Friday, December 7, 2007

Another loss to music Bummer. Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the first electronic music composers I listened to, has died. I remember listening to his Hymnen while in college, being completely mesmerized by the mixture of the world's national anthems and squeaks of radio static. Influential, controversial, a giant. What a loss. More Stockhausen posts: Karlheinz Stockhausen, RIP. Pioneering avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen died on Wednesday. Stockhausen's pioneering electro-acoustic music influenced everyone from John Cage to the Beatles, David Bowie to Sonic Youth. He was 79. Link to Stockhausen.org, Link to Associated Press obituary. [Boing Boing] Stockhausen Dead. Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the most important and controversial postwar composers who helped shape a new understanding of sound through electronic compositions, died at his home in western Germany. He was 79. NYT [Archinect.com Feed] I didn't realize that he appears on the Sgt. Pepper's cover; turns out the Beatles had some good musical sense after all. 2:49:12 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

A rewarding experience Carl Kessler, like a proud papa, spreads the news about a nice little award that IBM Software Group VP Steve Mills handed out last week: Congratulations to the OmniFind Yahoo! Edition development team!. The OmniFind Yahoo! Edition development team won the IBM Software Group Consumability Excellence Award for 3Q07 [~] congratulations! . . . [outside-in-thinking] This is the team that I've been working on since earlier this year (but the award was for the first release, before I joined). The product has earned all sorts of praise in the press, and provides an example within IBM of how usable [~] consumable, in the lingo [~] an IBM product can be. Working on OYE has been really educational for me: I get to push the envelope on how much information we can get into the user interface, and how little "help" we need to deliver in support of using the product. And the users seem to appreciate the results. Carl is a few rungs up the management ladder in the development organization that I work with; he definitely "gets it" when it comes to quality, usable, just-in-time documentation. 7:20:17 AM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

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