Wednesday, May 29, 2002

Minor updates. Thanks to coherent instructions, I'm using Radio's Outliner to manage and display my linklist. Not really a "blogroll," since I want to track more than weblogs. Linklist works for me. Also changed the tagline back to something I'd orginally thought of when starting this site: history is nothing more than a vast collection of todays. Implication being that you can create a history simply by writing a little bit, every day. The more days you have, the richer your history becomes. 11:15:36 PM

Most of my posts during the day are done via e-mail. I make sure to send plain text messages. I double and triple check the HTML. I confirm that there are no errant spaces or funky punctuation, and preview everything in my browser before sending it to my Radio server, patiently waiting on my desktop to ping my super secret e-mail account, with my super secret password, so it can then post my pithy comments online. And then, every once in awhile, I get an unbelievably long link because somehow, someway, a space was inserted between a slash and an "a." I'll fix it when I get home (update: fixed it, but kept the screenshot to remember the mystery space). But still. Very annoying. 3:08:58 PM

Enjoying a tasty (if not enormous) burrito from Chipotle for lunch today. Yummy. I've known for awhile that they're owned by McDonald's. I suppose that I'm okay with that, although I'm not fond of discovering that what I thought was a small, up-and-coming company is really a carefully crafted enterprise funded by a gigantoid parent company (also see what I thought was a small, independent bookstore that is actually owned by a local media conglomerate). Anyway. The food is great, and fresh, so I don't mind the subterfuge as much. But while trying to look up information about Chipotle online, I learned that McDonald's also owns Boston Market, and a pizza chain I've never heard of. Sigh. Guess I won't feel so bad anymore if I bring fries from McDonald's into the Boston Market across the street. Seriously, though, I wish there was a law where these subsidiary companies were required to display a small sign on their front door, listing their parent company. Same applies to ESPN and ABC, which are both in turn owned by Disney. Who can you trust, if you don't know which hands are lining which pockets? 2:35:08 PM

Finally. 81°F, with temperatures forecasted in the eighties through the weekend. 2:10:39 PM

I'd printed this article on why great technologies do not make great designs to read during some downtime. Lots of good common sense inside. Unfortunately, like most things common and sensible, we tend to forget about it tomorrow, or next week. It's good to refresh the memory every now and then: We develop inbred thinking in this industry. We spend most of our time with people who scored over 700 on their math SATs, we know people involved in IPOs and stock options, and we work with folks who take computers apart for fun. We forget that the people within our industry are very different from the rest of the world. That's why going into the usability lab or a focus group seems like a trip into the twilight zone. It seems like those users are in the minority, visiting us from some twisted and slower universe. The reality is this: we are the overwhelming minority. Those visitors in the usability lab are the majority, and they are the folks using our products and paying our salaries. 1:19:19 PM

Jakob Nielson: About half of the users now access the Internet from more than one location. Despite the implications of this for service design, many systems assume that users remain bound to a single computer. 10:31:18 AM