I'm leaving sometime today for Iowa. My husband and I are driving cross-country, taking a slow route there to see the sites.
I imagine this site will be quiet (a.k.a abandoned) for the next two weeks. Widgetopia and boxes and arrows should continue to entertain, though!

Résumé
by Dorothy Parker

Razors pain you; Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful; Nooses give;
Gas smells awful; You might as well live.

My outlook & outlook express have decided to give up the ghost on my sickly home mach8ine. I'm planning a clean install to wipe my drive, but I'm still backign up stuff. That means I need a mail client that functions (I find squirrelmail which dreamhost provides... well... squirrely)

Outlook is virusy
Eurdora advertises
Batmail is geeky
Thuderbird is full of bugs

You might as well phone.

Sigh. My new dream project: Design a mail client.

(I went with Thunderbird)

Four Years Later not a thing seems out of place: reading excerpt from Brand leadership on guidelines for using the web to build strong brands:

One: Create a Positive Experience A Web site should deliver a positive site experience by having three basic characteristics. First, it should be easy to use; the visitor should not get confused or frustrated. It should meet expectations with respect to the information it contains and the activities that it supports. Second, it should have a reason to be visited. It needs to offer value in terms of information, a transaction, entertainment, or a social experience. Without motivation to visit, bookmark, and revisit, the site will not be worthwhile. To the extent that the site can offer real substance, it can actually augment the brand by providing an enhanced level of functional, emotional, or self-expressive benefits. Third, it should exploit the unique characteristics of the Web. In particular, it should strive to be involving and interactive (e.g., the Pepsi site), personalized, (e.g., the Amazon site), and timely (e.g., the CNN site).

I'm rereading David Aaker's excellent book, Building Strong Brands and in chapter 7 he goes over changing a brand, and the reasons why. He then counters them all saying that consistency is usually the best course (he's not that didactic: he mentions KFC's need to distance themselves from fried food. Hmm. Did that work?)

I had my aha of recognition when he mentioned this scenario: a brand manager is asked in a meeting with senior types what is he going to do about the fact that the brand has been flat the last three quarters. Will he

a) Say: I'm going to do the same thing as the last three managers?
b) Say: I have an exciting new plan to reinvent our brand!

So it goes with redesigns as well-- it's not the users who are bored with the design, it's not the users who are bored with the brand, it's the employees. And they decide on change.

The second whammy was my realization that most people determine that they are going to change before they realize how they are going to change.

This means companies have committed to change before they have determined if the change makes things better or worse. Then, six months down the line, millions of bucks in the hole, who is going to be the brave one who says "This is going to make things worse. Let's not do it." The same guy who said "I've got an exciting new plan?"

Of course there are may ways to avoid this trap: going in ready to get out, prototyping, testing with user groups, shorter change cycles, regular checkpoints to decide go/no go. But think of the last redesign you saw. Wasn't more like "We're doing a redesign AHHRRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHAAAAAHHH" (my berserker imitation, excuse me).

At times like this I think of poor Levis, floundering to try to make themselves more relevent than the 501. All they did was weaken their claim to reliable comfortable real jeans, and take their changes with the piranhas of change: the fashionable set.

We, the ones who look at our site, our brand, our product ever day, we are the deadly ones. What our customers call comfort we call dull. We're like a bored teenager that dies her hair blue over a long weekend. We must curb that energy, and point it toward extention and growth with care, rather than reinvention.

I'm doing a lot of defining these days, between widgetopia and a project I'm working. This defintion of "icon" is worth a honorable mention.

"Ultimately from Greek eikon (likeness, image, portrait), an icon (or ikon) is an image, a representation, a simile. Accordingly, 192 iconicity in a semiotic sense refers to signs where the motivation is due to some kind of physical resemblance or similarity between the signified and signifier (see section ); 193 a Christian icon is a picture of a sacred or sanctified personage, traditional to the Eastern Church, which can be seen as hand-made (painted) or non-manmade (archeiropoietos). 194 Semiotically incorrect, but nevertheless widely used, is the denomination of the symbols on the GUI desktop and in WWW documents as ''icons''. In this paper, I call the graphic representations of hyperlinks Graphical Link Markers (GLMs). "

Reading Globetechnology

"A Canadian man accused of being one of the biggest spammers in the world by Yahoo Inc. has agreed to stop sending unwanted e-mails and plans to help educate children about the dangers of the Internet."

I thought, it's never enough to be guilty, it's never enough to stop doing what your doing, no: you have to REPENT your SINS and PREACH to others about the EVIL of your ways.

Then again, why look a gift PR oppurtunity in the mouth.

I've been silent as the grave as of late. My apologies. Some of my time is with drupal, which is a pleasure, some is getting widgetopia.net working steadily better, a goodly bit of it is finishing up a consulting project, and part of it is getting ready to drive to Iowa saturday. So my silence is probably not going to change much until July.

For now, enjoy this peculiar poem my father emailed me. things like this remind me why I love the web.

George Meriton
Excerpt...
"The Labouring Man, that toils all day full sore,
A pot of Ale at Night, doth him Restore,
And makes him all his Toil and paines forget,
And for another day-work, hee's then fit;
There's more in drinking Ale, sure that we wot,
For most Ingenious Artists, love a Pot;
Nay amorous Ladyes it will pleasure too,
Make frozen Maids, and Nuns, and Virgins do
The thing you know; Soldiers and Gown-men,
Rich and poor, old and young, lame and sound men
May such advantage reap by drinking Ale"

7 Things to Know about Building a User Experience Team is a succinct checklist of criteria to keep in mind while bringing UCD inhouse.

I'd like to point out #2, "Executives and managers should set the standard for "customer-centric" behavior.' and #4 "Make ongoing conversation about user experience a part of the company culture."

Too often managers hire a "user advocate" whose job then is to fight full time. Customer care is not somebodies job; it's everybodies job. And a lack of user centeredness is not fixed by a single hire any more than content organziation is fixed by buying a CMS, no matter how much we wish for easy answers.

Having blogged for many years now, I find myself suddenly promoted to guru in the latest Design by Fire: Gurus v. Bloggers, Round 2

All I can say is: dang my front page breaks in his screenshot. Well, I stopped working widgetopia for the evening to fix up the embarrassing mistakes I've been meaning to get to on my personal site.
I guess I should stop doing things like mucking with drupal and building widgetopia and managing Boxes and Arrows and setting up a conference for IA and building a business and get my site spruced up. OR maybe I could ask Andrei for a "Design Eye" makeover.

If the old saw is true, then MoreGoogle is great. Open in new window from Yahoo, screenshots from alexa/amazon and interface from google. I might ask "is there no shame" but I'm sure someone else is asking "where's my lawyer"