Year: 2007

  • My photos from Oaxaca

    Well it took nearly forever, but I’ve finally got all my photos from my trip to Oaxaca posted to Flickr. I organized them into umpteen sets by event and then collected those all together into one master collection, linked from earlier in this sentence. The badge in this entry points to the same photos except…

  • How honest WAS he?

    “To the tune of” the stand-up comedian’s standard intonation. How honest WAS he? HE was so honest that when he got the “Bank Error in Your Favor” card in Monopoly, he paid the money back!

  • Some possible best practices for social design

    Joshua Porter, who specializes in Social Web Design and with whom I’ve debated in the past around the perennially boring topic of “Information Architecture vs. Interaction Design, Which is the Best Discipline EVAR!?!?,” has culled an interesting list of social design best practices from Google’s documentation of its new “OpenSocial” API collection.

  • National sick-as-a-dog month

    A friend asked me via twitter if I was doing National Blog Post Month as well as National Novel Writing Month, because apparently I had up to that point posted every day in November, but in fact I was not doing the former and am no longer doing the latter. In fact I’ve been trying…

  • Buried Alive in Water: Leave No Marks; Suffer No Penalties

    This article in today’s Washington Post distills into one and half pages a straight-to-the-point legal history of Waterboarding, and plainspoken descriptions of the actual physical experience. It is worth more than all the other obtuse, vacillating, shallowly researched, tongue-tied, contortedly circumspect coverage I have seen, all of it, combined. The author, Evan Wallach, is a…

  • All Time’s the Wrong Time

    [My boldface] Vetoing health care for children. President Bush explained: “[W]ith federal revenues at an all-time high and the deficit declining, now is not the time to raise taxes.” It goes without saying that when federal revenues are low and the deficit rising, that is also not the time. So it’s a lot like Iraq…

  • What can I say about OpenSocial?

    The blog world, along with my slice of the twitter world, is abuzz with attempts to understand, analyze, deconstruct, laud, and excoriate Google’s new OpenSocial initiative.

  • Stumbling out of the gate

    I’m feeling a bit under the weather, fighting off some kind of bug. That’s my first excuse. I woke up on time today after going to be really early last night. I was exhausted. I got up, put the coffee on, and sat down to fold some laundry. The cat was still asleep, which is…

  • Snack-Size Candy Bars

    At this time of year, nutrition experts urge parents to remember that “snack-size” candy bars only that. There’s just not enough there in one bar for an entire meal.

  • Matt Leacock's Pandemic game poised to infect the world

    Interview with Yahoo! principal interaction designer Matt Leacock about his forthcoming boardgame, Pandemic.

  • The eerily missing word

    Even if you slept through most of Social Studies in high school, the word “Extraterritoriality” was almost impossible to avoid. It was going to be on the test. Yet, in the weeks since the mass slaughter by Blackwater in Baghdad, it has been absolutely eerie in its total absence from the news. It referred to…

  • In my day we had to write our web-blogs by hand in html 1.0, barefoot in the snow, uphill all the way, against the wind

    I’ve discovered that it’s easy to remember the anniversary of your first blog post* if you’re as clever or random as I was and wrote it on your birthday. This then reminds me to crank out my yearly age-revealing, I’ve-been-blogging-since post. And this is a special one, too, for what it’s worth. Ten years of…

  • Back from Oaxaca

    Posting over low bandwidth. Consider this photo a down payment toward a great deal more imagery and tales to come. This is one of the many artworks, most with religious themes, decorating the hotel I stayed in my first night in Oaxaca, the Hostal de la Noria. UPDATE: (or del, I have to doublecheck that)…

  • Enumerating social media patterns: a work in progress

    At BarCamp Block earlier this year I led a discussion of social media design patterns. The slides I posted were really more just about patterns and how we deal with them at Yahoo! But the group exercise was to brainstorm a huge list of social media and social networking activities that could be described and…

  • Going off the grid

    Very late Tuesday night – in fact so late that it will really be very early Wednesday morning – I’m heading down to Oakland airport to hop on a Mexicana plane and fly to Guadalajara and then Mexico City and finally to Oaxaca. Yes, it’s the OAK to OAX run. Once there I will spend…

  • It's nearly that novel-writin' time of year again

  • Stanking up the gym

    Got to work, checked some email, decided to stop dallying and head to the gym for 50 minutes on the stationary bike. Suddenly realized I’d forgotten to bring a change of gym clothes to work today, like I usually do.

  • Set the terms of the debate

    TechPresident, a project of Personal Democracy Forum (which I used to write for), in cooperation with the New York Times and MSNBC, has launched a site called 10 Questions where anyone can suggest a question for the presidential candidates and anyone can vote the suggested questions up or down. It’s a kind of more open…

  • Brown bag accomplished

    There is a cycle I go through in preparing for a public speaking gig. The UED (user experience design) brown bag series at Yahoo! is low key in a way. We do it in a medium-sized room with hookups to remote campuses, such as Santa Monica. It’s “all in the family” and thus not as…

  • Do pattern libraries really work?

    I wish I could have been at the recent Chicago IxDA Pattern Library conversation, a participatory discussion about using pattern libraries in practice…. Here are my thoughts on the reported conversation.

  • Selling Amazon shorts

    If Apple can sell electronic downloads of songs with no packaging for 99c a pop why can’t Amazon sell short little chapbooks electronically, download only, for 49c? The answer is they can, of course.