A cursory glance at my portfolio reveals my preoccupation with methods. I’m currently in the middle of my third course meant to instill methods of eliciting software requirements, usability aspects, work process breakdowns, and everything else HCI. And while I do love having more Methods in my toolkit, I’m learning very quickly what constitutes a good method, and I think it comes down to a tradeoff between formality and quality of information, with clarity of use being something of a confound.
Archive for October 2005
This happened a week ago, but with my computer troubles (I promise I’ll update about my super glue episode soon) I haven’t been able to write as conveniently as I used to. So some things might have a little delay to them. Bear with me.
Carnegie Mellon has a parking garage for visitors and for faculty or staff who don’t have a parking permit elsewhere. By purchasing a garage card, you get to save a lot of money. The good news is that it only costs $3.00 to buy. The bad news is that, starting this Fall, CMU is celebrating the extra level added to the garage by prohibiting students from having discount cards. Apparently we weren’t paying CMU enough in tuition.
I watched the Family Guy movie at Dave’s place tonight, and the general notion was that it was a disappointment. There were some good moments, to be sure, but so much of the humor seemed to be based on previous episodes of Family Guy. “Hey, remember that one where Stuey had a sexy party? Well…. here’s another one!” Great.
But here’s something to watch for. We randomly paused the movie after the “Stuey got so drunk and he’ll never do it again” scene… right at the start of the TiVo scene… and Chris is doing something with the camcorder. It’s off the screen, and only visible for a second… but check it out. That’s worth a laugh or two.
You may have heard a lot lately about this search war between Google and Yahoo, who has the biggest search index, etc., etc. This doesn’t really affect me all that much… I tend to make my decisions based on what is most convenient. However, a banner ad I encountered today might scare me away from Yahoo for a while.
Sorry for the small image size, but I think you can still make out that awful monstrosity on the left side of the image. And, let me be the first to say… BLECH! I don’t want to know how many spiders I eat while I sleep! I’d rather remain blissfully ignorant since, upon waking up, I obviously don’t realize I’ve eaten one.
What I’m dying to know is whether this type of marketing strategy is working for them. It’s not as though you can’t do a similar search on Google (in fact, a Google search revealed that it is highly unlikely to swallow spiders while you sleep), and I promise that this ad isn’t doing any favors for their arachnophobe demographic. I’m slightly disturbed that all my Yahoo search results will start featuring spiders that I eat while asleep. Playing with phobias is tricky business; if you aren’t careful, you might get the opposite effect.
