So I went in for my second interview at Yahoo! today, meeting with about 10 folks in the UI departments (hi if you're reading this!)

I think the interviews went pretty well (especially considering that I winged the presentation, missing some nifty stuff I didn't get the chance to go over, in favor of other nifty stuff), but the proof is in the pudding, so we'll see how it goes.

Also, on the way to the interview, I got a call from one of the leaders of the SXSW Festival. I didn't mention it here because I don't harp on failure, but AOLiza didn't make the finalist cut two weeks ago in the SXSW website competition. Well today they informed me that one of the finalists has dropped out because they went out of business and their site shut down, and I was next on the list, so now AOLiza's one of four finalists in the Humor/Satire category! Win or lose, I'll be walking tall as a finalist, along with one of my hotel-roomies Ernie. Should be a fun time in Austin, not that it wouldn't've been already.

I think I speak both for Kisa and myself when I say that this has (so far) been a pretty nice, lazy weekend.

I went to a "Tell" tonight. Basically it's about 15 friends (maybe half of whom I knew personally, but who all knew Norman and Sharon, our hosts), al getting together and telling stories, either readings from stpries that are particularly meaningful to them, unpublished works written by them, a relative, or another acquaintance, or stories told in true storytelling fashion.

The whole thing was really low key, meaningful, and fun. The night before a different group of friends had a game night, a weekly ting we've started where we try to introduce a new game each week (this week was Chez Geek). Here's where I get weird about using people's personal names. About 20% of the readers here are people I actually know personally, and the rest have no idea who I'm talking about when I mention these people, but what the heck, proper names are no more confusing than simple pronouns would be. Anyhow, Dawn and Bates couldn't make it out (Dawn is running a fever, the latest in the string of the afflicted that includes Emily, Karen, Ammy and Sherman), but Emily, Ammy, Rick, and Sherman and I all had a fun time, baking cookies, eating dinner, and playing games.

What the two activities both have in common is that they're both opportunities for social circles to mingle (with open invites ("if you're invited, then you can invite people, etc.")) and to share new ideas and games. Just the kind of thing I like to get out of the house and spend time with real people. I'll probably organize a tell of my own in the next month or two. they're great fun and I'm intent on recording the next one, in mp3 if not digital video. I'd love to be able to share some moments from tonight.

have a great three-day weekend! I'll probably check in again tomorrow (read: today) anyhow, but if I don't have a great Presidents' Day (observed)!

I'm not sure where I got the idea, but I always thought the new Star Wars movies were supposed to be seperated by 2 years, 1999, 2001, and 2003. Well, it being 2001 (can you believe it's already been two years since Episode I?) I was wondering why we haven't been hearing any hype, and it turns out II is set for 2002 and III is due in 2005.

Did I just misremember, or are they taking more time to do it right?

Anthropologists often resort to looking at the ideosyncracies of a society's language to learn about what's important to them. Strafe's Guide to Streetspeak says more about my chosen subculture than a library full of Neal Stephenson, Douglas Coupland and William Gibson.

Pet peeve for the morning (actually it's been going on far longer than that):

A lot of people browse the net in ways not intended by the web developer. Specifically, instead of surfing on a liniar path (o---o---o---o) they'll often open a link in a new window to start a new cognitive thread. This happens all over the place, but it especially happens on search engines, where the user wants to look at a returned link, but doesn't want to cover the search results page.

Great. All well and good. Some obnoxious folks (like me, sadly) will try to enforce this behavior on the reader, by taking the links they feel should be cognitive departures, and making them open in new windows by specifying the 'target' attribute in the HTML tag. You'll notice that on my site because nearly every link that isn't to another page on my site I make open in a new window. (sidebar: Do you hate this? If so, let me know. If you like it, let me know too.)

Okay, great. the real problem is when people use javascript to open a new window with just the right size and properties (I do this on AOLiza, and CNN and ABCnews.com do it all over the place). The problem there is if you the user try to open the link in a new window, ignoring the fact that it's not a 'real' link, but is a javascript function that will have the net result of popping up a new window, the whole thiong fails miserably, you getting a big blank window and a javascript error.

Okay, long spiel. Moral please? There should be a different affordance, (a different look indicating the function of an item) for links that will spawn new windows. I haven't the foggiest idea what would work. Of course, it would have to come at the browser level, not the site level, because it would need to carry over into all sites, or else we're just talking about another design ideosyncracy on another little site, which is the last thing we need. Maybe if popup links looked like other links, but were italicized, indicating that you don't need to actively open it in a new window: it's going to do it anyhow.

Just a thought. I'm certain there ae more fundamental changes that need to be made to the web. I figure it's likely there will eitehr be a standards overhaul in about 4 years or these things will be fixed when content shifts to the next-big-thing.

You see some strange people in Berkeley, freshmen, tourists, gutterpunks and just plain crazies. Then, every now and then you see something that's just... different.

The scary thing is, there was another guy there taking pictures with a digital camera, and he says this guy has hiw own web site of himself in weird places. I forgot the URL. wackyguy.com, weirdguy.com, ro something like that. If anyone recognizes this mug, lemmie know and I'll post the link.

Congratulations on surviving Valentine's Day! Sorry, no personal drams to share, but if you're interested in that kind of thing, there's no place better than Way Too Personal. Who replies to internet matchmaking services? How weird can things get? How should you not try to make first contact? All this and more can be found at this site. A good primer for "what not to do" and a great soruce for entertainment.

Makes me want to walk around strange neighborhoods and walk up to random people. They can't be as weird as this bunch.

Last year in George Lakoff's course on Language and the Mind, one of the topics we covered was the contested concept. Briefly, a contested concept is a term which means different things to different people, like 'art,' or 'feminism,' or 'government.'

I've been thinking about contested concepts a bit more lately, specifically in the context of the final paper I wrote for the class, examining ways to scientifically map and cluster people's varying views of these concepts, and seeing how these views relate to demographic, geographic, or even temporal variables.

Yesterday I was thinking about the term 'respect' and I was wondering what your views of the term are. This is just a brief study to see if respect is a good candidate for mapping.

So, if you're bored at work, home, or class, and you're at all interested, I'd love it if you would just jot down a few sentences on what respect means to you, just the essence of the term. I'll summarize the results (no names attached) and post them in a couple days. I'll also post the paper, if anyone's interested, as a real study of the contested concept might be the next step.

So if you're up for it, send your response to me at hello@fury.com. Thanks!

Having the opportunity to view "Preview Releases" of Apple's Quicktime 5 is cool, but here's what sucks:

• To use the preview release, you have to uninstall your existing implementation of quicktime completely.
• The preview release is for a limited time only, and expires on February 15th.
• When it expires, suddenly most of your software doesn't work because it relies on Quicktime codecs to raster JPEG and GIF graphics, as well as manage MP3 and AIFF sounds. Basically the sound turns off and a lot of pictures don't work.
• When you try to download the New public beta, with an expiration date a little further in the future, you suddenly realize that everyone else who downloaded Quicktime 5 PR 2 is doing exactly the same thing and you wonder why you can't seem to download the files you need to make your computer work...

Gak. That's all...