I can't resist a good internet meme.

Four jobs I've had
Security guard at a women's catholic college (the wolf guarding the sheep as it were)
Archery instructor, kids' summer camp
Copywriter, TV Guide
Marketing assistant, women's lingerie company

Four movies I can watch over and over
Office Space
The Last of the Mohicans
Star Wars
Lost in Translation

Four places I've lived
Baltimore, MD
Los Angeles, CA
Hoboken, NJ
Pittsburgh, PA

Four TV shows I love
Lost
Twin Peaks
Homicide: Life on the Street
Sports Night

Four places I've vacationed
Savannah, Georgia
Cannes, France
Florence, Italy
Death Valley, CA

Four of my favorite dishes
Yellow curry chicken
Rice gelato
Caprese salads
Grape leaves

Four sites I visit daily
Fark
Wikipedia
Yahoo News
Amazon

Four places I would rather be now
A pub in Dublin
Anywhere in the South of France
At a dinner with friends
Sydney, Australia (because I've always wanted to visit)

Four things in my pocket right now
A crumpled Hamilton
Mobile Phone
Credit cards
A handful of receipts

Originally posted on Friday, January 27, 2006 | Link | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

One of the things I was unprepared for when I moved back to San Francisco after a nearly 20 year absence was how much of a one-industry town the city has become. It's now a lot more like Los Angeles (movies/TV) or Washington (politics) than it is like, say, New York or Boston, which have much more diversified industries.

A map of the mile around the Adaptive Path office with the names of technology companies and design firms on it would be a massive cluster. That map of the Bay Area might even be crazier. You don't have to find people in the tech field here, they find you. Other parents at my kid's school, people you meet at parties and at the park...it's all tech tech tech. We went to a client's office and realized we had another client in the same building and one in the building around the corner. This is probably not an unusual circumstance.

While this is interesting--the person next to you might be someone you've only read about--it also creates a (dare I say it) bubble effect. We're so over hyped trends before non-geeks even register them. We get wound-up by companies and technologies that don't affect anyone outside our technology circle.

It's easy in SF to fall into this trap. The harder part is to look beyond the Bay Area and find real applications for the technology and design ideas we're having. We need to apply our talents to where they are really needed--most of which aren't a mile from our offices.

Originally posted on Sunday, January 22, 2006 | Link | Comments (1) | Trackback (0)

For the curious, I've posted the table of contents for my upcoming book. If there's something grossly missing from an introductory book on interaction design, please let me know.

Originally posted on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 | Link | Comments (2) | Trackback (1)

I'm tagging along with Jesse James Garrett and Yahoo's Bill Scott for another workshop on Designing and Building with Ajax on January 26th at my alma mater, UCLA, one of the birthplaces of what became the internet. Use my code if you register and get 10% off: FODS.

After December's event in Chicago, we've revamped the content a little, tilting a little more towards design and less towards code (although there's still some of that too). What we're going to talk about is not just what Ajax is (although that's how the day begins), but how to think about and document Ajax applications. Should be an interesting day, complete with a super-secret announcement too!

Originally posted on Sunday, January 15, 2006 | Link | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

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