 |
||
|
The personal web log of Mike Lee, a web information architect living and working "I surf as much as I eat." curiousLee in...   Hiptop Nation Technorati GeoURL Blogstreet Daypop Stats Photo Friday Mirror Project Google Images The City Paper UMBC TechPort email me past monthly... 2000: 10.11.12 2001: 01.02.03.04.05.06 07.08. 09.10.11.12 2002: 01.02.03.04.05.06 07.08.09.10.11.12 2003: 01.02.03.04.05.06
 [?] |
Friday, January 31, 2003
Thursday, January 30, 2003
Lost spacecraft painting found
 When I opened my copy of Lost Spacecraft: The Search For Liberty Bell 7 today, I was pleasantly surprised to find a concept painting I created for the author back in 1988. Liberty Bell 7, piloted by Virgil Grissom in 1961, was the only manned spacecraft ever lost at sea. Grissom was rescued after his successful landing, but the capsule sank in 16,000 feet of water in the Atlantic Ocean. The book is the first person account of Curt Newport's 14-year quest to recover the capsule. I met Curt in the late 80s when I was still volunteering as a weekend tourguide at The Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Curt was already an expert in deep sea salvage operations, and had worked on the recovery of the Air India crash and the Challenger Disaster. I was working as an airbrush illustrator and photo retoucher (1988 was the year before Photoshop 1.0 arrived), and Curt commissioned the painting to use in presentations to potential investors. It was a pleasure to sit with Curt as he passionately described in great detail the technical details he had uncovered so far, and to sketch his vision of the capsule's resting place on the ocean floor. At the time, the only manned submarine that could reach this kind of depth was the Nautile, so I found reference photos of the sub at the library (this was way, way before the Web remember). It took me about 15 hours to complete the detailed 16x20" color painting using a Thayer & Chandler airbrush, many sheets of frisket (masking) film, and acrylic paints. The image above is just a B&W scan from the book that I've cleaned up and quickly colorized. I'd love to find the original to buy it back. Little did we know at the time that it wouldn't be until 1999—after several attempts—that the capsule would finally be found and recovered. While Curt kept a singular career focus, the painting I created for him marked the end of my analog illustration career as I acquired a Macintosh and Photoshop soon after, and have worked in digital media ever since. Wednesday, January 29, 2003
A world in ice
 I went back to the icicles I photographed last week and captured a close-up of one of them. Making the image was probably the most satisfying thing I did all day. I'm in the zone now where my daily commute and work location is looking really familiar. So I'm challenging myself to look closer, harder, longer at the same mundane scenes to extract some fresh perspectives. When I loaded the image as my new desktop wallpaper (92 k JPEG), it coordinated very well with the paint job of my PowerBook. If you're on a graphite Mac, it would match even better. What appears to be a serene backdrop behind the image is Manhattan locked in by severe ice. Monday's photo was only a small patch of ice and hinted at what was to come. By 3pm this afternoon, the river was pretty much full of ice floes (load this 55 k JPEG) that dislodged from up river in today's veritable heatwave (see graph below). All commuter ferrys have been disrupted, and are running on very limited schedules. Back in the offices of AIG Corporate eBusiness, the holiday haze has definitely thawed, and projects are kicking into full gear. I'm in the thick of helping to coordinate a full-blown usability test to be conducted by an outside vendor in a lab next week. Tomorrow morning, we're kicking off a web site pilot project to finally test the new version of the content management system on some real files. I am also enjoying the treat of working for AIG from Baltimore for the next two days as I have to attend a big staff meeting at e.magination tomorrow afternoon. On top of busy days at work, my social calendar is filling up for next week. It's Chinese New Year already, and we're going to a family brunch on Sunday. More on next week's activities in the next post. Saturday, January 25, 2003
Real WiFi at home
I finally got an old graphite-type AirPort wireless base station installed at home tonight. I had been using an ad hoc connection between my iMac and Powerbook, but the signal was always flaky. Five years ago, we had every room in our house wired wired for ethernet to a rack and hub in our basement, so even until recently, we haven't felt a need for wireless. Small Dog Electronics is selling refurbished models of the old base station for $129 so I ordered one. The base station came without manuals, so I had to poke around Google and Apple's web site for tech notes. Once I got everything plugged in, I discovered via the setup utilities that the base station had been set to the configuration of the previous owner's network. A paperclip in the reset hole wiped the AirPort back to factory settings. Then I plugged the AirPort into my Powerbook with a regular ethernet cable (the Powerbook auto-switches to crossover mode). I used the excellent third-party JAVA-based AirPort Configurator Utility to upload my DSL network settings. After the AirPort restarted with an LED light show, I unplugged the network cable from my laptop and returned it to the wallplate. Then I turned on AirPort networking on the Powerbook and miraculously, everything worked—including passwords. The signal is strong throughout the house. This success comes after entering 23 different pieces of information into the configurator. Apple's own admin utility that comes with OS X is not much less complicated. I'm not sure how non-techies would ever get through all this. Anyway, my encrypted WiFi station ID is of course WIRELESSLEE. Friday, January 24, 2003
Ice spikes skyline
Wednesday, January 22, 2003
Number of links in this post = temperature outside
Hiptop haiku from Station A. Monday, January 20, 2003
Lissajous skyline 2
 Lower Manhattan Lissajified No.1 This is my current desktop wallpaper. It can be yours too. (192k JPEG)
Spoons' WiFi
 I'm posting from Spoons Coffeehouse & Roastery in the Federal Hill area of Baltimore. After a nice meeting with Dianne, I pulled out my Powerbook, and as soon as I opened my web browser, Rendezvous automatically found a signal. A sign-in screen for AirPath Networks came up. Sweet! The hostess tells me they just got it installed a couple days ago. I signed up for the "pay-as-you-go" $4.95/hr. plan which lets me roam to and connect at any AirPath Hotspot as well as the Boingo Network. A small "Internet Session" pop-up window appears after you log in and tracks your session time.The time elapsed is shown in seconds, which is not very user-friendly. I have to remember that there are 3600 seconds in an hour. A logout button is provided in the same window. I checked both the AirPath and Boingo hotspot databases and found that The City Cafe, Village Cafe, and some bars at BWI are covered as well as an assortment of hotels. This will be a very handy option to have for the few times I'm not within range of free WiFi or a work-related network. A cookie and cup of coffee later, this post is done, and I'm off to pick up Amy at BWI, so I may see what connectivity I can sniff there. Saturday, January 18, 2003
Dual city-zen-ship
I heard yesterday via my supervisor in Baltimore that my consulting contract at AIG has been officially extended into April. The arc of some of the projects easily spans into June so I really do want to stay to accomplish some more. That also means a third extension into July is very possible. And there are not many more exciting cities to work on the planet than New York. My sponsor at AIG Corporate eBusiness says she can give me some relief from the Sunday-Friday travel routine by letting me work a couple days a week from my desk in Baltimore. Between being bathed in WiFi at most of my resting spots and my Sidekick, I'm accessible via the Internet all the time now. People at AIG are also quite used to team members joining meetings by conference call. More thoughts in the next post or two... Thursday, January 16, 2003
The scent of web links and why you need smelly content
 The New York WebProducers organization hosted a presentation by Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering tonight. The basic theme of the evening was that you should lay a trail of cues in your navigation and page design to logically guide users to their desired content. Thus users follow a "scent" to content that you have made "smelly." I had never seen Jared speak before, and he certainly didn't disappoint me with his smart and humorous presentation. His field-tested best practices on the scent of information support the original findings of Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card on information foraging theory. But I can see how he might have irritated some when the humor at times tipped over into shrill pronouncements spiced with a dash of hubris. What I'll remember most from the evening were his jokes. Here are a sampling:
The PowerPoint presentation (minus the jokes) and a full transcript (minus the shrill) will be posted in the next few weeks on the WebProducers site. Or you can e-mail Jared directly. Jared will be delivering a similar talk at the upcoming IA Summit. Monday, January 13, 2003
Lissajous skyline 1
 Brooklyn Bridge Lissajified No.1  Brooklyn Bridge Lissajified No.2 Recipe: What is lissajous? Sunday, January 12, 2003
Sunday somethings
I was enjoying this piece in the December issue of Discover on the latest work of the legendary Carver Mead. The article is a very thorough look at the Foveon X3 digital image sensor—the first sensor of its kind to see color the way the human does. On CG Architect, I see that work is continuing on AutoTrace, an open-source program for autotracing bitmap images into vector format. It has much of the same functionality as Adobe's old non-OS X native Streamline. There is talk of creating an install package for OS X and I'm looking forward to that appearing. If you're facile with Linux and Windows software installation, there are executables ready to go. Also on CG Architect is news of an update to SketchUp for OS X. SketchUp is a radically different drawing environment for 3D concepting. On the SketchUp home page, scroll down and look at the tiny animation on the lower right column for a minute. Amazing. Jeremy Hedley wonders if we need to engineer kindness into our electronic systems. Noah Grey's latest special photography collection is from an expedition to Death Valley. The series from Zabriskie Point shortens my breath. Noah writes: The next few days would find us hiking in two canyons, exploring a turn-of-the-century Spanish castle and a ghost town, walking at the lowest point in the United States, shivering on a mountaintop, and catching the sunrise and the sunset at one of the world's greatest rocky vistas, among other things. In the four days we were there, I found myself in enough scattered moments, at enough places and times, to take a good handful of the photographs I already knew would be the best I'd ever done. If I could take those moments and bottle them to give away, no one would ever feel a need to ask me again, "Why are you a photographer?—why do you do what you do, why are you what you are?" Those moments answered a lifetime's worth of questions as never before. I played with this nice city-to-city distance calculator which says that it's 170 miles from Baltimore to New York as the crow flies. And lastly, some information architects have been doing a lot of navel-gazing. BoingBoing brings us a site that will help you take navel-gazing to a new level. Saturday, January 11, 2003
CuriousLee archives and RSS feed fixed ...
... hopefully for a while. I had switched this site over to a new host, and didn't propagate the new web log directory paths to all of my prefs in Blogger Pro. At first, I thought I was experiencing some variation on the dreaded disappearing archives problem, but thankfully it wasn't that. With new paths in place, the XML file is now showing current posts, and the last half of December 2002 (which opens with a nice sunset photo) and the beginning of January 2003 have appeared in the curiousLee archives. General ramble related to blog maintenance:
Social Revolution Through Diagramming
 I haven't been posting much on information architecture lately because I've been doing it eight hours a day in the complex social and technical environment of a Fortune 500. I think about IA on the commute to and from work, hang out with IAs after work, and am helping out on a small way on the posters piece of the next IA Summit. Now there's even talk of starting an IA thing here in Baltimore. My way of doing a brain flush is to make pretty photos, of which only a tiny fraction make it up on this blog. Working with the lean, busy teams that remain out of a stock market slide, a sagging economy and several re-orgs, it's a challenge to get people to absorb information. Text memos, information matricies in Excel, utilitarian Visio diagrams are sometimes not enough to help people grok new concepts from the disciplines of IA and user experience. I felt there was a pressing need for all the disparate internal players and vendors to have a common mental model of the basic forces that shape the user experience of the web sites. The title of this post is from a t-shirt that Matt Jones was wearing during his talk at last year's IA Summit. The words resonate because a fundamental requirement of the work I do as an information architect is to produce deliverables that give good demo. I've literally worn out a pair of shoes meeting with dozens of people in several buildings to compile a giant, demo-friendly concept map of the web properties at AIG, of which a tiny chunk from the Adobe Illustrator file is shown above. People readily engage in a well-designed diagram, and I've gotten more general feedback in two days than in all my prior weeks combined. So maybe I'm on my way to some more shared understanding amongst the teams. But the revolution part comes next and requires more clear thinking visualized, good storytelling, and gentle teaching. New models and strategies for user experience, information architecture, and content management have to be developed in a collaborative way. Plans grown from within last longer. I'm buying a new pair of shoes this weekend. Thursday, January 09, 2003
Compressing time
I find my week flies by faster when I schedule a couple social events during my evenings in New York City. Tuesday night was another great NY IA salon which was at Michael's this month. I finally had the honor of meeting Dr. Bella Hass Weinberg, Professor of Library and Information Science at St. John's University, and hearing her fascinating stories. If you Google her name, you'll find years worth of reading. Last night I met up with old friend Tony Tran at Radio Perfecto (eating there for the third time) in the East Village. It was the restaurant/bar's first night ever of live music. About 30 people crammed in a 12x12 foot back room to hear performances from local singer-songwriters Nicole Atkins, Regina Spektor and James Levy. It was my first time soaking in some of the Village's artistic and cultural magic. I was going to go to the first meeting of The Christopher Hitchens Drinking Club tonight, but I think I'm going to stay in to rest up. Next week, Nikah and I are going to the Po Bronson book signing at the B&N in Chelsea. And here I am on the brink of Friday already... Sunday, January 05, 2003
Snowy bark
 Another close-up of snow from today's new fall. I'm sighting down along the side of a tree on 32nd Street near Charles in Baltimore. My brain must be quietly pushing out a photo series on this theme in light of the recent photo of snow crystals on a leaf. Saturday, January 04, 2003
Phone trance
Nooper has posted a gallery of photos of Japanese interacting with their cellphones. Of course, this is what I look like many times a day as I use my Sidekick. Also, check out their gallery of print ads.
Fast company
After reading Po Bronson's article, What Should I Do With My Life? on the Fast Company site, I poked around and discovered a short article about Strategux, a new experience design firm in Baltimore. They opened at about the same time I started commuting to New York City, but today, my wife visited their offices and usability lab. They've partnered with The University of Baltimore IDIA program to construct the lab in their space using some of UB's equipment. They sound like great folks and it's good to know there's a real testing lab a stone's throw away from the Kinko's on South Charles Street. Friday, January 03, 2003
The art of semiotics
Some heady reading from the University of Aarhus Center for Semantics: The Dynamics of Aesthetics, Schemas and Symbols, Grounding Iconicity, The Schematism of Diagrams, and Domains and the Grounding of Meaning.
Crystalix on the other coast
Scott Stanko of Crystalix of California wrote to tell me that I failed in my previous blog post to mention their original storefront location on Pier 39 in San Francisco. They are in Building J. Call 415.837.0504 for hours of operation and pricing. IA/UI/UX types in SF who read this blog can have their faces encoded in a block of crystal glass to create a portrait that will last for many thousands of years. Wednesday, January 01, 2003
A magical cruise into 2003
My photos from our picturebook-perfect New Year's Eve cruise.
back to... current ... top
past monthly... 2000: 10.11.12 2001: 01.02.03.04.05.06.07.08.09.10.11.12 2002: 01.02.03.04.05.06.07.08.09.10.11.12 2003: 01.02.03.04.05.06
powered by... Blogger Pro. The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer. [?] |
|
I saw these icicles during lunch and only had my Sidekick camera, so I 
