Oct 31
This is great: Guy Kawasaki opened up a BoutyUp fund so everyone could pitch in and get Dave Winer a new Diamond encrusted iPhone. Details here:
http://www.bountyup.com/bounty/Buy+Dave+Winer+a+Jeweled+iPhone
It was when I was doing a freelance gig, producing the online version of the 1996 Bank of America Annual Report (kindda ironic, as that’s where I work now), and after showing my client the usual four tiers and types of pages the site would comprise, and getting them approved, and going into production to grind out a couple hundred pages just to have the client (yep, that was you, Cliff 
) say:
“Blue… could we change all those table headers from grey to blue?” Continue reading »
Oct 29
It never ceases to amaze me, that the best experience we seem to come up with for feeding a computer, after multi-touch this-and-that and semantic wonderment, and peer2peer, socially syndicated gobble-d-gook, are text fields, radio buttons, check boxes and menus.
My Dad used to say that he had an unparalleled skill at creating errors on “those Web forms” which he didn’t even realize were called forms. Continue reading »
Oct 28
Woke up. Made coffee. Made breakfast for the kids. Touched base with the blogshere. Brainstormed a new product idea with Donna. Signed up for Last.fm. Signed up for medium, whatever that is. Signed up for some voice-to-blog thig Guy twittered about. Created a new amp/pedel cobo in Garage Band. Learned some new minor chord voicings for a song I’m working on. Jammed a bit. Worked with the girls on piano. Vacuumed a 5 bedroom house. Did some laundry. Made the girls lunch. Fixed the comments section of my blog Installed a spam deterent thingy, since I decided to remove registration to comment. Took the kids to a park.
Fairly productive day.
All that’s left is to: Go grocery shopping. Get the kids to bed. Re-record part of a podcast. Take out the trash. Take out the recycling. Run some backups. Maybe relax and work on this song that’s manopolizing my frontal lobe. Go to bed.
From Joe’s phone
Oct 24
If you’ve ever struggled to make a decision … you’ve engaged in the design process, though you may not have even known it.
In the next 5 chapters I’m goign to describe the 5 phases of design: Discovery, planning, design, execution, and follow-up.
Oct 24
My professional objective is to come up with the most amzing experiences imaginable.
Imaginable.
Think about that word for a minute.
Imaginable.
Not experiences we know how to build… Not even experiences we know.
Just great experiences which will make people say “that was amazing! I want to do it again, and I’m going to tell everyone I talk to about it.”
And I don’t worry about who’s getting the credit; whose “incentive compensation metric” is getting boosted, ’cause that kind of thinking leads to the siloed brain-rot that drives disintegrated experiences that customers hate.
The most amazing experiences: that’ what I’m going to work on.
Oct 24
Listening to conversations between designers and developers is an endless source of amusement. Contributors and visionaries from both camps will always have expectations and frame questions from the view of their own professional specialty.
It gets even better, when a programmer and a designer discuss working Agile methodologies, and gets even better when they have varying appreciations of what exactly agility is. Continue reading »
Oct 07
So I decided that a new website is in order. Why? Well, the current most recent version of my site was made in 2003, and a lot’s changed since then.
First off, I’m not in the business of providing custom solutions anymore: that site really showed the range of services I had been providing my clients for over a decade and was intended to bring in new clients. As I’m currently employed I’m not really looking for clients, and my focus has narrowed from being a full service integrator to living up at the “Fuzzy Front End” of the development practice, where I start at the strategic planning point and pretty much back off once concepts have been approved.
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