Archive for December 2005

For the benefit of my audience who doesn’t reside in Nebraska, I thought this story would give you a chuckle (I couldn’t find it anywhere on Google News… but there might be a reason for that…).

In the Omaha area there’s a small chain of restaurants (3 or so) called King Kong, a restaurant that sells large burgers and gyros, among other things. Apparently, King Kong has copyrighted any and all use of “King Kong” as it relates to talking about or promoting a restaurant, so they’re suing Burger King over their new “Kong-Sized whopper.”

Maybe I should trademark using King Kong to promote my website. Then I could say you’d get some Kong-sized design skills if you hire me… but that’s pretty scary. The only thing scarier, in fact, is waking up next to the King.

Alternate Title: How Everyone in the World is Better Than Me.

We had a lazy day in the Zaiss household on the 24th, and my mom suggested I try one of these sudoku puzzles (the ones where you place 1 - 9 inclusive in each row, column, and square). So I tried them. Addictive, but I got the first one wrong. What a shame.

Well, it turns out that I received a Sudoku calendar for Christmas. And it’s daily. That means a daily sudoku for the next 365 days starting in one week. Thinking I need much practice, I took my friend KC’s advice to explore some sudoku on the web. I did one tonight (easy), and did it casually while talking to friends online. It took me 37 minutes. For fun, I asked “How did I do?” I got this graph back:

with big, red text underneath that said “Below Average: 100% are faster.” Apparently the graph ends at 30 minutes, and NOBODY (except me) takes longer. Ouch. Thanks Web Sudoku, for trampling my aspirations of future Sudoku problem solving.

Another semester is done, and I’m embarking on what I realized recently would be my last school-type winter break, at least for a few years.

My friend Laura asked what I was doing to celebrate being back in Omaha, commenting that most of our friends had celebrated their return home by getting food not available in Pittsburgh. It hadn’t occurred to me until she brought it up, but there were a bunch of good places that I need to be sure to swing by…

• Runza: Describing it as a homemade hot pocket doesn’t do it justice (but you can think about it that way).
• Zio’s Pizza: Vince’s dad Otis XII used to advertise for them, but that’s not the only reason… good pizza!
• Hong Kong Cafe: There is no good cheap chinese in Pittsburgh! Hong Kong Cafe is awesome and cheap.
• Blue Sushi: I love that Sushi Too delivers, but the atmosphere is nothing compared to Blue. I feel so cultured there.

Oh yeah, I should probably also make a point of seeing family and friends, celebrating holidays, doing my Google design challenge, and finishing a bunch of work that I put off until break. Laura, quit distracting me with food!

If you aren’t a frequent comment reader, this post is prompted by Chaia tagging me off an earlier post. You can read her blog to discover her random habits of nudism (Note: I can’t link to a specific post so just look around for a post from Dec. 13).

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I recently returned from Seattle interviewing for a Usability Engineer position in the Visual Studio group at Microsoft. It was an interesting time, but I won’t explain too many details here (ask me one on one for those). But there were a couple of interesting questions / points from the interview that I wanted to share, along with my two cents. For the HCI folks embarking on interviews, I think it will be interesting food for thought.

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Braden’s been busy at Google – with our short videos from IID (and other things, I’m sure). Since the blowpop server has been decomissioned, I thought I’d link up the videos so you can check them out if you missed them on the last round. Doing a Google Video search for “CMU Interface Interaction Design” yields most of them, but my project (SonicBand) isn’t listed with them… you can find it here.

My former hair salon recently disowned me. It’s a very tragic story that I still cry about to this day, but this entry focuses on what happened next. I needed to find a place to get my haircut, and I remembered hearing something about Philip Pelusi, but I couldn’t remember what it was. Regardless, I decided to make an appointment.

Right away I felt pretty disappointed. After discussing my preferred hair style (shorter is better), the lady asked, “Do you want me to use scissors or an electric razor in the back?” C’mon now. There is clearly a preferred answer to that question. It’s like a Web Designer asking whether the client wants a giant image for a webpage that takes 5 minutes to load, or a nice streamlined page that makes good use of CSS and JavaScript. There’s the easy way, and there’s the right way.

That might have been a bit esoteric, so in simpler terms, imagine this reply: “Well… do you want me to pay with money or bits of string?” It’s one thing if they have a particular policy - but if you need the client to tell you how to do your job, then you aren’t doing it well.

On that note, I remembered what I heard about Philip Pelusi a while back when I was leaving. “Overpriced SuperCuts.” And it’s true.

I was walking by Tank, the new Newell-Simon Roboceptionist, and I caught a few words of what he was saying to the people who were typing to him:

And remember: If your computer stops working, don’t hit it. We have feelings too.

Nothing sums up my current profession better.

For a contentious debate, that is.

A week ago, while I was at student health, the physician’s assistant asked what I thought about pornography being shown at the student center. “Excuse me?” I hadn’t heard it was happening. I guess that goes to show the box that grad students shove themselves into – according to a local news article, there were posters advertising the XXX movie for a couple weeks prior. I guess I need to pay more attention.

Anyway, it’s been sort of a hot topic for the past couple weeks here on campus, culminating with an email from the Student Body President this morning announcing a forum to discuss the issue and come to some conclusion about whether or not pornography can be shown on campus.

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Over the past two days, the New York Times has been featuring an article on Glide Effortless, a web application to allow managing and sharing of different types of content online. I haven’t played around with it, but I’m planning to when I have free time (ha) and will post my thoughts then.

But in reading the NYT article, I found an interesting reference to pie menus (context menus - or menus that appear when you right / ctrl click for the non-HCI heads in the audience - that are circular instead of lists).

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