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Read Sportscolumn.com for biased views on sports. Uneven columns, but that Philly fan is usually entertaining. Too bad the Eagles will disappoint him once again. Not sure how or why or when, but it will happen.

Here’s an Empire State Building made entirely of Legos. [via Slashdot] When I was a kid, my dad and I built a paper model of this building from a kit. Took a long time, but it was fun. It was also fun, years later, when it was a bit worse for wear, to burn the model. Somewhere, there are pictures of that pyre. With a bit of Googling, I found the exact item (well, a 1994 reprint): Build Your Own Empire State Building: So Easy Even an Adult Can Do It. I don’t remember that extra qualifier… guess it would be harder for me now! 😉

Old link from Wellesley press release promoting her thesis. No one did that for mine… not that it deserved it. And here’s a record of her athletic accomplishment (scroll down to the District 1 Academic All-Americas). Woo-hoo.

Significant use of the iSight, as recorded by David Pogue in the NYTimes. A heck of a lot better than that TV commercial for AT&T wireless about a travelling salesman talking to his daughter at bedtime while he sits in the airport.

No, no, no. I don’t mean the children. I mean ‘smell’ what’s a few levels down in a heirarchical taxonomy, as Victor Lombardi writes in Where Nav Meets Taxonomy. Children, in this case, are those topics which are subordinate to other topics. Think biological classification: mammals are a parent of canines, and so forth. Lots of energy in site design/navigation goes into trying to apply taxonomies and ontologies to site content, pretending that this will work for most visitors because they will understand that canines are mammals, and know where to look for information about dogs if they see a link titled Mammals on the home page of your site.

There is a reason most good sites (unlike this one) have solid search. Taxonomies are important metadata for search, but are not often a perfect match for how people understand, and navigate, certain content.

I’ll have to read Victor’s site more often, although the RSS feed didn’t seem to work, which makes keeping track more complicated. Update: now the RSS feed is working fine… maybe I found a bad link earlier this afternoon.

Thanks to Jeffrey Veen for linking to this SFGate.com piece, “The Hot Porn Of Pottery Barn
Think Abercrombie & Fitch is racy? You haven’t seen these naked, nubile coffee tables“. The article is amusing, about how some people are (over)reacting to different catalogs and their presentation. But you should skip straight to the gallery of images from catalogs, with excellent captions.

I have not used Friendster, although I’ve barely tried LinkedIn, which is similar but aimed at professional rather than personal use. (They are connected, but not the same company. Somehow, Friendster garnered millions of dollars of venture funding a few weeks ago… why? Anyway, the point of this post is that Philip Greenspun (early web database guru) teaches software development, and he had his class do a usability analysis of Friendster. Since I haven’t used the site/application, I haven’t read them all — but for Friendster, what great free feedback!

I found this article on Software Reality via Slashdot. On Slashdot, the thread was titled “The Rise and Rise of IT Administrators,” and it rails for developers and against all “administrators.” This is more provocative, but the more telling part of what’s causing problems in the world of software development is in the title of the actual article: role fragmentation. It’s not necessarily “administrators” who are causing the problems. In an ever-increasing desire to build a safe, scalable environment, some systems have reached a complexity level which adds incredible friction to the development lifecycle, sapping years out of the life of all involved, from developers to testers to the non-IT folks involved with (or dependent on) the successful completion of these projects. The complexity means that no one person can understand every layer in the stack AND develop software AND deploy said software. At least, not quickly, with a turnaround time which reflects a world where iterative development is the norm, and the scope of changes can range from simple typo-fixes to full-scale architecture shifts. Both the fixes and the shifts take similar amounts of deployment time, which forces a certain mode of thinking and planning on the developers and all those who depend on them. I’ve experienced one of these environments firsthand (though I’m not a developer), and the pain is like a dull headache that never goes away.

Just got off the iChat AV with my sister and her husband, who are snow-bound in their apartment in Brooklyn. They’ve upgraded to Panther, and we just put the new iSight to the test. Success! Works fairly well cross-country. Slight lag on the audio, and the lighting matters, but definitely smooth and easy, although I don’t know why the Canon video camera on our end doesn’t automatically show the picture. Audio only works well, too.

Until we have an iSight here in San Francisco, there are a few too many cables to connect, so it’s a bit hard to have an impromptu session. An iSight for this end of the conversation will be my Christmas present… in case you’re interested in my list, that one is already taken (thanks to my wife).

Until the iSight is a permanent fixture on (at least) the desktop computer, the idea of piphony won’t replace the regular phone conversations. Piphony is a term for Picture in Picture phoning coined by Mitch Ratcliffe, according to Doc Searls.

Enjoyed dinner with a friend tonight whom we haven’t seen in a while. Must remember to do so more often. Is it early for New Year’s resolutions? I know someone who is, ahem, less than fond of New Year’s. It’s not that much of an event for me, except that it makes me think every year that this is the year I’ll really keep track of my expenses in Quicken. Let’s be clear right now… that’s not going to happen in 2004, either. How would I find time to blog?