if others here will ever feel the same way.
There are a lot of things about the world that you never experience when you stay in a town like this too long. And, really, you have to leave for a while to fully appreciate that…
Wow, just wow.
Warning: Not for the kids. Not for work either. In fact this is one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen in a long, long time. It’s so sad that I’m not even going to bother commenting on it. But just some brief background: it’s a clip of campus police officers tasering a guy over and over again basically because -
- get this -
- wait for it -
he didn’t have a student ID card.
Good to see our campus police are keeping us safe. I know I’LL be sleeping better tonight 
.
The article is here.
The YouTube video (shot on a student’s cellphone - warning, this is disturbing stuff):
One of my pet peeves is advertisements (and other clickable images on websites) that inentionally mislead users by showing bogus affordances that make an ad link look like a scrollbar, button, form etc.
This wasn’t too big of a deal until fairly recently, since “Web 2.0″ and Flash-based UI widgets (such as embedded video players etc.) used to be a fairly unusual sight. Today, however, we have flash games on MySpace, YouTube flash video players, etc. and so the frauds can be slightly tougher to spot.
A good example of this is the MSNBC flickr-looking “scroll” ad showing up on news sites lately (as of this moment at least)…
WHy does this bother me? Because it’s fundamentally dishonest (not to mention annoying), and, more importantly, because it erodes users’ trust in things on webpages that look like buttons, scrollbars, form fields, etc., which in turn makes our job harder, especially as we attempt to design interface elements that may be new or initially unfamiliar.
And so I have a new term for this annoying stuff - “UI spam.” To me, it’s the obvious term, since it’s generally unwanted, inherently deceptive, and usually done to make a cheap buck.
I “discovered” the entrance to the roof of my apartment building yesterday and took some photos of the surrounding view. Pretty sweet.
Looking southeast (towards the Mission District - SF Bay is on the left):
East/northeast (downtown):
North (Western Addition/Pacific Heights):
Southwest (Twin Peaks):
South (Mission/Castro/Dolores Park - San Bruno Mountain in the background ):
Attention HCI Informatics students…
Over the next few days I’ll be making a few posts containing tips and info I’ve picked up over the past several months. Much of this info is stuff I’d wished I’d known before I graduated from IU and entered the “real world…”
This info may or may not be helpful to others out there as well. If some of this stuff looks like old news to you, please disregard it (and if you disagree or have more to add, feel free to leave comments).
To begin, I’d like to simply post some links to design-related podcasts I’ve run into over the past year or so. There’s a lot of crap out there, but I’ve found the following handful of audio feeds to be very informative, enjoyable to listen to, and (most importantly) very current and relevant to what’s going on in the industry (more informal, entertainment-geared podcasts like diggnation etc. aren’t included here, but that doesn’t mean I don’t listen to them as well).
So, without further ado:
Well, my ambient orb finally arrived from Thinkgeek today. It’s been the talk of the office all afternoon. Tonight I will take it home and start hacking it, but in the meantime it’s displaying local weather forecast information (not terribly useful in San Francisco, since the weather here is fairly predictable. Still, though….)
Finally got the time to port everything over to wordpress. Now I can do things that normal bloggers do, such as provide a valid feed, properly manage links, etc. I will never take such things fro granted again.
For readers, this probably means more readable content in the near future, since posting won’t be such a daunting enterprise. Life is good.
EDIT: Still some quirks to iron out, such as the clickability of links etc. I’m actually starting to miss blogger. Too bad their new beta doesn’t allow you to host anywhere besides blogspot…