04
May 2000
E-commerce.
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28
April 2000
Internet
consumer segments.
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20
April 2000
Salon's
"Finland -- the open-source society."
An
uncharacteristic, travel-induced, un-Birkirtsly
observation: It occurred to me that the treasured
volume, weight, smell, and interactions ultimately
translate to more stuff I will have to haul up five
flights of stairs when I get back. So I'm searching
for texts online that I will print out to read with
good food, ecological guilt, and lots of complaints
about the Experience. Puskin
was to be my first victim, but although there's
plenty
of bootleg Pushkin in Russian, the selection is
a bit narrower in English...
Criticism and non-fiction is easier read by the
sheaf than fiction, although I will still purchase
Maurice
Couturier's Roman et censure, ou la mauvaise
foi d'Eros [Novel and Censorship, or Eros' Bad
Faith] (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1996) after reading
the fifth
chapter online (that is-- printing it out to
have with salmon for supper)...Tonight will be Tristam
Shandy and noodles.
A
reading list by Kathy Acker.and by a triple
free association of ideas, A
Book I Need by
Nathalie Sarraute.
Following
the precedent set by Disgruntled
Housewife in the infancy of the Internet, I
pause to endorse a product: Terax
Conditioner.
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18
April 2000
This
morning in the Helsingin
Sanomat there was a story
of a man who died six years ago in his apartment
and was only discovered yesterday. In the paper
version of the newspaper, the story was accompanied
by an image of six years of garish junk mail piled
up behind the front door.
Hmm...
The building at Vitra is uninhabitable. I haven't
been to Bilbao,
but the interior images don't look promising. In
my world, if architecture is to be excused as sculpture
(as opposed to an inhabitable space, "Ooops,
excuse me.") it had better damn well
be sublime
sculpture. In fact, I think there's plenty
of evidence to suggest that there's really no
excuse at all. Unlike some unnamed-but-name-dropping-fawning-pansy-fruity-drink-drinkin-architectural
critics, I'm of the opinion that it's better to
nail at least one of the two. At the very least
it's has to be a good sculpture or a good
space. Either one justifies the existence of the
building. At the very most, it's both... I am irritated
because every time I venture to point out the emperor's
bare ass, people politely turn their heads as if
I've just sneezed snot all over myself.
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16
April 2000
Everything
twice
: mistranslations
and puns, the
most bestest opening lines ever (witness the
confounded starts of my English-as-second-language
Finnish colleagues), and butterflies
(why so many literary links with incest?...can't
be purely the anagram).
I
bought a very handy Soviet military aviator cap
in Estonia...Unfortunately, I debated the goggles
and when I returned, the vendor was gone. I will
be thinking of them forever...They were lovely perforated
blue-painted steel with thick glass clipped to the
front of the frames. They tied in the back with
brown laces...
The
FNwire interview with the search engine is brilliant.
I always had a fantasy that I could call up Information
and ask for any sort of Information (not just telephone
numbers). In fact I did, a couple of times (not
recently). I think the operators were so startled
they just answered as best they could instead of
correcting my misconception. The point is-- it's
awfully attractive to imagine a service that answers
natural language queries. Several people referred
to Ask
Jeeves in recent user testing, "I'd like
it to be like Ask Jeeves. You can ask whatever you
want." On inquiry, each admitted that he'd
never actually used the service. Hmm.
This
month's Blueprint magazine features the communication
devices of the Future (another gem from user testing:
"The future's getting on a bit now, isn't it?").
The Future being 2 or 3 years from now. Also, Wallpaper
is online... [Deep breath] It's lovely. I kept trying
to despise it, but they keep digging up cool building
materials and designers no one else makes the effort
to find. Then when they extolled one of V's buildings,
I had to cave. The site looks really nice. Additionally,
it's really well organized. There-- I said it. It's
design porn... Or it's like adultery. Most people
do it but everyone emphatically thinks it's wrong.
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30
March 2000
I
am, once again, missing the CHI
conference. I appreciate the rigor of the work
that comes out of that conference, conservative
as it often is. Everyone in the world is going--
even my clients. In fact, a whole passel of them
are preaching there... Which is a thought that would
paralyze me if I dwelt on it.
How
can I have lived my whole life and not known that:
Someone
whom I don't know just brought her baby into the
office. She (the baby) is very fresh and teeny and
sleepy. She was dressed in a soft, white, woolly
little suit. She looked like a toy lamb. I was very
fascinated with her little fingernails... Every
time I see a child or especially a baby in my workplace,
I realize how truly homogenous is my environment.
I grew up taking babies for granted because they
were always underfoot. Now suddenly I live in this
bizarre, futuristic world where all the people by
whom I'm surrounded are young and beautiful and
clever (1500
of the most talented, creative, gorgeous, stylish,
arrogant, etc.... I poke very gentle
fun because I truly love my job and my work environment).
Still, I don't spend a lot of time with infants
or older people these days.
A
musical composition program that responds to it's
audience (environmental audio cues) real time
using a neural network. I was hoping for an audio
clip.
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29
March 2000
I'm
thinking about usability testing. I rank every aspect
of the evening: very easy, easy, neither easy nor
difficult, difficult, very difficult. The pizza
was easy, the headache is difficult, and the coffee
was very, very difficult... I've noticed a tendency
toward difficult coffee in these parts.
----------------------------------------
28
March 2000
I
need someone who knows what's she's talking about
on a more detailed level than do I. Even my grasp
of the concept is a bit tenuous. I know what
makes sense in the context and how I want to
see it implemented. I just need someone who went
to school for all this nonsense to answer specific
questions. I just need to know everything.
----------------------------------------
26
March 2000
Albrecht
Schmidt is thinking carefully about the related
possibilities of ambient
media and wireless, context-based
computing. The latter, of course, is where we
have to concentrate to keep ourselves in the style
to which we are accustomed and the marmalade on
the table, but the idea of context-based interactions
quickly becomes pretty fluid.
The time change really couldn't have come at a worse
moment for me. I went from spending two weeks in
Texas to arriving in Helsinki and they immediately
moved the hours forward. That puts me at a nine
hour disadvantage. I'm starting to feel a bit drunk
all the time. Add to that, the wireless technology
in Europe leaves the Americas in the dust (everyone
bops around with these elegant little devices called
Psions
and talks cryptically in acronyms) and I am reeling
as I desperately try not to embarrass myself by
spending a lot of time (= money) painstakingly inventing
something that already exists. It's all very fun
and definitely my sort of thing.
I
didn't feel like talking. Sometimes I don't.
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25
March 2000
He
told me this story:
In
my ignorance, I ate something very strange for supper
last night. I'm not really clear on what it was,
but it involved things pickled in a way I can't
condone... Swedish is fine. There are enough parallels
to English, but Finnish
renders me helpless. The grocery store has become
a very dangerous place.
I've
been thinking a lot about personalization. It's
more interesting than pure interface customization,
which is where it seems like we spend the majority
of our attention. Personalization, as opposed to
customization, is passive on the part of the user.
I'm wondering if there's a good way to use an IA
(neural
network?) to respond to users over time. I can't
think of (or find) an example of an artificial intelligence
used
in the context of an interface... There must be
some example. The closest might be the use of neural
networks in medical
diagnosis and forecasting.
A
user would certainly still have access to customization
features, both for contextual customization and
decontextualized customization (the latter more
for gross state changes); but the interface would
subsequently learn by... Oh never mind-- that's
why we don't use neural networks in interface design:
we don't have enough data to make the responsivity
relevant... It's only a matter of time until we
have much more visceral interfaces, if I have anything
to do with it.
I
am reading a very
fat book of Alice Munro's short stories. I was
enjoying them at first; I was able to appreciate
the delicacy of the prose and the character sketches,
but I don't think I ought to be reading the entire
book straight through. It doesn't feel quite polite.
The cumulative effect of the stories is an exhausting
female desperation. It makes me tired and depressed.
I don't want to be forced to identify with a series
of protagonists whose every decision is directed,
even obliquely, by an angry and illogical male.
And
that makes me feel somehow nasty and superior...
So I went to the bookstore that's nestled in the
arm of Stockmann's, where I went five years ago
to buy a sketch book. This time I bought a very
expensive English language copy of Plain
Pleasures by Jane
Bowles who was properly nuts without the help
of anyone else, male or otherwise.
