Over the past few days I've been using the websites of various financial institutions and have been frustrated by how terrible they are ( Read more... )

Yesterday I was helping a kid edit an essay at the Pirate Supply Store - it's a front for a writing clinic - and couldn't help but notice some interesting characteristics of the manner in which he used the computer ( Read more... )

After waiting a week for a free crackberry that never materialized, I bought an 8-gig iPhone today. It refuses to sync my non-subscription calendar & lacks the wonderful opportunistic playlist synching featured by the Shuffle but otherwise largely meets (high) expectations. Typing on it is definitely much harder than on the crackberry but I'm ( Read more... )

Earlier this afternoon I was trying to make dinner reservations for myself and a couple of friends who are visiting from the exurbs on Monday evening. I was pleased at how easy it was to filter the T-dot's cornucopia of restaurants by type of cuisine, price level, and distance from me. I was even more pleased that I could visually scope out how far ( Read more... )

Last night's BayCHI seminar was a panel discussion by the heads of 5 hi-tech companies involved in new ways of finding information. In an unusual move, rather than having each speaker's bio read out, we were just shown the top-ranked Delicious tags for their companies. Netflix's Neil Hunt spoke about the Long Tail and how it forms the core of the ( Read more... )

last week's HCI seminar was about research into improving the workflow of knowledge workers. After telling us about his discoveries from the experiments that he had conducted over the past decade in France, he left us with a valuable pair of requirements lists for designing and deploying new systems within an organization ( Read more... )

My Mini showed up yesterday afternoon. After dinner I unpacked it and turned it on. There were no problems with my Dell LCD display but I was mildly disappointed that, despite the promises of digital audio support, it did not offer either optical or coax audio ports so I'm still stuck with stereo sound. Upon booting it asked me if I wanted to ( Read more... )

About 6 months after graduating I'd begun to miss the classroom a little so I looked into what Stanford had to offer and discovered that there's a grad-level seminar course on HCI with weekly guest lectures that are open to the public. Yesterday I attended the final lecture for this quarter, delivered by a trio of research scientists from the ( Read more... )

The Mac Mini I ordered on Tuesday night was just shipped and has begun it's journey to my office from the urban sprawl we call LA. If you want to participate in the excitement, subscribe to the RSS feed for its tripIt's a Core Duo system with 2 gigs of RAM. The keyboard and Mighty mouse arrived today so it would be super-awesome if the Mini itself ( Read more... )

Last night's BayCHI talks were about Getting Things Done. The 1st talk (by Mimi Yin of the Open Source Applications Foundation) was about Chandler. She outlined all the ways in which it would support the GTD methodology. They seem to have covered many of the ideas I've had while thinking about collaboration tools for almost 2 years and included a ( Read more... )