::thursday, june 28::

CNN.com - Bradbury to adapt TV version of 'Illustrated Man' - June 21, 2001

I do love Ray, and I'm so glad he's still up and at-em. Can't wait to see the movies coming out. Frank Darabont making F451!! Hey, Green Mile was actually not as bad as I expected, even though I'd put off seeing it for like 2 years. He'd definitely be different from the ice-cold lens Truffaut used (though I kind of like that version too).

Who Would Buy That? (auction oddities from all over the web)

Within seconds of sending my buddy Derek a link to Driven By Boredom's Gag Ebay Auctions, he turned around a link to this site.... touche indeed.

For those of us annoyed by improper use of the apostrophe

::monday, june 25::

O'Reilly Network: Clay Shirky

One of the best net pundits going. Here's all his articles for O'Reilly...

::sunday, june 24::

All Your Auctions Are Belong To Us...

Fake ebay auctions.....Genius performance art via the web. Or just a bored kid. Or both.

Shut Up Loser

Ok. I'm now officially worried about our future...

::friday, june 22::

12-inch-figures--Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Ok...I'm really not that much of a Python fanatic or anything, but this is cool.

::thursday, june 21::

Mac creators talk about Jobs, OS X at MacHack

Raskin said that he told Steve Jobs that he wanted to create a computer that started with the user and would support the user. Raskin claims that Jobs said the idea was the stupidest thing he had ever heard. After working on Jobs, the Macintosh project -- called bicycle for some time -- was born.

Vividence: 06-07-2001: Web Design

The Vividence study found the following to be the most common problems with the 69 e-commerce Web sites included in the Tangled Web study:
* 53% had poorly organized search results: Common mistakes included erroneous results, items not ranked in order of fit to their search results and too many results.
* 32% had poor information architecture: Many of the sites displayed poor information architecture through their product and content organization on their Web sites. Errors included poor grouping of information, inconsistent elements within a group and random ordering of elements.

Kill the X10 Popups

Go here and supposedly you'll get a new cookie that'll keep those blasted X10 ads from popping up on you all the time. Hope it works. Thanks to Derek at Mandatory Curfew for the tip.

Triumph of the Weblogs

Through a gradual process of evolution and technology development, the voices have finally found a native online form through which to express themselves: a new kind of Website called the Weblog...

::wednesday, june 20::

A Ray of Hope for Air Travelers Following Signs

Great article about instructional design & how an airport has been transformed just by providing better signage & direction. (you may need to sign up for a free nytimes account to view this)

::tuesday, june 19::

How Institutions Think -- Mary Douglas

I've been reading this. It's a small book, but dense. Amazing insight into how the group mind of a company or organization ends up with its own language and its own paradigm, much as an individual might do.

::friday, june 15::

Michael Palin on the re-release of `The Holy Grail'

It's about time this hit theaters again. Never got to see it for real on the big screen before. I'll be there with my coconut shells on.

Space Age Gear - Soccer Bots

Further teasing my robot fetish... these actually look kind of affordable.

::monday, june 11::

m o v i e l e n s

I think I've mentioned this before, but I'm again enjoying this terrific example of collaborative filtering. If you don't know what that is, go check it out...take the time to sign up and review a bunch of movies. It's amazing what it'll dig up.

::saturday, june 9::

a radiohead website

the website for radiohead has just been updated.

::tuesday, june 5::

LikeTelevision - Seven Samurai

No kidding. Unless I'm missing something, you can watch all of Seven Samurai online. Check it out.

Tomalak's Realm closing down

I didn't check Tomalak's log nearly as often as I should have, mostly because every time I checked it I'd see three articles that I HAD to read. Almost too useful for its own good. Anyway, I'll miss knowing it's there.

Thunderwalker Adios

What exactly does it mean when you spend a significant portion (in this case, the better part of a year) of your life in a world that now essentially does not exist anymore? In 1997 I spent a LOT of time (wow, kind of ashamed to admit this now) running around in a highly specialized multiplayer gaming environment for Quake known as ThunderWalker Capture-The-Flag. It was fast, furious, not for the faint of heart. It was addictive. Truly. Those of us who spent so many spare (and not spare) hours doing it, some of whom achieved a kind of godlike status as the absolute best anyone could imagine (not me alas), still probably have waking dreams about the vast architectures we practically flew across with rocket-fast harpoon tethers to grab the quad or a flag, sniping flag carriers from what felt like a mile away, hearing "Spoon!" when we scored for our team.

I won't go into any more detail... and I'm embarrassed now to think I was once so fixated on such a thing. But now the guys who created it (at the time mere college underclassmen) have moved on to other things. The game it was based on is now "obsolete" (weird...how computers make games obsolete...imagine baseball ever being thought of as obsolete?), and the people who played it are on to other things---we all hope (otherwise one would worry). But it's still weird to think that I can remember secret passages in ThunderWalker maps better than the route to my neighborhood grocery store, and yet those places are basically gone now. I could explore them on my own machine, alone, but they'd be ghosttowns, without even ghosts.

::monday, june 4::

InfoSpaces

Shockwave presentation by Jon C. Wretlind (at infotect.com) outlining some nice pithy ideas. Too bad there's no audio or more context with it to make some of the content more clear. Still, a nicely designed shockwave slide thingie.

Grow Your Site, Keep Your Users | Computerworld News & Features Story

Some behind-the-scenes insights into eBay's design strategies.

Design

Amazing (though homely) page summarizing and linking some of the most influential and important ideas regarding info architecture and usable design. Great overview for anybody, new or veteran.

ABOUT THIS SITE: Usability Testing

Nice overview of how the UCSD library system performed usability research and design prototyping for their updated system.

::saturday, june 2::

Wasp Star

Andy Partridge is at the top of his game here. I can't stop listening to this damn thing, nor can I cease humming the songs out loud or silently in my head. Of course he's not the only one in the band, but his lyrics are terrific in this one, and the band manages to kick some incredible hooks into each track. I'm not a rabid XTC fan or anything, but I can't help recommending this disc.