HELL YEAH! Living Colour is touring again!
The hands-down best band of the late 80s’/early 90′s will be playing at Slim’s in San Fran on May 12th. There is NO WAY I’m missing this! Let me know if you want to join me! Man, I’m psyched!
Hi! I’m leaving for Portland, Oregon in about an hour to attend the Intel Human Centered Product Innovation 2 Conference. They’ve got a lot of wonderful designers, researchers and industry bigwigs (some of whom I’ve mentioned before) lined up to speak, so it should be great! I’ll keep you updated.
I have a new favorite food: Honey & Nut Toasty O’s (which are like Honey Nut Cheerios, but come in a gigantic plastic bag) in Westsoy Lite Plain Non Dairy Soy Berverage, topped off with fresh sliced strawberries. Sooo good! Excuse me while I go back for another bowl…
Here’s a great little design truism, gleaned from a paper by cognitive scientist Kyle Cave:
“In our visual system, attention is distributed in the sequence:
1. location
2. color
3. shape”
…from a post to the CHI-web mailing list by Rummel Bernard. Here is the paper: Cave, K.R. (1999) The FeatureGate model of visual selection. Psychological Research 62, 182-194.
Catching up on my word-a-day calendar this afternoon, I ran across this word: zeugma. I’m intrigued by words like this. That is, words that describe the properties or uses of other words.
Does anyone know where I can find a list of these sorts of words? Please post a comment if you do!
Yay! Our TiVo updated itself to version 2.0.1 today. You can read more about the update on the AVS TiVo Forum.
[Update from July 30, 2002: The Open Country domain name seems to owned by some software company now, so I've removed the link. Raskin now has the project out on SourceForge.]
I went to the BayCHI East meeting Tuesday night. Jef Raskin is a fascinating person, if not an engaging speaker. He’s obviously a very intelligent guy, but seems to lack the ability to distill his thoughts in to bite-sized chunks.
I like the fact that he’s all about design based on quantifiable measurements. He talked about how more design needs to based on factors that are common to all people. He calls it “Population Independent Design.”
He also has no reservations about bashing designers who aren’t familiar with what he considers the basics: Fitts’ Law, GOMS & Hick’s Law, specifically.
Another thing he mentioned: “People can only pay attention to one thing at a time.” This idea seems to be working its way into the pool of popular knowledge (for example, in The Cluetrain Manifesto, linked in a related post on Evhead).
The thing that surprised me the most was how many people in the audience didn’t accept that the system Raskin describes in The Humane Interface would be better than the current systems built on WIMP. This seems obvious to me – maybe they just hadn’t read his book?
I spoke with him after his talk (got my copy of The Humane Interface signed too). He mentioned that he’s working with the open source community at Open Country to develop a spec for the system described in The Humane Interface. I looked, but couldn’t find anything of the sort on that site.
Please post a comment with your thoughts – especially if you find that spec on Open Country.
I’m in Martha & Bros Coffee Company on Church Street right now, connected to the Internet through an open (read: free) wireless network called toaster.net. This is sweet! Martha’s is closing now. I’ll post more later….
For Brad and Chad: the San Francisco Bay 802.11b Wireless Internet Access Point List (via evhead).
I drove down to Santa Clara today for the first time in a while. All I can say is, “Viva la dot bomb!” The 101 was wide open (compared to, say, a few months ago).