Wednesday, July 19, 2006
A silly tale of anonymous yuppie male bonding: This morning I shut the door of my apartment and headed toward the elevators to start my commute to work. In front of me walked another man my age, also presumably heading to his job. He pressed the button, calling for the elevator while I was still half way down the hall. When I was about 20 paces away the lift arrived, and this man was nice enough to hold the door. Inside the elevator was another guy about our age, also dressed for the rat race.
The doors closed behind us and we started down from the 11th floor. All of us were something less than awake, that state where it’s only the force of routine that compels a man to move. We were three men likely all of similar means, living in the same overpriced high-rise, all likely headed to Manhattan, and probably all ending our journeys at near identical cubes.
We all looked at one another as if one of us should address our common circumstances. I was the first to break the silence.
“Another day”, I said quietly.
The man to my left raised his fists above his shoulders, and repeated “Another Day”, this time with a louder voice and with a more satirical tone. Then guy on my right repeated the phrase again this time even louder with a visible smile.
Finally the doors opened and we all filed out. Our buildings doorman tells us to all have a good day, and we walk our separate ways.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Think about the children! With the rash of stories about teenage misadventure on myspace, including this one written by my girlfriend, and legislators threatening action against social networking sites, is it time for Rupert Murdock to start worrying?
Sites like facebook, myspace and friendster, suffer from the same problem as the original napster, centralization. These companies are blamed for what users are doing on their networks because they are the one central point that facilitates the connection between all peers.
If you contacted me by leaving a comment on this blog post, and you happened to be an axe murderer, no one is going to blame my hosting provider when I’m killed. Aplus Hosting isn’t NewsCorp. They don’t have deep pockets or political enemies, and make a poor target for a family values crusade.
Kids are fickle, facebook is hot and myspace is not, and visiting friendster is like taking a date to a hospice. Being the flavor of the month is a transient state if the biggest sites bow to pressure and kids feel limited in any way, expect them to move on.
You might think I’m crazy predicting the downfall of myspace, recently ranked as the nets top destination. However this is a crowded field with many competing products, and keeping the interest of the ritalin set isn’t easy. If the current top social networking sites start limiting what users can do and who they can contact, they’ll implode.
What I imagine will replace them are many smaller more generic sites that allow you to have your own web page. They will have a social networking aspect but it will be an optional widget you add onto your page. These widgets, will allow cross-linking between networks. If all you have are smaller sites that allow people to have web pages, if the networking thing isn’t even part of your application, if everything is open, all you really have is the web itself. No centralization, no one to shake down.
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Hubris! With no updates for months my Google ranking has fallen by an absurd magnitude, pushing me not only out of the top spot, but off the first page all together. Perhaps I should’ve kept my mouth shut. The god of the wired seems to prefer modesty over braggadocio. Now all I can do is repent my sins and hope my ranking improves.
Thursday, December 16, 2004
It's official! This site is now the number one listing for Mathew Halpern (with one T) on Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Two other Mathew Halperns each have a significant web presence, and at one time or another were listed higher. Both share a common interest with me, one designes icons, and the other writes music. A potential employer, old friends, anyone who is looking might get us confused. For now I am safe, those searching will likely end up here before clicking on a competing Mathew's links.
Note: I won’t link to either of my namesakes in this post because it would drive their rankings up.
You can call it managing one’s web presence. A must for business, expect it to become more and more important to individuals, especially those with high profile jobs. Its not only ensuring people can find you, but ensuring that information you don’t want distributed is removed from other sites. Do a really want things I designed in 1998 to remain online as examples of my work? Is this something I can control? Imagine every rambling message board posting you’ve ever written is going to come up during that run for office you’ve always been planning. That’s the future folks.
Friday, November 12, 2004
A funny thing about reading online product reviews for computer peripherals, no matter what the product, camera, mp3 player, scanner, no matter how good a physical interface it has, every review says the software sucks. In fact, they are likely to recommend, a practice I have been following for years, not installing the custom drivers or software if your operating system can handle the device without it. I have never installed the software that came with my printer, my camera, or my MP3 player. It’s much easier to let the computer think they generic devices or hard drives. This is a sorry state of affairs, and unfortunately it’s likely to continue, at least for a while longer. Most consumers do not inspect software or consider it in making their purchasing decisions. Hardware interfaces have suffered from this problem for ages. Most people choose features over usability, and without an incentive for improvement, none can be expected.
In the medium term we may get some relief from the aging baby boomers. A bigger market of people who are used to technology, but increasingly have trouble with complex UIs could swing manufacturers towards simplifying their offerings.
For now here is some advice for hardware manufacturers in improving their user experiences. (Casio, RCA, Kodak, please pay attention this is aimed at you).
Since people are not making purchasing decisions based on included software, don’t include any. Which sounds better on a box “Plug it in, it just works!”, or “includes crippled off-brand editing software version 2”?
Let people buy their own software for organizing pictures and music. Since your offerings are all sub-standard anyway. Let them blame Microsoft for any problems that they encounter. Actually Windows XP manages to burn discs, import pictures from a scanner or camera, and manage media files, exceptionally well. If you can’t do better than the default, don’t bother. If people want more features let them buy it.
But wait Epson says, our printer has features that can’t be accessed from the default windows drivers. Who cares, if I needed them I would install your buggy resource hogging software. How about having 2 sets of instructions one for basic users, and another advanced. The simple ones can say, plug me in, and click ok. Users will be happy.
Now that I have managed to save all these companies money by reducing their development costs, as well as showing them how to improve user experiences, I have a subway to catch.
Monday, August 30, 2004
Due to elephant invasion I’ll be working from home this week. My telecommuting wasn’t voluntary. Contractors are not welcome in government buildings near the convention site. I would complain about the silliness of this particular precaution if the view from my terrace, where I sit with my laptop, weren’t so pleasant.
Since the republicans are in town. I thought I would be nice to give them some design advice. The most noticeable thing about the convention site is the blindingly bright red floor, and it looks horrible on TV. Contrasting with the blue chairs, the floor creates a strobe light effect. This always happens when you put inverse colors at full saturation directly next to one another with no neutral lines between them. It’s amateurish. People will tune out if you hurt their eyes.
Another tip for the GOP: motion attracts the eye, when your backdrop moves I stop looking at the speaker. This is the equivalent of using a blink tag on the web. I am anxiously waiting to see if keep the motion on during the important speeches.
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
Once again I’m sick. At least once a year my tonsils become infected, I get a bad cough, and generally feel shitty. A short course of antibiotics may cure me but I would still rather not be sick in the first place. Which leads us back to the 80’s when AIDS put a big scare into everybody, and drastically changed the treatment of conditions like mine. In response, doctors became very reluctant to perform tonsillectomies. Tonsils being a major source of T-cells are useful in fighting AIDS. Thus, young people, being the most the likely to engage in high-risk activities, should keep their tonsils. At least that was the thinking at the time, or at least that is how my doctor explained it to me.
So unlike my parents or grandparents I still have my tonsils. As a teenager they would become infected much more often then today, as much as 3 or 4 times a year. I was constantly taking antibiotics. In generations past tonsillectomies were a right of passage, kids looked forward to eating post surgery ice-cream to sooth their throats. Today no matter how often I get these annoying little infections no doctor ever suggests removing the mostly unnecessary organ of focus. Since most doctors now deem this surgery unwise it is not clear that insurance would cover the operation when antibiotics will likely cure the short term problem.
On the plus side, knowing you will get a particular condition once a year in a way makes it easy to deal with. I can think back through years of tonsil infections and remember where I was living and who I was working for during each. It’s like I’ve grown up with my good friends streptococcus, amoxicillin, and zithromax. Where will we have our reunion next year?
