I discovered it was J. R. R. Tolkien's birthday today.

I read his books in seventh grade. At that time I was living in Iowa, and they seemed a fantastic and impossible alternative to the grey misery I felt. I dreamed of walking in lothlorien, and of living in rivendell. Little did I know that san francisco existed....

I started rereading them recently, prompted by a movie trailer that made me think "This time they might have got it right." Me and thousands of others-- LOTR holds half of amazon's top ten list.

I'm now disturbed by the classism and luddite tendancies of the author's work, but yet... elves. drwarves. darkest evil, and brave painful choices.... It's still a great story. One of the great ones.

Happy birthday, JRR.

Zeitgeist 2001 shows what we searched for, month by month.

Homepage Improvement - wring more results from your website
lists 10 good resolutions for improving your site in the new year. reading through, I was amazed how many classic usability issues there were-- almost all would be revealed in testing. Then I noticed they were gleaned from Jakob's new Homepage Usability book.

Has anyone read it? worth getting?

Design Your Own O'Reilly Book Cover!

Erin's insightful take on the somewhat unfortunate Information Architecture versus Graphic Design is worth looking at, if you missed it-- as I did-- in the holiday shuffle.

Again, designers are mistaken for stylists ( Adam Greenfield's quickly catching on term for style-above-substance designers).

When the us and them is replaced with the us and us, life will be quite better.

How else can you explain alphabet 26?