Design notes

P A R A N O I D,
originally uploaded by Aphotic Aura.

We were talking at work today in the context of telephone tech support and I came up with the idea of a best practices document entitled The Seven Words You Can't Use in a User Interface. I was thinking of a scenario where the support person would have to tell the user "Now click on the button whose name begins with C. No, the other one."

Not those Seven Words.

Well, maybe.

What passes for a movie review

I was IM'ing with my buddy D the other day and this transpired:

(6:23:58 PM) me: I did go to see Iron Man this weekend tho

(6:24:04 PM) D: How was it?

(6:24:38 PM) D: The comment I heard was that, unlike many superhero movies, the lead character is not a teenager/young adult trying to fit in.

(6:24:45 PM) me: Worth a matinee price. Robert Downey Jr: good. Jeff Bridges: pretty good. Mrs. Coldplay: did not have much to work with.

(6:24:58 PM) me: No, he's a CEO.

(6:26:01 PM) D: We definitely need more entertainment that helps boost the self-esteem of insecure CEOs.

(6:27:02 PM) me: I kept wondering whether it will get released in Germany under the name Eisenmensch

(6:27:18 PM) D: Everything sounds more sinister in German.

(6:27:23 PM) me: Eisenmann sounds like a person of the Jewish faith.

(6:27:41 PM) me: But he does turn into a mensch in the 2nd half

(6:27:56 PM) D: Is mensch German, or Yiddish?

(6:28:04 PM) me: Probably the latter.

(6:28:59 PM) me: Someone pointed out that Puccini's Madama Butterfly seems completely different if you refer to it as Frau Schimmerling instead

(6:29:00 PM) D: Superman was Ubermensch in Niezsche. He wasn't Jewish.

(6:29:09 PM) me: Oh, that's right.

La plume de ma tante

I was looking at the recent pageload activity for this blog over at Statcounter's excellent service and stumbled upon this totally excellent re-rendering of part of my sidebar from the French Babelfish.

Thank you for that. I am thinking it might be nice to change the language used on the sidebar periodically, every other day, maybe.

No, I'm serious!

Joyce 40404

I haven't gotten into the Twitter phenomenon because I have not yet figured out why I should care to follow the rambling stream-of-consciousness of someone else, or why anybody would care to follow mine. Then I started to think of someone else has been accused of producing a chaotic flow of images and words - James Joyce - who created a masterpiece of self-absorption in his monumental book Ulysses. Fans of that work yearly commemorate the events depicted there with Bloomsday readings. In a way, blogs and static web content stand in relation to micro-blogs in the same way that traditional short stories and novels stood in relation to Modernist writing. What could be a better subject to take advantage of these ideas than Ulysses in an updated presentation using the wonder of Web 2.0?

Picture this: each of the major characters and a goodly number of the minor ones would be assigned Twitter accounts and those interested in the re-enactment would add them as friends. Early in the morning of June 16th the readers would receive the opening tweets from Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus in the Telemachus episode. Besides their dialogue, they could send out a few links to geotagged images or sound pieces on the Web to further ground the experience. Then they'd follow Stephen and, later, Leopold Bloom around Dublin through their obsessive little observations throughout the day and into the night. Gerty MacDowell would play the key role in Nausikaa (though perhaps not the late Paddy Dignam) and the anonymous narrator of the Cyclops episode too. And of course at the end, Molly Bloom would take charge in the Penelope chapter. Everything would be in real-time and first-person as it should be, and the transcript of the day's worth of transmissions would constitute a record of the event as well.

Those who are not playing parts in the story (the "readers") probably ought to refrain from stepping on the action by sending messages of their own or everything could fall apart. And of course there would be the risk of Twitter's servers possibly not being able to keep up with the heavy load, which would add to the excitement, I think.

If one could pull this off, perhaps the next challenge would be to adapt Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse to the Twitter format, taking the form of messages sent over ten years.

Thumbs up,
originally uploaded by Wexxie.

I was wondering how does one say...

pyromania in Greek?

greecefires_satellite,
originally uploaded by Darriuss Royce.

What to do when encountering snakes on a beach

I would like to promote the adjective laocoonic, meaning one who seldom speaks except to say 'aaah, get them off of me, get them OFF!' Have we not all had days like that?

Laocoon and his Sons,
originally uploaded by Schumata.

Show your axes

People don't know just what to do with the metaphor of the learning curve, speaking of it in such a variety of terms:

Type of learning curve	Hits in Google (13 June 2007)
steep	90700
high	41900
fast	28700
sharp	22300
shallow	19700
slow	12800
gradual	9290
excellent	4490
gnarly	5
grotesque	2

I think everyone agrees that the horizontal coordinate is time, but the confusion is whether the vertical coordinate is effort or results. The Wikipedia article suggests that the original sense had to do with the outcome of the learning rather than the difficulty of it, which seems to be the more prevalent interpretation these days. My idea is that anyone throwing around the metaphor ought to provide an actual picture of the curve they have in mind, with labels along the axes, so that the person hearing the phrase knows which sense is intended without having to resort to context.

With this entry, the meme has officially passed its peak

attribution

Things I've said recently which would have been incomprehensible 25 years ago

• "Where did I leave my computer?" I was rushing off to an appointment and had mislaid my laptop temporarily. Back in the old days, we did have personal computers, though only luggable in the most generous sense of the term.


• "They left their two Bobcats in our driveway."
  The neighbors are putting an addition on the back of their house and we have agreed to let them use part of our property to bring their equipment through. Because of the recent rain, we have about 15 yards of mud that gets tracked through the kitchen now.
  The Bobcat(tm) line of small earthmoving equipment does not quite go back that far.


• "It keeps doing that whenever I'm not wearing the Bluetooth." Because of the hands-free cell phone laws here, I spend a good part of the day with a headset stuck in my ear, which mostly works fine. But when I do take the thing out and my wife calls, we often seem to get into this thing where the phone thinks it should be picking up from the headset instead of the built-in speaker, and she can't hear me, even though I can hear her. Twenty-five years ago a good many phones I used still had dials on them.


• "I was thinking it might be a good time to buy some more Chinese stock." I was at my doctor's office and the subject of the recent market downturns came up, and I mentioned the possibility of an opportunity to take advantage of the situation. The only Chinese stock we knew about back in the old days was usually made with chicken and ginger.


• "I haven't had T'ang-T'ang noodles in years." We were at a restaurant at the tail end of the Lunar New Year celebration, having the traditional noodle dishes. I'd have this dish at the old Joyce Chen's Small Eating Place in Cambridge regularly, though they were called dan-dan noodles.

I lost because I had been defeated

My last post mentioning syllogisms brought this nitpick to mind once more.

When I heard the phrase used on NPR the other day, I realized then and there that I didn't want to be the last person holding onto the original usage of this phrase. But it made me sad.

[Tombstone Generator is here.]