I had the pleasure of having free lunch at Maggiano’s yesterday. Ivan and I had great appetizers of stuffed Mushrooms and Spinach-Artichoke Dip. We then had a big helping of Eric Schaffer patting his own back on how to institutionalize usability using his Usability Central product. OK the guy is good. But he’s used to hearing that from many people. The idea is cool. I could buy all the usability documentation from him and put it on my intranet so I don’t have to build all that stuff from scratch. It will be cool when I come up with the $14,000 for it.

Christina Wodtke posted an excellent article on boxes and arrows talking about Information Architects not being considered designers. Amazing that people would find what I do not to be design. Furthermore interesting to note that Christina understands so perfectly the difference between one who defends his work (designer) and one who does not (the majority of other people on any given project). I ranted about it. Now I’m over it. Returning to my exquisitely undefined job now…

I don’t get to the blog too much…when I do, it’s quality. Memorial Day was a week ago, and I still can’t believe how strange the final hour of it was. We put together our new firepit and stacked it high with the usual kindling and logs, then lit ‘er up on our back porch. Soon the fire was crackling. The air was full of that campfire smell, and Trish and I were chatting about the weekend. We put the cover on thinking that it would be better for the house if it weren’t quite so hot. After about a minute I start to hear sizzling…. sizzling…. sizzzleFOOM! All of the sudden the outside of the cover spontaneously combusted!

I hate to admit it, but I froze. I stood there thinking, “Wow, that’s a really big fire.” Me, the Boy Scout who is supposed to Be Prepared. My wife, the practical one who didn’t want the house to catch fire went for the fire extinguisher. By the way, fire extinguishers work! We put the cover out, then had a hearty chuckle as we thought of the friends who declined to come over that night. They’ll have to wait for another time to come “wind down the weekend with us.”

Welcome back to me! I finally have removed the shackles of Yahoo Geocities. I’ve spent my 2 month hiatus from MP (Magnetic Poetry) searching for a new hosting service that will allow me ftp access to my own friggin’ website. Catalog.com is the winner! $35/year. That’s it! And I’ve got my snazzy new domain name ziprz.com. No more www.geocities.com/ziprz for me. Why did it take me, a self-proclaimed User Experience Guru (on my business card), so long to realize what every other real designer that graduated after me already knew. Geocities is for sissies and first year Marketing MBA’s who need to “Learn Web Design”. Shame on me for letting myself suck so bad. I’m going to spend less time learning the in’s and outs of my chosen design discipline, and learning how to be a dad, and I’m going to spend far more time figuring out how to have the most impressive personal website around. You just wait world! This site is best if used within 2 weeks of the date on the label.

Ivan sent me this link a while back when I was looking for some IA information. I thought I had lost some of these lists when I left Xerox. Nope, they still exist. And they’re listed in a wiki. Huh?

I’m not sure if it is possible for me to read through all of PeterMe’s blogs, but if I could, I’d be a far better designer. The guy designed epinions.com which really was my first foray into web community. Better than that though, Peter seems to be able to frequently converse about highly intellectual topics. I don’t know what my problem is, but the intellectual half of me gets hacked off somewhere between a client requirement like “It’s got to be easy to use”, and an internal process meeting where someone says “We need to train the sales people”. God, please give me my brain back! and thanks Peter for providing me with interesting thought topics on a daliy basis…

I had the pleasure of reading Futurize Your Enterprise: Business Strategy in the Age of the E-customer by David Siegel. I forced myself to do it for the sake of a client that actually knows the guy. I found it to be pretty thought provoking. The book is the right kind of book for all of us designers that are reading way too many how to books, and not enough future vision books.

We took the boy to Rochester this weekend to visit his grandparents for the first time. There was a lot of spoil-the-baby going on. Aah, Baby Love. By the way, is there a way to stop him from getting any bigger? If any one has a solution that doesn’t border on the freakish Michael Jackson cryogenic chamber, please let me know. Side note: 60 degrees and sunny in Rochester – the capital of dreary. Back to Chicago where it is 30 degrees and snowing. What gives?

We checked out A Beautiful Mind today at a real movie theater. I’m no film snob. It doesn’t need to be “indie”. It doesn’t need to be artsy, nor French. It just has to be good. Mainstream, least common denominator, watered-down-for-the-ticket-sales good. Russel Crowe is great. Just like my sicko fascination with Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson movies. All this was to distract Tricia and I from the fact that we took our 8 week old to day care today. ugh! Oh yeah we saw Fast and the Furious on DVD too. nice ride!

Tricia and I ventured out to the 2002 Chicago Autoshow yesterday. Whereas last year, finding the CTA bus back to Union Station (no signs anywhere!) and sprinting after the friendly bus driver were our greatest adventures, this year involved taking our brand new son Mason on the trip. The competent McCormick place staff directed us to 3 different floors for entry into the show. And thinking we were smarter than 1 million other Chicagoans we bought our tickets on the Internet so we could go to the special “Fast Line”. You know, the one that ended up having 1 million other Chicagoans in it.

OK, about the cars…You can tell the economy has been horrible by how few concept cars there were. The 2002 Concepts didn’t seem to have nearly the imagination as last year’s either. I really think the car companies are all played out on the cross-over SUV and were just out of ideas for this year. My favorite trend however is the retro-new vehicles. My favorite is the Chevy SSR. This thing is part truck, part convertible, part hot-rod. It is bad ass! I like that the car companies are digging into the past – a time when people didn’t have to please all the demographics to get a car produced. Funny that I found a classic 1950’s Chrysler 300 to be best in show.