The omnivore’s 100

From Andrew Wheeler at http://www.verygoodtaste.co.uk/archives/399

The Omnivore’s Hundred

Here’s a chance for a little interactivity for all the bloggers out there. Below is a list of 100 things that I think every good omnivore should have tried at least once in their life. The list includes fine food, strange food, everyday food and even some pretty bad food – but a good omnivore should really try it all. Don’t worry if you haven’t, mind you; neither have I, though I’ll be sure to work on it. Don’t worry if you don’t recognise everything in the hundred, either; Wikipedia has the answers.

Here’s what I want you to do:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here and/or at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Cramming my phone bill

I will admit it. Until now, I wasn’t the kind of person who actually looked closely at the phone bill. Scan it, sure. Make sure that the cost is in the ballpark? Right. But we don’t use the landline much at all, so it’s not very exciting reading.

This month, though, it just didn’t seem…right. Just a little too high. There was a charge on the bill from YCP Network Fax. Never heard of this company. Not sure what it was, but I’m quite sure I didn’t need to be paying someone $15 to use the fax machine that I already had on this second house line.

A call to Verizon confirmed that a monthly service charge had been added to the bill by this third-party company. There’s no way I added this service, intentionally at least. The Verizon rep insisted that there had to be verification before anything could be added to our account, and they would send us the information that *I* verified. They also agreed to remove the charges from our account (this was actually the second month).

Yesterday, I got the paperwork telling me that I “confirmed” this service. Apparently the services was added at a site called employ-e.net. This is a site that apparently has lots of job listings on it. Now, I’m certainly not looking for a job, so I am sure I wouldn’t have used or registered at this site. And upon visiting it, I realize that I’ve never seen it before. But then it gets weirder.

The registration information on the paperwork is just slightly wrong. There’s a typo in my address…I wouldn’t have a typo in my address, as whenever I fill out a form on the web, my address auto-fills. But ok, maybe there was a typo. In the mother’s maiden name field, there’s a name I’ve never heard of, much less been related to. And the phone number, remember, is our FAX line…why would I fill out a form with my fax number as contact?

But then it gets even stranger. I use Chrome as my web browser. They said I signed up on July 1, 2010. I went back to my browser history for that day, and the week before it and a few days after it. Nothing. And when I say nothing, I mean that none of the pages I visited even had a form of any sort that I could have filled out. I did buy a couple of things on Amazon with my Prime one-click account a few days before that date, but Amazon has a different email address and phone number than were on this paperwork.

And then you realize, I’ve been slimed. The paperwork says that I would have had to do X, Y, and Z to sign up, and then I would have gotten an email confirmation from these bozos welcoming me to their service. Well guess what, bozos? I don’t ever throw away an email. Even spam gets archived, suckers. There was NOTHING from them. Nothing nothing nothing.

So, somehow, my phone got crammed. Now here’s the real question. Why does Verizon allow anyone with my address and phone number to add a pay service to my phone bill? They have a maiden name, and it’s THE WRONG ONE, they have my address, a phone number, and an email address. There’s nothing here they couldn’t get from a domain registration record, customer loyalty card, hell, everyone has your name, address, phone number, and email address. And that’s ALL THEY NEED to add some pay service to my phone bill?

Verizon, why do you allow this? Why don’t you require verification from your customers when someone wants to use you for a moneymaking scam? Why do you make me spend FIVE MINUTES verifying my identity when I call you just to ask a simple question, make me spend HOURS on the phone doing third party verification when I’ve already had to give you my Social Security number and my firstborn, but you let some known scammer add his service to my phone bill without so much as a hello?

Imma ask this question of you, Verizon, and I’d like an answer.

Webinar deluge

I spent much of today online in live conversations about social media. I’ll be doing two more webinars tomorrow. They’re important discussions to have, and I’m glad to be loading them all into a couple of days…then take some time to digest.

The hardest part has been the presentations themselves. Most of the folks leading these discussions have been involved in social media for six months or so. Maybe a year. Listening to that kind of a talk can kind of feel like watching your dad dance to rock and roll music.

Were you on Friendster? Orkut? Do you know what FriendFeed is? Have you squatted your username on Brightkite? Forget about Twitter and Facebook — I mean, don’t forget about them, they’re hugely important…but if you’ve not studied up on the past, and not looked in the niches (hey, tried TopHarbor?), this probably all looks bright and shiny to you. The original online social network was probably Usenet.

So, I just wanted to share a few things that I’m thinking about in this social networking space.

* The notion of monetizing social networks, or measuring their ROI, is like the notion of measuring ROI on telephones.

* Different social networks serve different functions, and have different audiences. LinkedIn is data driven. Who are you, where do you work, what do you do, how many TPS reports did you push out? Facebook is a publication — you and your life. Pictures of the kids alongside your latest contract win at work. A picture of you as a person, and a place to keep in touch with other people. Twitter is a conversation. It’s a way of establishing relationships with other people, doing customer service, enhancing customer relations, while allowing companies to show a human side, and humans to establish relationships.

* Protecting your Twitter updates is silly. Of course you protect your Facebook stuff — you don’t want strangers downloading pictures of your kids. But Twitter? The rule is, never say anything on the internet that you wouldn’t say to your mother, your kids, or your boss.

* Social media is a public utility without a monetary framework. It’s not the tools, it’s the people. It’s what you say and do in this public town square that enhances (or doesn’t) your brand, your name, your reputation.

With two more webinars tomorrow, I probably will have more to say about this tomorrow. Also, after sleep. 🙂

YouTube’s Added Value

I’ve been using YouTube quite a bit lately to host shareable videos. It’s so easy, a child can use it (and clearly they do, for better or worse). But it’s also maturing into what could become an enterprise-level tool that is a lot more meaningful than videos of kittens falling asleep.

It’s important to me to ensure that as much video as possible is captioned. We’ve captioned many of our YouTube videos already, and we’re hard at work captioning more. The goal is that all of the videos we publish will be closed captioned. Why is this important? Well, certainly for accessibility. Someone who can’t hear the audio track of a video needs to know what’s being said. But also, people in offices who don’t turn up their volume, people in noisy places who can’t quite make out what’s being said through their speakers — they too can use closed captions to ‘hear’ what’s going on.

That’s enough reason for me. But it wasn’t enough for Google. They’ve added the killer-app feature that makes it critical for all thinking people to add captions to their videos — SUBTITLES. That’s right, if you caption your video, the user viewing it has the option to translate those captions into any of approximately 40 different languages. (The thumbnails below will link you to screen shots of just how it works on the user end.)

First there was YouTube EDU, and now captioned *and* subtitled videos — a suite of remarkable tools rising from a pool of skateboarding dogs and angsty teens.

Does (not?) compute…

A few people have asked me recently what tools I use to do the web work I do. So I thought I’d do a rundown of the top apps that make me productive. In writing this, I have realized that I may, in fact, have the most boring jam-packed Dock in all of Mac-land.

BBEdit [text/code editor] (and not just for the obvious reasons) — When I first started using a Mac professionally, it was out of necessity. My Windows machine had blown a motherboard, and the only available loaner was an iMac (StudioDV, the smokey one). I was the only one in the office who was still using Windows, so my colleagues were more than happy to offer me help and advice on appropriate software. BBEdit is the reason I stuck with the Mac. Edit over FTP? Things like ‘Process Lines Containing’ and built-in Tidy and an instant live Preview…it works like I do. Light, powerful, and can clean/update/edit/create faster than anything else out there. I spend most of my day in BBEdit, and not just writing code…but jotting notes, lists, doing information architecture, etc.

LaunchBar [app launching tool] — Shortly after I got my first Mac, I installed LaunchBar. Since then, I’ve gotten quite a few new Macs (hmm…let’s see…at least eight or nine…) and the first thing I install is LaunchBar. I don’t know where any of my apps live. I don’t need to clear off my desktop or have them in the dock to launch them. (Also finds people in the Address Book.) Command-space and the first letter or two, enter. It’s in my muscle memory. Saves me many minutes every day.

Fugu [SFTP client] — Free, BSD-licensed, academic. It’s simple, clean, and always seems to work. Can’t ask for more than that from a client like that.

Fetch [FTP client] — Free academic license (thanks Jim!), and for the one server I have to log into with FTP, it works a treat. Fast, and cute puppy.

xScope [visual design support] — I tried xScope on a whim when it first came out, and I have saved insane amounts of time since. It allows you to measure web-page objects, among other things. So, I have a photo that I want to replace…rather than viewing the image and getting info, or opening it in Photoshop (neither of which necessarily gives you the right info, as the image could be scaled in the CSS or HTML), you just hover over the image, and the pixel dimensions show up. I highly endorse this product and/or service.

LiveScribe Desktop [digital notebook] — This software is the interface between my Mac and my LiveScribe pen. Being able to open that up, type in someone’s name, and find all the meeting notes for all the meetings I’ve ever been in with that person is quite handy.

Yojimbo [information aggregator] — I like junk drawers. I can always find what I need in my junk drawer. Same is true with Yojimbo. I keep all my serial numbers, passwords, and receipts from stuff bought on line in here.

FileMagnet [iPod/iPhone sync] — Some info is important enough that I want to have it with me all the time, but I don’t want it in the cloud. It’s primarily stuff I export from Yojimbo, and then transfer with FileMagnet. Works great. (I posted some details of the Yojimbo/FileMagnet workflow on the Yojimbo talk list.)

Photoshop [image editor] — If BBEdit is my right hand, Photoshop is my left. I don’t LOVE it, but working on the web without it would be like trying to slice bread without a knife. There are tools that are lighter and sleeker and cooler and written in Cocoa, but there’s nothing that comes close to the brute-force power that Photoshop has. Period.

Camino [web browser] — Sure, I use Safari and Firefox, too, and the Web Developer Toolbar is crucial for some tasks. But for some reason, I enjoy browsing in Camino better. It’s faster than either. And even though it has that bug where it doesn’t know how to display buttons properly, I still find it to be the best choice for me. Of course, choosing a browser is like choosing a flavor of chocolate.

VMWare Fusion [Windows virtualization] — I have to test everything on IE. Because people still USE IE you see. 🙂

SLife [time tracker] — Gives me a broad view of which apps I spend the most time in, and vaguely what I was doing. It’s kinda neat.

New tech, same as the old tech

Those of you who know me will be astounded to learn that I’m using Flash. What you won’t be astounded by is that I’m using it to caption video. 🙂

I am really enjoying my new job. The people are great, the work is good, and challenging, but well within the realm of do-able. Plus, I have my own thermostat. I miss my friends at Brown, but we’ve kept in touch, which is nice. I now fill my car’s gas tank once every three weeks or so. Can’t complain about that.

Lately, I’ve been focusing a lot on CMS analysis. It seems like a lot of the decisions we’re working on making and the changes we’re moving towards are things I was involved in five years ago. The good thing is, there’s five years more research and experience in the world to tap into. To that end, you may be interested to see what peer institutions are doing in the realm of content management. 129 self-selected web developers answered a long and very informative survey regarding their experience with CMS products (homegrown, commercial, and open source). Take a look. (Requires Flash. Sigh.)

Saying goodbye

Tomorrow is my last day in the office. I’ve been at Brown for twelve years — twelve *and a half*, if you want to be precise about it. It is the third proper job since college, and by far the longest. I’ve had at least five different titles, and no fewer than eleven offices. On balance, I’ve liked each one. Even the cubicle with no windows in the center of a basement of a concrete bunker was all right, because I had some really smart, cool people in that bunker with me.

It will be sad to leave, I think. But it really hasn’t hit me. The notion that tomorrow is my last day is completely foreign. I will drive to the office, park, walk up the street about a half mile (or maybe take the shuttle), card my way in, and waltz into my lovely corner office — a space with three windows and my purple leafy curtains. The desk is still cluttered with papers, wires, and who knows what. There are still a couple of bags that I never unpacked from the last move a year and a half ago. Bookshelves are full, and my shrinkwrapped MacWrite 1.0 and MacPaint 1.0 are still on the top shelf.

I’ll sit down at my desk, and realize that there are still things that have to get done on at least one of my pressing projects (in fact, I just this moment, 9pm, got ANOTHER email from a professor who has ‘one last thing’). I’ll probably read email, check Twitter or news, and try not to get sucked in for more than five or ten minutes. If I can finish the work that I need to get done by noon, I can start packing. Three hours should be enough, I hope…because that’s when the party starts. We’re expecting about forty people in our conference room, and frankly, I hope it’s packed to the gills. There’ll be beer…in fact, all I asked for was beer and cupcakes. Even regular cake would be fine. But I think that’s a fitting sendoff. No pretentious hors d’oeuvres, no fancy speeches. Just some of the people who have made the last twelve years great for me (and some who’ve made it a challenge, but still) hanging out, having a beer on a Friday afternoon. I can’t think of anything better.

What is going to be weird, though, is Monday morning. I don’t have to rush to work. I have to…er…well, I have a meeting at the Benefits office at my new job (which doesn’t start until the 23rd) at 10. Then I have to…er…the house is pretty clean. So is the car. There’s really no gardening to do, and it’s going to rain anyway. Hmm.

Maybe I’ll schedule a massage.

I hoped that writing this would make it more real, but it doesn’t. I know I will always be welcome at Brown, and I know that many of the friendships I’ve made there will last forever. But I also know that of the forty people at that party, I’ll likely never speak to or set eyes on at least half of them ever again. It’s comforting to realize that for the rest, when we do touch base, it’s likely to feel as though no time has passed at all, and we pick up right where we left off.

And I’ll make new friends, tackle new projects, drive less, and maybe relax more. I’ll have to navigate the scary waters of bureaucracy that I haven’t had to swim in for more than a decade…but I think I can do it. I like to smile, and people like smiles.

Tomorrow I’ll smile. I don’t know if I’ll cry. Probably not. If I don’t, maybe it’ll be because I’m older now. It’s work. It’s less emotional. It’s not baby seals and starving children, it’s just a job. Or it’ll be because it’s just not real. Either way, though, I think there’ll be cupcakes.

Must try this out…

Overstream allows you to add captions/subtitles to your YouTube or other videos. Awesome. (UPDATE: Now YouTube allows you to add captions directly to YouTube videos — see the May 2009 blog post here on the topic.)

Accessibility article

Opera developer James Edwards makes a point about AJAX and accessibility. I definitely see, and mostly agree with, his point. But one must consider the subtleties. If a particular user interaction makes a function significantly more simple for most users to understand or interact with, but it’s not accessible, the developer has to do a lot of soul searching. Is the solution as good? His Flickr remake example works, but it’s nowhere near as appealing as Flickr’s current interface. You have to edit all the fields at once. You have to take extra steps, as a sighted user, to work with the page. But most importantly, it looks nothing like your final product when you’re interacting with it. That’s the appeal of Flickr’s current interface…there’s no difference in the admin interface and the end-user interface. It just works.

So while the point is very well taken, there has to be some happy medium, for the sake of usability. We can’t throw away, or significantly dumb down, some ideal usability for mainstream users simply to make something ideally accessible. We should make it BOTH accessible AND usable at the same time. It can be done, but it’s hard.

User interface is king

This morning, it was 68 degrees before 8 a.m. My son dressed in shorts for the first time this year. And he knew it was going to be the best recess of the season so far. But he had a paper for school (fifth grade) that he had hand-written, and needed to type up before handing it in this afternoon. He’d forgotten to do it last night, and if he didn’t have it done this morning, he was going to have to stay in at recess and type it up then.

So he scrambled to type it up this morning before we left the house. He didn’t finish. He was heading to Mimi’s house for breakfast, though, and might have some time there, so I suggested he email it to himself, then check his email at Mimi’s, and finish typing it there. Then he could email the final copy to himself (to pick up at school), and I told him to send it to me, too, just in case.

I dropped him off at Mimi’s, and  headed up to work. When I sat down at my desk, there was email from the little guy — with an attachment (in .rtf) of his paper. Some of the people I work with can’t even attach a document to an email, but he pulled it off. (And he did it all by himself, without help.)

Now, of course, part of the reason is that he’s a super genius. 🙂 But the other part is that some folks have really figured out conceptual UI design. My little guy uses GMail, and GMail really makes it hard to go wrong. It’s got a top-down format, which makes you go step by step. No horizontal toolbars, no bevy of options, just a straightforward process, so easy, a ten-year-old can grok it. Only eight things to think about. To, CC, BCC, subject, formatting, spelling, attach a file, event invitation, and then you’re off. (OK, event invitation? Meh.)

Compare that to about a dozen or so (depending on your preferences) in Mail.app (chat? If I want to chat with someone, I’ll go to iChat, thanks) and OWA (Outlook Web Access) — and do note that several of the OWA options are icons, so you have no idea what they mean…

I have a phone on my desk. It has 38 buttons on it. I have only ever used 12 of them. I suppose if I were some fancy phone-nerd, I’d use the 38 buttons, but someone like me doesn’t need 38 buttons. I need 12. I also need a smaller phone. 🙂

Watch your words

SXSW Interactive continues in Texas, and amid the announcements of party attendance, hangovers, and meetups, some insightful stuff does bubble to the top. Tiff Fehr, a smart and talented Digital Web Magazine staffer, posted about her experiences on day three of the conference. The final point she makes is an excellent one for anyone in the public eye, whether a writer, a software developer, or even a curmudgeon — you are your brand. Remember this when you post to social networks.

People who are interested in your work will look at your blog, sure. But they’ll also look at your Flickr pictures, your Facebook comments, your Twitter tweets. All those together build onto any brand that you intentionally try to develop for yourself. That can work really well for you, supplementing your corporate identity with a bit of humanity or humor or dynamism. But it can also torpedo the hard work you’ve done to establish a brand in the first place. Sure, you might look respectable on your blog, but when your Flickr feed is full of dog fights and you shoot off your foul mouth in your YouTube phonecam videos, you’re not doing your brand any favors. And by extension, you’re not helping your business, whether you work for yourself or someone else.

When social networks die…

I found myself saying to a colleague this morning, “Orkut has gone the way of Friendster.” We were mulling over the reasons why certain social networks last, while others go the way of the summer fling.

I’ll admit it, I join every social network I see, more or less. If there’s anything particularly intriguing about a site, I’ll throw my hat into the ring. And I’ve found that the networks that I continue to use are the ones that offer me something other than social networking as a primary draw. Why do I still use Flickr? Because no matter what computer I’m on, no matter where in the world I am, I can find my pictures. While I’m not a knitter, I have learned from Ravelry members that it’s the bees knees, not primarily because of the other people, but because it offers tools to knitters that they’ve not had before — at least not at this level. The fact that there are other people in the Ravelry world to share with is just the proverbial icing.

Having things in common isn’t enough to sustain a social networking relationship. Perhaps it is in the real world — you can sit down over coffee and talk about the finale of The Wire, or the silly Olympics logo. But asynchronous relationships based on two-dimensional interactions are transient. There’s not much to hold your interest, and plenty of other shiny things to distract you.

For a social network to be really meaningful, it has to first be in service to the individual member somehow. It has to draw the user to it for a reason other than connecting with other people. Interest in Facebook (or is it facebook?) is waning, but it hasn’t tanked as quickly as Friendster (or mySpace) because someone is always sending you a new app, or a Zombie Bite, or an invitation to a game of Scrabble. But I sense even that will lose its appeal soon enough.

So, what explains the popularity and sustained success of LinkedIn? I’m still not sure how it fits into the paradigm. LinkedIn is different things for different people. For me, it’s a place to keep a skeleton copy of my c.v., and a place to keep track of people I am not regularly in touch with — so if someone’s email address changes, I’ll still be able to find her. For recruiters, it has very little to do with the social networking, and a lot about the résumé. Perhaps that’s the answer, then — it’s the Flickr of résumés. It’s a place for me to maintain a pointer to me, in case anyone’s looking for me. My relationships with others on LinkedIn are less important to me than my own details…but it sure is fun to find old friends from high school, and see where they ended up.

I guess the lesson learned here is, social networking for the sake of it, simply to exploit similarities in relationships, will always be short-lived. Anticipation, then excitement, then early adoption, then critical mass, then waning. It’s the relationships based on more than just proximity (even virtual proximity) that really seem to last.

Another awesome service

I like Macs. I really do. And I need a .Mac account for syncing my calendar and Yojimbo. But .Mac stinks. I try to keep three computers synced, and it always seems that one or more of them doesn’t sync properly. All the machines are up to date, all software on the same version, but I regularly have to delete my sync data or perform some other magic trick to get syncing to work.

I have some workarounds for that. I’ve started using Sandy (UPDATE: Sandy’s now gone. 😦 )to track my calendar entries, and I just have all my iCals subscribe to her syndicated version of my calendar. I try to make sure that I massage my .Mac periodically so my Yojimbo entries sync. I don’t worry about bookmarks, and Address Book contacts seem to sync eventually, so I’m usually OK.

But files. OH FILES. I hate carrying a thumb drive. I fear losing them. I worry I’ll forget them. But whenever I am connected to my iDisk and try to save something on my MacBookPro, the machine hangs. DotMac is just not my friend.

Enter Jungle Disk. On the one hand, it’s so simple, I shouldn’t have to pay for it. On the other hand, $20 for a lifetime of software support and upgrades as an interface to the gignormous Amazon S3 servers is kind of a no-brainer. I could spend a few hours figuring out how to tap into S3 myself, sure. I know I’d be able to do it eventually. But my time is worth more than $20 an hour, so why not outsource that? I did. I bought a Jungle Disk client license.

I used the service for a month. I took everything off of my .Mac account and moved it onto my Jungle Disk. At 10-cents-per-gig download and 18-cents-per-gig upload, it wasn’t a budget breaker. My first month’s bill from Amazon was 21 cents. I can work on Mechanical Turk for about five minutes and make that back.

Jungle Disk works just like a regular WebDav connection. It’s a bit slower than write-to-disk, but not so much so that it is annoying or anything. And today, Jungle Disk 1.5 was released. For $1 a month (first 12 months free), you can have web access to your files, encrypted or not (you decide).

If only there were a way to sync my Yojimbo data reliably, I’d be dumping that $99 annual .Mac fee.

Web services that work

Remember years ago, that neat service that got a lot of press, Wildfire? It was one of those services that you could call, and it did voice recognition — a woman’s voice responded, and she was your personal assistant. But it was expensive and complicated, and the company went for enterprise-level. On the other hand, enter Jott. Free (at least for now) service that you can call — it transcribes and then forwards your voice messages to anyone else’s email or SMS. Now, that’s just dandy, and I probably wouldn’t use it just for that…I’m rarely away from my email for so long that I can’t wait to get someone a message, and if it’s that important, I’ll just call.

But now imagine if that service could send your messages not to other humans, but to other SERVICES. That’s where IWantSandy comes in. Sandy is your personal assistant, and to get her to do stuff or remember stuff, you just send her an email, or even cc: her on an email to someone else. Any date/time/event/contact information is extracted from the email, and added to your Sandy repository. Which is fine and dandy, except I already use iCal. Well. Sandy also syndicates your Sandy calendar, so you can subscribe to it in iCal, and then the events in your Sandy calendar show up as events in your everyday calendar — even syncing to your iPod or iPhone or other PDA that speaks iCal.

The other day, I had Sandy remember stuff about Thanksgiving. I even told her what I was going to need from the grocery store. Now, when I get to the store, I can drop Sandy a quick note (or call her through Jott) asking her for my grocery list, and she’ll email my grocery list to my phone.

When I started using these services, I wanted to dive in and figure out how they work, so that I could tweak them to within an inch of their lives. I started reading the developer API doc. Then Sandy sent me a reminder about an upcoming event, and I stopped reading. I have a basic enough understanding of how it works. But what’s more important is THAT it works. As Ben Schneiderman said at World Usability Day New England 2007, it’s not about what computers can do, it’s about what you can do with computers.

I was telling a colleague about these services this morning. He thought the confluence of these services was pretty cool, and then he asked if any of our ‘clients’ had been asking for this kind of support. I explained that, no, these are bleeding-edge kinds of uses, and only the earliest of adopters would be using them — and those folks can generally support themselves. But what if we set up Jott/Sandy accounts FOR them, and just told them how to use the services? Not how they work, not the ins and outs, just, “Call this number, say these things, and then in five minutes, sync your iPod, and it’ll show up.” We could even create our own wrapper around the services, so as to not make them scary and intimidating or disjointed, or even make them not seem Web 2.0 (which some folks DO find scary). Just, hey, here’s a cool thing. Call, wait, sync. Period.

I’m going to have to play with these some more.

World Usability Day New England 2007

First, and most important, kudos to Sarah Horton of Dartmouth College, and Steve Fadden of Landmark College, who pulled together a fabulous, memorable program for WUDNE2007. Ben Schneiderman, founder of the HCILab at UMD College Park, was our keynote speaker, and he remained throughout the entire day to participate — his work is remarkable, and if you haven’t read Leonardo’s Laptop, you should.

A few takeaways from the day:
Five years ago, it was all about what computers can do. Today, it’s about what *we* can do using computers.
Acceptance of universal usability is a slow process. (This I simply do not understand.)
Kurzweil, Dragon, and Inspiration are important tools for many students with learning / mobility / sensory disabilities

Also, a comparison to note. WUDNE began at 9 a.m. with coffee and snacks, there was a keynote by one of the most well-respected scholars in the field of human/computer interaction, we had a team of experts who literally ‘wrote the book’ on universal usability (Sarah Horton from Dartmouth and Pat Lynch from Yale), a pair of folks from Fidelity who are involved hands-on with one of the largest financial-management web projects in the world, as well as a panel of students who are consumers of assistive technology, and Steve Fadden, PhD, director of research and a professor at Landmark College. We had a few posters, lunch was catered by Panera, break with cookies and coffee, and we wrapped it up at 3:30 p.m.

Compare that to one of the west-coast WUD events, in Seattle. Started at 3 p.m. (well, the proper program didn’t really start until 6), had a couple of two hip young speakers, a panel discussion, and then a beer party.

The important thing underrepresented at WUDNE? Young industry up-and-comers.
The strength of WUDNE? Scholarship.
The important thing underrepresented in Seattle? Scholarship.
The strength of Seattle? Young industry up-and-comers.

Something to chew on.

Who are your users?

No half-decent web developer would tell you that accessibility is not important. But few developers have been fortunate enough to work hands-on with users who have disabilities, and/or the software that they use. I’ve been very fortunate to have experience with lots of assistive technology — in fact, just yesterday, I had a routine eye checkup, and I was explaining to my eye doctor what a refreshable Braille display was, and how it worked. He was floored!

Well, here’s an opportunity to see a few different users of assistive technology, and see the processes the use to bend computers to their wills. I found the videos uplifting and enlightening — honestly, I had no idea just how good AssistiveWare’s Mac software really was — even controlling Windows through Parallels! It’s good stuff.

You’ll get paid when the VC comes in…

‘Uh… Four million [new] active users means minimum 20,000 concurrent users at any given moment, and you want to do all of this on ONE co-located virtual server in India? On .Net and MS SQL Server? Honestly? You really, really think that’s how it will go? In that case, can I punch you? Please? I mean, I only ask because you seem like the type of person who’d ponder the question and then just blurt out “Yes,” and I’ve been dying to hit something since I pressed “1” to join your conference.’

OK, this blog post from Joe the Peacock had me giggling in my coffee.

It’s all about the user, dear.

I find it interesting how web publishing so clearly mirrors print publishing. Perhaps not the advertising model — that’s still in flux in both camps — but the user model. Newspaper editors are concerned with two types of stories: the ones that the readers want to read, and the ones that the readers need to read.

Then I think about my local newspaper. There’s the police log, the fire log, the public notices, the school lunch menus — all the stuff I want, available when I want to find it. I already know it’s there. It’s referenced in the page index of the paper, so I know right where to flip. It’s always in the same font, the same size, easily recognizable. It’s easy for the user, who anticipates its existence, to locate it when she wants to.

But then there’s the stuff we need to know, but don’t know to look for. That’s the stuff on the front page, the news well, the feature well — the stuff we don’t even know to ask about, because we don’t know what we don’t know. The editors have a handle on the content. They know what they’ve got, and we readers entrust them to judge the important items, and stick them where we can’t help but see them. We need to know, even if we didn’t ask (because we didn’t know to ask, so didn’t come awanting).

As web publishers, we show our users what we think they need to read — someone has to do the information architecture, make decisions about what goes where, and frame the user’s first impression. We also need to provide users with what they want to read; we are rightly inclined to include search functionality, site maps, and other navigational aids to expose content at the user’s behest.

What drives the need? For a local paper, perhaps good citizenship. For a trade pub, something important to our careers or our businesses. For a web project…whatever you, as the content wrangler, decide to be the most important. (If you make a glaringly wrong decision — well, either you didn’t have enough information, or you’re in the wrong line of work.)

Experience in conventional publishing is a boon for anyone who’s a web developer, because although the media is somewhat different, the users are the same, and they’re looking for the same stuff. As a consumer, I don’t care if I’m reading the school committee meeting minutes on a screen or on a page. I’m the same person, looking for the same information.

As web developers, it’s our job to make sure our users can get what they need as easily and intuitively as possible. User interfaces should be developed by people who know how to develop user interfaces (e.g. editors and art directors), not database developers who have no such experience. But too often, the UI follows the backend. (Here’s a fun real-world example. Well, fun, as in, horrifying.) A clock asymptotically approaches useless if you can’t figure out how to set it — I can more easily look at my watch than dig the manual out of the glove box and profess some mysterious incantation over the trip odometer — something that I’ll not remember six months later when I need to reset the clock. Make it easy, or I’m not going to be able to get what I want or what I need.

People forget. We’re busy. And I feel rather disrespected when something that could have been made so obvious is not. As a web developer, I’m in the service of my users. It’s my job to give them what they need, to give them what they want, and facilitate their getting it. I feel pretty maternal towards my users. I wish more content owners did.

“When Available”: Closed Captioning in iTunes

“With iTunes 7.4…[y]ou can now also play purchased videos with closed captioning (when available)…”

So! This is cool. Sort of. Of course, none of the videos in the iTunes store up until now has been captioned, so nothing you’ve bought in the past would apply. I’d love to see a press release about the plans for captioned video, though.

Also, it only applies to ‘purchased videos’…so, hmmm. Gonna have to find out some more information about this. I already rip my DVDs with captions open (in Handbrake), so that’s not a problem. But come on. If the HDTV over-the-air signal can handle the scant extra bandwidth captions require, surely broadband can.

The Cool Table

What do Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia; manners expert Letitia Baldrige; astronomer Carl Sagan; author Robin Cook, M.D.; Senator Patrick Moynihan; writer Molly Ivins; the late actor Tony Randall; novelist Erica Jong; and NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg have in common?