Yes, I have almost acheived computing Nirvana. The other day I installed a DVD burner on my Mac G4. I got it mad cheap from Staples.com – only $170 after rebates. It’s the same drive as the Apple SuperDrive (Pioneer DVR-105) and even though Apple itself doesn’t allow you to buy a SuperDrive and put it into an old G4, they kindly put up the world’s greatest user forums where other kind souls helped me pick out the right drive. To find the best price, I used Dealmac.com, another lifesaver. which required an upgrade from Mac OSX 10.2 to 10.2.3.

And last night I installed iLife. Now I could care less at this point how they tweaked my iMovie, I assume it will rock, and iTunes, and iPhoto too. But I really wanted to use iDVD. So I did. And it crashed, and crashed again, and crashed again. But in the end I did get the tutorial to burn. And man, iDVD is a lot of fun.

So Monster decided to change its look and feel for the Super Bowl. Whoopee! I agree with all of Walt’s points about the reduced productivity, and the striking resemblance to Apple Switch. I’d like to add to that.

Monster has become a frightening hodge-podge of different “projects” cobbled together to resemble a web property. It is scary how different each area of the site now looks and interacts. From the recruiter backend, to the Career Center, to My Monster, every thing looks different. The use of graphic Monster buttons and catchy little callouts all over the page makes the site look like the outfield at your local minor league ballpark (and they’ve started cleaning up the aesthetics of those ballparks). I really think that Monster is due for a total architecture and look and feel upgrade. Unfortunately I know how difficult that would be.

Friday was interesting…Tricia calls me in a panic that someone called her at home, saying that he wanted to talk to me. Come to find out it was a guy from Rochester that was surfing the web and found that a website he had asked to be taken down in the past was put back up. He was pissed that some of the work shown on the site was his and not the site owner’s (the site featured pictures of high-end carpentry and trim work). Well, he found the right guy.

When I was just out of school I did a cheapo website for a guy that did high-end carpentry. He had given me the images of his work, which I never even had a second thought about disputing. I did, however use stock photos for navigation. I always worried about some rights police calling me out on those stock photos. Little did I know that the guy gave me photos of work that he didn’t really do. So when I heard this guy’s story on the phone through his clenched teeth, and 3 legal notices that he read me, I had a sinking feeling…

I had put up this guy’s site a couple years ago in my online portfolio, under my student work. I didn’t ask the site owner’s permission because I slathered a huge yellow box onto every page that said “portfolio piece only, site not live”. Apparently the Google crawler that powers Yahoo is so good that it found the site hidden in my subdirectories. It showed up in search engines as though it were put up again. I took the site down in 5 minutes, no big deal. I did learn a thing or two though. 1. Permissions from all parties on anything done on the web is a big deal. 2. This world is run by sue-happy people and the lawyers that fuel their habits. 3. It is so easy to get tracked down. Even if you don’t live in the same town where you first developed something.

I wholeheartedly agree with Sarah Horton’s ‘Beauty is Only Screen Deep‘. She laments about doing things in web design that confounds the medium. Particularly using graphic text for beauty, only to ignore the fact that users want to READ the text not LOOK at it. I too am frustrated, and I too am committing the same sins even in my latest web effort.

In the best case all web design should be using text as text, scaling to fit users’ screens, allowing for users with disabilities to access it, etc. But right now I am struck by how web display technology is getting better, but is still the worst case. I am getting up to speed on CSS, XHTML, XML, DHTML, etc. And I’m finding that it still is far too similar to the days when people hand coded PostScript to get their layouts to print on early laser printers. While we “young” designers take for granted the fact that we don’t have to do paper mechanicals, is designing for the web not almost nearly as bad? In those days making a mechanical took the designer away from conceiving of ground breaking communications, and set up the whole system of Creative Director (conceive of the concept), Art Director (execute the concept), Production Artist (execute the mechanical). In a pinch the Art Director could, and would do it all.

Now we have – just a few of the players listed here – the Creative Director (conceive of the concept), Interaction Designer/Info Architect (create the user flow), Usability specialist (test the experience), Art Director (execute the concept), and Programmers (execute the mechanical). In a pinch the “Web Designer” can, and will do it all. But wait, when trying to do so, you find out that the medium is STILL in the dark ages. The whole construct of the web and HTML was built to communicate text on screen, not visual experience. Even with all the latest standards and browsers, it still comes down to hand-coding in text, that which is meant to provide a compelling visual experience. It would be a totally different story if the web were built to be interactive based on a more visual platform.

Television works. It is completely designer controlled, and has dealt with device flexibility and accessibility. TV inaccessible? Turn up the volume, move closer to it, turn on the closed captioning, or the Spanish. What if Flash .swf + actionscript were the default web standard, natively supported by every browser without a plug-in? That’s closer to the right kind of medium for on-screen display, and designer flexibility. Plus it provides a much simpler content creation approach. Making a red square box doesn’t involve 13 lines of code.

Sadly, Flash .swf will not become the default web language. It is owned by Macromedia. Instead I encourage the W3C to provide whatever other positioning tags necessary within its standards to allow some great vendor to come in and make a completely free form HTML editing environment. The code that gets created must be perfect so that all the standards-nazis don’t complain. So that all the programmers don’t say “Oh what messy code that thing makes” (NetObjects Fusion anyone?). Give me Quark for the web now! Let it be accepted by all. Let it be the industry standard. Let it have all the options necessary to make the content it creates flexible, functional, accessible, and beautiful. When is the last time you needed a programmer to help you create a great printed piece? Let that be with the web soon! PLEASE!

I just have networking so on my mind. The Chicago UPA meeting last night was interesting. I walked into a crowd of Usability people and learned about the history of the UPA, of which we are starting a Chicago Chapter. I might event join the organization.

I’m struck by networking right now both from a personal quest, and because we’re working on a project at TMP that is closely related. I’m not a networker. I don’t know how to “work a crowd” in a professional/meaningful way. I walk into a room of strangers – of people whose sole interest similar to mine is what we do for a living. I figured I’d be the guy who would go and just sit in a chair and eat the sucky finger food that was to serve as my dinner.

But, something happened. “Jerry” from GM Locomotive came up to me and started a chat on usability in trains. So, now I know a train guy. Then, out of the corner of my eye I saw Brain Joosse from Technotribe. I knew Brian because a coworker referred me to him after my dotcom bombed. Brian interviewed me to freelance with his little virtual multimedia – web company. Come to find out he is living the dream of working from home in a virtual company. I could have talked to him for a few hours. But this is the essence of networking. I don’t even need to read a book that I’ve been meaning to get to written by a client of our dotbomb.

And isn’t a blog a great form of networking? Uh, yeah. In a totally non-threatening way, you can read someone’s history of thought, and who they know, and what they like, and what they link to. Anyone of these things can spark a connection with someone much more naturally than any message board, or even real personal contact. Personal contact is flawed in that you can’t review someone’s history based on what they are talking about at the moment. Think of how many Starbuck clerks would actually offer a mutually beneficial relationship, if only you knew that once they had lived in Western New York, and rooted for the Bills. Read others’ blogs. It’s Blogworking baby!

I’m heading to the inaugural meeting of the Chicago UPA tonight. I’m all for making websites usable, and networking with other Usabiligeeks. I’m thinking there probably won’t be much learning going on. More like “What do we want to name the group?” Oh well. Everything starts small.

Is it possible that my blog can live up the the hype of this graphic? Mark, interactionartdirecdesignboy in the TMP NY office designed this beauty. I don’t think I’ll have a problem meeting the challenge. As a matter of fact, I’m inspired.

OK, instead of reading the dissertation I just wrote on web accessiblity, rife with amazing insight, and groundbreaking ideas, you are reading a simple expletive. F THIS! websites that timeout suck! Blogger, you suck for timing out when I hit the post button. You suck for being as sucky as an IBM 386, that gives you the blue screen when you go to save your term paper. C’mon web people. The days of timing out and deleting data are over. You can’t expect people to contribute quality thought to the web if your input method SUCKS! If I had more time on my hands I’d develop the equivalent to “F’d Company” that would be “F’d Words”. It would be a warehouse of all of the Ebay ads that I have lost, the blogs that I have lost, the blood sweat and tears that I have lost. FYou Blogger! The days of copying and pasting my text out of my web text input fields are over.

Colophon: The text in this message was carefully crafted in the Blogger Text Input area, copied to my Windows 2000 clipboard and pasted into my blog window after receiving a timeout error.

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…