Archive for September 2005

The worst possible event in the life of a grad student has happened to me - my PowerBook is incapacitated. The pin of the power adaptor snapped off and is now lodged inside my laptop, preventing it from being powered up. I have 40% of my battery left, and then … death. To my PowerBook, anyway.

The good news is that this apparently happens quite frequently. The bad news is that Apple is quoting me upwards of $1000 to fix it. That number changed a lot, it was initially $470, and the guy at AppleCare education “got it down” to $350 (I think he thought he was working at a used car lot, but I wasn’t interested in bartering for the life of my laptop).

So, as with most things in the life of the grad student, we go with Option B: the one that costs less than $10. I’m going to try and use superglue to get the pin and pull it out. If it works, I will be extremely overjoyed… I’ll keep you posted.

So Cartoon Network is airing a new show soon calling Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo. The voice talent for the commercial must have had such a good time.

I sat through another lecture about the importance of using metaphors in interface design today, and I reached my breaking point. I’m gonna come right out and say it: I think metaphors get more credit than they deserve in interface design. Yes, I know that many design objects have names that map to real world objects (desktop, trash can, windows, tabs, etc.), but, to reference an idea in today’s lecture, just because the designer uses a real world object as inspiration for a design decision does not mean that the user reaps any benefit from the metaphor.

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I gave my last presentation for the semester today. It seems really odd to be saying that after only 3 weeks of sitting in classes, but hey, I’m not complaining.

I’ve been watching grad student presentations for the past year now, from students at CMU and elsewhere, and doing a fair number of them myself. Frankly, I think presentations should be fun, which probably explains why I turned my undergrad senior thesis presentation into a video game and gave Jack a pat on the back for his off the wall IID final presentation (click the presentation link on this page to scope it out).

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Check out the top Google hit for “failure.” Maybe I should start being more reserved in using this insult.

No, surely not, no…

More hilarity and hijinks in my Software Engineering Class as we begin our Contextual Design unit. For the non-HCIers in the audience, Contextual Design essentially involves going to a user’s context and modelling his/her work in order to thoroughly understand it. It’s the formative method that I feel is most emphasized in our program.

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Studio 8 came out yesterday (Happy Birthday to me…), so I decided I would take the time to scope out what they actually improved about Flash 8. I ranted about this in an earlier post, but the short version of the story is that Flash MX 2004 (that’s Version 7) was a very small upgrade from Flash MX (Version 6). The two most notable changes were an increase in the ActionScript capabilities, and a reorganization of the Menu commands so that I couldn’t find any of the commands I had gotten used to invoking. Since I struggle with the latter far more than I enjoy the former, you can see why I’m a little distressed.

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I hate feeling like I don’t belong. Like that one time in swimming lessons when I was 8, and I was “promoted” to the advanced class, where I was required to hold my breath under water for a minute as a warm up exercise. Excuse me?! “I think I’d like to go back to the Beginner class,” I said, and I was off dog paddling to the other end of the pool.

I’m getting a similar feeling in my Software Engineering class this semester. The class is called “Methods: Deciding What To Design” – which sounds relevant to HCI (and actually, it is). But all this excitement doesn’t negate the fact that it is, in fact, a Software Engineering class. So when someone asks a question for clarification, and the professor says, “You can think of this like a Heap Sorting algorithm,” and everyone in the class is suddenly enlightened (except for the lone HCI student in the room, who has undergone a comprehension loss), it’s easy to feel like you don’t belong.

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In Summer 2004, my friends and I worked at The Gallup Organization on a self-administered version of their employee engagement metric. You can check out a screenshot.

Here’s Summer 2005, and those Target commercials get running. You know the ones – you don’t actually get any information, but it shows this girl drawing on a piece of paper, and it says oddsagainst7even.com. After seeing that commercial for the 100th time, I finally checked it out. Whaddaya know! I guess we were leading a trend. But… since our product was never put into use, Target did it first. Oh well.

Technically, though, I think J. K. Rowling gets credited for the desk theme first. Her site is fun, though, because you can solve puzzles. Puzzles are fun.

My mom’s chillin with me in Houston this weekend as I’m getting ready to go back to Pittsburgh to start my second to last semester in the MHCI program (yay!). On our way back to the car from my dad’s room, we were in the parking garage elevator, and my mom said, “I don’t remember what floor we were on. I remember green.”

I’m actually quite impressed with how MD Anderson handles the potentially rampant problem of sick patients forgetting where they park their car. When you first go to the elevator from the garage, you are inundated with a not-so-pretty color…

Limey, no? Be grateful I didn’t snap the Pepto-bismol floor…

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