Posted in Photography on September 29, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
Here’s a pic I took on my drive home today:
I made this slightly out of the way trip so that I could submit an entry to A Day On Earth 9/29, which I came across in one of my Flickr feeds.
The curious thing about this to me is that I’m pretty skeptical about this whole MySpace for Boomers phenomenon. Yet I got all fired up to find an entry for this. Hmmmm.
Posted in Friday cat blogging on September 29, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
I realized that this cat hasn’t made an appearance yet in my collection of Friday cat blogging photos yet.
This one has actually been faved on Flickr by four people. Go figure! But I particularly liked the comment that one person left:
… i like that her toys are all over the floor, just like my house.
Guilty as charged!
Posted in WM_archive on September 27, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
Kumie, a former co-worker, shares her pain with iTunes. Her letter to Apple:
While you sh** heads are getting your act together with Itunes 7, maybe you should put a link to download Itunes 6 on the Itunes page in the meantime. Your sh***y program and sh***y new “gapless playback” feature has deleted about 4 gigs worth of music off of my Ipod, and it keeps crashing everytime I try to load new songs onto my Ipod.
Kind Regards,
Kumie
I don’t have quite her same pain with iPhoto (which I’m currently using on this laptop because I’m too cheap to upgrade my old OS9 Photoshop license), but I can feel.
This is not an Apple issue…software problems are the norm rather than the exception. The curious thing is that Apple, who does incredible product design (crap, I love their packaging) hasn’t figured out how to translate that to the application space.
I wonder if that will happen in my lifetime?
Posted in Visual on September 27, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
This one went into the queue when I was doing my renewal, but better late than never. I ran across this post from Presentation Zen which is largely about the Tufte vs Powerpoint smackdown.
Re PPT, the highlights for me are those which counter Tufte’s position: Don Norman’s “In defense of Powerpoint” and Jean-luc Doumont’s The cognitive style of PowerPoint: slides are not all evil.
Enough said about Don (though you should also check out his take on Google’s simplicity). I know Jean-luc from STC, and had the great privilege of being able to review his essay before it was published in their quarterly journal. If you are at all interested in this subject, then either pay the $6 to download it from Amazon, or go find a college library that has back issues of Technical Communication, and find v52(1), p.64 (Feb 2005).
Presentation Zen also recommended Seth Godin’s Gel 2006 talk, specifically because he talks about Tufte and Minard’s graphic of Napoleon’s march to Moscow, which I first saw back in the 1980s in an ACM magazine (I actually framed that magazine page, and still have it in my office nearly 20 years later…that’s one cool graphic).
Godin makes the point that Minard’s graphic is, in essence, “broken on purpose.” He first says that “I think it’s one of the worst graphs ever made” but that this graph is really for the kind of person who gets satisfaction out of getting the complexity in the graph. Or as Godin says, break it for the people you don’t care about, and make it work for the people you do.
But I also recommend the Godin video for its main subject which is why things are broken, which include:
Since I’ve watched it, I keep coming back to one or more of his points and go, yep, that’s it (particularly the first and fifth).
Posted in WM_archive on September 26, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
Note to self: Dirk’s article on applied empathy as a design framework looks very interesting. Consider application to our new efforts. (Hat tip: InfoDesign)
Posted in Administrivia on September 26, 2006 | 1 Comment »
Got a blog? Then I hope you have Akismet.
I’m not sure why I put off installing it here, but the 20 or so spam comments over the weekend were more than enough motivation. Granted, comment moderation is nice (especially when there is a batch mode), but frankly, I was tired of just getting the useless email notifications. Now they too are a thing of the past.
Askimet works nicely with WordPress, but there are other implementations, including an official one for Movable Type.
Sweet!
Posted in WM_archive on September 23, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
(Gee…a whole week with no posts? Wish I had a good excuse.)
I heard yesterday that we’ve now hit the point where the average home has more TVs than people. Yikes.
Of course, I’m a guilty party. I live alone, but have two myself (three if you count the tiny portable that’s been in my desk drawer for a few years now). And I sit here now, catching up on all my feeds, uploading a Flickr pic, and finally blogging myself … catching up on 5 hours of Oprah, an episode of Six Degrees, and the episodes of Countdown (Olbermann rocks) and The Daily Show I haven’t yet watched from the previous week.
Other TV notes: IMO, Studio 60 lived up to the hype; likewise Grey’s Anatomy. Seriously great writing. Despite the fact that Men in Trees has kooky Anne Heche and is too much like Northern Exposure, the cute scientist makes it worth TiVoing. I’m bummed that there’s no Medium until January (after football), but am really looking forward to Ugly Betty.
Geez. I may need an intervention!
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our modern culture -- especially diet. Beth writes about ancestral health, health policy, & mindfulness. And cats! More »
