constant narrator

… I was evidently thinking about the same stuff I’m thinking about now, although in a much more rudimentary form. I stumbled across this research project I did for one of my last college classes in early 1996. The class was awesome and terrifically bleeding edge at the time: International Internetworks. We looked at networking in the developing world and how it could faciliate research and relationships. We also looked at some of the technology people were starting to set up in remote places.

I remember one component of the project was we to interview an expert about our topic and include it in the report and how much I enjoyed bantering over email with my interview subject. I wrote about Building Women’s Web Spaces, which included a lot of my earlier women’s studies research, but half of the paper talked about content creation, information architecture and basic usability. I also notice that I had been writing online long enough (4 years) to already have my cheeky web-writing voice planted firmly in the paper. Some of the writing is horrible, but some makes me laugh. I remember being especially proud of the Clean Design<tm> of my project. Look at that fly header with the drop shadow! w00t!

I think it’s cool that UIowa maintains this page. It’s a nice time warp into what people were looking at back then from the scholarly angle.

I’m not really an instant messaging person, but I just got out of a chat with my old co-worker from Sri Lanka who is now in Damascus, Syria. Damascus. We were talking just like she was in the cube with me. Now, I was hyped for the ‘mind boggling global potential of the internet’ in 1992 (at ~3am on a late night in March) but sometimes it just hits me afresh what a beautiful thing such said global communication is. How cool is it that I can talk with this woman who, a few years ago, I would have lost track of as she made her way across the world to learn Arabic and finally back to Sri Lanka? Instead she’s online telling me she’s going to stay for a year and I would love Damascus and how I should come visit her. I love you internet!

I am a hopeless geek.

Today I broke down and finally bought a miniDisc recorder. I’ve been enamoured ever since pfly did the stereo walk-around recordings at Burning Man 98, but the desire increased after my Dad died and I realized I had no good recordings of him.

Since my grandpa is 94 (although doing quite well), the urgency has increased each time I go home to record him telling some of his excellent stories. I had an ill-fated attempt at purchase and use last year with dbauler, because I didn’t do my research. I left Iowa bummed and left Best Buy with an open-package MD that didn’t have a mic input. No more! After reading up online, I know I am completely in over my head. MD has some seriously geeky followers as well as hardcore broadcasters with their $600 mics. I still need to go to an audio store locally to figure out what (lower-end) mic to get, and then read the stupidly complicated and unhelpful MD manual. Then I’m off next week to get some midwestern goodness on tape. Er, disc.

And after that, recordings of rusty train noises!

I shepard the UI of a web app. I inherited an app with a lot of data-overload, and I often argue to leave less important data points out and condense what is left. It’s all about strategic weeding and obvious signage. Therefore, I’m creating a set of icons this week. I seek icon inspiration.

While searching for this link that bug read on one of his RSS feeds, I also stumbled onto GUIdebook, which is a well-ordered museum of past and present GUI OSes. It includes screen shots, icons, sounds and splash screens, arranged so a reader can view the evolution of a particular OS or compare different ones.

Walt Disney Home Video to test market self-destructing DVDs:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/21/technology/21FLEX.html?8hpib

An incredibly stupid idea with tons of extra plastic and printed paper waste for landfills! Brilliant! Why buy something you can keep and watch over and over when you can pay almost as much for something that is a worthless piece of trash 48 hours after opening it? I hope the loss of a few million dollars will help repair a little of Disney’s short-sightedness. Bleach! Grak! Blergh!