Tag: Random
A Tennis Miracle!
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…
Perfectionism
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…
Who is in my brain?
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…
Good Times Theme Song
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.…
HCI Program Wishlist
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…
The Creative Rhythm
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,…
Dueling Principles
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…
Bluesky Social
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…
Oppenheimer Movie Review
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…
Brand Destruction
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…
Apple should acquire Lucid Air
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…
Hand Crafted
I was recently in Prague and noticed something about all of the sidewalks and many of the streets. They usually looked something like this: It looked pretty and had a cool pattern, but I didn’t think that much of it until I saw these guys working. They had simple tools: bricks, shovels and hammers. They…
Walking in Bangalore, India
I recently spent a week in Bangalore, India for work. As usual, I looked at everything around me. I observed how the streets and sidewalks were built and how the design of the city affected the culture and usability. Of course, I only saw a sliver of the whole city, but I noticed a few…
Good Governance
Sorry. This is a long meandering post. It’s not about UX, so I hope it’s not too annoying. It’s just been on my mind lately. It’s easy to say government is inefficient or wasteful, even if it’s not true. We hear it repeated over and over. All well-crafted propaganda is designed to sound accurate/truthful and…