Weight Maven

I heard this really bad news at a meeting this AM:

Fire coursed through the shops of the historic Eastern Market on Capitol Hill early Monday morning, gutting the southern half of the 134-year-old landmark.

I’m ashamed that in my nearly ten years in DC, I had just gotten to Eastern Market last fall.

The good news is that the overwhelming sentiment is to rebuild. Terrific!

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Another Beth blogs:

Web Analytics packages are sold as if it’s an automatic coffee maker. In fact, it is more like buying a coffee plantation. You can still get your cup of coffee (eventually), but your [sic] going to have to stick your hands in a lot more manure than you ever knew.

How funny! (And how true.)

Ten years ago I wrote a paper for an STC conference titled “Lies, Damned Lies, and Web Statistics” that talked about doing web metrics in the days well before there were “real” web analytic packages.

And the funny quote then was:

Interpreting web statistics has been described as “trying to nail Jell-o to the wall.”

My approach back in the day was to write Perl scripts to churn log files. How passé now! But many of the issues (such as what you actually measure versus what is interpreted) are still very valid, and newer technologies, like AJAX are only muddying the metrics waters.

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Ugh. It looks like it hit at least 85 degrees here today. This wouldn’t be a problem, except that I live in an old building that has a forced water heating/cooling system. This means that you don’t get AC until they’ve flipped the switch from heating to cooling … and we haven’t switched :(.

The good news is that this old building is really well insulated. The bad news is that it takes like all night for the heat that builds up during the day to dissipate (even with open windows and fan action).

Gonna be another long night!

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Okay, I normally don’t go for the kind of great expository writing that Liz and Kathleen do so well, but I’m making an exception today. Today is my last day as part of AARP’s web team. It’s also my last day in web development; I’m staying with AARP, but moving into a completely different area, where I’ll be a project manager involved with our social impact work.

There’s a lot that went into this decision that I won’t go into here, but ultimately I’m moving back to be involved more directly with non-profit efforts. While our web group supported the non-profit side, we ourselves were in the for-profit subsidiary, and in recent years, have become more and more commercially focused.

Me? I’m motivated by things other than revenue generation. And with the Boomers (myself included) heading towards retirement age, the next couple of decades are going to make aging issues a really interesting place to play … or work.

So now I’m going to be more directly involved in these issues.

Part of me is wondering if I’m insane for making this leap. I have over a decade of web experience, and I’m just saying see ya? But I’m pretty committed to staying with AARP. Now that I’m spitting distance of 50 (and having spent nearly 10 years on the periphery of issues like affordable health care and Social Security solvency), I’m expecting to retire from AARP; it just seems to be prudent for me.

And given the prospect of another 10-15 years here, I had to figure out whether I wanted to spend all that time doing web work. And the truth is, I didn’t. It sounds trite, but I want to do work that makes the world a better place, not just work that I’m reasonably competent at. (The bonus is that AARP has 53 state and territory offices, so this new job may open up some opportunities to either head back to New England or explore some place completely different.)

So, my new job may be a bit of frying pan into the fire situation (I spent the last day and a half listening to my new colleagues vent about the long, tedious, painful process that is called “operational planning” here :). But the thought of being involved more directly in efforts related to affordable health care and financial security feels right.

To my friends in WSO, both past and present, it was truly a pleasure working with you!

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Just announced:

Talk show host Don Imus’ situation worsened Wednesday, when MSNBC announced that it would no longer simulcast the “Imus in the Morning” radio program.

I’ve been reading the commentary on places like HuffPo that claim that we need to tolerate Imus’ kind of speech, but for me, what was the real issue here was that Imus didn’t just make a comment using slang from some hip-hop song, he targeted it at a group of young women who were completely undeserving of the statement in question, and were clearly hurt by it.

So I’m glad MSNBC made this decision. It would have been nice if they had done it before the advertisers had started peeling off in droves, but hey, better late than never.

Update, 4/12: So now it’s buh-bye from CBS. For all those who worry (like David Shuster Gregory on Hardball right now), whether or not the punishment fits the crime, all I can say is, if Opie and Anthony are an example, then being fired for offensive, hurtful on-air behavior may be temporary at best.

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Or, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

So I was doing my regular read of InfoDesign, and came across Keith Instone’s Reaction to NextD, which points to this PDF by GK VanPatter, IA’s Unidentical Twins (Revisited), which is an expansion of a recent comment to Peter Morville post on Information Architecture 3.0 from last fall.

The issue?

While the Information Architecture community of today is notorious for having a short, inwardly focused, airbrushed historical memory, it is well known that contemporary Information Architecture practice and the Information Architecture community began years before the dot-com era arrived (as did the Experience Design community).

Yep. And that’s when all the trouble began. You see, all of this is really Richard Saul Wurman’s fault, since he’s the one who chose the term “information architecture” when he really meant information design. Really.

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