Saturday, August 27, 2005

I feel so. . . so. . . special! Seems Jared got the same email I did from Julie at Microsoft, personalized in a very special way: Hello Spool?. Microsoft Staffing has a strange way of greeting people. . . [UIE Brain Sparks] Sorry, Julie, I'm pretty happy where I am, thank you anyway. 7:48:30 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

Why, yes, now that you ask. . . Yes, I have been on vacation. An entire week away from home at the get-away at Lake Tahoe. With the wife and kids. For the first time, ever, an entire week on vacation with this family. Each summer, I spend a week, more or less, at the lake. Every year I try to catch up on the reading that I haven't done during the rest of the year by taking a big box of books with me with the goal of reading five of them. I made it through 4-1/2 books this year: John Markoff's wonderful What the Dormouse Said. There's plenty of history of the last twenty years or so, of the PC and the Web and the fortunes made (and lost) in Silicon Valley. This one's remarkable for turning back the clock all the way to the early '60s (with a bit of the 50s even), to look at some of the previously unheralded founders of the personal computer industry. I learned a lot, like that Doug Engelbart did a whole lot more than invent the mouse, and that free software didn't start with Richard Stallman. Highly recommended. The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler. Subtitled Mythic Structure for Writers. Is it a formula for screenwriters who want to pen the latest Hollywood hit? Or analysis of the elements that make Star Wars and Harry Potter so appealing by touching archetypes within us all? Yes. Speaking of whom, I made it through Harry Potter #5, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Which 1) keeps me ahead of young son Willy, who's working his way through the series with Mom's help, 2) keeps me ahead of the HP film production schedule, and 3) qualifies me to move on to #6. The Elements of User Experience, by Jesse James Garrett. While "user experience" is much more than designing Web sites (the book's focus), Garrett's framework for looking at the different elements and roles is clearly useful. It helped clarify some of my thinking. Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Only got through half of this one--the writing's very good, but the exposition is sufficiently dense that it will take some time getting through. Fascinating, though. Who knew we relied on so many metaphors? 7:30:08 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

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