In 2019, I was honored to be a part of an enormously successful USTA 4.0 men’s doubles team. We went to Nationals in Arizona and played our hearts out. I will remember that year of tennis for a long, long time. It was amazing. We kept winning by the skin of our teeth. Our captain…
I have noticed over the years how perfectionism can be a blight on both work and personal relationships. It is a cultural issue and often is the cause of poor user experience. You would think it would increase quality, but it does the exact opposite. The way I experience perfectionism in the world is when…
UPDATE: The Twenty Twenty Four theme is causing me many problems. I had to revert it to Twenty Twenty Three. The theme looked drastically different in Safari and would not work correctly. I updated my WordPress blog (as usual) to 6.4 and switched to the new Twenty Twenty Four theme. WordPress has been moving more…
Once upon a time, in the late 20th century, we had rich desktop software patterns. Each program was creative and interesting in its structure and design. Programs like Winamp, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Lotus Notes, Quicken, Act, and more all were as different as can be. There were designers specializing in “human factors”, but mostly these…
Hold your breathe for as long as you can. I assume it is your brain that decides to do that. Eventually, you can’t continue and you are forced to breathe. What decided it was time to stop? Again, your brain, right? So clearly at least 2 different things were happening in your brain at the…
This is dating me, but I used to watch the show Good Times. It’s a comedy-drama, created by Norman Lear, about a poor family living in the projects of New York. I remember the opening credits song as happy one, upbeat and peppy. I have come to realize that I didn’t actually know the lyrics.…
These are things I wish they taught in UX bootcamps and HCI colleges majors. Design is Everywhere Seriously, look around you. Everything you see, touch, taste, hear, and smell. Everything has passed through human hands in it’s construction. When you smell the gas leak, did you know that was designed on purpose because natural gas…
Someone was asking me about the process of blogging. I thought about how it has changed over the last 25 years. For a long time, the process was simple and went like this: The problem recently has been that I have separated my work computer and my home computer setups. This is annoying, but realistically,…
People sometimes confuse direction with dictation, both as an IC and a manager. One technique I often use is dueling principles. They are delivered two at a time and are contradictory. I ask the individual to use practical wisdom and judgment to make the final decision using the principles as guides. Here some examples I have used…
I use Beeper to consolidate all of my messaging apps. Here are the supported networks. It’s now free! (I paid, silly me) Anyway, if you want to give it a whirl, please use my refer code. It works pretty well and supports mobile, desktop, tablet, and web. The last tool like this I had was…
I was recently invited to try Bluesky Social, the Twitter competitor founded by the original Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. It seems pretty early days. There is no iPad app or WordPress Plug-in. Not many influencers have accounts yet. My account here. I need to try putting up some posts and see if it devolves into…
I just watched Oppenheimer in San Francisco in true IMAX 70mm. To cut to the chase, I have not been this annoyed by a movie in decades, first some background, so you you know where I’m coming from. I have read The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen…
Lately, I have seen some examples of brands being obliterated. The two that stand out are HBO and Twitter. HBO Home Box Office has been around for half a century. It existed at the dawn of the “cable” revolution. Before cable, we had only broadcast television and movies. Cable expanded our puny list of 5-6…
I was thinking about the new Visio Pro goggles from Apple. I can not, for the life of me, understand why Apple thinks business people are going to strap a computer to their faces to have a zoom call. It seems ok for gaming, but nothing special to me. This does not seem like a…