This might sound stupid, but I was struggling to find out what font Microsoft used in their menus in Office 2007.  I thought it was Calibri, but that was incorrect.  It turns out to be Segoe UI.

Google sort of let me down there.  I googled and googled and couldn’t find a post with the answer.  This link finally had the word Segoe in it and that helped me.  ALthough the wikipedia links should have shown up.  How very stange.  Maybe my googling skills are getting rusty?

John McCain has proposed a 300 million dollar prize for a better battery.  Although I certainly am in favor of a significant increase in funding for batteries, I don’t understand why this is a prize.  Why not just invest 300 million in R&D grants for better batteries?

Is it really a “prize”?  So one company wins and everyone else loses?  The government can be a powerful force for R&D.  Energy, healthcare, food production, economy and even art are things the government can improve simply by providing grants to enterprising companies and individuals who can make a difference.

It’s a great thing to invest in, but we need to invest MORE.  And we need to do it in a more diverse way.  We need to build geo-thermal, wind, solar and every conceivable way to get off of gasoline.  The encouraging thing is that if McCain is for it, then maybe there is a window of opportunity where both parties can agree and move the ball forward.

I just noticed something this morning.  I always knew the arrow was sort of a smile.  The M and the A were the eyes and the arrow was the smile.  However, I didn’t notice that the arrow goes from A to Z until today.  From A to Z.  They don’t just sell books.  Get it?

I now rank this logo much higher in my “Logo Hall of Fame”.  The arrow inside the E and the X in FedEx is still my number one logo.  Nice job, to whomever designed the amazon.com logo.

This is EXACTLY how Katie and Matthew interact.

Except replace Lois with Katie.

This is an update to my post previously about income in the United States.  Based on 111,617,402 households in the US as of 2006.

It’s not much different than before.  82% of people make less than 100k in the household.  Of course, in some locales, 100k is plenty to thrive.  However, 200k+ is not all that much.  To have only 3% make that much, even including two parents working, is surprising.  I thought there would be more.

Look at the African America households by comparison. Much bleaker:

Every once in a while, I do a little exploration on the web to look for interesting things.  I don’t do it that often because it is a road that leads to everywhere and I could get lost for hours.  However, I feel compelled to do it a little bit of the time and this morning was one of those times.  I started with a Google Search of UI Blog.  Here is what I found in the order I found it:

1. User-Interface Blog - Looks promising.  I will subscribe.
2. Jensen Harris Blog - Microsoft Office guy who blogs about UI.  I am going to subscribe.
3. Microsoft Officce Labs - Like Google Labs.  They are ideas and experiments.  Good place for some beta software.
4. SharePointPedia - This is a neat resource on SharePoint.  They are trying to use it like Wikipedia, which I think is fairly brilliant.  Sharepoint might be the coolest web application that exists.  I love it.  I wish I could install the latest version at Marketo, but unfortunately, time is a scarce resource.  Hopefully, we will get an IT person in this year.
5. Taskmarket - This is a site where businesses can find freelancers.  I am going to try it for graphic design.  The neat thing: It’s based on Sharepoint.
6. Sharepoint public demo (latest version) - Sharepoint reminds me of Intuit’s quickbase.  Great applications that don’t get enough respect.

That’s when I came up for air.  I like Design blogs.  If you know if a good one, let me know.

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.

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.

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.

The boys and I attended the Markers Faire last weekend.  We first went in the morning and then had to leave for little league practice.  Then we biked back without Matthew to spend time before Katie had to go to the Opera.  Both times, we forgot the camera.  Ugh!  How lame are we.  Here are some pictures from other people.

The boys loved it.  There were tons of things for them to get excited about.  Giant Statues on Fire.  People riding giant cupcakes.  Solar powered vehicles.  This statue was just awesome to be near.  Man-eating robots. A giant-sized Mousetrap game.  A bus powered by the riders legs.  And much more…

I wish I brought the camera.  Anyway, we had a great time and wished we could have spent more.

One guy asked if I was a “maker”, and I said “Yes, I design UX for web applications”.  He said, “No, that doesn’t count.  It’s an abstraction.  You have to have something tangible and solid, not just code.”

I thought the guy was being mean, but he did have this cool robot kid on a tricycle.

When I was younger, I made more things like paintings and giant bubbles.  Now, I just made three boys.  (Katie did the hard work).  Despite the guy saying it doesn’t count, I think making great software counts.  It’s creative and people interact with it.  Someone made this wordpress software I am typing into.  I feel more of a connection to it than I do the keyboard that someone made that is “real”.

The Makers Faire was a wonderful celebration of creativity and ingenuity.  I recommend it to anyone who can attend next year.