Archive for May 2005

I whipped up an About page today and listed Splashdown first under my favorite music groups. But simply listing them first isn’t enough to explain how I truly feel about this band. I decided a post was in order.

Blueshift Album Cover

I was exposed to Splashdown in high school when my debate partner and her boyfriend at the time went to one of their concerts. 89.7 The River, a local independent radio station operated out of Iowa Western Community College (my favorite station in Omaha), sponsored the Boston band to come to Omaha. I’m so glad they did. Because of that move, I was exposed to this awesome band, and I’ve gone on to expose many others. You’re next. -grin-

Splashdown defies classification, so asking what genre they fit in or what type of music they are won’t really do the band justice. I found another blog post with a good description. It made me chuckle. But more accurate is their bio page from their time with Lilith Fair.

If I’ve piqued your interest, even a little, then check out some of their music. You can listen to it here (scroll down about 1/4 of the way) and here. The first website is maintained by one of the former band members, so there aren’t any copyright issues here. The short explanation is this: Blueshift, Splashdown’s only full album, was shelved by the record company that produced it, so Splashdown wasn’t allowed to sell it. As I understand it, that’s what led to their breakup. However, they are allowed to give out the music for free. So enjoy it!

If you take the time to listen, comment here and let me know what you think.

I went clicking around the website for One Innovation Place, or OneIP, today. For those of you who don’t know this little chunk of my history, OneIP is the follow on of VIA Design, a small student-run initiative founded by three other students and me under the tutelage of Dr. Jerry Wagner at UNO. One of them is still working there. After going to the website, can you tell who it is? I’ll give you a hint. Most of the projects listed in the gallery are hers, and she’s second in the line of “current members” under Jerry himself. In fairness, she is pretty talented. Scope out some of her work.

Anyway, the website is still in progress, I think, so shame on me for linking to it at this point. There are some images not in place yet, so use your imagination. And try not to freak out that my head is 10 times the size as everyone else’s under “Past Members.” I actually have a regular-sized head.

I know most people would blog about anything before they would blog about Ikea. But so many people in my MHCI program are shocked that I had never been to Ikea, that I feel my first adventure there deserves an entry.

In all, if I could avoid it, I wouldn’t go back there. There are good things there, don’t get me wrong. And it was a good place to go to get some things for the “Creative Corner” of our new Project workspace (which rocks, by the way. I have a window!). I imagine it is also a good place for single people to go to buy cheap furniture that they don’t intend to last past the duration of their graduate program.

Cozy… but is it classy?

But when you start getting to the upscale parts of Ikea, I am steering clear. “For $1,300 this bedroom set could be yours!” That’s a lot of money for what I saw. This is the benefit of being from Nebraska (and yes, there is more than one of those). Nebraska Furniture Mart has nice furniture in the price range of a little higher than Ikea. The furniture can be quite nice, and if you know where to look and how to barter with the salespeople, it doesn’t have to be that expensive.

Their website states Mrs. B’s motto: “Sell cheap and tell the truth.” While some people have occasionally had difficulties with NFM, I think they are running a solid business that gets better over time. But hey, I might be slightly biased. All of my furniture, TV, and PS2 are from NFM. So there ya go.

My official policy, then, will be to furnish my home space from NFM. If I need cheap add-ons for my office (to make it more “Creative Class,” shall we say?) then perhaps I’ll indulge Ikea with a tour around the floor.

Apologies to PC users who might have recently experienced a funky phenomenon with my blog. Apparently, if I emphasize something for too long (across a line break), it screws things up in Internet Explorer. Who knew? I know I didn’t cause this breakdown, but hopefully I can go about fixing it sometime soon. In the meantime, I’ll keep my emphases brief.

Sadly, I wasn’t quite the 24 enthusiast this year. I think it has to do with not living with Vince and Eric… without them to remind me of the importance of 24, I seem to have lost the faith.

I wasn’t even able to catch the season finale. Gosh I feel like a slacker. But if you happened to catch some of the season, you might check out Jenn’s List of Lessons from season 4 of 24. Even if you only caught a few episodes, you should get a couple laughs from it. I thought it was hilarious.

I hear a season 5 is in the works. Holy cow. I guess I’ll try to be a better fan next year.

Communication breakdowns are, by far, the most frequent kind of breakdown plaguing my life. I think the same can be said of many people.

The incident inspiring this post happened to me last night at Whole Foods. I arrived 20 minutes before they closed, so I was already kinda flustered and moving quickly. I move to the checkout line, and the employee starts ringing up my food. Here is how the conversation went from my perspective:

Employee: “You want to stomp on these cans?”
Me: “Excuse me?”
Employee: “You want to stomp on these cans?”
Me: -blank stare-
Employee: “Your order, does it stop at these cans?”

Those types of events tend to be funnier than another type of communication breakdown that has been plaguing me lately. People always talk about how constructive criticism is, but even constructive criticism can be worthless. Take this example from my recent adventure to California. Someone was taking me to my hotel, and on the way, said:

Gee, there are a lot of hotels closer to campus than yours.

What am I supposed to do with that piece of advice?! My management company pulled something similar on me the other day. My mom sent my lease to me (it sucks to need a cosigner), and I picked it up from the management office. When I opened the package and gave the lease to the management lady, she said:

Oh, she could have just sent that directly to us!

Good call there. Why don’t I mail the lease back to my parents so they can send it to you this time. Grumble. I suppose there’s nothing to be done about these kinds of communication breakdowns.

The first type I mentioned is a bit trickier. I have pretty good hearing (I can hear a cell phone ringing across the room that is inside a purse buried under tons of things when the person sitting next to it doesn’t hear it), so I don’t think that’s really the issue. I think the problem lies in not expecting someone to say what they are about to say to you, and then your mind filling in the blanks with what seems logical at the time.

So the story from the start of this post makes sense (sort of). I was at a Whole Foods store. Whole Foods is about natural food, the environment, things like that. I recycle to help the environment. When I recycle cans, I crush them. So, it could potentially make sense for a Whole Foods employee to tell me to stomp on cans. Right?

And then the audience said, “Thanks be to contextual inquiry.”

So the presentation wasn’t quite that awesome, but I will say it was worthy of my excitement from my post yesterday. My co-presenter and I were in our element; while we are far from experts in deliberative polling or participatory democracy, we know what we’re talking about when it comes to HCI and Design. I think it showed.

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I was chatting with Alex tonight, and he said:

Good plan getting zszaiss higher in the google ranking with the blogging.

Plan? I had a plan? It wasn’t really intentional, but a Google search on Zaiss reveals that I’m currently at #6. That’s pretty amazing, because I checked (out of curiousity) a couple weeks ago, and I was at #16. I’ve made it above the Zaiss family crest; now, I’ve just got to make it above those crazy German sites. Bet you didn’t know Zaiss was German, did ya! Well, you do now.

It’s Friday night, and I’m chilling outside the student center at Stanford pondering my talk tomorrow. For those of you who aren’t very familiar with what’s going on, I’m attending (and presenting at) the Second Annual Online Deliberation Conference, which is also the 10th DIAC (Directions and Implications in Advanced Computing) Conference. I’m here with Dr. Robert Cavalier to present findings from my work that I’ve done on PICOLA, a multimedia tool that is used to conduct a Deliberative Poll (per Jim Fishkin’s model) in an online environment.

Phew! That was a bit condensed. What you should know is that the conference contains about 100 people from a variety of disciplines (I just met a NYU Law graduate who’s waiting to take the bar exam), who are all obsessed with using technology to make a real impact on the world. Interestingly, it’s not about a bunch of “smarter than thou” political philosophy professors trying to figure out how to make people participate in their conception of a better democracy. Instead, a lot of the talks address getting people to participate somehow, and not so much what they choose to participate in.

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So I’m walking home from school today, and I see this lady driving in her car, leaning out the window, flailing her arms madly and honking her horn. What was she doing, you might ask? Let me give you a hint, from the Guide to Living in Pittsburgh:

Do what others would do if they had a close personal relationship with you. [For example,] Honk to say “Hi” to the friend you see walking along the sidewalk. No one will mind, since he is their friend as well.

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