I had a dream last night. Someone asked what was the coolest thing on the web. I interpreted the question to be specific to a web service like Gmail, Yahoo, Wikipedia, or anything “hosted”. The question to me was, “What is the thing on the web that changes the world the most?” It’s amazing to…
At dinner, Jared likes to pick a “theme” that we can talk about. I asked the family, “What was your favorite present ever?” Jared looked at me and thought. Finally, he said, “George Washington!” It took me a minute to get it. Matthew had the Croup this weekend. Katie felt compelled to bring him to…
Just finished watching Superbad from Netflix. At first I thought it was funny. There were some scenes that I laughed out loud. Couldn’t breathe sort of laughing. Katie was laughing too. Then after a while, I started feeling bored. Something else too. I was feeling like, “This is way too much like high school, except…
In technology development, there is a famous triangle. It shows how you prioritize your efforts. By focusing in one area, you mess up another. It is a brutal game that never has a happy ending. No matter what you choose, something suffers. Even the “balanced” approach has flaws. I created a game to play with…
CompUSA is closing it’s doors. Apparently they are being liquidated. So now is the time to purchase electronics if one is near you. Maybe a color printer! It’s amazing to me how long it takes for predictions to come true. In the 80’s they said, “Computers will make a paperless office”. We still aren’t paperless,…
What are the worst management sins? Here is my short list. Micromanagment. I really hate it when a boss says, “I want you to be responsible for this, but I am going to dictate how you do it.” This is the thing that made me want to leave Intuit. If you delegate then, let the…
I haven’t used Listernine in years. I was in Rite-aid this morning, buying Claritin and I saw the Listerine. I was looking for one for the kids, but I thought it might be better to try it on my own first. It’s ADA certified so I felt confident. I took a swing and started swishing…
Avinash, analytics and web guru, was kind enough to invite me to GooglePlex for lunch. The food was good overall, the variety was outstanding, but it was the energy and the style that was most impressive. I really appreciated the energy of the people and the way everything was arranged. Everyone shared offices. Everyone had…
A couple of years ago, I was interviewing for an interaction design position as Opsware. At the time, my only interaction design experience was with Hotkoko. They took interaction design super-seriously. Their work products were top-notch with every conceivable detail spelled out. I was thoroughly impressed. The product also looked really good. The head of…
The first operating system I remember being aware of was DOS. It came on a stack of 3.5″ floppy disks. Before that, I had computers, but I wasn’t aware of a particular OS. Windows 3.1 was my first OS that I could say had an actual Graphical User Interface (GUI). Of course, Apple had the…
First of all, I love these two photos. The look on their faces is priceless. Here is the family on Halloween. Picasa has been doing well for us in the last year. The only drawback has been the lack of “collections”. Collections have recently been added to Flickr. The lack of this feature was the…
We are in the long tail at work. The product is getting close to releasable. The little details start kicking in and take an enormous amount of time and attention. I think the product will be well received, but like most products, the devil is in the details. The heat at work has definitely been…
Last night I was struggling with a problem that refused to budge. I was very confident in the beginning. Of course, Internet Explorer just refused to cooperate and Firefox was just fine. The problem kept going to a for while as a lost confidence. Right before I was about to quit, I sat very still…
I don’t know exactly why, but I made an Amazon.com Wishlist. I was writing my book and got to a stopping point and wanted to see what Amazon.com did for some UI thing. And I just said, “Well, I am here. Why not? Note: The content of this site is always objective and free. I…