In my adolescence, I read many of Anne McCaffrey’s books, especially the Pern books, which are about a world where dragons and dragonriders are real (eventually explained as genetically bred from small lizards… whatever!). The last of the three books I picked up at the library a few weeks ago is the newest Pern book,…

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Just replied to an email from a colleague from my college days, and it made me think about getting to know people in new contexts. I use the word colleague, but he was a friend, though never very close. We knew each other at the boathouse, without spending much time together for other reasons. But…

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Steve Yelvington explains why the move to Cascading Style Sheets is a business decision, not a technical/standards decision. …if all things were equal, all sites should be CSS2-compliant. But all things aren’t equal. He also describes the business needs of most news sites as ‘presentational integrity’ which he defines as knowing where content AND ads…

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The San Francisco Public Library website is oh-so-slow. I’m trying to find out if the local branch, or any branch, has a copy of Desolation Island by Patrick O’Brian (I’m almost done with the biography). But in both Safari and IE 5.2.2 on MacOS X, the results are empty and slow. I haven’t used the…

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The Lafayette Project is still under wraps, but MegNut and two other early bloggers are the founders, and at least in what little they say, I think they are tackling a real problem. That problem is “We want to help readers browse weblogs when they *don’t* know what they’re looking for.” (The entire admittedly vague…

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Should not be so hard to do, but I found the instructions, so we’ll see if this works.

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Watched 12 hours of user tests over the last two days, typing into my work blog the entire time… more than 40 pages of single-spaced transcripts/notes, on my laptop without the ergonomic keyboard. Ouch. But also used the opportunity to make my blog more of a public item at work, to positive response. Since a…

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Bringing in real people today to look at some new ideas at work. This is labeled ‘user testing’ — but it really means ‘assumption testing.’ Various ideas and strongly-held beliefs make their way into concrete form (in this case, web pages) based on gut instinct, log files, and compromises between internal consistuents. Now we really…

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I’m not going to do it, but I can write 1,000 words a lot easier than I can find/draw/photograph a picture to tell the same story. I find it frustrating to work with people who are need visuals because I have a harder time explaining myself. But it’s not worth beating my head against the…

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Tiny, tiny example. Yesterday I noted that I was trying ImageWell, which (I now know) I came across via John Robb’s blog. I had one odd crash later that day, after upgrading to MacOS X 10.2.5. I didn’t think much of it, nor connect the dots. But I later read Chris Gulker was also trying…

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