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A Blimp a Day...

Driving to work this morning (I normally do not drive) I saw a blimp floating over the Mall near the Capitol building. I thought it was an odd place for a blimp. I also realized their is not a sporting event that would cause the blimp to be in town today (a city being awarded a baseball team is not a blimp event). I tried to figure out whose blimp it was, but it was all gray.

My next thought was somebody stole a blimp and is going to fly it into the Capitol. Very quickly that was ruled out as a rational option. I switch my radio from satellite to AM to the news station, which is chatting on about the baseball team and the weather. Nothing about a rogue blimp.

A co-worker at mid-day brings up the odd blimp story in the Washington Post. Yes, the U.S. Army is leasing a blimp to protect the Nation's Capitol. Have we spent so much money on Iraq that all we can afford is a blimp?

Good Party?

Yesterday at the end of a little party for Will, I was asking if he enjoyed his first birthday party. He responded with a, "yah". That completely made my year as it was the first yah or yes we have heard. Fortunately he repeated it for Joy later.

Preview of Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World

I went on a little book buying spree this past week as I am finishing reading the last binge buy or two. I picked up a couple O'Reilly reference books (will review them later) and a few books from the interaction design, cogsci, and information design arena. The one that is standing out in as I preview them is the Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World : A Critical Sourcebook by Carolyn Handa. This book is a collection of essays and articles from various well quoted and referred to designers, writers, and academics. Looking through the references and end-notes the heros of communication research are used for the foundations of those chosen to write. Visual Rhetoric is focussed on the academic world, but if we are not learning every day we will never get better, and this book could fill in the gaps.

The book is broken into five sections: Toward a Pedagogy of the Visual, The Rhetoric of the Image, The Rhetoric of Design, Visual Rhetoric and Argument, and Visual Rhetoric and Culture. The names of the writers that jump out are Gunter Kress, Catherine L. Hobbes, J.L. Lemke, Rudolph Arnheim, Roland Barthes, Scott McCloud, Jeffery Keedy, Jessica Helfand, Keith Kenney, Michele S. Shauf, Richard A. Lanham, Robert Horn, and Bell Hooks drew my attention. I have a very strong feeling this will be a great resource. I don't think it will bump Digital Ground by Malcolm McCullough from my vote for the best book I have read this year, but it is proving 2004 is a very strong year for books.

Beautiful Hero

Things have been a little busy about these parts. But we were able to sneak out to see Hero. This is a great film to see on the big screen as it is beautifully filmed. I caught myself absorbing the details of the windblown clothes while the hair stayed perfectly still. The colors and contrasts were amazing making a wonderful visual treat. Yes, the story was good and there were poignant moral lessons about war that were directed at today. If you enjoy great cinematography you really owe it to you to your self to see this on the big screen.

SeatGuru

While on the subject of travel sites, SeatGuru is another site to have in your pocket. I have yet to book my flight to Amsterdam, but the airline I will most likely go with is not listed. This will work wonders for domestic flights however.

Boutique Hotel Guides

Adam has provided a link to greatsmallhotels, which seems to be a very good resource along with Tablet Hotels. Both resources focus on boutique hotels around the globe. The price range in greatsmallhotels is broader and has some wonderful looking options at the lower end of the scale. Tablet Hotels has slightly better reviews, the interface is more appealing to me, and I really like the "Sensory Guide" to guide you to things around the hotel's location that match: look, listen, taste, touch, and scent.

700

700

QoM

The quote of the month goes to Brian who said, "there is nothing like bad design to hide the fact that they have no content".

43folders for Refining Your Personal InfoCloud

I have been completely enjoying Merlin Mann's 43folders the past couple weeks. It has been one of my guilty pleasures and great finds. Merlin provides insights to geeks (some bits are Mac oriented) on how to better organize the digital information around them (or you - if the shoe fits). This is a great tutorial on refining your Personal InfoCloud, if I ever saw one.

Everytime I read this I do keep thinking about how Ben Hammersley has hit it on the head with the Two Emerging Classes. The volume of information available, along with the junk, and the skills needed to best find and manage the information are not for the technically meek.

vanderwal.net RSS Feeds now Optimized and aggregated by FeedBurner

We are now providing a consolidated feed of the main blog RSS feed, our vanderwal del.icio.us feed, and vanderwal Flickr feed in one vanderwal.net Feedburner feed. You ask about the feed of our Quick Links? Currently, it is not included in the Feedburner feed, but we have optimized that active feed with Feedburner also at, vanderwal.net Quick Link FeedBurner feed.

If you like the feeds the way you have been getting them you can still do so. Lately the Quick Link and del.icio.us feeds are being updated more frequently as they take much less time to post to. These are just snippets of things I am interested in coming back to or have found of interest and have not found the time for a full blog entry.

We are considering replacing the Quick Links with our del.icio.us feed at some point in the not too distant future. Tell us what you think.

Breaking News Alert?

I subscribe to the CNN e-mail breaking news alert, mostly because of the times we are in and where I live. Every few days (it can go a week or two) I will get an alert about a disaster, a death of an important figure, violent weather, natural disasters, etc. I have these go directly to my mobile device as it is always with me. Today's breaking news did not need to be that important in the scope of everything going on. Martha choses to go to jail is not worthy of breaking new alert.

This was the third or fourth Martha disaster alert in the past six to nine months. Get over it, she is not worthy of the breaking news alert. Neither is Kobe Bryant showing up in court, nor what ever is going on with Michael Jackson. News that the U.S. funds for reconstructing Iraq are being diverted for security is much larger news. There have been many more life changing stories that have deeper and broader impact.

Is there a former editor of Vanity Fair choosing the breaking news alerts at CNN?

Crawl in a Hole

There are days when you see something that makes you want to crawl in a hole out of embarrassment for somebody else.

This evening presented one of these moments. I was walking toward the Metro platform and I thought I saw a fake tail or odd fashion accessory hanging between the legs of a woman wearing a skirt. The closer I got the more curious I became. I was wondering if it was a belt that wrapped and then draped to nearly touch the ground. As I got close and ready to make my turn up the platform I realized the accessory was inside her skirt. Well the accessory was actually toilet paper.

Emerging Class Divide with Technology

Ben Hammersly does a wonderful job of highlighting the current state of The Emerging Two Cultures of the Internet and extends it in More on the Emerging Two Cultures. The two cultures are the geeks and real people. There are many tools and means to access digital information on the internet, but these are mostly available to the geeks that are early adopters or in some cases the adopters. Ease of use has not hit many of our friends and relatives.

Ben looks at the web as an place that again takes increasing knowledge and understanding of the arcane to get through the mire of spam, nefarious pop-ups, and viruses. There are some of us that understand how to go about doing this dance (or bought a Mac to make the whole thing easier) and do not find it difficult, but many would like to have the hours back to work on things more fun. The average person does not have the capabilities or time to stay on top of all these things. Ben's description of the Windows XP SP2 pitfall is right in line with the diverging communities. There is not a need for these, if things were done better in the first place.

Easing the Digital Realm

We have a system of tools that make information creation easy in digital formats. These tools may not be our best friend as of yet as many tools may be seemingly easy to use, but the tools are lacking when trying to easily develop information in an optimal format to ease the use of the information by the person consuming or interacting with that information. As people accessing information we find a lot of information, we may not always find the information we desire or need.

But, once we get the information and try to consume that information by copying parts into our reference notes for our work we run into difficulties. We also have problems storing the information so we can have it at the ready when we need it. It is very difficult, not impossible, to have information follow us in our Personal InfoCloud, which is our repository of information we want following us for our easy use and reuse.

Unfortunately those of us that can wrangle and have the time to wrangle with the tools to get them to easily, efficiently, and accurately perform in a manner that makes our lives easier are relatively few. There should not be two classes of people, things need to get better. The focus needs to get on the people using information and trying to reuse it.

Guide to Critical Thinking

Anne posts and excellent Guide to Critical Thinking

Walking

He is walking!

Gordon Rugg and the Verifier Method

In the current Wired Magazine an article on Gordon Rugg - Scientific Method Man (yes, it is the same Gordon Rugg of card sorting notoriety). The article focuses on his solving the Voynich manuscript, actually deciphering it as a hoax. How he goes about solving the manuscript is what really has me intrigued.

Rugg uses a method he has been developing, called the verifier approach, which develops a means critical examination using:

The verifier method boils down to seven steps: 1) amass knowledge of a discipline through interviews and reading; 2) determine whether critical expertise has yet to be applied in the field; 3) look for bias and mistakenly held assumptions in the research; 4) analyze jargon to uncover differing definitions of key terms; 5) check for classic mistakes using human-error tools; 6) follow the errors as they ripple through underlying assumptions; 7) suggest new avenues for research that emerge from steps one through six.

One area that Rugg has used this has been solving cross-discipline terminology problems leading to communication difficulties. He also found that pattern-matching is often used to solve problems or diagnose illness, but a more thorough inquiry may have found a more exact cause, which leads to a better solution and better cure.

Can the verifier method be applied to web development? Information Architecture? Maybe, but the depth of knowledge and experience is still rather shallow, but getting better every day. Much of the confounding issues in getting to optimal solutions is the cross discipline backgrounds as well as the splintered communities that "focus" on claimed distinct areas that have no definite boundaries and even have extensive cross over. Where does HCI end and Usability Engineering begin? Information Architecture, Information Design, Interaction Design, etc. begin and end. There is a lot of "big umbrella" talk from all the groups as well as those that desire smaller distinct roles for their niche. There is a lot of cross-pollination across these roles and fields as they all are needed in part to get to a good solution for the products they work on.

One thing seems sure, I want to know much more about the verifier method. It seems like understanding the criteria better for the verifier method will help frame a language of criticism and cross-boundary peer review for development and design.