rundown

Today I went to an informal informatics journal article discussion. The article in question was Jesse James Garrett’s diagram from “The Elements of User Experience” which itself is a small meisterwerk of information presentation.

The leader of the discussion was an Information Architect who happens to be a web designer. She said when people asked her why she became a web designer when she had a library background; her answer is, “Because web design is SO library-relevant!” (paraphrase) — and she’s right! — good web design is all about the structure of information and how to best present it to the user. She’s totally my new hero, for this month at least.

It was a great discussion, we got into all sorts of things. Like XML as metadata, how to do competitive surveys, and why Google has a search box at the bottom of every results page (something so sneakily intuitive I’d never really thought about it, or realized its purpose). Muy interessante. Makes me think about web design and development in a totally different way (a hugely *better* way, to be honest).

Too bad the IA class she’s co-teaching next quarter is only offered every other year. My schedule is already packed with the required core courses for my program; otherwise I would’ve loved to have taken it. Sometimes I feel like I got into the wrong program. Then again, the fact that I can get into this *along* with movie stuff is one of the reasons I picked my program. Right?

Filed under: school

dos mas? how about just dos?

Dude, I am so totally craving a burrito right now. If it weren’t 1AM, and if I weren’t in my PJs, and if I wasn’t sposed to have gone to bed an hour ago, and if I had a car, and if I knew of a King Taco or its equivalent in my area that was open late, I would so not be having this problem.

The only place I can think of where I can go tomorrow to satisfy this craving is….the El Pollo Loco down the street.

Grrr!

I might have to settle for collecting raw materials from Whole Foods and building my own sad Chipotle wannabe (that’s what my homemade burritos usually turn out to be).

A burrito with none of the authenticity, nor the killer King Taco sauce (*sobs*).

I knew I should’ve gone to Albertacos last weekend when I had the chance!

[And yes, I linked to my own Yelp reviews. It's a free country!]

Filed under: food

The most ambiguous headline ever

The title of this blog post in Wired showed up in my Google home page this morning:

“Toyota Hybrid Pioneer Killed”

And I clicked it, at first thinking it was about a hybrid project that had been cancelled, or like, maybe they decided to stop making Priuses? Prii? But who would want to cancel a program that’s been so successful?

Then, as the page was loading, I realized, what if it’s about an actual man who was killed? Was he the unfortunate victim of a random mugging gone awry, or was it….murder? (Dun-dun-duuuuuuun!) But who would want to kill the inventor of the hybrid?

So first of all, from the title you can’t even tell if the article is going be about a man or a thing. And the seriousness of what just got “killed” depends on whether or not we’re talking about a “he” or an “it.”

The page finally loaded, and the story is this:

Dave Hermance, the lead engineer of Toyota’s hybrid vehicle development in the U.S., died on Saturday when his small plane crashed into the Pacific Ocean near Los Angeles. He was instrumental in bringing the Prius to the U.S., and his passing is a blow to Toyota’s hybrid vehicle program.

So yeah, it was a man, and he died in a plane crash. So, yeah…. sadness.

But from a purely journalistic standpoint, that title gave almost no hint to what the actual story was going to be. I guess that kind of ambiguity is one way to get people to read through an article, but even so. Way to go, John “Wordsmith” Gartner.

And here’s a link to the more complete story (with a much better headline!) in the LA Times.

Filed under: Uncategorized

zero sum

The good news: when I came home for Thanksgiving weekend I weighed myself and discovered I’d lost at least 5 pounds over the course of the quarter. This would be the happy result of walking and forgetting to eat from time to time.

The bad news: I weighed myself this morning, after 3 days of gorging on turkey and all that crap, and found I’d gained at least a pound for each day I’ve been home. And I don’t leave for school again until tomorrow!

Maybe I should just not come home again til Easter.

Filed under: food, personal

Wikipedia Brown

Any fans of Encyclopedia Brown?

It’s got to have been at least a dozen years since I read my last Encyclopedia Brown story, but even a quick glance at this website brought the nostalgia flooding back. He gets a lot of details right, and adds some inspired touches.

A pretty cute take on that series; be sure to read to the very end!

[Wikipedia Brown by Adam Cadre]

Filed under: book, fun

1 vile thing

1 thing i do *not* appreciate about my school:

Bad cops

Today in film class we watched a series of avant-garde films, and the first one screened was Stan Brakhage’s “The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes.” Now, the other four were no picnic either, and after the screening was done we were all relieved not to have to view any more disturbing videos.

Then I came home and found this all over the internet, and I realized I was wrong. This is way more chilling, and utterly loathsome. If there’s any hope for us, those cops’ careers are *done.*

Filed under: school, video

5 things

5 things I appreciate about my school, particularly in relation to other schools I have attended:

1. It’s the middle of November, and the average temp is 85 degrees (you will kindly ignore the whole global warming factor. It’s not 85 degrees in Connecticut now, is it?).

2. I just downloaded a 10.4MB program in about 3 seconds using my campus apartment’s internet connection.

3. Attending a UC means having access to about 9 trillion databases, including one where I can download music.

4. People here are NICE.

5. It’s only 45 minutes away from home (if I drive on a weekend, anyway).

6. Squirrels here are NICE.

Filed under: best thing, school

night owl

I’ve been staying up later and later these past few weeks, though my circadian clock still makes me wake up around 8AM. I hope that will change (except on days when I actually *have* to get up that early).

When I was a freshman I would regularly sleep til noon, after being up til past 3AM. By sophomore year, though, I always felt guilty when I slept that late, as if getting up while it was still AM was some kind of special virtue. So I always had the idealistic goal of getting to bed early, and getting up early. Still a value held in vain during sophomore year. It got better in junior year, and by the time I graduated, I was able to get up before nine on most days (and I thought highly of myself for it!).

Cause – effect or vice versa, I now consider those hours before noon as “extra” time to do whatever I want without feeling like I wasted part of my day. I started going to bed at midnight, which meant I had a good 12 hours to be “productive.”

But lately that old habit of staying up til two has been creeping back into my life, and it’s not just the homework. I’m reluctantly discovering that I am indeed much more awake and functional in the late hours, and pretty much braindead in the mornings no matter how much sleep I’ve gotten.

What I’m trying to change now is the feeling of guilt I have when I’m up past midnight. If I can stop feeling guilty about that, I can start trying to not feel guilty about waking up a bit later than I have been lately. If my biological clock will let me.

Granted, this homework business might make feelings of guilt more or less moot, since it forces my hand. I predict that the painful end result of anything I try will simply be lots of sleep deprivation.

And hey, it’s already starting! I have no idea how to end this post.

Filed under: personal, school

field trip #5 (or something)

Our program went on a tour at Paramount Studios. This wasn’t the ordinary tourist’s tour, though. We instead got to take a peek at the vaults, the many, many vaults containing many, many elements of many, many films. And imagine our astonishment at learning that there’s a whole ‘nother facility in Pennsylvania, half a mile underground, storing many, many, many more elements (usually copies of what’s here in LA) as backup. These are actual bits of film and tape. It must be unbelievably huge. Take that, Google!

Speaking of which, apparently, since everythign is produced digitally these days, elements of films made today are usually kept digital, and rarely transferred to film for archival purposes (because of cost). It seems kind of shortsighted of them, if I heard correctly, not to have devised some sort of permanent, or at least reliable/archive-quality backup system for these (although you can’t really blame anyone when the task itself is so daunting). While you can physically unroll and hold to the light to see what’s on a piece of film, digital information is much harder to search and retrieve. Then there’s the problem of media, and obsolescence, and all that good stuff. And there’s so much information on a moving image that the sheer quantity of data to consider is sort of mind-boggling. And since film is still the most permanent medium we have, the issue of taking care of what’s left is still an important one.

Even the whole process of cataloging all these bits of film, all the information they have to enter into databases – it’s crazy. And it reminds me of the records room at the law firm I temp’d for, and how they also had the sisyphean task of managing their own input and output of information stored in legal records.

Information is how life moves, these days, and it’s hard not to think of managing it all as an exercise in futility. Which is why you have to stay narrow-minded, and take it one bit at a time. (Which also means lots of jobs for people in this business =D)

Filed under: mias

what i did this weekend

If you’re wondering what those photos in my flickr badge below are, I posted them to take part in a group photo pool: Tell a story in 5 frames. You take 5 photos and use them to tell a story. The only words allowed are the ones in the title.

My story is here: peek-a-boo. It stars my third-youngest baby cousin.

It’s definitely one of those ’slices of life’ (as opposed to ‘slices of cake‘) stories.

The other ones in that group are pretty cool, though. The best ones chosen for the week are put in the pool. Give it a look-see!

Filed under: fun, personal