thoughtcrumbs : december 2004

Initial review of Creative Muvo MP3 player

So far I love my new mini MP3 player, a 256MB Creative Muvo TX FM. All I wanted was something lightweight to hold a few hours of music while I run. Something inexpensive, simple, and that didn't require a particular brand of software. This one functions as a USB thumb drive; I just drag MP3s onto it and hit shuffle. The LCD orientation can be reversed, so that the track title is right-side up no matter which arm the player is strapped to. When you reverse the orientation, the next-track scrollwheel on the side reverses, as well. Nice and consistent. But the volume buttons don't reverse. Somewhat confusing, but overall easy enough to use without much attention. A more thorough review may appear here over time.

And my indie-rock pretensions go out the window when I run; nothing but old-school Bobby Brown, LL Cool J, and Michael Jackson get my feet moving.

Cure for the hungry cat

Lack of sleep is forcing me to succumb to yuppie impulses: I'm going to get an automatic pet food dispenser. Every morning at 4:30, Hazel begins her nuzzle/noise onslaught and doesn't give up until my alarm goes off, an hour and a half later, when I give her a dainty scoop of food. She licks my chin and tries to pry my eyelids open with her paws. She steps on the pedal of the trashcan that contains the kibble. (A heavy plant on top keeps it closed.) She clangs her ID tag against the ceramic bowl. She bats at the blinds. The spray bottle doesn't reach her across the apartment, and after more than six months of torture, I'm convinced her schedule isn't going to change.

I'm thinking about the following options:

• Building one myself, perhaps out of Lego Mindstorms.
• Ergo Autopetfeeder. Very expensive, but otherwise perfect. The company provides the manual online and a video of the dispenser working. Too bad I don't trust the shoddily-designed site enough to provide my credit card number.
• Automatic cat feeder. Only dispenses five meals, and is designed more for wet food. But I can get it from a company I trust (PetSmart), so this will probably be the one I choose.

"Use Flash like you would cilantro"

Sparingly and for a single high-impact effect. From Five Mistakes Band & Label Sites Make.

Psychoanalysis on 34th Street

Today I saw Miracle on 34th Street for the first time as an adult, and particularly appreciated this quote:

Maybe he's only a little crazy. Like painters, or composers, or . . . some of those men in Washington.

Photos of the Pittock Mansion

Hannah, Bryce and I toured the Pittock Mansion yesterday. Lots of seasonally-appropriate photos to be had. Samples:

Username checking done right

Haloscan has a great registration feature: Pick a username, and it'll tell you whether that name has been taken as soon as you tab to the next field. No submit button, no server delays, no suggestions of cryptic number suffixes. Just instant feedback:

Ownership of user experience

Christina makes some excellent points about the user experience "ownership" discussion over at OK-Cancel. I've mentioned before that I'm grateful to work in a small institution where I wear all four hats (design, IA, usability, development), and that the sometimes divisive conversations about UX between designers, IAs, and usability specialists for me take the form of an interminable inner dialogue. Christina's point is that no one discipline owns UX and that the best work is done by businesses encouraging people to collaborate beyond the boundaries of their official job titles. Selected quotes:

[To designers:] Don't bag on the usability people, ask them to find out some new stuff for you to work with, and hey, ask them what they think of blue, anyhow. Design's not so precious a power that you can't ask for someone's two cents.

The MFA is the new MBA.

Spending more time building cool things or spending more time building cool strategies is better than trying to come up with yet another label for what we do, or another essay on why--instead explaining value, what if we just *be* valuable.

"Active learning" web browser at Penn State

Information Science professor Guangfeng Song at Penn State McKeesport is developing a browser that learns from its user's behavior and makes adjustments to improve its user's experience. The goal is not just to customize browsers to individuals, but to collect aggregate activity from multiple users to better inform future web design. Privacy issues aside, centralizing methods for assisting the user (breadcrumbs, visited link colors, saved search queries) within the browser removes some of the onus from individual site designers, each of whom has her own method for "helping" visitors. Browsers already offer a lot of this functionality: bookmarks, saved passwords, finishing typed URLs, all of which are fairly standardized across browsers, and people can decide which ones to use. Adding a level of machine learning has a lot of potential.

Gingerbread motherboard

Nothing says Christmas like piped icing circuitry. From Boing Boing.

Punctuation neuroses

Scott has some thoughtful comments on ubiquitous technology affecting writing conventions. Apparently we have the same qualms about including spaces in filenames:

i just can't bring myself to put spaces in filenames even if the system supports them; er, well, i've certainly done it, and kinda still do, sometimes; but i feel off afterwards, like i'd just drooled on my shirt.

Maybe the library will let me keep it

A review of David Copperfield is in the reading section.

Inadvertent grammatical honor?

Wikipedia is now "The Wikipedia." Don Norman said it. The article implicitly bestows a sense of singular authority to the site. Congrats, Wikipedia!

"The Don" reveals all (again)

In his latest OK-Cancel column, Don Norman says:

The most important consulting rule that I follow is: "Never solve the problem as stated." Why? Because it is invariably the wrong problem, usually being the symptom rather than the cause.

This is the fundamental rule of reference interviews, as well. Library patrons have fuzzy understandings of what the reference desk is for, and yet want to appear confident and knowledgeable. They contort their real questions in vague and misleading ways, and the librarian has to resist the urge to offer the apparent solution without getting to the root issue first.

Mathematics handbags

These are nifty (scroll halfway down the page). The designer says: "The patterns on these bags, simple functions, were cut out on our laser cutter. A graphing calculator I wrote generates HPGL files that can be imported into Corel Draw and then sent to the laser cutter."

Advertising studies and tricks

A few recent advertising memes:

• A good discussion at Jason Kottke's site about blocking RSS/Atom advertising. Feed aggregator developers say they're not planning features specifically to block ads, but that other features for usability (i.e., custom CSS files or per-feed filters) could be used to that effect.
• For Firefox users, this chunk of CSS will block ads.
• Most Hated Advertising Techniques, Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox, reviews data compiled by Ebay and Yahoo! researchers, some of which was from my study. Alertbox summary: Users vehemently dislike pop-ups, slow-loading graphics, and misleading ads. Nielsen reminds advertisers and site owners that this abhorrence stems from the violation of basic usability principles: users' options should be clear, plainly worded, and provide the desired information.
  
  I'd add that click-cost should be minimized as well: people halfway through a registration or purchase process shouldn't lose their place when clicking on ads, and the ads shouldn't go to pages that break the Back button.
• Also, Internet Explorer users are four times more likely to click on ads than Firefox users. (Thanks, Alan!)

And more jargon

Topics at dinner with my uncle this evening ranged from online photo sharing to network security, specifically Flickr and sniffers. I worry about the prevalence of booger metaphors in modern technology.

Who needs screws when you have duct tape?

Living in my apartment requires zen levels of acquiescence. My landlord's willingness to repair things is directly proportional to his financial standing, and judging by the regular notices we get from the gas company threatening to shut off our common water heater because the landlord didn't pay the bill, I've learned not to expect much. His shirkiness is surpassed only by his cleverness with adhesive tape, and really, I have to give him bonus points for making me laugh.

Here we have a loose doorstop and fallen address number:

William Safire on what the chillens are saying

Though admittedly a silverback (simian slang for old man) William Safire has a wicked grasp on the argot of high schoolers. Apparently the new "Monet" is "butterface." (As in, she's got a great body, but her face . . .)

Perhaps MSN could have used a better example of community-building

Michael Connolly, project manager for MSN Spaces* on the sense of community engendered by blogs:

You take an event like the Halo 2 launch. Every single blog has this shared, communal experience of "I'm not gonna talk with my wife again for another 48 hours because I'm sitting in the basement." And we are all sitting in the basement, all playing Halo 2, all going through the same thing. And some friends of mine were blogging about eating Cheerios for dinner for a week when Halo 2 launched.

Perhaps he's a bit overly inclusive on his shared video game experience (something that never hit my radar, nor would it have really interested me), but I understand the sentiment.

A few years ago, World AIDS Day was commemorated through the online equivalent of A Day With(out) Art: hundreds of blogs went silent. Bloggers posted solid black screens or images of red ribbons pointing to Link and Think. Everyone was a part of this reflection en masse. Similarly, when Multnomah County started issuing same-sex marriage licenses, and when Willamette Week had an article about the best and worst blogs in Oregon, ORBlogs had a flurry of posts and cross-linking. In one case, history was being made in our own state, and in the other, we griped about the newspaper's mediocre choice of "good" blogs (or perhaps we were all just cranky at not being selected.)

*Blogger's evil new twin with non-validating markup and corporate ownership and censorship of individuals' posts. But there's plenty of chatter about that elsewhere.

CACM special issue on the blogosphere

This month's Communications of the ACM focuses on the blogosphere (you'll need an ACM digital library subscription to read more than the TOC). Highlights include:

• A demographic study of blogger profiles harvested from livejournal stats. In perhaps the best table I've ever seen in an ACM publication, the authors show representative interests of various blogging age groups. Twenty- and thirty-somethings are into grad school, Tivo, and public radio, while those older than 57 are apparently focused on "death and cheese."
• Semantic blogging, using blogging tools and distributed ontologies for sharing and managing other kinds of data (such as bibliographies). It reminds me somewhat of Haystack, in that you can choose the most useful organization paradigm (inbox, blog, file explorer) for your data, depending on what you want to do with them.
• An eloquent article by Rebecca Blood on the way blogging tools shaped the evolution of blogs. Like some blogging pioneers, she still hand codes her HTML, but finds that the online community is increasingly influenced by the technology of trackbacks, blogrolls, and permalinks. She says, "Every element that I can't reproduce leaves me invisible."