The Laptop Nomad

Going Free

2006-02-20T17:48:00.000-08:00

It's been awhile since I last posted, mostly because I had to give the Powerbook back for the contract I was on, at which point, my personal laptop then up and died right thereafter. I've been contemplating buying another Mac, specifically, the MacBook Pro, but they've now been pushed back another 4 weeks. This works well because I didn't really have it in my budget right now to plop down another $2000+ on a system.

In the meantime, I've had a friend lend me an older Dell laptop, which I've now installed Ubuntu Linux. I have to say, I'm finding Ubuntu to fit my needs quite well. The only program that I truly miss is Microsoft Visio, but I didn't really have that on the Mac, either. I've download DIA, and have the Draw program that comes with Open Office, and I intend to give each of them the full run through, perhaps create some wireframe stencils for whichever one I find I prefer. Still, if I'm only missing 1 application from the Windows World, I think I'm doing pretty good. If I were doing full-time I/A work, I might find it a bit more difficult to concede on Visio, but I'm not right now, and I find Ubuntu is great for development and simple productivity apps.

Things I enjoy about Ubuntu:

Apt-Get and the Synaptic Package Manager. I've always wanted a nice, user-friendly version of Linux based on the Debian distro, primarily because I knew Apt-Get was the friendliest package manager for linux, and installing new apps on Linux is one of the areas that I always have had problems.
It behaves almost exactly like a slightly degraded version of OS X. Infact, it seems the Ubuntu crew borrows liberally from the Apple folks. There's a couple of small things that need to be fixed, primarily a short-cut / Windows key combinations, but they're somewhat minor, and I can forgive them given that the software is completely free.
Regular updates. There's a new version of Ubuntu out, roughly speaking, every 6 months. Given that I'm new to the system, I don't know how significant these updates are, but the committment to activity means I'm more comfortable adopting it knowing that they're working on bugs.
Plug and play, easy install. Installing Ubuntu was one of the easiest OS's I've ever installed, and quick, too. The only snag I ran into was buying a Linksys 802.11G wireless card. It wouldn't work, and I had to go with Netgear, which worked out great.
Ruby, and Rails, were both dead simple to install, and I'm back up and working on some personal content management projects with some software I had started on before my laptop took a dive.

Also, while I don't particularly care for the 'look and feel' of Open Office Writer, the Spreadsheet app in Open Office is generally good. And I've recently started using Writely to do most of my word processing (fantastic app!). All in all, I'm very happy with Ubuntu, and it's getting to the point where paying $2000 for a MacBook seems a little insane now that I've got a decent GUI wrapped around a linux distro, and it's not costing me a dime.

Mmmmm... Check it out .

Becoming a Better Geek - A List of New Year Resolutions

2006-01-15T19:44:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I'm a little late with my resolutions, that's just because it's been a busy new year. Now that things have settled down a bit, I'm starting sift through my notes, reflect back on what went right, and what went wrong in 2005. 2005 was a disruptive year, I left not 1, not 2, but 3 different jobs. Never in my life have things felt so unstable, so insecure, and for a short while, I thought I might have to move to Nevada for a contract(fortunately, that wasn't the case). On the plus side, every job I left meant higher pay at the next one, and it has brought me closer to my real industry value. I still have a tendancy to undersell myself professionally, but that's partly because a small part of me refuses to believe that people will actually pay me to do what I'd likely to do for far less money if it meant doing something outside of the web.

If 2005 was a disruptive year, 2006 is definitely a rebuilding year. A new apartment, a new job, and a far greater sense of stability with much greater pay than ever before means that I can focus on creating more long-term value within myself. I definitely have my personal resolutions(start running again, cook more, Smart Home hacking, etc), but the goal with this posting is to share more professional minded goals. With that in mind, here's the short list:

1. Improved Communication Skills. As this technology stuff becomes more and more old hat, and tools continually get easier to learn and implement, the hard part seems to be focusing on improving my communication skills and applying them to my career. Primarily, I'm thinking in terms of group communication and presentations, having to talk intelligently in front of more than 5-10 people, and having to communicate in meaningful, or instructive ways. To that end, I've already joined a local Toastmasters group, and I can already see the benefits. Public speaking, or presentations in general, are one of the most difficult areas one has to improve, and I'd wager that a big reason for that is that most people have limited opportunity to practice. Toastmasters, while some may think of it as a perverse, self-obsessed, baby-boomer created self-improvement program, it does offers a lot of opportunity talking in front of groups, and a captive audience that is willing, nay, committed, to offering constructive feedback. I've only been to one session, but I can see it becoming slightly addictive as a research tool (you have to know what you're talking about) for play or work. In fact, I'm already scribing quite a few mini presentations.

2. Become Better Known as an Expert in My Field. I work in web development. Some may tie the title Information Architecture, Interaction Designer, or User Experience Developer to a lot of I do, but in my mind, a lot of those titles sound pretentious (if I hear the word Architect to describe one more field outside of those who actually design large buildings, my head is going to explode). If there's any title that I'm most comfortable with (outside of web developer), it would most likely be Interaction Designer. It fits within my interests, and can be applied to a wide variety of fields. In addition, I already work with, and know personally, quite a few top notch Information Architects, and I really have very little interest in competing for their positions. Plus, if the web of the late nineties and first few years of this century needed I/A's to organize the web's content, the popularization of AJAX, the Read/Write web, and the web as a platform surely needs people highly skilled in Interaction Design. To that end, I'm making sure I participate more, both in the online IxD and I/A communities, as well as professionally, at conferences and seminars. I'm also working with others, and have plans to create a series of workshops in the DC area, which I hope to be announcing in the coming months.

3. Learn Another Scripting Language. I had to learn J2EE (reluctantly so) for an old employer when our engineer left, and we still had a CMS to build, maintain, and enhance. I never much enjoyed it, and thus was never much good at it. I definitely dug on the UML diagramming, creating wireframes, abstracting layers, and generally building a technology product that could be reused and sold. But Java, and Struts, and always seemed a bit verbose, and very time consuming. Still, I love designing and building technology tools, products, and services, even if it's just for myself. That's why, when Ruby on Rails was released as an open source, rapid application development framework based on a Struts inspired MVC model, I dug right in. I'm now fairly well versed in Ruby, and Rails, and I plan to continue to develop in it as my primary tool (at least 1 major project planned right now). Still, it can't hurt to pick up another langauge, and since I'm dropping compiled languages (or, JIT ones), and less than ideal object oriented ones, Python seems a good backup. I'm choosing Python because it seems to have a sizable community, is more object oriented than PHP, has a couple of interesting frameworks and projects already underway, and seems to double as a nice "glue" language for system administrators, linux hackers, and Mac enthusiasts.

4. Contribute to an Open Source Project. As I left a company building in Java, and went to focus my professional skills on front-end developmont (CSS/XHTML/JavaScript), I gained a much clearer understanding of the benefits of open source. It's gotten to the point where other than a few exceptions, it's increasingly difficult to see myself ever going back to using proprietary, closed source applications. This phenomena is most pronounced when it comes to choosing a programming language. Java? No thanks. .Net, uh-uh. I want a quick, rapid development or prototyping environment that will allow me to focus on ideas, and that won't have me tied to a specific platform; one that will be supported by the community long after some company invents the Next Best Thing and stops supporting it. My first project will likely be an web RSS scraper built for myself with Python, XPath, and HTML Tidy to gather local events. After that, I'm going to start moving to Visio mockups & storyboards of Ajax interactions, and moving to develop, and freely release those interfaces to the community. Possibly by the end of the year moving towards wireframing and architecting interfaces for new Linux applications0.

5. Go Back to School. Due to family committments, as well as a less than ideal vision of what I wanted to do long-term, I never finished college. It still bugs me to this day. Fortunately, I'm in a position with a great new employer, where they are willing to help pay for me to go back to school. I'm also fortunate that in that I'm single, without children, with little to no debt, so I can readily afford the time to go back to school. My only difficulty is that I love learning, and I'd ideally like to go back for a double major in Economics and either, Human Computer Interaction, or Library Sciences. Of course, topping that off with an MBA would be grand, but as they say, one thing at a time. I would think a double major in Economics and Library Sciences would be fascinating, but my career is point more towards HCI, long-term.

p.s. #6 is to get back on a Mac! It's hard to be a professonal when you're working with a toy!

A Quick Pointer to a Great Music Writer

2006-01-15T17:10:00.000-08:00

If you're looking for a passionate, interesting, wordy, and all around great blog on music, you could do a lot worse than this guy. Check out his list of the best music of 2005, and read up and listen to his compiled Christmas music from the last two years. This guy is a surefire way to find great new tunes.

Chris was also one of the people who introduced me to TWAS, simply some of the best music writing on the web.

I am a Schmuck

2005-12-28T15:15:00.000-08:00

File this under "totally obvious".

I'm an anti-mouse kinda guy. I want to use the keyboard as much as possible. This is somewhat of a new trend for me, but I figure if I can use the keyboard accelerators, that's less time I have to spend reaching around and pointing all over with a mouse. In the end, for most tasks, I figure the keyboard will be quicker.

Well, it's always bothered me when cycling through a page using the Tab key, especially on forms, that if I accidently tabbed one field too far, I would either have to click on the right field, or tab all the way through the page again.

Well, today, curiosity got the best of me, and I decided to Google the "previous tab" shortcut stroke. Sure enough, it's there: Shift+Tab

Brilliant.

I'm sure it's been there for years, as it is totally logical with Microsofts interface guidelines. I will now be much happier geek.

If only someone would create a version of Quicksilver for the PC, then I would be completely set. In the meantime, the Google Desktop will have to do.

DOM Scripting - Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model -- By Jeremy Keith

2005-12-26T13:53:00.001-08:00

I mentioned this book in a post the other day, but it really deserves it's own post. I just finished the book on Saturday, and I feel comfortable saying it's without a doubt, one most well written technology books I've ever had the pleasure to read.

I was skeptical at first, up until now, I felt the same as Dave Shea (CSS extraordinaire) in the forward:

"JavaScript? No way. It's inaccessible, you know. Relying on it will make your site unusable, too. It's the root of many an evil pop-up window. I mean, it probably even kicked your dog when no one was looking...."

"... Or so I thought..."

"... In fact, the sate of DOM Scripting at the moment reminds me of where CSS was in 2002. Up to that point, CSS had been considered this quirky little web display language that no one used for anything more than font styling."

Well, in 2002 I took to the leadership at my then current company, and laid the ground work for us to transition towards CSS layouts. It was, I believe, a good decision and has been a feather in my cap for every job I've applied for since.

Since 2002, much like Mr. Shea, I've avoided the use of JavaScript in my work. I thought of it as a hack, and admittedly, in many cases and implementations I've seen, still do. Mr. Keith, however, lays a great foundation for how to go about implementing JavaScript. In one of the most methodical, almost anal retentive, approaches I've seen applied to any programming book, Keith goes case by case instructing you how to go about using the trifecta of XHTML/CSS/JavaScript to create dynamic pages that also benefit from maintaining they're accessibility.

If you're an XHTML/CSS purist such as myself, who's strayed from JavaScript due to accessibilty and clientside benchmarks, DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith is the perfect introduction to the language. It's a rare book that will easily double as an introductory text, as well as a proper reference for best practices and proper implementation. I also picked up the Oreilly JavaScript Rhino book at the same time, and I can't imagine working with DOM Scripting with both books at my side.

Seriously, I may sound as though I'm gushing a bit, but it may be the most accessible book I've read on technology. Mr. Keith obviously knows a large majority of his audience is designer oriented web developers who have avoided JavaScript due to it's programming nature. As such, he does a remarkable job describing technology in a very human language.

Go buy it!

Local Giant -- Poor Usability Leads to a Poor Customer Experience (or why I love John Mackey)

2005-12-25T14:35:00.000-08:00

I recently moved into a new apartment in the Columbia Heights area of Washington, DC. It's a great apartment, with a view overlooking the city, and a clear line of sight to the Washington Monument. No doubt about it, it's the best apartment I've lived in since I moved here 6 years ago.

One thing that came up recently, though, was grocery shopping. I've been fortunate to live within a 5 minute walk to a Whole Foods for the past 3 years, something I always appreciated. Nowadays, in my new apartment, I have two choices. I can walk 15 minutes to the new Columbia Heights Giant, or I can make a slightly longer jaunt down to my old stomping grounds and hit the Whole Foods in Logan Circle.

Well, yesterday, after deciding I needed a few more groceries for today, I decided to swing by the new Giant, which I really hadn't been to much since it opened. Plus, I figured, moving into the neighborhood, I had better get acquainted with it.

I have to say, it was one of the most unpleasant shopping experiences I've had in awhile. A quick list of bad encounters and other observations:

Store Entry. There's one entrance to the entire store, and it actually doubles as the stores only exit. To make matters worse, not only do you have street traffic coming in, but you also have people getting on/off the elevator. This leads to a high level of congestion, and carts clangin', etc. The paranoid part of me speculates that this was actually a conscious decision by management in order to more easily catch/trap shoplifters since store resides in an "up and coming" neighborhood.
Store Aisles. One thing Giant seems to take a bit of pride in promoting about the new store is the vast selection, and overall size. However, from a usability standpoint, they've created aisles with no mid-way breakpoint, and the signs hanging at the end of each aisle are hung fairly high, with a relatively small print (at least it seems small when reading from the other end of the aisle).
Employee Hiring: This is just one thing that I've noticed, and it's certainly not the fault of the employees, but it's worth noting in my opinion. One of the reasons I love shopping at WholeFoods is that they really seem to employ a sort of "behavorial hiring" practice. If you're not familiar with that term, it's pretty popular these days in the service industry, and it basically just means hiring people who are naturally well suited to customer service positions. I actually believe I'm one of those people, as any technical support position I've ever had, most of the success came because customers really enjoyed the natural people person approach. To bring this back to Giant, they seem to have no sense of what it means to hire customer focused employees. That's not to say that the Giant employees are all unpleasant to deal with, but none of them seem to enjoy interacting with customers, and it comes through.

The next few things are not so much a usability issue, per se, just small annoyances. However, they stick in my craw ;-) :

Floors are generally dirtier.
On prior visits I have seen customers snacking from the produce section, this last time I saw an employee stick her hand into the prepared food section to grab and eat a couple of french fries.
Bombarded with advertisements. Okay, look, I'm already in your store, I'm likely buying quite a bit of groceries, or at least as much as I believe I need. I don't need the Giant spokeswoman selling me additional goods through a recording on a loudspeaker as walk through the store.

Also, and this is again a personal issue, but as I walked through yesterday, I couldn't help but gain a sense that the entire experience was unnatural. The produce section is great, and varied, but they seemingly get produce that is likely not grown in the DC area, or even the east coast! How does it get here? Is it fresh? What sort of chemicals are they growing it with?

Simarly, walking out of the produce section, and into the meat section, everything's wrapped in skin tight plastic, in order to keep it as fresh as possible, as long as possible. No thanks, I'll take my meat as naturally as possible, and I'll likely buy it the day I need it, possibly up to two days in advance.

Finally, if you compare the aisles of your local WholeFoods or other organic markets against those of Giant/Safeway/(insert traditional supermarket), I think you'll notice something. In attempt to make sure product stands out as much as possible on already crowded shelves, the people who supply to Giant/Safeway/etc make these horribly bright and garish packages to sell they're goods. I've found on my last few trips to Giant, that this has actually made the whole experience that much more unpleasant. If I were one to be prone to random headaches, I'm pretty sure a trip to Giant would induce one.

All of this brings me to one last comment. The new Giant was built(half-assedly so) to compete with the likes of Whole Foods, and to a lesser(but growing) degree, Wegmans. I'm of the opinion now that Whole Foods is pretty much unstoppable, and here to stay. As someone who loves food, and believes that it has the power to not only sustain, but also heal, as well as bring friends and families together, I can only ask that John Mackey and the rest of Whole Foods continues forward in their success. While Giant has stumbled with their location in Columbia Heights, at least it was a stumble in the right direction. Something we probably all need to do a little more often.

Happy Holidays

Google, AOL & speculation

2005-12-22T20:20:00.000-08:00

Sitting here this last week, it seems there was some concern in the web community as to whether Google's purchase of a 5% stake in AOL was a misstep down an ultimately very damaging path. It's pretty well known that most tech savvy people are not fond of AOL (myself included), and that they seem to have a pretty good reputation of bringing the stock down on otherwise attractive companies.

I'm still not sure this was a good move by Google, on whole. It could turn out to be some curse that brings their stock down this year, and it would not surprise me.

However, Google made one blatantly aggressive move in this acquisition that has me extremely excited: they've requested that AOL Instant Messenger become compliant with GTalk. Combine this with the fact that Google has released the API for GTalk this past week, allowing for all sorts of mash ups with the application, and you have a foot hold for a lot of interesting mashups in the most mainstream of all I/M clients. What this means is, when mobile phone manufacturers start releasing their 3G compliant phones this coming year, we'll have mashups with the GTalk API that will allow us to use the wireless internet to make free calls on our cell phones, and not utilize any of our cell phone carrier minutes (i.e. Sprint Nextel, Cingular, etc).

This is very cool, and Google deserves a lot of credit for pushing this through. I think for Google, next year, GTalk will become they're killer application. Ideally, you should be able to connect from your cell phone, to any AIM or Gtalk client in the world, for free. Once that reaches the tipping point, you can be sure that the telecoms will slowly start to matter less and less. Will the FCC start to regulate VOIP and the internet? Let's hope not!

ARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!! Editing in Dreamweaver using Tables!

2005-12-21T13:32:00.000-08:00

Ack! I'm on smallish project for a larger client, and the site templates were just handed over to me today.... It's using a table based layout, and everything's been constructed using Dreamweaver...

If I'm not mistaken, it's going to be 2006 in less than 10 days -- it's been 4 years since I've had to do an implementation such as this...

I thought this battle was over?!

Question to figure out: How do you convince an organization with 4 designers, who do most of the HTML work, that it's time to move on and that they have to learn CSS?

I've successfully transitioned other companies that I've worked for in the past, but this one is inherently more beauracratic. I will consider it a major coup if I am able to transition this organization to pure CSS within the next 6 months. I would like to do it in less.

Oh, and if you haven't already, go pick up DOM Scripting - Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model by Jeremy Keith. It's the best programming book I've read in quite some time, Mr. Keith does the single best simple introduction to a programming/scripting language that I've yet seen.

Recommended.

Yahoo.icio.us is not so Del.icio.us

2005-12-14T17:16:00.000-08:00

Sorry, Yahoo - I'm not impressed. Less than a week after you're announced purchasing of my precious Del.icio.us, and you already have it experiencing downtime.

This sucks.

Del.icio.us should've stayed the independant route a little while longer. I shudder to think what Yahoo's user experience design team will do to the del.icio.us. Del.icio.us was nearly perfect up until recently(though, they really should have a tag management system a la 43Folders), and Yahoo's u/x track record is pretty poor, by my judgement.

Washington Post Redesign (when did this happen?) with a cool new feature.

2005-12-06T16:16:00.000-08:00

It appears that the Washington Post has redesigned their site to the slowly growing in popularity resolution of 1024x768. And... it looks great (at least relative to the old design).

The old site was a jumbled mess, and the Post definitely uses to the extra space to help solve that problem. Still showing they're still a bit worried about customers, they wisely use the right column for advertisements that might get cut off by smaller browsers.

Unfortunately, newspaper based websites (other than the International Herald Tribune) still suck, and the Post continues to suffer from trying to cram headlines from nearly every section of the website onto the front page.

Still, the new redesign is without a doubt an improvement. More importantly, there are hints that the Post is going to be a bit more aggressive with utilizing the web. As pointed out over on Signal Vs. Noise today, the Post is testing a new feature that allows for receiving RSS feeds of the votes made by all members of Congress (read more on the Signal v Noise blog). This is great because, in case you're not a tech geek, RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication, and it definitely earns the title. It will be great to see what kind of mashups are made with the tool. I'm sure someone will grab the feeds and start building a visual representation of the votes made on certain bills. I can see this becoming very valuable during election cycles, etc.

In addition to the RSS feeds, if you observe the URL that the this is being fed from, the Post appears to have created a section, or subdomain, on their site named Projects. If you go to it now, it only redirects to their home page. However, if they're being smart about it, they could be one of the first major print and newspaper media companies to have a beta section on their official website. Sounds cool to me. Print media is under attack by the web, and it's interesting to observe how they respond.

This appears to be a good move by the Washington Post.

A Web Based Real Rhapsody: Great News for Music Fans

2005-12-06T09:33:00.000-08:00

Real has quietly announced a web based version of their popular music service, Rhapsody. Up until my switch from a PC to a Mac, I had been a subscriber for almost 2 years. In my opinion, it's easily the best of the digital music services.

The great news about the newest version of their software is that it's strictly a web based product, meaning you only have to login to the site using your account, and that there's no software to download, and that those on non-Windows computers (i.e. Linux and Mac) now have an alternative to iTunes.

I'm going to try and spend some time reviewing the software in the next month, but if you haven't used Real Rhapsody(in any format) yet, I highly recommend it. It's especially useful for those of us who spend quite a bit of time working on a computer, whether at home, or in the office. Most critics will highlight that you never get to "own" the music you listen to on Rhapsody, and of course, they're right. However, I think of Rhapsody as a mix between XM Satellite Radio and Amazon.com. Over 6 million people pay $10 a month for XM, and you have little choice in the music you get to listen to, other than their vast channel selection. I think of Rhapsody as a service similar to XM, but with an ability to browse similar artists, get recommendations from editors, while creating precise playlists of the artists, songs and albums you want to hear.

What would be especially interesting for Real to do with Rhapsody, would be for them to institute some of the features found in what are typically referred to as Web 2.0 sites and applications. It would be great for community reviews of artists, the ability for users created tags and categorizations, and possibly RSS feeds of new or recommended artists in the genres you like. It would certainly add value to the service, but perhaps there's risks that I'm having a difficult time imagining right now.

Off Topic: Gourmet Magazine - Simply knowing your audience

2005-12-05T17:25:00.002-08:00

This post is deviating from the normal observations of technology and hotspot reviews, to a observation in simplicity, and knowing your audience well.

Among my few non-tech related hobbies, I very much enjoy cooking, most people who know me personally know this quite well. So it's not uncommon for me to receive subscriptions to common cooking magazines, even if the only one I read on a regular basis is the brilliant Cook's Illustrated.

That said, I've never been much of a fan of the more popular cooking magazines, namely, Bon Appetit and Gourmet. Most often, the recipes are needlessly complex, are too picture perfect, and appear to be designed for an uptight crowd who doesn't realize that the point of a good home cooked meal is to enjoy the little imperfections, drink too much red wine or other booze with family and close friends (and sometimes not so close friends), and that number one enjoyment to be found in food is not to develop "food porn" quality photos, but to get dirty, make some mistakes, learn from them, and continue on because you love food.

With those complaints leveled, I must admit to being impressed with the direction Gourmet Editor in Chief, Ruth Reichl (formerly of the NYTimes) has taken the magazine. She's brought Anthony Bourdain (of Kitchen Confidential fame) on board to write, I believe, a monthly column. She's also taken a stronger focus on food travel destinations within the United States, seems to be focusing on easier to find ingredients, and generally is making the magazine more accessible, while still retaining a sense of elegance.

One other observation about Gourmet, as recent subscriber to the magazine (thanks, Mom!), one of my favorite discoveries was that when you receive the magazine in mail, they send you an edition with a cover stripped of all text on the cover, save for the name of the magazine. It's a great touch, it simplifies the cover, allows for an elegant, simple cover, and piques your interest of what lay inside, and probably helps their subscription rate, however slightly.

I'm unaware of how long Gourmet has maintained this practice, but credit must be given for a thoughtful approach, and I wish more companies, certainly more magazines, would follow there lead.

Random Saturday Blogging Bits - Part 2

2005-11-26T18:00:00.000-08:00

It's a quiet weekend in D.C., what with everyone heading back to their hometowns for the holidays. Cold and a bit breezy outside, I've decided to spend a low-key evening doing some reading at the local Starbucks on Capitol Hill. It's 2 level store, with a laid back, student/work friendly environment upstairs, plenty of comfy chairs, a conference room, as well as fireplace. It's one of my favorites, and I like to come here at least 1 weekend a month to read, catch up on work related materials, and browse current trends in the blogosphere and design communities.

Well, anyhow, sitting here tonight and a few things have come across my mind:

I've been offered a new job as of Wednesday afternoon(with a 3rd inquiry arriving late that evening). I actually had two offers come across my inbox, both offering a sizable salary increase, and more importantly, a chance to do more interesting work than at a point in my career, while working with extremely talented people. Of course, that's how it should be when starting a new job. Nonetheless, I can't help but feel extremely fortunate. For a mostly self-taught schmuck (some great mentorship along the way) such as myself, who struggled in high school, and never finished college, uprooted his life from the west coast to DC without the support (financially speaking, I of course had the emotional support of a lot of friends along the way) of anyone, I find it amazing that I'm now being offered an opportunity to work alongside some of the best, and most well known user experience professionals in DC. My hope is that it'll be a long-term, mutually satisfying experience that will provide me with plenty of opportunities to learn and grow along the way.
Staying on a similar thread, one of the reasons I chose the job offer I did is because of the tuition reimbursement program combined with the opportunity to be learn and grow with proven industry professionals. If there is one thing this rather difficult past year has given me, it is a more clear understanding of my long term professional goals. I left my first job this year with no clear understanding of what I wanted to do next, and fell into a technical support project management position, which, while a painful experience, it was also one of the primary drivers for discovering what I wanted to do long term. I always tell people that the world is too rich with opportunities to waste your time dating people you're not attracted to, working a job that you don't love, and generally not following your passions. Those of us in rich, Western countries are extremely fortunate due to all the opportunities afforded us, and shame on those who are capable, but don't take advantage (while helping others, of course). So, for the long term, I've decided to reenter school, focus on getting my degree (as well, later a graduates), with the end goal being the ability to command opportunities to hold a title of Interaction Designer as part of a premier User Experience team, with knowledge and skills that afford me the ability to design both online and offline experiences. I'm particularly fond of the work and research Peter Morville is conducting in the realm of Ambient Findability, as well as the research being done at the Stanford Captology project, and finally Wayfinding and Transmedia. To my relatively uninformed mind, all of these must intersect at some point, along with Information Architecture and Interaction Design, for a flexible career that will provide an endless list of interesting projects in our ever more information rich and complex society.
With the first two points being a bit more long winded than anticipated, I'll keep this one short with a few interesting links to check out:

RBirds Pattern Observations : NYC Design firm publishes obversations and critiques of design, marketing and brand patterns in common consumer products. Not the most in-depth research, but certainly interesting, and available for free.
Rbirds About Design Blog : While most of my design reading on the web relates strictly to the web, it's nice to get insights from a company doing real design and marketing work for large consumer products in the offline realm. Worth reading, and perhaps grabbing the RSS feed.
The Curtis Creek Manifesto: There seems to be fair amount of information designers on the web currently interested in the use of comics as an effective way to present information, the Curtis Creek Manifesto on fly fishing seems to be a favorite. Apparently, I really need to read Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud.
Paul Graham on Web 2.0: Paul, per usual, shares his incredible insights, and hits upon a few thoughts I'd been mulling over regarding Web 2.0, as well as few new insights. A must read for those interested in the current state of the web, where it's going, and why we in the web community are so excited.

Finally, in closing out this post, I realized as I was typing, that my favorite holiday has just passed and I didn't take time to write about it. So, please, indulge me for a few moments. I love Thanksgiving, it is without a doubt my favorite holiday. I try to cook the entire meal every year, as I find it to be an incredibly rewarding experience, and what better way to celebrate Thanksgiving than by feeding and giving sustenance to the friends and family that you're so thankful for all year. Though I wasn't able to be with the people most important this year, and was unable to cook for anyone, I'm still incredibly thankful for all the opportunities being brought about at this time in my life, and the people who've supported me along the way.

Cheers

The Google Influence

2005-11-14T23:25:00.000-08:00

I don't mean for this site to be all about praising Google, it's just that they seem to be the most interesting company around these days, especially of the 3 tech giants (Google, Yahoo, Mircosoft a.k.a GYM, though I have a hunch we're going to need to learn to fit Apple in that acronym somewhere).

Their primary advantage seems to be in the execution, and brilliant marketing strategy that I'm not sure I've completely figured out. Of course, they do trip everyonce in awhile. And for all the praise I'd like to sing about Google Analytics, they do deserve the beating they're about to take for not warning existing Urchin customers, while not being able to keep the service up. Still, for every bad move Google makes, they seem to make 9 or 10 great ones. And if not, at least they hint to a greater, untapped, and coming soon potential.

In addition, beyond all that Google does directly, they are beginning to force the preexisting tech giants to rethink their notions of the web and software in general.

Take for instance this article posted at CNET today:

Microsoft eyes making desktop apps free.

You can be sure that the only reason Microsoft is thinking of this is because of Google's threat to take traditional software to the web and serve it to us for free. It's rather amazing to think it has come to this, and stands as a testament to the power of the market. We didn't need government intervention for Microsoft to finally be threatened, we just needed to rethink the nature of the intersection between technology, business, life in general, and all those other little details that come up day to day.

Now, to be fair, I am having an extremely hard time figuring out how anyone is going to top Google. Search, or findability in general, will continue to be the single most important factor from a consumer standpoint for the foreseeable future. Search is not limited to the internet, or at least to a web broswer. Neverminnd that in a few short years, Google has already positioned itself as one of, if not the largest of the worlds advertising platforms. Continuing forward, if Google has it's way, it will be a major player in the telecom industry(say hello to completely free VOIP based WiFi cell phones), it will be major player in the health and genetic research industry, it will become a player in the realm of Space research, and it will continue to lead the path to findability in realms we haven't yet conceptualized a possibility for yet.

Don't believe me? Come back in a few short years. If you're not using a mobile version of the Google Talk I/M messenger downloaded to your cell phone, comfortably switching from a free (likely Google provided) wifi hotspot (read: your entire city) to a traditional cell connection where the wifi may be weak, it'll probably be because you're on someone elses free network. Google is accelarating the adoption of internet technologies so fast that I believe most futurists and technologists themselves are a bit surprised by it. I certainly am. The pace of innovation is astounding, and because it's being done (mostly) by Google, it's somehow comforting.

Finally, to comment on the article linked above. I can't imagine Microsoft will succeed in the realm of free software. The concerns outlined by Microsoft employees in the article are very real. Reliably tying adversting into desktop applications, especially if you're a poorly trusted firm such as Microsoft, is going to be an extremely difficult task. I wouldn't allow such software, certainly not from Microsoft, anywhere near a personal computer of mine.

However, if Microsoft does succeed at all with advertising based software, it will be in no small part due to a change heart from the software giant. No matter what anyone says, the Google mantra of "Don't be Evil" is very comforting when it is adhered to (fairly) rigorously. Microsoft is going to have a significant PR challenge in offering any free software, one that is likely to take years to turnaround significantly.

However, if Google's influence and dominance remains unchecked, Microsoft maybe able use that to their advantage to gain goodwill.

Google Analytics (or, So Long WebTrends!)

2005-11-14T14:12:00.000-08:00

Google has announced their release of the newest version of the Urchin web analytics software that they acquired earlier this last year. The biggest surprise, it's free. At least up to 5,000,000 page views a month, and if you use Google AdSense, it's completely free.

I have to admit to feeling a bit sorry for some of the smaller players with big ideas. Hopefully there'll still be room for those folks to innovate and find their niche. However, the one company I'm having a hard time feeling any empathy for is WebTrends. I haven't used the new Google Analytics, but judging by six months spent with WebTrends(shudder), I tend to think Google stands a pretty good chance of disrupting the online analytics world if they focus on simplifying the interface.

There's a lot of things that these analytic software packages do well, but having an easy to understand user interface that scales well when dealing with a large number sites is not one of them. I used to provide technical support to roughly 90 web properties under a single umbrella organization that used WebTrends and it was the single most needlessly confusing piece of software I had ever used. WebTrends had forced migration from their Live variation, to their newer, "better" WebTrends OnDemand.

What a pile of junk.

I have no doubt that WebTrends has some very intelligent people working for their organization, their customer support is generally good, and my experience with their regional contractors was excellent. In addition, there were occasional glimmers of hope that they understood the problems inherent in their interface, some of which were occasionally improved incrementally.

However, this post isn't meant to be a direct slam at WebTrends, moreso a "I hope they clean up their act due to increased competition" post. Unfortunately, I have my doubts that this will happen in any significant manner. My best guess is that while Google will leverage their integration of AdWords and offering of a self service, free solution, making them an ever deeper, true, "Web 2.0" company. Meanwhile, WebTrends will focus on ever larger clients, and offering a better customer experience. Of course, the problem with this model is that it generally assumes a certain level of difficultly in using their software. As McAfee recently displayed (and other smart companies have known for awhile), a properly designed user interface can alleviate a lot of support necessary for a product to succeed.

Ultimately, I think WebTrends will have to change drastically, and possibly merge with the likes of Yahoo or Microsoft in order to survive in what is quickly becoming a Google dominated web.

OS X App: Quicksilver

2005-11-13T15:13:00.000-08:00

Been on OS X for a couple of months now, and if there's one application that stands out as incredibly useful, and that I haven't seen replicated on other operating systems, it is Quicksilver.

In 3 words:

What Linux Needs.

It offers benefits similar to the those found in Google Desktop on Windows or Apple's own Spotlight, but is easier to use, and much more focused on a singular goal.

Check it out.

Thoughts on Apple, Microsoft and the current state of Linux

2005-11-13T11:54:00.000-08:00

I've been developing a Ruby on Rails application lately, doing so primarly on a PowerBook G4 running OS X (Tiger). As my first foray working on a Mac, it's been an interesting experience, one that I'm (somewhat) happy to continue.

Prior to OS X, I had occasionally played around with various *nix environments, but had yet to fully configure a development environment on any of them. I'm still far from a linux system administrator professional, but I feel what I have learned thus far, and what I will learn over the next few months, will only serve to help me professionally. The benefit of having your testing and development environment so closely mirror your production environment is a huge time saver, especially for those of us fairly new to server administration.

Still, as I work on this Mac, a couple of things come to mind:

While good, the Mac interface doesn't stand out as being leaps and bounds better than Windows from a productivity and usability standpoint. It certainly feels more "grown up", but as far as productivity in a Windowed environment, I'm positive I can be as fast, if not faster, on PC. Granted, I've been Windows user for over 10+ years, and I've only been on a Mac for 2 months, so that speed may differential may change in favor of OS X over time.
There are very little proprietary, closed source applicatations on either Mac or Windows that use regularly. The first two that come to mind are Microsoft Visio on the PC, and Omnigraffle on the Mac. I may dabble in graphic programs occasionally, but I am by no means a graphic designer. Other than diagramming software, there's essentially no program that I use that can't be replaced with open source software(OSS) or free web services.
As a software developer, my main comfort of the Mac is the stability and power of a *nix core underneath a beautiful interface. Frankly, though, if Windows was built on top of *nix variant, I would have no problem switching back to a Windows based system (and probably would).
Finally, now that I've seen what is possible from a visual interface and interaction standpoint using a *nix system, I'm somewhat bothered by the idea of paying for an operating system. From seeing what is possible on Mac OS X, and with the operating system as a platform becoming less significant due to the webs potential, it's become clear to me that Microsoft is going to be under significant assault over the next few years.
Linux is nearing significant threat levels, and while it's still mostly in the server and enterprise arenas, I'm sure it is on everyone's radar. Apple continues to chew away at Microsofts market share, and the *nix community is benefitting from better software and better compatibility, or at least easier ports. Also, Apple, directly and indirectly, benefits the open source community by the addition of such tools as SAMBA and Apache, and many others bundled right into the OS, thus giving these tools a wider audience and user base.

So that brings me back to my final point. While Google maybe the realization of everything we had thought the internet should be, Apple is slowly turning OS X into the realization of everything we had hoped an OS to be, save for one little detail:

It is not free, and it is likely that it will never be free.

It's interesting to think that of all the mind boggling brilliant contributions the open source community has contributed to Linux over time, there's been a distinct and noticeable lack of clear direction in designing a clean, attractive and highly usable user interface. Sure, we have organizations like KDE, Gnome, and others trying to standardize a human interaction model for Linux interfaces, but they all stand out for their lack of innovation, and somewhat bulky, Windows like interfaces.

It's time to rethink the standard interface on Linux. Windows is due for a significant overall next year with release of Vista, and it's learning quite a bit from OS X. The several major Linux distributors such as Novell, RedHat, and Ubuntu, as well as the consortium of developers who make up KDE and GNOME would be well advised follow that lead. Why base your user interface on a second place interface (Windows) when their is a clear leader such as Apple to base your starting points?

The Linux community may not have the resources necessary to do full scale, cohesive HCI and usability research and development on the scale of Microsoft or Apple, but it certainly start to make better decisions based upon the success and failures of both companies.

Which brings me to my final thoughts on this matter. I was browsing the Ubuntu community forums the other day, and came across a post pointing to Gnome-look.org. It's essentially a site that allows members to post user created themes and mockups for review. The site got me to thinking, I've been searching for an open source project to join, and I think I've decided what I want it to be.

I'm going to begin taking my user experience design skills to the Linux community.

I'm going to start from scratch. I'll most likely use either a basic Debian distribution, or perhaps just start off with Ubuntu. However, over the course of the next year, to two years, I'm going to start doing user research in my spare time, the primary focus being to attempt to rethink and challenge the common conceptual models that exist in Windows, Linux, and to a lesser degree, OS X.

It's also going to be directly tied into another project / weblog that I plan to launch in the couple of months, preferably before the end the of the year.

Cafe Pet Peeve - Wide Brimmed Coffee Mugs

2005-10-27T13:13:00.000-07:00

Okay, this maybe indicative of the fact that I have waaay too much time on my hand. Then again, isn't that already apparent with the existence of this blog?

Anyhow, I'm not sure if this trend began with the TV show Friends, but it's basically where I remember it catching fire. That is the trend of wide brimmed coffee mugs at trendy coffee shops. Heck, I used to enjoy the novelty factor of them myself. However, as of late, hanging out Tryst here in DC these last couple of days, I've begun to notice a major drawback.

Let's face it, as I laptop nomad, I spend 6-10 hours a day in a coffee shop. If a coffee shop is going to charge a significant amount for refills on coffee (as Tryst does), I want to drink the coffee fairly slowly. Unfortunately, I've noticed these past couple of days that the coffee at Tryst goes cold very quickly due to the heat dissipating out of a wider surface exposure. I find that I don't even get half way through my coffee before it's too cold and bitter to drink.

Just a hat tip, if you're going to be spending any significant amount of time in an independant coffee shop, perhaps it's worthwhile asking them if they'll serve your coffee in a to-go cup.

Frappr - Good fun, join in!

2005-10-26T16:21:00.000-07:00

So Frappr seems to be getting a good deal of attention today, and I thought it might be fun to make a group for Laptop Nomads across the country. See, even though we don't work in an office, and interact with officemates throughout the day, we're still real people!

Check out Frappr, then join in!

Blogging from the Flock

2005-10-21T11:22:00.000-07:00

Well, the Flock has finally been set free as of yesterday. Infact, I'm using it right now to write this post. It's very nice. I experienced a bit of slowness with it earlier this morning, but that seems to have been a short lived glitch.

The one bit that sticks out for myself is how much they've improved on the standard skin of Firefox. It feels so nice that it almost appears to be a standard Mac application. I can only assume that the skin is the work of Jon Hicks, it really is beautiful.

I haven't played around with it too much yet, but plan to do so over the next couple of days and will hopefully write more as I get a better feel of it's overall "social" integration.

Vingles or Vodcasts, or how Apple finally got me on board.

2005-10-16T14:56:00.000-07:00

There's alot of talk online about the release of Apple's video based iPod last week. A lot of the talk has revolved around the discussion of whether the video iPod will be a success for Apple, and whether they can do for video, what they've done for music.

I'll be the first to say, I don't think the video capability of the Ipod will catch mindshare anything like the .99 music singles of iTunes. But, then again, Apple doesn't need it to do so right now. As it stands the Ipod is now, basically, the best(or at least most popular) portable music player available, and it just so happens to play music.

What I happen to think is interesting about the Ipod right now is the accelerated release schedule that Apple's been following with it. I'm not sure what else they've got in the release pipeline for the Ipod, but pure speculation would lead to at least the following:

Networked/Wifi based Ipod. This seems to be the favorite speculation of the technorati, but knowing Apple, they won't release it until they feel they have the interface correct, which could take awile. Perhaps another 6 months, but who knows. I imagine a networked Ipod that allows for easy, integrated social behavior would be a popular release around Christmas time for kids, etc., but that would be a very aggressive schedule.
Nanos w/more space. Nano's are very popular still, but they're still a bit expensive compared to other models. I suspect will see an increase in storage as Flash prices continue to drop, meanwhile, I'm guessing Apple won't budge on the price.
Smaller, thinner, standard Ipods with more space. These will continue to be a big seller for Apple, and as demand video grows over time, they'll need to keep pace by offering more storage.
Finally, I think most people expect Apple will eventually release a true mobile phone Ipod, one that they design inhouse, and that is manufactured by a 3rd party. I'll put the odds of this at 50/50, as I suspect that they might forgo cellular technology altogether and skip straight to internet based communications. It would be great to see Apple team up with Google to enable a wifi based, video ipod that allowed you to use Gtalk, or any other Jabber type client for an internet based Ipod phone with built in video chat.

As for the success of Vingles (video singles), I hope they pick up, but am not terribly optimistic. It's strange, because I'm not terribly fond of buying music on iTunes, and I can count on one hand the number of songs I've purchased through the software (and no, I don't pirate music). Coming to an awareness on this inconsistency bothered me, and I thought I'd try to figure it out. I basically came down to the following:

My interests in music are eclectic, and fairly substantial. I also happen to enjoy getting a bit of the packaging when I pay for music. Paying .99 per song that comes in mp3, without any of the artwork, lyrics, etc just doesn't seem attractive.

I came to the realization awhile ago that I really enjoy the subscription model offered by Real Rhapsody, and the ability it offers me to enjoy literally hundreds of songs throughout a month for just $9.99. I've realized that as long as it's always available to me, I don't care whether I own the music or not, so paying a continuing fee doesn't bother me. It's much like paying for service such as XM Radio (not something I'm personally interested in), but with much greater control over contenet.

Prior to paying $10 a month for Rhapsody, I was averaged buying close to 200-250 CDs a year for the 2 years prior, which has been brought down to under 5 this year. That's a massive savings on my part, a savings which iTunes cannot offer.

All of that explains my disinterest in iTunes for music, but it doesn't explain my interest in video distributed in iTunes. That can be explained with the following:

Living and working in the city (and as a Laptop Nomad), I spend an inordinate amount of time in front of my laptop. Much more than anywhere else, infact. And as much as my interest in music is fairly vast and eclectic, my taste in TV runs fairly limited. When I have the time, I basically watch The Daily Show, Real Time w/Bill Maher, Iron Chef America, and maybe Meet the Press. I'll watch more if I'm bored, but honestly, I'd rather be in front of my laptop than my TV. $1.99 per TV show is a steal considering the convenience.

So, perhaps I make up a strange demographic, and one certainly not large enough to have the kind of positive effects that music did for Apple, but I think it's a demographic that will certainly grow over time.

In the meantime, I'm very happy to have a legitimate way to buy TV shows online that I can watch while I'm working outside the house. Perhaps it's just a side effect of having roommates, but I'm really prefering to work outside the house in the comfort of Starbucks, which right now has a fireplace lit keeping me warm.

Random Saturday Blogging Bits

2005-10-15T12:27:00.000-07:00

Sitting out at Murky Coffee in Northern Virginia today, trying to get motivated to start translating some backend wireframes into XHTML/CSS based templates that I can start tossing Ruby on Rails code into.

So this is purely a procrastination post, which will probably be pretty apparent from the content.

First of all, Google updated their privacy policy yesterday, and it made me realize, Google is one of the largest, most successful companies in the world, and I trust them much more than any government I can name. Off the top of my head, I'd say the same thing about Whole Foods Markets, and maybe even JetBlue since they turned themselves around after an incident a few years ago. However, I probably wouldn't put Microsoft on that list, and there's an endless list of mediocre companies that I feel wouldn't be any worse than any number of governments, and then there are a few big companies that that I think would be just as bad, if not worse than a lot of corrupt governments.

Maybe I'm naive, but I think as information becomes more accessible, companies will be forced to become more transparent (Microsoft?) due to customer demand. Unfortunately, I have considerable doubts that this same transformation will happen in world governments.

Other tidbits:

Google Reader has already become my defacto news reader. Google gets a lot of praise for their well executed use of AJAX and other popular technology trends, but there's one area of the user experience that I feel they consistently hit right, and that's the use of timing (for lack of a better phrase) in their software. For instance, in the Google Reader, when I scroll to a new item, the timing on the scroll just seems perfect. It's not too slow as to jerk the user out of the experience, nor is so slow as to try your patience. It's perfect. It's this similar attention to detail in other areas, such as archiving an email in Gmail, that's really part of the Google experience, and part of the reason I'm skeptical of the new Yahoo email. As an aside, I actually think Microsofts Kahuna Mail looks more attractive than what I've seen coming out of Yahoo.

To continue on that thought for a moment, I would love to see links or reference to any user experience design research and data available on the effect of partial screen refreshes. Anyone?

The Microsoft Office user experience team working on the next iteration of Office (12) has begun to change my perception of my Microsoft towards one that is decidedly more positive than any time in the past. I'm heading from ambivalence, with perhaps a slightly negative view, to slight excitement. Judging from other comments I've seen lately on the web, I'm not alone in this change of perception. This can only be good news for Microsoft. As much as Microsoft has been monopolistic in practice over the past few years, I don't think it's that far of stretch too say that they're going to need to undergo drastic changes over the next 10 years if they're going to stay competitive in an ever more web focused world.

After bouncing around from blog software and various hosts trying to find an easy to use solution, I'm finding blogger to be fantastic for maintaining a simple site. It's been a slow turnaround, and my impression until lately was always of the blogger of old, with a slow unusable, and buggy interface. However, since the buyout from Google, they've created a few great standards based templates, as well as given the backend of the site a major overhaul. It's much faster, easier to use, and setup. Overall, I think it's the best turnkey solution available for blogging. It obviously doesn't have the power of Typepad, but then, you're not paying for it. And while they're are hosted versions of WordPress available for free, none of them are as easy to use, or offer such high quality templates such as those found in Blogger.

Oh, and Murky Coffee out in Clarendon can be summed up in 3 words:

Damn. Good. Coffee.

Of course, I could use a few more, if asked. Lessee, attractive staff, attractive clientele, comfy couches, and free wifi. A nice place overall.

Another interesting aspect of being out here in NoVa, as someone coming from a more traditionally multicultural environment in DC, it seems the young/artistic crowds are migrating more towards VA; I'm guessing in lure of cheaper ren, and it's close proximity to DC. It's odd to see a more diverse crowd hanging in the burbs than you would have in say, Tryst(DC) about 4 or 5 years ago. Of course, that's under the assumption that DC counts as a artistic / cultural hub. It certainaly seems lacking these days.

I'm not going to lie about it...

2005-10-13T23:17:00.000-07:00

Part of my reason for wanting to start this blog was to test out Google Adsense. I want to test how much money can be made from keeping a journal about your hobbies, interests, etc.

So, after 5 days, and 9 posts, I'm reporting total of.... drumrolll please.... 32 cents!

I've struck gold!

It's obviously time to turn in my notice wiht my employer and embark on this journey full time. ;-)

In all seriousness, though. Adsense allows you to post the same ad code in multiple sites, and I think I'll be testing that out on a few upcoming projects. I've also signed up for an account with Yahoo's new ad system, and will probably test out whatever Microsoft and 37Signals have planned.

However, for the immediate future, I'm really not going to worry about it. Just thought it was amusing.

Subscribe to this Site

2005-10-13T16:50:00.000-07:00

I'm utilizing this post as a subscription permalink for visitors who want to subscribe to the site via XML feeds. For those of you who want the link now, here it is:

http://laptopnomad.blogspot.com/atom.xml

For those of you who are not aware of what RSS is, below is a quick explanation of the benefits of RSS subscription feeds:

Let's say you have 15 sites you read on a weekly basis, maybe even more on a less regular basis. Let's also guess that it's taken awhile for you to adjust to the navigation on each of those sites, and perhaps on a few of them, even though you've adjusted, you still don't care for the decisions of the web designer.

Add to all of that, you probably forget to check a few of the sites on a regular basis, and probably miss good content. If you spend anytime going back and looking for that missed content, you're having to waste even more time.

Enter XML feeds.

If you've paid attention lately, you've probably seen all sorts of little orange buttons popping up on your favorite websites. In true technologist fashion, they've been labeled with 3 letter acronyms such as RSS, XML, or if possibly just as meaningless, ATOM. Don't let the acronyms scare you away, these are very useful. To use these links, you'll need to copy and paste them into a news reader. My two favorites are:

Bloglines
Google Reader

Once you've registered an account with either of these websites, you'll need to enter the feed address into their subscription section. Once it's in their, you're reader will be automatically updated with the latest news from that feed/site. Most readers will tell you how many unread articles you have per site, and most will allow you to save articles to read later.

At the end the day(or week), you'll end up easily finding, reading, saving, and archiving news from all the sites you used to try and read on a regular basis. It's a beautiful system once you get used to it.

Sadly, less than 10% of the web subscribes to these feeds. On the plus side, that means there's a large untapped market for those of us who want to market these feeds in the future.

Busboys & Poets - 14th & V St. NW

2005-10-13T10:49:00.000-07:00

So, I'm relaxing here at the relatively new Busboys & Poets up in the U St. area of Washington, DC. I'm diggin' how comfortable the location is, and it's nice to have a free hotspot integrated with an exceptionally nice food and drink atmosphere.

The place is fairly swanky, with a full bar, a nice loungey type cafe with plenty of comfortable couches and a decent number of power outlets juice your laptop. Another nice plus is that food prices are totally reasonable. I haven't had anything today, but had sampled one of their small pizzas on previous trip. Great, fresh ingredients, and at roughly $7 a pop, one pizza is almost enough for two people, definitely one.

Other good tidbits: above and beyond the cafe, bar and restaurant, they offer a small bookstore in house. The selection is small, and sadly, doesn't offer any real technology related sections, but it's still a nice diversion nonetheless. They also offer regular events, so even though I've never been here at night, they seem to put effort towards involving the local community to bring in clientele.

If I had to make any criticisms, it would be that the place is still in search of a crowd, and it lacks the psuedo social atmosphere found in other nearby cafes such as Tryst in Adams Morgan. Of course, the plus side to that is, you're never long for an outlet to plug into, or a comfortable couch to plop down on.

Oh, and they definitely need to get some small baked goods on the menu(cookies, etc). Something to snack on while we're all here working.

All in all, a good place to sit down and work for awhile.

Recommended
Free Wifi offered in house
At least 1 more available, but untested.

I was wrong about Podcasts.

2005-10-11T15:55:00.000-07:00

I initially brushed off podcasts as nothing more than a fad, partially due to the fact that I found the name to be a bit of a turnoff (I still do, to a point). I also wasn't very fond of them, because my last job was a very fast paced position where I was in constant communication with other team members throughout the day, and didn't think I had time the to dedicate time to finding a worthwhile podcast.

Well, now, as I embark on this laptop nomad lifestyle for the next few months, I'm finding podcasts to be a nice background while I get my work done at Starbucks throughout the day. I'm still searching for good podcasts, and I'm using Odeo to subscribe to them on my Powerbook(listening through iTunes). Odeo seems a bit limited in terms of their index, but I like the idea as well as their visual interface. The new Yahoo Podcast search engine seems a bit cluttered for my tastes, but I'll keep it in mind for the future.

As for recommendations, look for the following on Odeo:

Word Nerds
Ebert & Roeper
Radio Economics
ChinesePod(Yahoo Podcasts, learn Chinese from ChinesePod.com)

Unfortunately, as much as I enjoy the concept of a Ruby on Rails podcast, I'm afraid I'm going to hold off on recommending the Ruby on Rails podcast for now. As it stands right now(judging from the Jamis Buck episode), it's the perfect example of a poorly executed Podcast. A lot of stammering, hemming and hawwing, and a general sense of a lack of planning.

For more on PodCasts, check out Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution:

Link

A few tidbits for today

2005-10-11T15:13:00.000-07:00

First, Peter Merholz has a post up on his blog commenting on the recent Alert Box from Jakob Neilsen. It's a good read, but my main reason for pointing it out is that he links to another great new blog by a member of the Office 12 User Interface team.

I've added it to my blogroll (Jensen Harris). Definitely worth a read if you dig on interface design. Microsoft is doing a pretty good job (they could be doing more, though) getting the word out early in the blogosphere about Office 12. It's amazing what a just a little openness can do for Microsofts reputation. I think Scoble's video interview of the Office U/X lead a while ago was the first time I had been able to hear a Microsoft employee justify their decisions in the design process, and it was great! As someone who just recently gave up on Windows and moved to Apple, the Office 12 interface is one the few shining examples of how Microsoft can get it right sometimes.

As for other news, Google just recently added bookmarks for search. It's great to see them experimenting with this, but until they open it up and make it a bit more social, I can't see it impeding my use of del.icio.us anytime soon. Still, they're making headway.

Oh, and quickly, Yahoo announced their Podcast search engine yesterday. Nice to see a major player stepping into this realm, and it's interesting to see Yahoo give the site a distinct media feeling instead of a more information based(a la Yahoo Search) design. It plays into the fact that Yahoo sees podcasts as a more traditional form of media which can benefit from advertising, marketing, etc., in ways that blogs have not been exploited for thus far.

Well, that's it for now, more on my feelings on podcasts later.

Laptop Nomad Complaint(Starbucks/Barnes and Noble and Wifi)

2005-10-10T15:03:00.000-07:00

This will be a fairly quick post, but I wanted to get it in writing. It's something that has been bothering me ever since I signed up for a Tmobile account. It's a simple really. Why on earth did Barnes and Noble partner with FreedomLink over TMobile? The B/N and Starbucks partnership was there long before FreedomLink or TMobile ever existed, so why would Barnes & Noble force it's Starbucks customers whom want to use wi-fi access to pay for an additional account with FreedomLink?

It's enough for me to not want to patron B/N anymore. It's shame too, because I'm fairly certain the ability to lookup books in the store that are recommended online while I'm working would force me to buy a few more books offline. I just don't get the FreedomLink bit, the only other place I've seen their hotspots are at Caribou Coffee, which while nice, are no where near as ubiquitous as Starbucks.

Anyhow, that's my rant. Bottom line: TMobile makes much more sense than FreedomLink for the Barnes and Noble customers. They really ought to switch as soon as possible.

Starbucks 3122 M St. (Georgetown)

2005-10-10T14:51:00.000-07:00

Hanging out at the Starbucks in Georgetown today, and am enjoying the atmosphere. There's a whole upstairs area, complete with a fireplace, six comfy chairs, and plenty of power outlets for the traveling laptop professional. Right now, the fire is keeping me nice & toasty, while there's a nice mix of young Georgetown college students, as well as professionals from Georgetown/K St. area, all of whom are more busy studying than they are chatting it up with their cafe neighbors.

It's not quite as nice as the Starbucks on Capitol Hill (my favorite so far), but it's a nice change of pace, allowing me to further mix up my daily routine on a day to day basis. It's clean, and the staff is friendly, helpful, and efficient. Overall, highly recommended, especially for the area. With the added power outlets, and convenient access to great food in Georgetown, it's a definite add to the mix.

If I had one complaint, it would be that it's almost too popular. The close proximity to the Georgetown campus means that you have a lot of students who spend an inordinate amount of time(read: as much as I do) hanging out, and it makes snagging a comfy chair fairly difficult.

Starbucks
Washington, DC
3122 M St. NW

Tmobile required.
Other networks available intermittently, but untested.

Slightly Off-topic: Google Reader

2005-10-09T13:24:00.000-07:00

This is pretty nifty, Google has released their entry into the RSS/ATOM feed reading software realm, and... it's okay. However underwhelmed the blogosphere was initially to the GReader, I bet in the next few months, we'll start to see it shape up nicely.

Oddly enough, this is one of the first applications Google has released in awhile that definitely requires them to label it Beta, and it might have hurt them a little bit. There are a few angles here that I see:

AJAX: They're using some AJAX in a way that is drastically different from any previous RSS/News reading software, but it's hard to judge yet whether it actually improves the user experience. This is going to cause a good deal of deserved backlash amongst the tech savvy users who already use a similar service. Gmail was a revelation in terms of user experience for webmail. Heck, it was relevation for email in general. I've yet to see a viable replacement for it. The reader, while well executed in some manners, seems like more of a pet project within the Google engineer crowd with a distinct lack of user experience design tied into it.
I consider myself fairly tech savvy, and yet after two days of using the GReader, and importing most of my subscriptions, I'm still not comfortable with the idea of trying to describe to someone how it works. While it introduces a good amount of new ideas, and the AJAX makes it just feel sexy, they really need to think about giving the user a bit more control of the sorting of posts etc. I don't understand why, after I subscribe to a feed, it continues to show up as a New Subscription. This is even after I click through the subscription, and ask it allow me to view all older posts within the subscription. The mind boggles

I understand the model they're trying to use, they want you to see the latest posts in your default(or Home) view. However, I wish an option was available to change your default view. In some ways, I think the view you have when clicking on the Subscription navigational button gives you a more useful view. And with just few changes, I think it(the subscription view) could become even more useful. Off the top of my head:

Remove the grey XML link and replace it with more useful information. I would much rather see the number of unread posts, and perhaps the number of Starred posts with a link to a view containining all starred posts.
Infact, just get rid of the Home view all together. I understand it might be a more friendly screen to introduce those uninitiated with the idea of feeds, but really, you already have the all label in the 'Your Subscription' view, so just get rid of the Home view. If users dislike the use of added screen space, offer them a simple -/+ button to minimize the subscriptions.

That's all I can think of right now. Despite all the criticisms, I do believe the GReader is a great tool. It's too early to tell if it's going to mature into a killer app, but I think it's going to replace my use of Bloglines for now, at least until I can test and compare it against the yet to be released FeedLounge.

Oh, I'm enjoying the Google Account/Blogger integration, something which never crossed my mind until the GReader. I hope they find an elegant way to tie the app into my Google Personalized homepage.

Cheers

Starbucks 22nd & K St NW

2005-10-09T12:49:00.000-07:00

Working from the Starbucks near George Washington University this afternoon. It's my first time in this Starbucks, and I must say, it's fairly nice. Not sure what the foot traffic would be like on a busy weekday, but it might be good place for future weekend work.

It has a nice decor, with large floor tiling intertwined with brick walkways, and a nice mix of comfy chairs, a couch, a six seat table well suited for studying, as well as nice little 4 seat bar near the barista where you can comfortably read the day's paper. In addition, it's a nice bright corner location with windows fully spanning the 2 street facing walls, while still maintaining the nice Starbucks ambience.

The crowd, perhaps suprisingly, is a mix of 30 something types, possibly grad students. As I mentioned, though, I imagine foot traffic picks up substantially for the weekday crowd. It's close to a metro, across the street from GW Hospital, and has a no shortage of office buildings nearby.

One great item of note for the laptop crowd, sitting from my current comfy chair, I can clearly see 3 power outlets within reach of two comfy chairs, as well as the 6 person table. I haven't scoped out the rest of the store, but it would seem a good indication.

Overall, it's a great hotspot for the laptop nomad, and definitely a space worth a return. And when I do return, I'll be sure to update post.

Cheers

Other info:
Tmobile Required
Other Networks available, but untested.

Introductory post

2005-10-08T11:12:00.000-07:00

Well, this is the first of hopefully many posts to this blog, the point of which is to review hot-spots that I find throughout my day to day life as a laptop nomad. I'm actually writing this first post on my PowerBook, from a hot spot in within a Borders Books & Music here in Washington, DC.

It's not one of my favorites. Why? Well, for one, there are no comfortable, cushioned chairs. Secondly, I don't see any readily available power outlets to plug into, which means, after a couple of hours of being here, my juice is about to run out.

On the plus side, it's fairly quiet, and the customer service from the counter is friendly and fast. A nice change from some of the Starbucks I've been to in this area. It's also bright, fairly clean, and doesn't have too many people coming in and stirring up trouble.

Finally the menu is decent, though not the baked goods do not appear as fresh as Starbucks, but I'll have to save that test for another day, as my battery is about to die.