Poking through my refferer logs I discovered SurfMind run by Andy Edmonds. His interests are UI, Radio, Mozilla, and Cogntive Modeling. What an amazing blog and he's a former CMU'er. I can see I have some reading to do.
3:34:47 PM
Geek Toys: MicroCar Smackdown
These tiny cars, which measure about 2 ½" long, have been a favorite of salarymen and schoolboys in Japan and throughout Asia.
Just a few weeks ago, Radio Shack upped the ante by releasing its version in the US, called ZipZaps.
Both cars use similar motor technology-- it's essentially a small cylinder with a high-speed motor embedded into it. The motors themselves are the same as those used to vibrate cell phones. Speeds range from 10,000 to 26,000 RPMs. Motors are interchangeable, and along with the right gears, can be swapped to give either better speed, or more control for tight turns.
This reminds me of a place my grandfather use to take me in Detroit, MI where you could rent mini cars and race them around a track. It was a ton of fun! I'm going to have to get some of these for my cousins.
3:16:19 PM
Audio Books
Audio Books
I LOVE books on tape, fiction and non-fiction. I try to only listen to unabridged versions although the books stores mostly sell terribly abridged stuff. eg. An 800 page Tom Clancy novel of 2 cassettes? What are they kidding? I rent tapes from various companies. The longest I've heard was an unabridged Clancy novel that was over fifty 90 minute cassettes. My favorite companies are:
Audible.com - www.audible.com Internet downloads, pretty cheap, but mostly abridged crap. Lots of business motivations speaker stuff, but historically not a lot of good fiction/non-fiction. However, they're the fastest growing of the companies I use so their library is getting better. When you buy a book you download it to you machine (unlimited download 3ish different machines). You have to make sure your portable music player supports their format. You can also burn most of their stuff to CD.
Books-On-Tape - http://www.booksontape.com/ The largest collection of unabridged books. You can buy (expensive) or rent (cheap) unabridged books. The way the rental works is they send you a mailer with pre-paid return postage. You can have the book for a little over a month and if you need more time just call them. I've been using them for years and they're great! Lately they've switched to recording more mainstream novels etc., but they're library has a great collection of historic, sci-fi, non-fiction, and classics.
Recorded Book - http://www.recordedbooks.com/ Library use these people a lot. They have a great collection of classics all unabridged.
Audio Books for Free - http://www.audiobooksforfree.com/ A new one I discovered recently, the site is pretty ugly, but they have free downloads of books in low bit rate MP3s. For a few dollars more you can can download higher quality MP3s.
Another method I'm exploring is using advanced Text to Speech programs, like Text-Aloud with ATT Natural Voices to read me web article and public domain books like the thousands available in the Universal Library being developed at CMU.
pnambic/p*-nam'bik/ [Acronym from the scene in the film version of "The Wizard of Oz" in which the true nature of the wizard is first discovered: "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."] 1. A stage of development of a process or function that, owing to incomplete implementation or to the complexity of the system, requires human interaction to simulate or replace some or all of the actions, inputs, or outputs of the process or function. 2. Of or pertaining to a process or function whose apparent operations are wholly or partially falsified. 3. Requiring prestidigitization.
The ultimate pnambic product was "Dan Bricklin's Demo", a program which supported flashy user-interface design prototyping. There is a related maxim among hackers: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo." See magic, sense 1, for illumination of this point. [Jargon File]
[Jon Udell] Interaction Design and Agile Methods - Designing complex systems is hard, he [Alan Cooper] said; only minds that are innately talented, and then specially trained, can do it well. Users can't articulate what they need, and may not even recognize it when they see it. So it's up to the interaction designer to figure out what they really need--as opposed to what they think or say they need. To a release-early-and-often guy like me, this sounds wildly arrogant.
My personal expereince designing systems tends to make me agree with Jon. User testing and Think Alouds have been a constant source of surprise and inspiration when learning about user motivations and internal mental models.
The problem here, he [Cooper] said, is that the "happy fraternity" of business, engineering, and marketing managers has been torn asunder. People who used to work face to face are now separated by the products of IT: email, IM, the intranet. Lacking emotional bandwidth, the focus all too easily drifts to solving the wrong problems. The same kind of syndrome afflicts us on a larger scale, he said, as we replace human touchpoints (sales clerks, travel agents) with software. Automation works to a point, but without the ability to cajole, negotiate, compromise, and apply the grease of human judgement, systems don't work well.
...Web services specs talk about things like assertions, attributes, contracts, transactions, and compensation logic. They describe these things mainly in XML that is human-readable for only special kinds of humans...
