The personal web log of Mike Lee, a web information architect, and teacher working in Baltimore, Maryland
New York City

 

"I surf as much as I eat."

 

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2000:10.11.12
2001:01.02.03.04.05.06
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2002:01.02.03.04.05.06
07.08.09.10.11.12

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Searing skyline

What I saw leaving the office today. I am blessed.

Makes a nice desktop wallpaper too. 189k

posted 11:51 PM +

Commuting scenes


I stumble out of my hotel, and turn the corner on to Wall Street to head down to the Pier 11 commuter ferry. It's a concrete canyon filled with many people who haven't had their morning coffee yet.


On the way back from Jersey City last night, I made a bunch of time exposures from the railing of the ferry. Pictured is our final approach to Pier 11. South Street Seaport is the bright blur at water's edge.
posted 11:26 PM +

Things remain the same

At Jessica and Jay's wedding, I was chatting with Jay's dad, Dr. Robin Grieves, about my adventures in dealing with social and technical complexity and he quipped, "dysfunction scales well." A search on Google amazingly came up with with no returns. Well there will be one soon...


posted 11:24 PM +

Pictures elsewhere...

Another photo is up on The Mirror Project, and I blogged from the commuter ferry on the Hudson River this morning. I was one of the few people who sat on the open deck of the 8:20 run. I put on a good show for the couple people that were up there by running around like a tourist with my cameras.
posted 12:12 PM +

Job shop joy



I stopped into Bowne & Co. Stationers during lunch earlier this week, and operated their 1844 Albion Hand Proof Press to print a letterpress sheet of which a close-up is shown above. It was a damned satisfying break from staring at my computer monitor to enjoy some hand craft and the smell of printer's ink. The shop is modeled after the small job shop printers, of which there were hundreds in lower Manhattan in the 1800s. Here's a sampling of my look around:


This is the charmingly cluttered front desk of the shop. I love how a cloth covers the desktop PC at right.


This is the Albion Hand Proof Press. It was built of sturdy iron in London. Imagine placing proof sheets and pulling the lever to produce four copies a minute!


Detail of the engraving on the press.

The text of the proof sheet is used to create the small informational booklet about the printshop:

New York was the center of the letterpress printing industry during the 19th century. Wood engraving firms and printing equipment manufacturers lined Fulton Street. Job shops clustered between Park Row and John, Fulton, Ann, Beekman, Spruce, and Frankfort Streets. Along the north-south streets crossing them were also paper suppliers, newspapers, type foundaries, bookbinders, and ink makers.

Bowne & Co., Stationers resembles a typical job shop of the late 1870's in lower Manhattan. Printing techniques were remarkably similar to those used by Johann Gutenberg in the mid-fifteenth century. Gutenberg, who was trained as a goldsmith in Germany, created movable type by casting individual letters in lead.

When the master printer received an order for printed material. he chose the typeface, then assigned the job to a compositor. After determining the length and width of the text, the compositor set each line of type by picking up each sort (letter, figure, punctuation mark, or blank space) by hand and placing it on a hand-held tray called a composing stick. Once that was full, the compositor would carefully transfer the type into a flat tray called a galley, and begin to set the next line of his copy.

With the entire job set, the type was tied up securely with string and the galley was carried to the proof press. The compositor inked the lines of type by hand with a brayer, and placed a piece of paper over the gallery. A large cylinder was rolled over the paper to create a single proof copy.

Then the compositor took the corrected type and positioned it in proper order to secure it for press. First, he positioned the type on a metal frame and surrounded it with wooden blocks called furniture. The galley was made level with a block and mallet and tightened with wedges of wood or metal.

Two pressmen worked together to print on a hand press. The "roller" inked the form while the "puller" laid the paper over  a screen. With the form inked, he cranked the bed of the press under the platen and pulled a lever as the platen lowered to strike the type. Often a printer's apprentice would hang the printed sheets to dry on "fly" lines that hung from the ceiling.

A job that would be repeated was tied-up for storage on a galley. Otherwise, the lines were given to an apprentice to distribute to the proper case for future use.

posted 5:14 PM +

Pattern recognition wisdom from birding and medicine

In the current issue of The Harvard Business Review, senior editor Diane L. Coutu interviews (only a summary available for free) bird watcher/illustrator David Sibley and physician Julia Yoshida how they both draw on years of accumulated tacit knowledge to recognize patterns. The interviewer contends that the ability to recognize patterns, especially at the strategic level, is an important, but underdeveloped cognitive skill in the business world. Here are a couple snips:

In medical diagnosis, pattern recognition is a key skill. Julia, how do birding skills translate into your work as a physician?

Yoshida: Medical diagnosis, like birding, involves recognizing different patterns. The other day, for example, a woman—an ex-smoker—came to see me complaining that she'd had a cold for a month. Since colds normally go away in a couple weeks, this was clearly not a pattern for a cold. So I asked the patient for more data. It turns out her symptoms persisted despite a course of antibiotics. This made a bacterial infection less likely, but the information could still fit a number of other patterns including a virus, an allergy, or even cancer. Eventually, I found out that things were worse for my patient during the week than on weekends. As it turned out, the cleaners were trying out a new product in the office where my patient worked.

It's fascinating to me how similar the diagnostic process is to birding. In birding, I group information into different patterns. Then I look at the markings, which, like the symptoms of an illness, could indicate various possibilities. For example, a warbler with drab olive coloring could be a Cape May or an orange-crowned warbler or a palm warbler. But if the bird pumps its tail, then I know it's a palm. Of course in medicine, you can do something you can't do in birding: You can conduct a physical diagnostic exam, which for the woman with the cough supported my initial diagnosis of an alergy.

If you had to train someone to be a good pattern finder, what would you focus on?

Sibley: A couple of the key things that I would stress would be self-awareness and self-criticism. The lack of ego is also an extremely important trait in a pattern finder because you have to be able to go back and review the decisions you made a year ago and admit where you were wrong. Sometimes new experiences just don't fit the patterns you thought you observed before. But you can't be defensive and cling to the identifications you made in the past because that will only obscure the newer patterns that are turning up as you learn more. So in this sense, the first lesson of birding is that mistakes are an opportunity for learning.

posted 3:12 PM +

Snuggling sidekicks



His and hers Sidekicks meet at Suzie's Soba in Hampden.
posted 11:58 PM +

Not quiet, just mobile

If you haven't tried already, look for my random blog entries on Hiptop Nation when this blog seems quiet for a few days. My Monday thru Friday routine has changed such that I don't have stretches of time to surf and work on posts. When I'm at work, I'm well, working, and connectivity from the hotel where I've stayed the last three weeks has been slow and flaky. I'm switching to a new hotel on Monday, so maybe my connectivity situation will improve.

I'm also excited about taking the commuter ferry from the financial district to the new office starting Monday morning. There will be some breathtaking views of the Manhattan skyline, and my camera will be fully charged and ready.

I neglected to mention here before that I've been taking the Amtrak up to NYC Sunday nights, and coming back Friday nights. So weekends back in Baltimore have been hectic. The consulting gig is supposed to go on for another two months, but as projects keep getting piled on me, I have the feeling I'll be asked to stay longer.

posted 10:08 PM +

Mobs of smart information architects

All the recent negative comments on the SIGIA list about the newly-formed AIfIA and its board by a few individuals with axes to grind has soiled what was once a valuable communications channel for the IA community. I’m most irritated, not by the ignorant attackers, but by the fact that good people, who would otherwise be writing informative articles and conference presentations (and generally advancing the profession), are having to waste time dealing with noise.

Somewhat visible on the listserve, but not really well documented on the web except perhaps on some blogs, are the locally organized information architecture gatherings in many cities around the world. When you attend these events, you learn that there are IAs, or people doing IA every day that benefit from all of the available resources out there. Leaving a rather quiet IA scene behind in Baltimore, I decided to hit the ground running in New York to soak up some "reality IA" by meeting as many IAs as possible.



Lou's flock: Thursday before last, after the first IA session of the NNGroup Usability Week Conference, Lou Rosenfeld invited a bunch of his students, and any local NYC IAs, out for drinks and food. Here are some of Lou's students with a couple rogue IAs. Left to right: Kan from Tokyo, Joh from Slovenia, Lou from Michigan, Claude from Quebec, me seated and looking like I'm at a Chinese banquet, Michael from Brooklyn, Dave from Atlanta, Molly from NYC, and Maja from Slovenia.




Victor's salon: Last Tuesday, I invoked the secret gang sign and got the directions to Victor's monthly IA salon. I hopped on the 3 train to Brooklyn, and walked through some driving wind and rain to Karen's apartment. All sat down at around 7:30 to a night of stimulating conversation. I was the newbie, so Victor had me introduce myself. I talked about the poster I presented at the last summit on 3D deliverables, and the rags-to-riches story of how I ended up in New York. While the topic of the evening was an introduction to AIfIA, the dialog was unmoderated this time, and ran a wide gamut. Later in the evning, Victor asked me to show my Sidekick, and that devolved the evening into a gadget fest, as other PDAs and digital cameras came flying out. Naturally, I blogged from the the comfy couch. Present this month were Charles (not pictured, and now left to right in the photo above), Anna, Victor, Rachel, Karen, Michael, Paul, Tanya, Liz, James, Christopher, Anders, and me at the bottom of the composite. Here's a larger 220k jpeg.




IAs on the case: The night after the salon, Marc, an IA from work, and I went uptown to Techspace, to see what we could learn from the NYC-CHI Applied IA Case Studies night. The evening was moderated by Scott Weiss of Usable Products Company, and author of the new book on my shelf at home on Handheld Usability. Seated from left to right are Josh Seiden of thirtysix | partners, who presented on how to make and use personas, Sandy Schlosser of ConsumerReports.org, who described seach engine optimization techniques, and Sandy's co-worker, Bob Huerster, who talked about building the site's very successful index. The presentations are supposed to be posted on the NYC-CHI site soon.

In all this conversation, the most common phrase I heard was "it depends." The common theme (besides the fact that these times are tough) is there are no easy answers, and IA is about selling, sweating the details, thinking on your feet, and selling some more. The binding force of it all is community.

My odyssey continues this week...


posted 8:35 AM +

Wife in danger ...

It was the last rebate at Amazon, which dropped the Sidekick (a.k.a Danger Hiptop) to $99, that convinced my wife to order one for herself. She will detach and retire the pokey Omnisky modem from her metallic pink Visor Deluxe, and deactivate her Sprint cell phone to consolidate both of those functions into the Sidekick. Soon I'll be able to welcome her to the smarter mob.

posted 11:26 PM +

Interface designers come to eye and mind

While surfing random sites on the train ride back from New York last night, I had the happy occasion to visit the sites of two accomplished interface designers. I bookmarked them so I could look at them in color on my iMac at home.

An article on Wired recalls one of the early conceptual illustrations of cyberspace by designer Jim Leftwich. I first saw the illustration, titled Cyberport, on one of America Online’s download forums way back in 1992. While I wouldn’t place this nice rendering on my desktop now (maybe because Hollywood films such as Johnny Mnemonic and The Matrix and various video games have made this imagery clichéd), do take a wander through Jim’s extensive portfolio and blog.

A thread of intelligent posts mixed in with the buzz of Hiptop Nation brought me to filterfine, May Woo’s blog and portfolio site. May worked as a traditional architectural designer in a former life, and has since worked on a range of user interface design projects including application screens for Be Inc. Her blog is on my daily scan list now.
posted 5:19 PM +

Now we're TALKIN!

One of the most criticized aspects of the T-Mobile Sidekick is its meager 200 voice minutes allocation. Now Danger Info reports that for another $20 a month (to $59/mo.), you can switch to, or start with the Sidekick Plus Plan with Whenever minutes upped to 500. Weekends and nights are now unlimited. The all-you-can-eat data plan is unchanged. This is a big help for someone like me who is currently travelling a lot. BTW, the device itself can still be had for $99 at Amazon after rebates.

posted 11:00 PM +

My wife gets good demo

Yesterday, while I was doing IA at work and meeting IAs in the evening (more soon), my wife Amy was getting her brain pampered at the MIT Media Lab. Amy's group at AARP (they run the public web site), has invested in the Open Mind Commonsense Project at the lab, and she volunteered to fly up for one of their periodic demos to investors. Open Mind Commonsense is a research effort in the discipline of artificial intelligence that seeks to teach computers all those things an average person knows but takes for granted. Open Mind operates a database into which any user from the Internet can contribute bits of common sense in the form of assertions. For more details (since I don't have time to summarize), visit Kurtzweil's site for an excellent article by Push Singh, the principal investigator.

What she said was most fun besides the demos (and being schmoozed by the likes of Bender and Minsky) was hanging out with smart managers and executives in the audience from places like Time, Motorola, AT&T and Sun Microsystems. She had such a great time she's volunteering to go to the next session. Shocking.
posted 6:40 PM +

Tail ends

I had mentioned to a couple people that I'm just about ready to lose my ponytail. It gets in the way even more now that I am having to put a tie on everyday. In the circle of 50 or so people I've encountered in my building, I am the only one with a ponytail. No surprise in this Fortune 500 insurance firm, but it's kinda cool that I can get away with it. So if I decide to cut it, the only thing that bothered me is what to do with it. I don't want to unceremoniously toss it in the trash after five years. Just today, Friend Gayle recommended the perfect solution in donating it to cancer patients. I more than meet the requirement of 10" length. Naturally, there will be a photo here the day I make the cut.

In another tail end, I'm waiting for a DNS change to happen on this server, after which I will have to change my Blogger preferences to point to the new mirrored site. The last couple posts may disappear for a few hours until I can get back to a computer tonight to make the change and push the posts out again. I'm holding off on uploading photos for this reason too.

posted 7:57 AM +

The scoop on corporate taxonomy

The task of classifying content for retrieval has become one of the required core competancies of information architects. Some IAs bring the rigor of library science to the task, others have cutting edge technologies at their disposal. A meaty white paper from The Delphi Group on Taxonomy & Content Classification sheds some light on the misconceptions on the definition of a taxonomy, describes the benefits of systematic content classifcation, and surveys the currently available technology tools. For now, you can download the 1.3mb PDF file directly from the Delphi Research Coverage area. Inktomi also offers the white paper along with some of their technical literature. You may have to register at one of the sites if the direct download goes away.
posted 10:15 PM +

Fanciful frames

Anakin and Padme admire holographic picture frames in the Nabarrie House. This is a deleted scene featured on disc 2 of the Attack of the Clones DVD.

posted 11:43 PM +

Ports of calling...

"Asilomar" means "refuge from the sea" in Spanish. Find out why this means so much to me.

posted 6:12 PM +

Bathed in books

Jeremey Antipixel Hedley comments on a thread at Plastic on what to do when you find you have too many books. To that I say, what's too many? Despite being as gadgeted and wired as any human can be, I still love books old and new. We have bookshelves in virtually every room in our Baltimore rowhouse. Books are slices of authors' brains that you can own for a few bucks and which compactly (and hopefully engagingly) encapsulate years if not a lifetime of thoughts. I get a sense of well-being having them all around. And I love libraries too. Several large collections are just a few minutes away in foot at The Johns Hopkins campus.

One type of book, however, does have a shelf life, and that's technology books. Books about specific software packages can become obsolete in about a year. And in particular, books covering Internet standards and protocols are always superceded by newer online updates. So I decided last year to just give books away such as Photoshop 5 WOW, and Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, First Edition. As others have mentioned on the Plastic thread, it's just not worth my time to shop armloads of books to bookstores, or upload entries into eBay.

There's a charming solution just down the street from our house in the form of a wonderful service called The Book Thing. Their business model is simple: people drop books off, other people come pick them up. The basement operation, which is only open on weekends, is powered by grants from foundations and pure passion. The director, Russell Wattenberg, says that people like somewhat outdated tech books, and they get snapped up fast. Even if you don't live in Baltimore, but drive in for visits on the weekend, try filling up a trunk with those old volumes and making a stop at 2645 North Charles Street. Bookcrossing has a node there, and you read more about The Book Thing at ShopWatch and The City Paper.

Of course, now that I am living in New York City on weekdays, I am tempted by a vast array of bookstores. I was in the annex of The Strand last week, but resisted temptation. I don't know how long I can control myself though.
posted 4:58 PM +

A think piece on the hiptop hunt

I was nursing a cold and new job information overload last night, and didn't have a chance to follow the Hiptop Halloween Hunt. I see that Countzero [smart blog, BTW] of Team Raven has drafted an interesting abstract for a proposed conference paper: Integrating and Evolving a Mob: The Growth of a Smart Mob into a Wireless Community of Practice.

This contest was coordinated from a blog system on a web server. Imagine what will be possible when Danger makes their SDK available and someone creates a way to give individual Hiptop/Sidekick units the ability to be the coordinating node of an ad hoc cluster of mobile users. Your AOL IM buddy list could be a starting point. Instead of P2P, do we have H2H or S2S? Hips vs. Hip-nots?

In related news, Beth now has no excuse not to buy a Sidekick. Amazon has them for $99 after rebates. I "sold" another one to a project manager at AIG today. He was heading out right after work to pick one up. Victor and Michael also want to see one too, and Peter is naturally processing the bigger picture. I'm hoping enough of us will have a Sidekick (or similar) at the Portland Summit that there will be a wireless virtual conference woven through the meatspace—all blogged live.

I am back home in Baltimore and still have the cold. I've also just about lost my voice. So I'm crashing now...
posted 9:28 PM +

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