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Reflection
During the radio silence of the last few weeks, I’ve turned my attention to other tasks. The largest has been to write two substantial UX articles, which should be published shortly. More details will follow. I’ve also written a few songs, recorded one - Pilcrow (demo, mp3), kickstarted an intensive exercise program and slowly coaxed [...]
Reconstruct
Quick personal post.
dConstruct was, of course, marvellous, but I shan’t review it. My partisan stance and lack of liberty to pay too much attention mean that others have done it more justice than I could: viz. Twitter search, the BBC article, and Matt Balara’s review (although I disagree with his verdict on Jeremy’s closing session).
I’m [...]
CDs for sale
I’ve decided to finally make the move to digital, so I’m selling all my CDs. Before I go down the eBay route, any of you lucky folks want to buy any? Full list here (pdf) - £3 each, £1 for EPs. First come, first served: leave a comment or hit me up at email [at] [...]
Planning and failing
I enjoyed Lloyd Davis’s post Stick your five-year plan, in which he argues the futility of long-term planning when it comes to one’s own life. I think in some respects he’s absolutely right. While it’s useful to have some structure, some framework to life, anything beyond a couple of years is likely to be wildly [...]
My new filing technique is unstoppable
It should come as no surprise that, as both an IA and a music snob, I keep my ID3 tags pretty much immaculate. Correct spellings, title case throughout, even proper diacritics, until they were ruined by the iTunes v7.7 update.
As part of my curatorial approach, I classify for optimal findability - which means, since I [...]
Design of everyday things
I have a policy of muting TV adverts due to their inherent idiocy, but here’s one I actually unmuted. I’m a sucker for under-appreciated nick nacks.
See also: 10 Perfectly Pure Gadgets.
Hey Twitter, here’s why we’re annoyed
It occurs to me that the reason people (myself included) are pissed at Twitter’s removal of UK SMS service is that it discards information and nullifies coping strategies we’ve built up over time.
Text messaging is one of the highest priority communication methods, superceded probably only by a ringing telephone. It tells users directly, wherever they [...]
Digital rights in a restrictive age
One of the difficulties of working in the internet industry is we sometimes feel like we’re fighting a losing battle against regulation. Despite the new horizons the digital age offers:
state databases of our information are growing, yet our access to public information is being eroded,
copyright is becoming more restrictive, making a criminal out of [...]
Agile and the horizon effect
The 1960s saw the first ideological skirmish in computer chess programming (and by extension much of the nascent field of AI) between two schools of thought: ‘brute force’ and ‘selective search’. Brute force methods involved looking at every possible position on the board, whereas selective search advocated pruning the game tree by ignoring moves that [...]
SXSW 2009 - vote for me!
The South By Southwest session picker has just gone online and I’m not too proud to shamelessly solicit votes for my session:
Divorce / Retry / Fail: Keeping Users Infatuated
We know all about lust. Our websites pose, preen and seduce, and it works – those users just can’t keep their hands off our bits. But, as [...]