Because Rachel demands more Piggies:

Do you have any stories about Giant Pig?

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It's tempting when designing a page to just design 'above the fold', that is, the things that the user sees without scrolling. The term comes from the newspaper industry, where half of the front page is 'above the fold' and the less important half is 'below the fold'.

It's interesting because in newspapers it's a 50/50 split. In tri-fold letters it's a 33/33/33 split. On web pages though, especially weblogs, the majority of content usually exists below the fold.

Sippey gives a great viewpoint of exactly what several popular weblogs look like if 'the fold' didn't exist. It's got me thinking about how the value and function of sidebar navigations changes as one descends into the depths of a page.

Scott McCloud (of Understanding Comics fame) uses this perspective extremely well in his online comics, starting from the beginning.

My mind boggles at the possibility of melding Scott's comic model with the inverse chronology of a weblog...

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So hey, it's already Sunday night (err, early Monday morning, that is), and that means it's time for Weekend Update!

This weekend started off early with a trip to see Alegria. A day after getting the (still unnamed) Prius, I was happy to trek up to downtown San Francisco for the show. The navigation system was fun to play with. It's actually a really elegant system. My masters project at CMU was designing next-generation car navigation and I was happy, yet sad, to see that many of our innovations were already in the works and available in this system. Nevertheless there are several serious usability flaws in the interface, but that's the meat of another post. I'm planning on writing a Prius sitelet, going in to detail on each of its systems from a user perspective.

Alegria was fantastic. It was Rachel's second time seeing Cirque du Soleil, and my second time seeing Alegria (I saw it 9 years ago when it first came to San Francisco). We sat in literally the first row (well, except for one person sitting in front of Rachel) and were close enough to touch the stage. The acts were amazing, all the more for being able to make and maintain eye contact with those characters who come close to the audience, and actually being under the flying trapeze. Cirque was, and always will be, magic to me.

Rachel's currently stage-managing SteinBeck's production of Santaland Diaries by David Sedaris. She got one of the producers to cover for her on Thursday so she could see the circus (we had tickets before she ever accepted the job and she told them it was a condition to accepting the gig). In compensation, I agreed to handle the box office for Friday's show. Ali and Mark came down to see the show and act as impromptu ushers. I sat back in the booth with Rachel as she ran the show, and had a great time watching a really funny play. I even unexpectedly got to see one of my old Berkeley drama teachers, John Fisher. After the performance was over and we had cleaned up and locked down the theater, the four of us went to the diner across the street and had a nice wind-down before I drove Ali and Mark back to their car at Orinda Bart and Rachel and I went to Emily's to visit with Kisa while Emily's out of town. We finally left Em's at about 2am (gotta take kitty time where you can!) and got to sleep well after 3am.

Saturday I made a serious faux pas. Rachel and I had been planning out the things we needed to accomplish in order to pull off Thanksgiving/Christmas dinner at our place on Monday night. Karen and I were comped to see the play Saturday night and Rachel and I realized that Saturday would be the only time we'd be able to go to Dickens Faire this year, albeit for only 3 or 4 hours. Working on our morning errands, I got a call from Karen to coordinate our plans for the day and it was suddenly clear to me that I'd seriously screwed up and doublebooked. In my head I thought Karen and I were seeing the play together, but I realized that when I didn't get to go to Dickens with her 1-1 last weekend, I hoped we could spend a whole day this weekend hanging out with her and that Saturday was that day. Serious oops. Damnit.

On the bright side, our doing chores late into the morning meant we were home when Mom and the girls from her chorus called to sing us a happy holidays. That was really special, and I wish I'd spent a little less time trying to prosletyse others into getting singing holiday greetings and spent a little more time placing orders for my friends. As it was the ladies were there singing later than they had in years, and I'm glad I didn't make them stay any later. Thanks, Mom!

Dickens Fair was a lot of fun. I got to see a lot of friends I almost never get to see otherwise, and I got to dance with a fair number of them. I had a weird realization, talking with Rachel, about how it would be so hard for me to work Dickens because it's during 'the busy season' and I suddenly realized that there really is a social season, almost as well defined as football season, and following almost the same calendar. I just know that if I were a girl I wouldn't wear white shoes after Labor Day because they'd get scuffed up with all the dancing that goes on almost every weekend after September.

Met Karen for the show (Rachel and I were running late because of the inexplicable 6:15pm Saturday gridlock before 7th street on 101). We walked around and talked for a while, then went in to see the show. The audience was more 'on' than they were for the Friday show, probably because it wasn't raining on Saturday and it was a packed house to boot. I liked the show even more the second time and Karen thought it was a riot. Ammy and Rick are seeing the show on Thursday and I have to decide today or tomorrow whether I can drive up there and see the show for a third time.

We drove Karen to her car at San Leandro bart after the show and again went down to spend some kitty-time with Kisa. Got back around midnight or so, did some cleaning and relaxing, and went to sleep, with a 7:15am alarm set.

Sunday Rachel and I started off with a visit to Watercourse Way for a 30-minute soak (in Two Stones if you're curious) followed by a pair of hour massages that left us both relaxed and my hair looking like a honky version of Don King.

Sunday morning shopping on University Avenue including a full tour through Restoration Hardware, the Apple Store, Gyros at a good greek place, and then off to IKEA, Pier 1, another Pier 1, and Target. The it was back home for cleaning and relaxing for a few minutes before Rachel had to take off to prep for Sunday's performance and I stayed here sorting papers and relaxing a bit.

Now it's nearly 2am, and I'm off to sleep so I can work hard tomorrow, take off a little earlier than usual (meetings permitting) and help Rachel with the Turkey and whatever else needs helping with.

On deck for this week are the special Monday dinner, Tuesday TiVo Poker Night, Wednesday Return of the King (actually, in the early afternoon, but then probably back to work for most of the evening). Thursday is when Ammy and Rick are seeing the play, and I know I have Friday plans as well. Saturday is Gaskell's Christmas Ball, and Sunday I'm heading to Carmel for family Christmas.

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Okay, the Clif's Notes version of my last five days (take two).

Thursday I was signed up to go to a philanthropic luncheon and in the evening join up with Ammy and Karen to see War Daddy, the play that Rachel was stage managing at the Zeum.

Midday Wednesday I knew that things would get too busy so I bowed out of the luncheon and had to postpone going to the play until this weekend. It turned out it was a good thing that I cancelled because I ended up staying at work all day and all night on thursday, not coming home at all, and grabbing a quick 90 minutes of sleep in a coworker's office. First time pulling an all-nighter at Google, and hopefully not a frequent occurance.

Incidentally, we're moving offices this weekend, and cardboard boxes and stickers were passed around earlier in the week. Anyhow, I worked pretty much solid until 5pm when I found out that 'be packed by the time you leave for the weekend' actually meant 'be packed by 6 when the movers start moving' (my fault, didn't read the faq closely enough). So, by 6:15 my GoogleLife is in boxes and stickered, and I'm out the door.

I was supposed to go to Liz's birthday/housewarming party on Friday night, but running on only 90 minutes sleep in the previous 40 hours, I knew I wasn't fit to drive the 140 miles to Sacramento, especially when I knew I'd have to drive back that evening to be ready to go to the Big Game (Cal vs. Stanford) on Saturday morning. So I went home and tried to sleep for about an hour before waking up to answer the phone.

After that I didn't get back to bed until after midnight, my circadian rhythms in direct opposition to my serotonin levels, making everything feel a little distant. Friday Night Waltz was at the same time, and 100 miles closer, but I didn't even think of going. Home was my final destination for the night.

Saturday morning Karen and I made an easy journey to Stanford, thanks to Rachel dropping us off on the way to work. Good thing to, since this is the first Stanford Big Game in decades without CalTrain access, since they've shut the train down on weekends for the last year and a half and didn't change the schedule for the event. (This is stupid because the way most public transit agencies increase ridership is when they introduce new potential riders to the system when they do one-off events like games and concerts. If you only run on weekdays, then only those people who use your train for commuting find out about your train. Chicken, I'd like you to meet egg.) Anyhow, Palo Alto was a resultant mess that we got to glide through relatively unscathed.

The game was a lot of fun. Both teams played badly at first, but it was nice to come from behind and pound the other team. This was also the first time I'd actually gone to a Big Game as a bona-fide alumnus. Karen wrote up a bit more on the game and the aftermath.

Karen dropped me off at the Zeum at 7:27pm for a 7:30pm curtain and I'm so glad I made it on time, though I'm so sorry that my own planning ended up making Karen sick so that she couldn't go. The show didn't actually start for another 10 minutes or so, so I even got to catch my breath.

Watching theatre alone is such a different experience for me than watching in a group. Somehow experiencing art with others, I feel that I have to immediately encapsulate my feelings and opinions into communicable nuggets, like I'm writing an essay, or at least that I have to have formed an opinion by the time the curtain falls. Seeing a play on my own I feel freer to experience it, rather than judge it.

While experiencing the play I realized a few things about my own approach to creative endeavors. I don't like anything I make to go out into the world until it's perfect. I realized on Saturday that this isn't because I'm so much a perfectionist, as it is that the kinds of art I produce are ones that stay up for a while, where imperfections are more glaring, and where the work is such an intentional act that improvisation is almost impossible. The musician can change a riff on the fly, or a painter can be very free with their brush, knowing both that the randomness and carefree effect can boost the work, and that the act itself is quick. Inspiration does play a large role in web design, but improvisation is harder to pull off, since every effect on the page is time-consuming enough to be deliberate by nature, and the best that one can hope for is for carefree inspiration that they can hold on to while transforming it into code.

Even then, if you make tools that people will use thousands of times, utility has to take a front seat to free-expression, and while aesthetics are vital, possibly even more important than in the more ephemeral disciplines of the performing arts, they're there to indicate the piece's function, or to create an emotional space to frame the work in.

It's probably a good thing I don't go to plays alone very often.

But even so, all that said, this is one of the reasons I so enjoyed riding Amtrak to and from Yahoo, more than a year ago. Setting myself to start writing in Oakland and to have a finished piece by Santa Clara, I started to see writing as an impromptu performance art, instead of a crafted and re-crafted tailored work to be scrutinized. I don't expect anyone to read what I write twice, or to write about what I write.

Back to my weekend, I enjoyed the play. I was impressed by many of the youth actors, though I felt that the playwriting lacked significant differentiation in most of the characters' dialogue. I love the Zeum's theater. It's just intimate enough to saddle the line between a performance to the audience and a performance with the audience. And of course it was technically great. After all, it had a great stage manager. :-)

Today was a day of relative sloth. There were many small things that needed to be done around the house, and Rachel, angel that she is, got the day started for us with omelettes in bed! Add on my organizing and archiving files off my powerbook before installing OS X 10.3, catching up on a little TV, a little email, and a little websurfing, and suddenly it's after midnight and I'm wondering where the day went.

In the morning I'm heading over to the new office to unpack my boxes and set up the computer, find out whether the new office has a bathroom closer than my old cube's 79 paces. We're right next to the kitchen area, which means far too many snacks in far too close proximity. Virtually nothing will get accomplished Monday, what with everyone unpacking, learning the lay of things, and with so many of us making ready for early Thanksgivings.

Rachel and I are flying out tomorrow night for Los Angeles where we'll stay a night before flying to Kauai with the greater family for Thanksgiving in Hawaii. It'll be nice to get away.

For the past few weeks I've been feeling a little growing ennui, especially when I'm alone. I don't know if I'm experiencing it more now, or if I'm just noticing it more now, but as I sit at home when Rachel's off shopping, visiting Nym, or off running a show, I sometimes compare the mental me to the person I'd expect I'd be and I seem muted. I'm not looking for sympathy, but I feel that acknowledging this alteration is probably an important step in changing it, and so I put it here to pin this acknowledgement down.

So yeah, Tomorrow night is LA, then Kauai, then back to LA and back here on an unspecified flight.

Overall, life is very, very good. Trouble is, I can usually identify problems and fix them when things aren't going their best. Right now though, I feel like fixing the problem involves letting go of something I don't yet want to let go of, because I feel like if I loose my grip I'll forget what it was like to hold on to it.

I'm sorry if this doesn't make any sense to newer readers, or even those who have been here for a while. Maybe it makes a lot of sense. I don't really know. I'm just looking forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas. I have so much to be thankful for, and though I may have less now, I value it so much more.

Anyhow, next week Rachel starts work on her next gig, a production of the Santaland Diaries, I have my company party, we might get to go to Dickens Fair, and then the next week I'll be getting my new car, and then it's only a few more weeks to Christmas.

And, as I've thought every Sunday night since I came back to the Bay Area three months ago, I know I'm lucky when I remember that tomorrow's Monday and I need to go to work, and it fills me with excitement.

I hope y'all had a good weekend.

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Probably my hottest passion in HCI is the concept of ambient displays. Ambient displays abound in nature. The way the spectrum of light changes a few minutes before rain starts falling, the way birds waking up at 4am let you know you've been studying too late again, your sense of balance. These are all examples of ambient displays.

In the HCI realm, the hot geek project de l'annee has been to create novel man-made ambient displays. Classic examples are the network activity dangling string and a thicket of waterfall and windchime-oriented projects. In the past few years most of these projects have been filed under the concept of 'ubiquitous computing' though I think this is a bit of a misnomer, since if an ambient display is truly ubiquitou, the 'computing' portion of it should be invisible to the user and therefore should no more have the label 'computing' than a car or DVD player should. The advancement of the field comes in the expression, not the computing.

At any rate, I've been wanting to create ambient displays at home for quite a while, but time, money, or other factors always got in the way. Now that I'm settling in to a new home, the desire to create an ambient informatic environment has risen anew, and I've spent the last several days thinking about two things: What form could these displays take, and what information do I want to display?

Though I don't have a shortage of answers for either of these two questions, I often find a disconnect between the two lists. Without any 'in the world' relationship between, say, traffic to fury.com and the sound of flowing water, that relationship has to exist in my head. Therein lies the problem, because there is a deliberate cognitive step that has to happen in my head when I hear the water surge briefly to understand what that display maps to in the real world. Further, someone who hasn't explicitly been told about the relationship between flowing water and my web site traffic (or in the linked example, the dangling string and the office's overall network activity), would never make that connection. This brought me to my first realization:

All ambient displays are learned.

Whether it's the flat sunlight before an imminent downpour, or the birds chirping at 4am, these displays only become effective as the user makes the connection (causal or otherwise) between the two phenomena. In the most effective ambient displays, this connection happens unconsciously, so that not only does the subject not know how they know it's about to rain, but they don't even notice that the light outside has changed.

In the network-string example, it's likely that the information needed to correlate the string to network traffic isn't available to the user, unless they start to realize that their web-browsing gets slower at the same time as the string gets more energetic. In the website traffic and water example, there is even less data to correlate because my website traffic is a metric completely hidden from someone sitting in my living room. The data that the subconscious brain needs to create this binding simply isn't available, and so explicit knowledge is required, negating the very nature of ubiquity.

To take it a step further, I believe that the linkage between the display and the underlying data should not only be available to the subject, but it must be available in a way where it is internalized inexplicitly. In other words, just having a sign saying "this string's activity indicates network traffic" won't do, because the knowledge of the linkage, while in the world, still has to be internalized consciously, and after the first handful of interactions with the display, the user will carry the knowledge in their head, but in their conscious attention.

This creates a direct obstacle to ubiquitous assimilation of the display's information, because a short-circuit to the conscious level has been created. When the subject encounters the ambient display, they think about the display and their explicit learned linkage, eliminating the opportunity for the display to affect them of its own accord.

It's like stopping hiccups: The most successful and difficult method to succeed is to think about something else entirely, only you can't, because you keep polling yourself to see if it worked, at which point you hiccup. By trying to use an ambient display ambiently, people will often try to see 'if it's working' which means it can't. When a linkage between display and data happens in the subconscious, there isn't that conscious recurrent check to see if it's working, because the conscious mind was never given a role in the experience.

So what makes an effective ambient display? What is effectiveness? Is ambience and/or ubiquity the most important facet? Or is it the fidelity to which the changing data is realized in the subject? It must be a middle ground, where explicit data is sacrificed for the sake of 'calm'. A cellphone ring is not an ambient display, while a static painting falls on the 'overly calm' side of the spectrum: a display that might have a deep meaning, but no change over time.

I'm still doing a lot of thinking on the subject, but rather than running headstrong into waterfalls and colored balls, I'm taking a step back and approaching from a research perspective. I'm going to start keeping a log of the ambient displays I sense every day, how I interact with them, and how I learned the relationship between the display and the information behind it.

My next step will be stretching a few of these displays a bit farther from their data, and see if they still work. For example, right now it's very quiet in my apartment because it's 1am. The ambient noise level is a display telling me very roughly what time it is. If I tied this kind of relationship to my radio, so that it grew softer as the evening wore on, and grew louder in the morning, mirroring the average change in ambient background noise, it might give me a better indication of the time of day, both when I'm staying up too late blogging, and when I should be getting up to start the day. In this respect it might serve as both an ambient alarm clock and 'time to sleep' notification, without any of the abruptness of a clock-radio. The most important difference here is that this radio doesn't attempt to tell you what to do or when, it simply gives you a better sense of the world around you.

Approaching the problem from the other end, I should take a look at the pieces of data I want that aren't adequately addressed by ambient displays. Then I need to find the right way to extend that data into the real world, as opposed to creating a display and an arbitrary linkage.

These are slow steps, but hopefully the results will have a greater utility to wow-factor ratio than most of the ambient work I've done so far.

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I love today's Google logo. It's my favorite yet. [archived copy]

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Explodingdog finally has a 3-D contender to the throne: Boring3D.

Warning: A good hour might be spent reading the beautiful and odd archives.

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I was talking with a friend a couple days ago about how horrible (or nice, depending) it would be to be Martha Stewart's cellmate. How would she go about redecorating the cell? Making it hers?

Thankfully, as always, people with more time on their hands had the same idea.

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Camposites, collages created from webcam pictures emailed to the artist, are some of the most surreal images I've ever seen.

I love how distortion of the images can cause a corresponding distortion of the emotion. For a quick overview, check out the gallery page [nsfw, contains nudity].

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For a seminar yesterday, we were to make a collage of our bathroom, real or ideal.

I took pictures of my own bathroom and mixed them together for a cognitive level look at my bathroom, with more important things taking up more space.

I can't explain how I forgot the actual toilet...

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So I was up until 6:30 this morning, in the cold multimedia lab, before walking over to my office to take a nap on the couch, prepping for my 8:30 class.

My cellphone went off at 8 as I asked it to, and I opted for a 5 minute snooze before facing the next half of my 48-hour day.

Apparently reality and I have a difference of opinion as to what constitutes 5 minutes, or so I realized when I looked at my watch and saw that it was 9:55.

Pissed at being (so very) late, and having a flashback to the recurring nightmares of waking up 2.5 hours late for a 3 hour final, I got up moved my car which, after two hours of delinquancy, didn't have a ticket (small favors, I thank thee), and was grateful (for once) that Interactive Programming is a 3 hour class, and I'd be coming in just after our mid-class break.

Walking in on a presentation, I was still asked by Pamela to see her after class. I thought I was older than that. Wanh. (stomping foot)

Nevertheless, the presentation went off without a hitch, and all went well. She told me I should be working on more challenging programming projects, and I certainly could; I just have to clear my work buffer to the point where the assignment doesn't get shoehorned into the sandman's time, because sometimes he takes time when you've really got better things to do.

So some of the fonts won't work quite right, unless you have the full Lucida family on your computer, but if you're interested, here's the thing I made last night, a takeoff on the traditional hangman game.

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If any of you have never been to Exploding Dog, you really should. Readers email him captions and he draws the pictures. I love that site because content only comes every week or so, so I forget about it for months at a time, then visit and spend a half-hour rolling in laughter.

And I'm not the only one. The only thing better than Sam's juxtaposed cunning wit and crude drawing style is when people take that art and put it in the most (in)appropriate of places.

Yesterday I was walking down the hall from my office, surrounded by Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute in the subfloors of Newell-Simon Hall, when I came across this office placard:

Usability study, anyone? (click to enlarge)

In related (well, loosly) news, the CMU HCII t-shirts are in! During orientation week we split into groups to design our class shirt that we would wear to conferences, and to show our HCI pride. My group's design won out, and now we've got the threads to show for it!

(Okay, very loosly. In Kevin's head it went "Ooh. I should get one of thise nifty exploding dog t-shirts. Oh I should tell them about the HCII t-shirts that came in! Yeah, I'll just talk about it here, since it followed from the train of thought. Oh, but not their train of thought. Oh well. It's my site. Yeah. I can just explain it all in 100 words or less at the end. Then it'll all make sense. Do you really think they care about it making sense? Do you think they're still reading? Oh, nevermind.")

Anyhow, funny sign, new t-shirts. End of line.

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Best. Poster. Ever.

(thanks Leia!)

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Well, it looks like yahoo has to recall the trillion plus web pages they've delivered in the last five years and two months.

It seems that back in '96, when Yahoo! was granted the registered trademark 'Yahoo!', they updated the home-page graphic to suit, but in so doing, there was a casualty: Timmy, otherwise now known here at Yahoo! as 'Pixel #2899.' I call him Timmy because he went away the same day that the 'TM' was replaced with the 'R'.

So what can be done? Timmy's disappearance has gone unnoticed for five years and has only just been noticed by one of our own visual designers, browsing through the world-wide web archive. Now the hunt is on to find Timmy, and bring him home.

Watch the saga! Reload your Yahoo! home page every day (or hour, minute, whatever) and watch for Timmy's return!

If you happen to find Timmy, be he in your recycle bin, a porn popup, or changed into a transparent gif, let me know! Please put Timmy on your site and post the link in this post's comments! I'll see to it that Timmy is returned to the Yahoo! signboard safe and sound.

And for all the cynics, this isn't some marketing ploy, 5 years in the making. The error was found this morning, and I'm just having fun with it, as we all know I am want to do. :-)

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So, having missed the train by seconds again (argh, argh, argh!) I was driving to Hayward Station as the sun rose over the Hayward Hills. It was a cloudy morning, and it was raining in Hayward, but when the sun rose above the mountains it was still beneath the clouds, and it glowed bright and golden and fuzzy, like viscous fire. It was pretty amazing.

Then, on the train, I saw an end-to-end rainbow, the kind that rides high into the sky, the half-circle you can only see during rainy sunrises or sunsets.

Nobody else on the train even noticed. It was just for me.

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So one project I've been participating in recently is Phineas's Exquisite Corpse project.

It's an art experiment, where one person makes a panel 450 pixels wide by 200 tall, then they send the bottom 15 pixel slice to the next person on the list. That person uses those 15 pixels as a starting base and continues on from there, and so on until the list is done (either 4 or 5 people per corpse).

Anyhow, I've been put on three of the lists, have finished two panels (I got my third on Thursday and am still working on it) and this afternoon the first corpse that I'd participated in was posted.

It's really pretty fun, though I haven't felt this impatient to see results from something since the last time I mailed in UPC codes to get my very own Boba Fett action figure, and had to wait 'four to six weeks for delivery'.

Four to six weeks, as most kids probably discovered (but probably won't anymore, in a world of Amazon and UPS 2nd Day Air and 7 days of inventory), is precisely the amount of time where even the most strong desire and anticipation falls victim to the elementary schooler's attention span. Actually, that goes all the way to high school, as even my SAT scores would always come back a few days after I stopped checking the mailbox every day.

Anyhow, sidetracked -- sorry. Exquisite corpse. Cool, slow, neat. Look, participate, wait.

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So I've been participating in An Exquisite Corpse, completing my first slice last night, and getting my next 'assignment' this morning. The 'starter slice' intrigued me, and I was looking forward to working on it (if this makes no sense, visit the site and read about it. Basically someone makes a 450x200 graphic and gives the bottom 15 pixel slice to the next person on the list, and they build off it to make their own panel, and so on) as soon as I got off work.

Since there was an A's game starting at 7, and the stadium is on my way home, I thought it might be a good day to stay late, and miss the traffic. Anyhow, now it's nearly 10, the panel is done and sent, and I just finished watching the Java Appletted webcast (Oakland beat Texas 7-1. Woohoo!). It's a bit late to drive an hour home just to come back as soon as I wake up so I'm crashing at Rick & Ammy's tonight.

Anyhow, just checking in with that life stuff. I'll have to write about Fray 5 and last night's Blink 182 concert later... Hasta!

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I love organic handwritten and sketched fonts, and Tom has the most diverse and original collection I've seen in ages. And they're all free!

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Using a Palm Vx to create large-format art. This entry is for Karen, because it's the kind of thing she woiuld do.

(Link from Slashdot)

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