My Twitter on the VP Debate

I couldn't watch it all, and made a mistake in not having my twitter in front of me while I did. But here's, in a glance, a big reason I love twitter. There's a slim chance that 2 of these people know each other, but I don't think the others do, although I bet they'd like each other if they met. (Assuming they won't mind: tingilinde whom I know from Bell Labs/AT&T, Nancy Baym from grad school mentorship days, Jared Spool from being, well, Jared, and Greg Raiz, a colleague from Boston.)

Designing the Stop Sign (the Agency Experience)

Having just given a workshop on setting yourself up as a consultant with some warnings about client types, this video is especially apropos. What if a corporation asked you to design a stop sign?

In the Freelanceswitch.com list of client types, I think they missed the Appreciative Hands-On Committee of Passive Aggressive Cheerleaders client. Who test your design on their 6 year olds!

Thanks for the timely pointer to Steve at Tingilinde...

Singles Ad Humor

Trying to ignore a sucky day, here are three coincidentally discovered items on dating that had me snickering this weekend. The first is the oldie but goodie by the very funny Joel Friesen, "WHY YOU SHOULD CONTINUE TO DATE ME; A SERIES OF CHARTS AND GRAPHS." For wacky uses of charts, it does not get much better. (Apparently she just concluded he was weird.)

Also from Joel, his second item of snigger-worthiness is his study of an online singles site's weirdest ads and criteria. This is in Fun with Lavalife. One of the finds:

Old White Ladies who Love Rap. If you refine a search down to its most basic elements you can find some pretty unique people. I looked for anyone over the age of 70 who lists rap music as their main source of inspiration. Oddly enough there is a bunch. But most seem to have accidentally filled in their age wrong, or they have incredible skin for a 103 year old gangsta.

Shortly after this, I looked over an art project on dating, called I Want You to Want Me, by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. I can't make out most of the screenshots, but the "Highlights" quotes rock. Here are a few:

• I'm interested in meeting a lusty male who dreams deconstruction and dismantles stale ideologies
• I'm looking for a virgin supermodel nymphomaniac with huge breasts that owns a liquor store.
• I'm looking for someone who can make my heart beat fast (not to be confused with giving me a heart attack).
• Looking for an entry level or junior administrative assistant who is willing to have some naughty fun with her older boss once a week, or maybe more if she’s willing.

That last one might be an actual job ad, not a singles ad. Who can tell? Now that I see these, I feel I missed a real data mining opportunity when I used one of these sites in California. It could have been so much more fun!

Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club

I find from Steve at tingilinde that the Journal of Improbable Research is now online!

I see they also sponsor a Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club of Scientists with Said Hair. I find this very interesting. Not because I am a scientist with hair of this type, but because I would like to meet scientists with hair that flows (and is luxurious). Perhaps I should found a Fans of Scientists with Luxurious Flowing Hair Club. Here are some sample locks, a kind of hair porn shot, if you ask me:

Thoughtful of them to post their members' info!

Zen Error Dialog and Flash Victim

I especially like the title bar on this guy: And a friend sent a link to a great animation of a flash victim getting destroyed by the app. Lots of in-jokes for designers who use Flash, and hilarious anyway. You definitely want sound on for it.

Funny Networks

I really appreciate a sense of humor in a network diagram. Here are two unusual ones found on visualcomplexity's feed, introduced with such sober and boring description that I was saddened for the VC readers who are probably missing the fun here.

The Story Map is a social network diagram of a wedding party, with the arcs annotated by relationship facts that link the nodes. It's beautiful and inspirational. Why are social network pics not funnier in general; relationships are, right? (Well, some. I guess professional ones aren't very. At least the publishable diagram versions.)

Next is a bigger investment, but worth it if you love detail (of the really obsessive type). An art project by Media A of massive size (10 meters), it's a representation of a fictitious designer's life spanning a century into the future. The Networked Designer's Critical Path is a PDF (3 MB) that takes time to download, but I guarantee it's very amusing and science fictional. Here's an excerpt (English in light gray):

Notice the chronic over-networking issue in the center there. Heh. My printer dialog says it would be 171 pages if I tiled to print this sucker at 100%. I'm tempted anyway.

Wow: Lotus Blossom

This is fast (no load time waits and a genuinely frenetic pace), simple (text and music -- turn it on because you need it), and even better, genuinely funny: Lotus Blossom.

Go watch! Where you can do it with the sound on. (Don't watch if you might have issues with strobe effects in place.)

Adorable Monsters

Two cute monster-related items for early April:

Daily Monster, an online growth of cool monster art. It's Stefan Bucher's site (thanks Steve): And while I was poking around on Jared Tarbell's site for a friend, I found his combinatoric monster art, which made me grin wide. I want to be Jared when I grow up.

Product Idea Generator

This is addictive, like any good generator. It's especially well-done. Too bad the reload link is so tiny, but you won't miss it. Samples I got:

• It's a rubber fish that shouts 'WARNING!' at the first sign of danger! It sounds better than it looks and mimics the movements of a lizard.
• It's a blow-up doll that's inflammable! It kills weeds down to the root and talks.
• It's a video recorder that scares dogs and stays exactly where you leave it.
• It's like a normal shoelace, but it runs on six little wheels.
• It's an aquarium that keeps track of your personal calendar!
• It's a trouser press that flies like a rocket! It doesn't need batteries and may cause drowsiness.

Powerpoint Hilarity

Le Grand Content by Clemens Kogler is an animated riff on powerpoint presentations of data and Big Questions (mostly those found in bad teenage poetry). It's very funny. Go and click on "view movie" and giggle.

Despair.com and Demotivation

I'm a big fan of despair.com. But handing out their posters could potentially get managers fired at the wrong companies-- maybe for the best! They've got other good products, including a funny book ("The Art of Demotivation"). I can think of a few people who need the pessimist's mug.

If you're having a bad day, I recommend their video podcasts. They will make you feel your life could be a lot worse. However, take care with the one on signs of a demotivated workforce. This one is on ZD Net, and the transcript lives here. It sounds a lot like the previous post I put up on "how to discourage innovation." An excerpt:

The fourth sign of a demotivated worker is acute defensiveness. As a result of their feeling defensive, they do extra work as a means of ingratiating themselves to executives. Now any time you can get an employee to do extra work, particularly for something as irrelevant as ingratiation, that's a good thing.

The fifth sign is employees feel acute self-doubt. As a result of their self-doubt, they will work very hard as a means of salvaging their identities.

The sixth sign of a demotivated workforce is the employees tend to feel a lack of emotional resilience. Now this is very important, because employees don't want to feel badly about themselves, and so consequently they will work extra hard to avoid humiliation. Though they tend to avoid seeking recognition, they will work very, very hard to avoid humiliation.

And then the seventh sign of a demotivated workforce is intense risk aversion. And this is very, very important, because employees are so unwilling to take any risks on their own, they will tend to be satisfied with simply being an extension of executive ambition. As a result of that, they will essentially do whatever you're asking for, and really that's what we're looking for.

Cryptid Hunting: What to Bring Along? at Cryptomundo.com

It's that time of year again: Bigfoot season. Cryptomundo.com posts an article about what extras to bring along on your hunt, to ensure proper scientific, nay, forensic, attention to the evidence. In Cryptid Hunting: What to Bring Along? we are told that today's Bigfoot hunter needs to pack:

1. Paper sacks and envelopes
2. Camera/video recorder (Preferrably with night vision)
3. Tweezer/tongs
4. Rubber gloves
5. Magnifying glass
6. Parabolic mic
7. Plaster of Paris
8. Tape measure
9. Log book
10. a few sterile collecting bottles or containers for fecal material samples and for urine specimens
11. tapes to record from your parabolic mic
12. "For DNA collection, you will want to have sterile latex gloves"
13. "If hair sampling envelopes are not available, place samples into small sealed paper envelope or zip lock bag (no brand recommended). Use a permanent marker or pen, clearly include all sampling information with each sample. This includes name of collector, time, date, assumed cryptid, human, or known species name, field tag number, gender (if known), age (if known), location including lat./long., Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) or township."

Ok, it only gets weirder and more obsessive. Read at your own OCD risk.

Ten things VPs never say

Scott Berkun posts about Ten things VPs never say, including: "Team A is more important than Team B," "the CEO and I disagree" (Leaders fear showing dissention, despite signs for those paying attention), "My morale is low," "I’m ending project X and here’s why," "No, I don’t want to be on the cover of Time." (To want to be a VP requires an ego. No person in the history of the corporation has been forced, at gunpoint, into executive status.)

All this entertainment aside, I've known a few nice VPs, especially at Mathworks (hi Roy if you're reading). (And I bet my new CEO would have said some of them as a VP, which is why I like him.)

[Updated to add: A VP reader of Berkun's blog took offense politely and Scott apologized for the stereotyping. One of the interesting things this VP cited was Joel's article The Development Abstraction Layer, about the infrastructure of management that enables delivering code to the customer, and the complexity of making it work well. It certainly made me think about the Design Abstraction Layer, and if/how that works -- but by Joel's analysis it's just a layer in the development management problem, which may in fact be correct thinking. Go read and see what you think.]

Google Romance

I nearly fell for one April Fool's post today (Cool Tools, I got too excited by the radio gum), but here's one I didn't (quite) fall for: Google Romance. It's very probable Google is going to be in this space. The storyboard of the two attractive users getting together surrounded by Google community products is obviously a work of realist fiction.

Is Your Boss a Psychopath?

At the risk of my boss reading this, here's an oldie but a goodie: Is Your Boss a Psychopath?

Corporate psychopaths score high on Factor 1, the "selfish, callous, and remorseless use of others" category. It includes eight traits: glibness and superficial charm; grandiose sense of self-worth; pathological lying; conning and manipulativeness; lack of remorse or guilt; shallow affect (i.e., a coldness covered up by dramatic emotional displays that are actually playacting); callousness and lack of empathy; and the failure to accept responsibility for one's own actions. Sound like anyone you know? (Corporate psychopaths score only low to moderate on Factor 2, which pinpoints "chronically unstable, antisocial, and socially deviant lifestyle," the hallmarks of people who wind up in jail for rougher crimes than creative accounting.)

A good point is made in that some psychopaths are created, not born that way, and American individualistic corporate culture is a petri dish for this type of behavior. They get ahead in part because of their traits.

Of course, cynics might say that it can be an advantage to lack a conscience. That's probably why major investors installed Dunlap as the CEO of Sunbeam: He had no qualms about decimating the workforce to impress Wall Street. One reason outside executives get brought into troubled companies is that they lack the emotional stake in either the enterprise or its people. It's easier for them to act callously and remorselessly, which is exactly what their backers want.

The good news is that a productive narcissist makes a great balance for an executive psychopath. Or a productive obsessive. It's all just one big mental hospital in a large corporation. (See the related NY Times short on presidents with mental illness symptoms.)

The Dumpster (Happy Valentine's Day!)

Off Information Aesthetics, the Dumpster is a visualization of breakups described on blogs in 2005, with sample color commentary from the posts. It's very pretty, and of course it was made in processing.

Waterfall 2006

The best laugh I've had in, well, at least a week (the pornographic car design conversation at my corporate beer bash was pretty good): Waterfall 2006 - International Conference on Sequential Development.

Highlights of this conference agenda:

• User Interaction: It Was Hard to Build, It Should Be Hard to Use by Jeff Patton
• Pair Managing: Two Managers per Programmer by Jim Highsmith
• Very Large Projects: How to Go So Slow No One Knows You'll Never Deliver by Jutta Eckstein
• The Joy of Silence: Cube Farm Designs That Cut Out Conversation by Alistair Cockburn
• Making Outsourcing Work: One Team Member per Continent by Babu Bhatt

The conference will also feature a number of workshops.

Unlike typical conferences where workshops involve participants talking with each other, all Waterfall 2006 workshops will be conducted by document. Come to a workshop, open up your favorite word processor and state your opinion on something. Email it to other workshop participants. (We'll set up mailing list aliases for this--after all, we want to keep this process efficient!) Then just sit back and wait for someone to reply with their own document. Don't miss this opportunity to participate in vigorous written discussion with your peers.

Nerd A.D.D.

This post is dedicated to my brother... another nerd who thinks he has ADD. I myself recognize the symptoms all too well, especially after a week at my sister's house where it was not ok to sit with a latop all the time. (The question on my mind today is: can I go to a party tonight and take along a book, my ipod-wannabe, and a palm pilot, in case I need more than conversation and drink to make it through?)

On RandsInRepose, the description of N.A.D.D.

Here's a tip: If the building you are currently in is burning to the ground, go find the person with NADD on your floor. Not only will they know where the fire escape is, they'll probably have some helpful tips about how to avoid smoke inhalation as well likely probabilities regarding the likelihood you'll survive. How is it this Jr. Software Engineer knows all this? Who knows, maybe he read it on a weblog two years ago. Perhaps a close virtual friend of his in New York is a fire fighter. Does it matter? He may save your life or, better yet, keep you well informed with useless facts before you are burnt to a crisp.

In the future... Sam's comics.

In the future we will all be connected by a network. 37Signals' weblog Signalvs.Noise is hosting some great comics by artist Sam Brown. He is illustrating "in the future" sentences supplied by readers in the comments. It makes reading the comments really fun and kinda Zen.

His style reminds me a little of my friend Ken's What Cartoon site.

Funfurde on the Morphescape

Funfurde had a post on a bunch of dinnerware that got me giggling. Less for the dinnerware than the post itself, I quote:

Like most of you, I've always wanted my dinnerware to look like the city scape of Istanbul, but Pottery Barn doesn't seem to carry anything like that. Fortunately for us, Karim Rashid has taken the first step toward overthrowing the tyranny of non-city-scape-plates by creating Morphescape, "an ambitious project that is equal parts beauty and function. The non-stop continuation of a single undulating surface is divided into every need for the table so you can actually have an entire table connected by each function as a modular scape. The inspiration is the city scape of Istanbul from minarets to mosques."

As most things on Funfurde, it be not cheap to have the cityscape of Istanbul on your table.

Writerbo: I'm Such a Hack.

Inspired by the Aibo robotic dog and wannabe writers everywhere, this is quite hilarious: a couple of ad flyers for a robotic author/whiner, with seven distinct self-loathing modes.

scott_lynch: Christ, Why Do I Bother?

My favorite quote: "Maybe Prairie Schooner would take it if I made the Humanities professors into lesbians. Christ, I'm such a hack."

Impress your social circle: rentagerman.de

I got this one from Danah Boyd's site: Rent a German.

Rentagerman.de offers a wide range of Germans for your personal and social needs.

You can select the German of your choice for an exclusive lifetime experience: Imagine to appear with your German at parties, family events, or just hang out with them at the local shopping center.

No matter which occasion you choose, you will surely impress your environment by presenting an original German.

If you are german or know a German who wishes to participate in the rentagerman network, please don´t hesitate to add your German to our site. On success, you will receive 40% of the rental fee !

So enjoy our human resources and make the rentagerman community grow fast !

Edited to add: I can't leave this site alone, I'm too enthralled.

Carl Hagen, 58 (New York): “After dinner, we watched TV together with the entire family. Suddenly the German started to cry. It was such real and pure emotion. I’d never seen this before. The support package cheered him up again and we read German poems together ‘til 3 am. Even Grandma stayed up and enjoyed the exotic sound of words like "Rasenmäher, Motorsäge or Solidargemeinschaft". Rented again, before our new friend left.”

So, rent-a-nice-scot would go over quite big among my friends. I smell a business plan.

Longmire does Romance Novels

Here's great LOL-inducing set of spoof romance covers, pointed out by Ellen Kushner on LiveJournal: Longmire does Romance Novels.

SNIF: Social Networking in Fur

The SNIF paper from MIT caused some consternation at the CHI conference in Portland this past week. It's a proposed design (or thought experiment, or classroom project) for smart leashes and collars which detect and react to other pets with smart leashes and collars and then save information about the pets' interactions. Two of the authors presented photos of leash prototypes attached to stuffed toys lying flat on the carpet, and cardboard mockups of dogs with pointy ears. It got a lot of giggles, but some people just left the room.

At the end, Marti Hearst (UC Berkeley) asked, "I'm not sure if this is a serious paper or a parody of a CHI paper, but in the spirit of parody, have you considered the dogs' privacy?" A big laugh there -- they nodded deadpan and said of course this was a concern.

My biggest disappointment with it was that it wasn't "done"; it hadn't been deployed and tested at all. Some of the people who left the room said the same -- amongst the flat out "it's ridiculous" accusations circulated "even if it was serious, they hadn't done the usual required analysis work." And some consternation that this got in and serious work got rejected instead, but then the CHI reviewing process is always a crazy crapshoot, since the conference is so interdisciplinary.

Maybe I've become a former-CHI-hardass in the past few years away, but I thought it was both funny AND interesting, despite the research flaws. Dog owners probably would like something like this, which for me makes it more than a little compelling! There are too many CHI papers with solutions to non-existent problems, or that present incremental design work on existing products. Dog owners meet other dogs and dog owners all the time, and they even meet non-dog-owners, sometimes quite enthusiastically ("want to meet women? get a puppy and take it for walks" -- who doesn't know this one?). So for me their paper was only 45 or 90 degrees off true right-on; it needed to focus less on making dogs happy with each other and more on the owners of dogs, and it did need some deployment (with associated design issues worked out) and testing.

In general, I'd like CHI to include more experimental thought-projects and I'd like to see more wacky creative design. I suppose the design briefings track sometimes included this stuff in the past. But of course I'd also like to see this stuff done well. CHI has been late for the boat on a lot of hot technology trends (games, poker, handheld entertainment, porn...? blogs?) because of the extreme "seriousness" of so many of the reviewers and attendees. Randy Pausch said in his opening plenary that it was important to be silly sometimes; I agree, because non-researchers and consumers and our users are sometimes silly too and buy dogs to meet women.

The Very Secret Diaries

If you missed these, they're a wonderful parody of the Lord of the Rings films, by a woman who has just sold her first book! In Cassandra Claire's honor, a revisit of The Very Secret Diaries. Here are some classic excerpts from Legolas's diary:

Day Four: Boromir so irritating. Why must he wear big shield like dinner plate all the time? Climbed up Caradhras but wimpy humans who cannot walk on snow insisted we climb back down. Am definitely prettiest member of the Fellowship. Go me!
Day 30: All this paddling about in boats is hell on my complexion. Aragorn obviously starting to find Frodo strangely attractive. Sam will kill him if he tries anything. Still the prettiest.
Day 33: Boromir tempted by Ring. So tedious. Cannot be tempted myself, as already have everything I want i.e. perfect hair and a butt like granite.

And who could ever forget Aragorn's "Still not king?"

Yahoo! 360 and Already a Great Parody

I posted about this the other day in one of the "whoa look at Yahoo now" posts: Yahoo! 360, their community posting beta (which I haven't see the inside of yet). Look at that page, and then go look at this parody site immediately afterwards:

SixFoo!660: "Finally, a way for social networks to stay connected to other social networks, and meet interesting social networks like yourself."

Share what matters to you. Create yet another place online. Share pictures of your cat. Create a blather. Make the same lists of crap you made somewhere else last week, send out a BLAMMO, crush on an indie chick and abandon it all after only 12 days.
Keep your social networks close. Invite social apps to your place to see what works about their service. They can steal ideas from your service. Tag each other silly until you can't feel your toes. It's a great way to feel like something new and important might be happening before the bubble bursts again in early 2007.

Click on the sign in link to see their UI... it's very nicely meta. (Thanks to Ka-Ping Yee for pointing it out to me today in our CHI conference workshop about subjects much like this.)

BoringBoring, Best Laugh of the Week

Maybe the best laugh of longer than a week, but I can't remember that far back anymore. Check out the April Fool's version of BoingBoing, aka BoringBoring, right on the money. I definitely LOLed a lot and fruitlessly clicked on their RSS link, wanting to keep the joke going for as long as I have to put up with boingboing in order to feel cool.

Favorite excerpts: the ad for Plain White T-Shirts and the O'Reilly "Maybe: Technology. Whatever" ad, Cory's DRM talk translated back into English (hey, Cory, get the hint), taking your knitting needles on a plane to make an infinite or four-dimensional space out of yarn (!!), and cool hack for turning any word into letters by just typing it.

Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry

My friend Angus sent me this book, the cover of which had me howling this morning. I figure that makes it worth a pointer here, and it's well in the travel theme. The bios of the authors include this guy, whom many of us have met:

Philippe Miseree. A professional traveller since his youth, there is not a town or city Philippe has not been recently disappointed by. No matter how obscure the destination you can bet he has been there before you and found it was not half as good as it was in the 1970s. His earlier works include "Turkey Before it was Spoilt," "India the Hard Way," "South-East Asia on Less than You Need," and "Unnecessarily Rough Travel." Philippe helped compile our "Complaints" section.

The inside cover's sequel guides sound worthwhile too, like Surviving Moustaschistan: "Tucked away between the break-away Soviet state of Kalashnikov and the former Persian province of Carpetsan, this arid, inhospitable land will whet the appetite of the most heavily vaccinated traveller."

Check it out: Molvania (a Jetlag Travel Guide).

Howard Zinn & Noam Chomsky: LOTR Commentary

My brother sent me this and it got me giggling in the middle of pretty lousy weather: McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Unused Audio Commentary By Howard Zinn & Noam Chomsky, Recorded Summer 2002, for The Fellowship of the Ring Platinum Series Extended Edition DVD, Part One.

Zinn: You view the conflict as being primarily about pipe-weed, do you not?

Chomsky: Well, what we see here, in Hobbiton, farmers tilling crops. The thing to remember is that the crop they are tilling is, in fact, pipe-weed, an addictive drug transported and sold throughout Middle Earth for great profit. ...

Zinn: Well, you know, it would be manifestly difficult to believe in magic rings unless everyone was high on pipe-weed. So it is in Gandalf's interest to keep Middle Earth hooked.

Clay Food. You too can etc.

Now this is a specialty book. Making Miniature Food and Market Stalls, out of polymer clay. There are 7 glowing user reviews! I mean, check this out:

"She starts with the bakery and deli stall (tarts, breakds, cakes, salami, pork pies and cheeses) to meat stalls (bacom, chops, poultry, beef...sausages) to fruit and veges (from potatoes to cucumbers with transluscent seeds to grapes), the fish stall and market display items."

"I made the cutest crab tonight."

Bill's Self Interview

Since everyone needs a laugh this time of year, and this made me cackle madly: Sarah Weinman linked to Bill Crider (a writer whose work I haven't read) interviewing himself on his own blog.

The Blog: When did you decide you wanted to become a writer?

Me: I've always wanted to write. In fact, I wrote my first novel at the age of five, a hardboiled tale of violence and revenge called The Velveteen Rabbit Takes Names and Kicks Ass. It would have been a blockbuster, but all the major publishers rejected it. "We don't do fanfic" was the typical turn-down.

It's at Bill's Blog: Interview!

Clutax, a Drug for Cleaning House.

Oh GOD, I wish I had this. It's the one drug my mother needs most.

From Apartment Therapy: Ssssh! Clutax is here: "...She told us that Clutax is a Canadian drug that makes it easier to focus and deal with decisions surrounding what to keep and what to throw out. "

COLORSTROLOGY !!!

Another item from Josh Rubin: COLORSTROLOGY, in which you find out the Pantone color code for your birthday and what it says about you. I'm supposed to be a Moonlite Mauve, Curious, Intelligent, Impressive. I don't really like mauve, so I don't know about the rest either. But as a former color management UI person, I'm kind of tickled by this Pantone flash gimmick.

Ryan McGinness: "Everything You Like"

Linked from Cool Hunting, this shirt has now sold out. I laughed. Ryan McGinness's "Everything You Like I Liked Five Years Ago" T-Shirt - $29.00 : Krudmart.com