Walkway framed by tombstones.
It took a long time, and I’m still working on it, but I’ve got a draft of my thesis up. Also, this is the draft that I will be graded on. Katherine made the police graphic for my poster, and I think it looks quite handsome here, as well.
The truly distressing part is how upsetting the wrong pattern can be. —xkcd: Computer Problems
Court Says Bush Illegally Wiretapped Two Americans | Threat Level | Wired.com
Boom. Judge Walker calls it like it is. Illegal wiretapping of at least two Americans in 2004.
Dropbox for ease of mind
I use a lot of sync service (SugarSync, Backblaze, Dropbox, MobileMe, Spanning Sync, and a few others). Of these, Dropbox requires the least mental maintenance. It’s closest neighbors in my pantheon of sync services are SugarSync and Mobile Me’s I Drive are the closest equivalents. All three allow you to keep files synchronized across multiple computers, as well as access them on the web.
While they all have strengths, Dropbox’s approach, keeping a single directory in sync, with some simple sharing and photo album options on top, is dead simple. The client runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, which is a boon for any cross-platform users, and if you run multiple clients (say, a desktop and a laptop) on the same local network, files sync directly from machine to machine, which is much faster than one syncing up to the cloud and the other pulling down from there.
Anyway. Just a few thoughts on file syncing. And Dropbox increased their referral bonuses recently, so if you sign up using this link, Get Dropbox, we’ll both get an extra 250 MB of storage.
Just finished Katherine’s new site: http://www.katherinejlee.com
Tools:
- Bonsai - for the site generation
- Nivo Slider - for the slideshows
- Textmate - for…text
- Acorn + Lightroom + Nikon D80 - for images (all photos mine, found on flickr)
- Wufoo - for dynamic content (order form, contact form)
- Google Analytics - for site analytics
- jQuery - for all js effects and making life easier
- And of course, Katherine and her etsy store
52 Weeks of UX: Why UX is really Marketing
If you ask any User Experience Professional what the principles of their profession are, one of the first principles you’ll hear is “Know Your Users”. This makes sense: if we are to create great experiences for users then we must know something about them. You’ll also find this phrase if you…
The phrase “know your users” certainly does apply equally to marketers and UX professionals. However, what you do with that knowledge distinguishes the two professions. Note to marketers: “know your users” isn’t the same as “know your enemy”. Good UX means designing a product to meet user needs. Good marketing means describing a product as meeting user needs.
Note: Good marketing is really hard. I couldn’t do it.
Optimization
I just spent several hours on a Friday night decluttering my computer. And not fun decluttering like moving pictures around and deleting old downloads. No, this was fixing permissions, removing MacPorts, installing Homebrew, tidying my dotfiles. Hard core nerding. And I feel great. After the hundredth permissions issue in the middle of mundane tasks, it’s tempting to flatten a machine just to end the pain. But now it is fun to install things! When things break, it’s because I wrote crummy code, not because the binary I’m trying to run is in a directory that is too high up my search path.
Point is, simple is good. Working is good.
MacPorts, I’m looking at you. RVM couldn’t do its thing because of /opt/bin getting up in my business. We’re through.
March Desktop (via heliostatic)
Imagine this: a developer who not only makes it hard to do the wrong thing, but easy to do the right one.
Shaun Inman loves his users (and does his own tech support).
In his excellent rss reader, Fever°, he offers users the ability to bulk unsubscribe from all of their feeds. I needed to do this tonight because I decided that the 800+ feeds I’ve subscribed to over the years are not all as important as they used to be (and that was too many feeds). However, in addition to requiring users to check the “Yes, I’m sure I want to do this” box, he offers a quick export link, and suggests that the user might want to take advantage of it.
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