so, small partly because he has been so kind in praising my own blogging (i mean, let’s be honest about our motivations, right? :), and large partly because he just kicks ass on his own, i’ve been enjoying kevin’s recent additions to planet info, and today i distracted myself a bit by poking around on his blog site, which is much richer than just the planet info feed.
he and amy both blog there, about all kindsa stuff, and seem to have been doing so for a fair while.
neat.
the snippet that compelled me to blog about the discovery was this one, which is really freaking hilarious.

the other thing, though, is a bigger issue i think about sometimes: can you imagine what it will be like when kids today grow up and have access to such potentially rich archives of so many of the random moments that made their parents laugh and cry? i mean, we tend to remember a Few of these moments no matter what, and they become the stories that we use to fill in gaps at family gatherings and meet-the-parents events for the rest of time. that will probably never stop happening, but now there is potentially going to be all this other stuff, too, this record of moments that we otherwise probably would have forgotten because it was either “that one time the baby accidentally spoke in bulgarian” or “how to drive the car” and, well, sometimes we have to make tough choices…
now, though, there is this lurking monster of jotted down moments, searchable and indexable, just waiting to inspire both mortification and gratitude in turn.
it might be a little messy, but i think it’s pretty awesome, and perhaps revolutionary in terms of what it will do to the way we relate to our personal histories.

ya think?

i voiced a thought like this the other day when erik, josh, and i were talking about leta (and wishing her all the luck and happiness in the world), so when it came up again a bit closer to home it reminded me to write about it.

and so i did.

the end.
now go read kevin’s blog!

just fyi, my technical difficulties with the student volunteer blog have been resolved, and i posted that rather lengthy essay on the ischools there, as well as something about the design community sig that i went to this afternoon.

so read up, if ya fancy.

there’s a backchannel discussion going on amongst the sv bloggers because some of the first posts were Boring As Sin ™, and i am of the opinion that this is because they told us to blog without using the first person, which almost made my brain explode because it was just too much of a computational challenge to reconcile that request. i wrote what i hope was a nice little email about it, saying that it saddened me to think that we would pass up the chance to let blogging do what it does best.

josh (of the family evnin) and i joked about it, and we agree that a place where a few students post stuff like “omg! i just sat next to jakob nielsen and he, like, looked at me for more than a half-second, i swear!” would actually be kind of awesome, and wouldn’t do anywhere near the harm to our reputations as i think that people fear it would.
but even if we agree to put on a slightly more official tone, isn’t there clearly some middle ground between talking about the bad bagels (and let me tell you, these are some bad bagels) and writing dry notes that seem like dictations or transcriptions of the slides?
i think the answer is decidedly yes, there is a middle ground, and we need to stick flags in it, proudly, at risk of seeming more oblivious to the realities of our field than we would if we discussed the bagels.
this is blogging, after all, and blogging is powerful. we need to own that.

so i was torn, upon arriving, about how to approach the whole thing. i decided not to completely ignore the objectivity request (by which i mean that i decided not to post things like my little revelation about the 10% milk), but i just couldn’t figure out how to keep my sense of style and perspective while still trying to sound objective, so i sought something in between.
then i was totally overwhelmed by my schedule, and i had the computer issues of yesterday, and i couldn’t post anyway, so it didn’t matter as much, and other bloggers raised some questions and a few emails were bounced back and forth and we were told:

I would be loathe to believe that anyone thought ALL they were
supposed to do here are verbatim reports. The initial guidelines were
to support ways of communicating *your* take on the session, in
tandem with live reporting, but thtat *your* take be situated in a
non first-person way.

whatever that means.

anyway, i ended up just taking the approach of writing thoughtful reports that aim to give the gist of the session and some wider implications and connections that i see. i avoid extraneous first person references, but i don’t leave them out entirely.
let me know how you think i’m doing.

at the moment, it still seems pretty boring out there to me, and i’m a little sad about it, but i’m also too whisked up in the conference to give it much mind. i’m meeting people, thinking about my work, and trying to squeeze in time to write my thoughts to you…. so i suppose i shouldn’t complain.

we’ll see what happens on the flipside.
now i need to get some sleep.
tomorrow we are doing design club, and we need to be on our game.

the brain’s not working too well at the moment, so i won’t say much, but here i am in montreal.
we had some good fun singing karaoke at japonais last night before our pre-dawn stretch suv limo ride to the airport, we had a good scare when the plane took off from indy without tiffanie, josh, and justin on board, and we had a good calorie blitz at the ben and jerry’s factory after we were all reunited in burlington.
we also had a good little tour of downtown montreal since we drove around in circles about 700 times trying to find our various ho(s)tels as we dealt with a barrage of bad maps, one way streets, and construction detours, and now we’ve had a good little introduction to french-canadian chinese-american cuisine.
we have not, however, had much good sleep.
so more detailed stories of these events, and more cogent accounts of the present state of affairs, will have to wait for the morning.
i’m volunteering beginning at 8am, and will be done early afternoon, so then i’ll try to write a little prologue to the week ahead.

in case you missed the memo, i’m in montreal for CHI, which is the big annual meeting of the association for computing machinery’s special interest group in human computer interaction (yeah, that’s why we abbreviate it), and i’ll be blogging it both here and here, with slightly different perspectives on each…
but we’ll talk about that tomorrow, too.
:)

night night!

i installed a new wordpress plugin yesterday.
it’s called “better feed” and i am using it to do things that really should be easier to do on my own, but whatever.
the principal reason that i sought it out was because it allows me to do this:
(more…)

i’m embarking on a quest to put more raw content on my blog, though not all of it will make the main feed.
here’s a long story about the chain of events that led me to take the plunge (i’ve been taking baby steps for a while), so if you have some time and are looking for a diversion, get yourself a cup of tea and stay a while. :)

(more…)

i posted a reference to the HCI list a few days ago about a blog entry i read at “Creating Passionate Users” the blog for the authors (and primarily, the head author) behind the new Head First book series from O’Reilly that is apparently getting quite a bit of buzz (and not just because they won the “Jolt Cola/Software Development Award for Best Computer Book” <- is that not the funniest thing ever?!). i said that one of the posts was interesting as a general user-centered pep talk, and that the blog itself had grabbed my attention because of the effective interweaving of homemade illustrations and incisive commentary. it has not disappointed me since. it's wordy, but i can deal with that. ;) and see? there are pictures, too! i put this one here because it cracked me up, and because you might not have believed me before. so now it's warring with the daily mumps, for the “how did i not know this shit was out there before [incredibly recent date]?!” award.

more on that front later, though.
i just thought i’d post something lucid while i had the chance, because erik asked if i was drunk after he read my last entry.
:)
this while i was chatting in gmail at the office while gallantly trying to salvage some productivity for the day.

here’s my dramatic reenactment:
erik: “are you flagrantly spurning responsible behavior during the work day, kynthia?”
me: “no!” *[she types frantically into the instant messenger client, causing important papers to fly across the room and lose themselves behind a bookcase full of calculus textbooks from the 1700’s.]*

it was awesome.

hey planet info, wanna have a little party?

i think it would be a blast, and early may sounds just about right for some free wine…

i’ve been getting a fair bit of comment spam lately, and most of it is hilarious gibberish that begins with something like “your site is awesome!” and then breaks into something more to the tune of “small green dogs juxtapose birch leaves and eat rubber tuna!!”

tonight, however, i received either the trickiest or the most benign yet, because it just said:

Your site is very cognitive. I think you will have good future.:)

and gave me a link to a guns n’ roses fan page.

awwww….

tastes crunchy and faintly of vanilla.

i’ve been playing with this online todo list tool, and one of the lists i made is of things i get an idea to blog about, so that i can forget about them without having to take the time to write the whole entry.
i’ve only been doing this for a couple of days, and it is showing signs of being not the best idea, because the list is too long.
right now it says:

• why i think we should manage information rather than limit it, aka response to jacki or why we should learn to stop worrying and love the throng
• why i started a bloglines account but end up just using delicious instead
• a hypothesis on why we need to immerse ourselves in media to feel more connected these days
• here’s my challenge: find an era when someone hasn’t written that their era is pivotal
• that visualizing text as images link
• feeling like a hack, going to wit (w;t), watching my moods shift — school, expectations, fear of tragedy
• notecard in my helmet?
• mantra about liking to do things
• liking sleep because it slows down my brain

i don’t really feel like writing about any of these things right now, and i really shouldn’t anyway because i have to finish getting ready for our final presentation in pervasive computing tomorrow, but i thought that posting the list itself would be a good way to write something, and also to record a peep of the discussion i have with myself about what sorts of things should really go here, how much detail i should include, how much i can capture without causing my head to explode, etc.

so there ya go.

peep!

if you want to vote on what sounds most intriguing, that could make for an interesting experiment… if i got responses my strategy could be to just keep a list like this, do my own triage, and then once a month or so post what i don’t get around to and have a readers’ choice edition.
:)

remember that drag links to open new tabs plug in that i talked about at the beginning of the month?
and how i said it hadn’t yet come to seem as strikingly the way it should be as the little x’es to close tabs?
well, sometime in the last couple of weeks i changed my mind.
in case you’re interested.
now i try to do it all the time, everywhere, and continue to be puzzled when it doesn’t work.

and now i posted 20 posts this month! up from only 7 last month! perhaps i’m getting closer to finding my stride…