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The Police. Invisible Sun. Great tune, from a fantastic album. I even took the rare step of rating the song in iTunes.

All the usual suspects warn against the passive voice. Paul Ford does something about it, with the Passivator, a bookmarklet which highlights some obvious uses of the passive voice on a page. While part of my purpose here is to improve my writing, I doubt I’ll spend the time to play with this more than once or twice. But technology in the service of editing is always of interest. [thanks to Simon]

And everyone does. His latest: “Situated Software,” from which, a quote:

Expectations of longevity, though, are the temporal version of scale — we assume applications should work for long periods in part because it costs so much to create them. Once it’s cheap and easy to throw together an application, though, that rationale weakens. Businesses routinely ask teams of well-paid people to put hundreds of hours of work creating a single PowerPoint deck that will be looked at in a single meeting. The idea that software should be built for many users, or last for many years, are cultural assumptions not required by the software itself.

I’m printing the whole essay for a further read.

Struggline with getting Radio to post my home page for the last week or so. But it is upstreaming the archive, 25 files at a time, every time I publish a new item. Maybe that’s a month per post, which means I need 6 more posts to get to the current day?

Google announces GMail via this press release dated April 1. Webmail with 1GB of free storage, plus great search (as you would expect). So… is it real?

I’m asking because Simon Willison’s post ranges from excitement about the idea of the service, but then points out that Google has a sense of humor about these things (PigeonRank, anyone?). If they were ever going to pull this kind of prank, this April — perhaps their last before they go public? — would be the time. And everyone is expecting a webmail service from Google anyway, as part of an effort to provide another platform for their advertising and a reason for people to register with Google, giving them further insight into their immense user base.

If it’s a hoax, it fooled:

• John Markoff of the New York Times
• Paul Festa of CNET News.com
• Amit Asaravala of Wired News
• Jefferson Graham of USA Today
• and over 343 publications, per Google News, are ‘related’

I guess we’ll all see tomorrow. Google gets so much publicity for free already… imagine all the follow-up articles every publication will have to run if this is a joke?

Check GMail.com on April 1.

Jared Spool has a new article at User Interface Engineering, “The Top 3 Priorities of the Talking Horse.

It could be that your site (or part of your site) is a talking horse. Is everyone focusing on just “making it work”?

There is the partial jab at Jakob Nielsen’s discount usability (although Jakob never uses “discount”).

Once the team knows the users’ tasks, they can look for places where support problems can appear. Unfortunately, we’ve found that inexpensive techniques such as design inspections or heuristic evaluations rarely identify these issues accurately. Teams are better off conducting rigorous, task-based, usability testing. Testing is a better approach to help identify where problems will originate.

I know, the contrast between the linked-to article and the quote is slight. But my perception is colored by this cartoon comparing Nielsen and Spool to leaders of opposing gangs. Humor in the usability world.

I’m starting one project where I’d like to get to the “talking horse” phase!

I’m old enough to have a clue who Mr. Ed was, but I never saw the show. Spool is wise to start of his essay with a longer explanation of his horse analogy. Mr. Ed hasn’t made a comeback, as far as I know, even in the world of digital cable.

For a new project at work, I’m blocking out the different components using Jesse James Garrett’s visual vocabulary. I’d seen this methodology before, but I was more intrigued after seeing the stencil available in OmniGraffle, a Mac OS X diagramming/charting tool (think Visio, for Mac).

I’m not a very visual person, but I’m learning more and more that my tendency to rely on written communication doesn’t convey enough information for some of my colleagues. Some people react and move to images, not words. That’s understandable. I know that I, too, grasp the power of an image or a diagram very quickly. But I’ve been reluctant to strike out visually since I know it’s a weakness. All you can do is dive in, so I’m relying on the tools of OmniGraffle to help me communicate. So far, I haven’t finished anything solid enough to share widely, but the visual vocabulary for information architecture hits a sweet spot in its simplicity. I think I’ll be able to provide a skeleton which all parties involved will understand, and when the time comes to flesh it out, well, I’ll ask the true visual experts to step in. How do you sell your ideas?

One bridge, five miles, and no kids = 24 hours of vacation. Never had to think about the clock, except to make it to our dinner reservation. Now that’s a birthday present to ourselves.

Michael McDonough’s Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School… let’s skip to #9, shall we?

9. It all comes down to output.
No matter how cool your computer rendering is, no matter how brilliant your essay is, no matter how fabulous your whatever is, if you can’t output it, distribute it, and make it known, it basically doesn’t exist. Orient yourself to output. Schedule output. Output, output, output. Show Me The Output.

Amen. If it’s not live, it’s academic. I have to remember that, too.
[via Design Observer, via Noise Between Stations]

I’m listening to the boy and the girl entertain each other. At 4:55, the hands of the clock were directly opposite each other, so the boy thought it was 6:00am, and launched into his usual “I’m awake, please come get me.” I went down and told him to keep sleeping, it wasn’t yet time. Twenty minutes later, he tried again, as I clearly wasn’t so convincing. Trip downstairs to share the opinion that it’s not yet time to get up. (Needless to say, I’m now irrevocably awake.)

Then the girl starts to make noises, and the boy decides that’s time to be the older brother: he tells the girl, it’s not yet 6 o’clock, so she should go back to sleep. Orders flow downhill! 😉 I’m eavesdropping on this while I type. Here’s some direct quotes (not including the hilarious laughter between the two of them):

It’s the middle of the night. And you’re tired. Need your rest. You have to go sleep. … After it (the minute hand) goes to the 11, it will be 6 o’clock, time for us to wake up.

All of this is said while he’s (I’m guessing) sitting (standing) straight up in his bed and entertaining his sister from across the room with various shouts and shenanigans. There’s no one sleeping in there. And, when the clock does hit 6:00am, I’ll hear a loud shout about the time, and I’ll go in. Just a few minutes left.