Wow, today is a terrible allergy day.  I took a claritin, but I still feel awful.  Maybe this is punishment for being mean to Katie.  She deserves better.  I woke up and my eyes immediately started bleeding, then I started sneezing.  I took a drink of water because I was terribly dehydrated and the fluid went straight to my nose.  Now my nose is raw from tissues and my head feels wobbly.

I wish I had the personality of someone who goes to the doctor and gets allergy shots.  This stinks.

I can’t think straight like this.

Women!  Am I right?  yes, I am right.

Typically, I don’t find this sort of thing amusing, but this one really made me laugh.

It made me think of Katie.  She has so much crap around the house that I look at and think, “We don’t need this!  Seriously, we don’t need this.”  So I throw it away and she gets this look on her face like, “You hurt me so much, I can barely keep from crying.  But I won’t cry because you said you hate that.  Fine, I won’t cry.  You are mean.  A mean, mean man, but all I will do is silently be near you.”

You know the look I mean!  Don’t make that face now.  No, really, don’t…ahh come on!  Nooooo.

Last weekend, I threw away tons of crap from the garage.  This week we bought a dresser for the boys and are starting to re-arrange the bedrooms of the boys.  I think the change is giving Katie a nervious breakdown.

But it’s not her fault.  Women!  Right??  I wonder if Bill Clinton has these sort of thoughts about Hillary?  I imagine he does.  Katie, I love you.  Really!  No seriously.

I turned 36 yesterday.  The day started off rough with a huge mistake I made and some scrambling to fix it.  It kept going with details and a million things to deal with.  I got a bunch done.  Some good product management candidates coming in next week.

Then we went to dinner at BenniHanna’s in Burlingame.  I had gone to Hibachi restaurants every year for my birthday.  It is one of my favorite memories.  The food is so sumptuous, the taste of ginger is so wonderful and the entertainment of the chef cooking right in front of you is awesome.  They tell jokes, they juggle knives, they flip shrimp into their hats.  It is just magical.

The restaurant brought back all of those memories.  I couldn’t decide what to order.  Hibachi shrimp, hibachi steak, hibachi scallops, it was all too much to bear.  Matthew learned a new word, “Arigato“.  He screamed it every time someone gave him something.  Matthew also ate a ton of hibachi shrimp.  He loved it.  He screamed, “More shrimp please!  Arigato!”

The entertainment was good, but the food lacked some seasoning.  It was a little bland.  Funny thing, the chef’s were all mexican.  They spoke spanish.  Maybe Matt should have yelled, “Gracias!”  Ethan and Jared both enjoyed the entertainment and the food.  The green tea ice cream was delicious. All in all, it was a lovely evening.  I hope we can do it again one day.

Oh right, the UX of 36.  It doesn’t feel like mid-30’s anymore.  It doesn’t feel like 30’s at all.  It feels like “almost 40″.  Ugh.  That is really wierd.  Time is accelerating for me.  A year used to be 365 days.  Now a year is only 120 days.  It is going way quicker.  The kids are growing up so fast.  They will be married with their own kids in no time.  Who will I be at 40?  Will I own a home?  Will I be a success?

This is the first birthday that bothers me a little.  It could be worse.  I could be 37.

I can’t get this commercial out of my head.

Make it stop.

Mozilla just posted a Release Candidate of Firefox 3.  I had installed a beta a while back but things have changed much.  The browser doesn’t crash on me anymore, but more importantly, everything that uses JavaScript launches twice as fast.  Gmail is really zippy.  So is Marketo.  EXT apps are wiked fast.  I am very pleased.

The big back button on the top left is a nice design feature.  In general, it is clean, fast and pleasing to the eye.  I think they did an excellent design job both technically and visually.  My plugins work (for the most part).  The only thing I see a flaw (and it is really minor) is the spinning dots all the way on the top right.  I am staring at them now.  Whay are they still spinning?  The page is done downloading.  Stop!  Maybe it’s an ajax call?  Firebug doesn’t say anything is asking.

Additionally, that spinner is a little off center, too high.  I would suggest that they put a different thing there. Or nothing.  They have the progress bar at the bottom right.  What is the point of that spinner?  It’s too small to be seen by average users and too annoying to be ignored by anal people like me.

Why am I obsessing about a silly little spinner?  Because the rest of the application is really strong and I am picking on them.  A+ guys.  Great work.  If we are very lucky, the whole world will choose this browser, so I can develop faster.

As previously posted 6 months ago, I had been working on a solid design for HTML emails that would work in every client.  The design of that email worked pretty well.  However, since then, I kept getting asked to do the impossible.  Rounded corners, curved strokes and shadows.  As mentioned, Outlook 2007 doesn’t support positioning and doesn’t support background-images.  This combination makes it really really hard to create a decent design.

I just upgraded one email for Marketo.  I got the rounded corners to work in all clients, but it was really annoying.  Doing the curved corner stroke (not shown) was so difficult, I just skipped it. I used a great tool from ReturnPath called Campaign Preview.  Check out this output of all the different email clients.  That is awesome!  I don’t have to send all those email’s by hand anymore.

One question I have is about Lotus Notes.  They are on version 8.0.1, but the return path does 6.5.4.  Who uses Lotus Notes anyway?  I can’t believe they are still working on it.  And the 6.5.4 rendering engine is the worst I have ever seen.  Why don’t they just use Firefox to render?  Why do all of these different email clients feel they have to reinvent the wheel?

Anyway, feel free to look at the source for the template.  It’s pretty readable and works well.

1. Go to http://maps.google.com and search for your house.
2. Then click “Show search options” to the right of the search box.
3. Notice the box “Restrict Results to:”
4. Change the box to “Real Estate”
5. Click search again
6. Notice the left hand side shows real estate listings.
7. Click one of the listings.
8. Click on the detail bubble on the right.

Side note: 3bdr, 2bath, 1400 sq feet = $830k.  1400 sq feet!

Ok, back to the UX.  I think Google made some serious errors here.  This feature is BURIED under a pile of clicks and drop downs.  I suppose they are trying to keeep the main UI simple so people won’t get confused with too much functionality.  However, the design seems messy to me for someone who wants that functionality.

As Google grows, their products are starting to get more and more features.  This is a critical time in the evolution of Google.  How do they handle feature bloat?  Do they redo their signature UI to make it more sophisticated including menubars and other UI tools that have worked well in operating systems?  Do they bury features like this and have lower adoption and usage rates?

My opinion on this is that Google needs to introduce a structure across all of their products that combines several of their existing options.  Notice at the top of the page on Maps that their are links to lots of other google sites.  On the top right is Help, My Account, Web History, etc etc etc.  Lots of stuff.  Plus the maps themselves have options like Real Estate.

Side note:  The language of “Restrict results to: Real Estate” doesn’t totally make sense.  It sounds wierd.

As I was saying, Google needs to make a coherent and consistent options UX across their products.  I think the top of the screen is the right place, but they need more power in it.  Put things in menus.  Menus are extremely useful as a product line grows.

You cant just keep adding functionality and not consider the UI.  Google is in danger of making their products hard to use if they don’t clean up once in a while.

Of course, all of this does not say it’s not a great feature.  I love it.  Google UI is really well done for the most part.  I am just raising the yellow flag that they are introducing some UX that are awkward at best.

I love detective work, figuring out how things work.  Here is a quick sample.

Rey Bango (proud new papa) posted about a plugin called ShareThis.  The reason he posted it was because they are using jQuery on their website.  So I click around and see that it has a WordPress Plugin.  Easy to install, (click below, it’s cool) and easy to manage.  So, of course, I look at the source.  Turns out that ShareThis uses MooTools as it’s base to build the feature.

Interesting that they choose jQuery for the site and MooTools for the script itself.

Anyway, I like the plugin.  Although it doesn’t happen that often, I like to think that people COULD share a post if they wanted.

Katie and I just finished watching Dan In Real Life.  We liked the movie very much.  It was a little formulaic,  but the direction, acting and writing were good enough to overcome the formula.  The story had a big family on a yearly reunion as the backdrop.  It reminded me alot of my own family and Katie.

The paralels were really weird actually.  If Katie had actually met my brother Dan in a bookstore after meeting me and they fell in love and I ended up with some hottie, then it would have been EXACTLY the same.  But alas, Lindy met Dan first, so it was not meant to be.  Otherwise it would have been just freaky!

Anyway, we give the movie 4/5 stars.  It was very enjoyable, especially if you have a big family.  We highly recommend.  I also suggest it strong to my brother Dan, because his name is Dan.  That is freaky.

Rachel Luxemburg was kind enough to forward me this report from Jakob Nielsen on how people read on the web.

I have always known that people do not read a web page the way they do a book or email. On the web, people will skim. They will pass whole blocks of text. Their eyes will jump around like mad. There have been slews of authors who point this out, like Steve Krug with “Happy Talk Must Die“. This article brings much needed statistics to the discussion. Some takeaways I get from it.

1. The report itself is too long. I skimmed it.
2. On an average visit, users read half the information only on those pages with 111 words or less. See the chart below

There are some techniques you can use to take advantage of this knowledge.

1. Use color and bold and highlight and CAPS to emphasize the key phrases that you want the user to see. This also works on your resume. Red is the most “alert” of the colors, however anything with high contrast will do the trick.
2. Use fewer words. Use declarative statements. Eliminate the fluff. CUT CUT CUT. It is critical to say what you want to say without getting verbose. A picture is worth a thousand words.
3. Being repetitive is ok sometimes. Even though it’s more words, if you put your key message in multiple places, then the liklihood of someone reading it goes up. Luck of the skimmer.
4. Use bullets and numbers. Easier to read.