Why is it a 'user-centered, intuitive design'? Because the documentation says so.

It may be Winter where you are but Spring has sprung at Berkeley and classes start tomorrow morning! Wow. My last semester as an undergrad...

Due to Berkeley's extensive breadth requirements, my last semester is a mishmash of cross-disciplinary study including linguistics, molecular and cell biology, Spanish, and information systems and international gender issues. I'm also TAing a class in UI design, prototyping, and usability. If you're curious, here's a link to my schedule.

For the first time ever, I'm actually enrolled in all the classes I intend to take at the beginning of the semester, and not enrolled in any I don't plan on taking.

I'll link the classes in the navbar to their respective home pages as soon as I find out where those pages are.

I'm an informaion packrat. Not only do I collect books, and have an obscenely long and completely unorganized bookmark page (four, in fact), but I'm a nut about saving personal data. I never trash email, old writing assignments, digital photos I take (even the bad ones), or anything that has the slightest chance of being needed or wanted later. I've been putting a lot of thought of late into the data formats I use. Last semester Microsoft Word kept flaking out on me, and I got in the habit of writing assignments in HTML. After making a good stylesheet it's really pretty easy to do, and has the added benefit that I can put a URL on every assignment, link them all to the web site, and be able to view and print from any computer on the net, without having to worry about fonts, versions, or obsolesence.

Still, archiving is not an easy thing. My current frustration is with email. Two years ago I finally forwent all desktop email applications and relied completely on Pine. Now, for various reasons, mostly having to do with the way Pine files emails, and secondarily having to do with the hurdles I have to jump to handle most attachments, I'm going back to Outlook Express (or possibly Entourage). I'm also, at long last, dumping Best Internet (aka verio) as an ISP since all I use them for anymore is email and that is not worth $29.95/month.

Back to the point, I save my emails, and I'm currently archiving last year's emails. Realistically looking at the frequency I'll want to mine data out of these archives, I'm not worrying too much about the format, as long as I get it on to a couple redundant CD-Rs in text, .gz, or .tar.gz format, so I can always grep (or gunzip -c * |grep zgrep (thanks Benjy) ) the stuff I want out later. Heck, by the time I want anything from there I'll probably be using Mac OS X regularly and I can do it all in the shell. Or I could always use BBEdit.

On real-world archival RAID systems: I'm thinking I'll burn three CD-Rs, each with 2/3rds of the data I'm archiving, then copy all three discs and send the copy down to SoCal. That way as long as two discs survive in any single location I can reconstruct all the data.

I think way too much about this stuff. I know you're thinking it's only email (and school assignments and the like), but I can't understand people who throw their email away after reading it. I guess I'm on the side of the fence that sees email as correspondence instead of just conversation.

ABCnews has a story linking Ginger to a patent filed by the inventor. According to ABC, Ginger is likely a personal, single-wheel scooter. This actually makes a lot of sense considering that the guy also invented that incredible gyroscopic wheelchair that can stand on two wheels and climb stairs. I don't know how fast I'd want to go on one of those things, probably not more than 15 or 20mph, but it looks pretty nifty.

Crystal and Karen have their new site up at its new domain: lifeamgood.com

Check it out for info on all the best in wine & cheese, dance (ballroom and period), and costuming in the Bay Area plus (the obligatory) so much more!

I think it's soo cool that so many of my friends have started their own web sites recently, especially those who weren't web geeks from the start. Ammy, Rick, Karen, Crystal, I just think it's too cool.

Wow. It looks just like me:

Go ahead and build your own!

On the road to ubiquitous computing, we tend to pick up a whole lot of shiny objects, PDAs, watches, pagers, cellphones, and the like. Whether we admit it or not, a lot of us are becoming part machine. we use artificial devices not only for communication, but also to offload tasks we used to do with our heads. Things like memorizing phone numbers and things to do, describing things we've seen, and even talking to people with our voice.

One reader wrote to me yesterday saying I never talk about being human, focusing on tech-tech-tech. That's true recently as, especially during this Winter break, I've been working on so many computer projects that most interesting stimuli come from the computer. But it isn't always this way. Several years ago I noticed a personal trend I call the 'cyborg cycle.'

Whenever I go to the airport and have to go through the metal detector I do a mental accounting of exactly how many battery-powered devices I have on my person or in my bags. The interesting thing is that this number varies by a roughly 18-month cycle, and that whenever I reach the top or bottom of the curve, I'm very proud of it. there are times when I won't wear so much as a watch, keeping all tasks in my head (and it's funny, I found that when I don't carry a watch, I can still tell the time to within 5 minutes, even if I haven't seen a clock in a couple hours). On the other side, I have what I can only describe as the 'technophilia dreamcoat,' a jacket I bought at the Gap two years ago that has a bazillion zippered pockets, one for each tech-toy.

Today for example, I haven't left the house yet and am not wearing any battery-powered device, but then I'm surrounded by three computers, two of which I'm using this second, so that doesn't really count. When I get up in a minute to get some lunch I'll put on the coat and load it up with:

• Obligatory Palm V PDA
• Nokia 5190 cellphone
• Canon Elph digital camera
• Stowaway keyboard (optional)

It's not the most I've carried, but as the items get fewer they get more capable and more complex. I stopped wearing a watch when I realized that the Palm, Nokia, and Elph all have their own clocks, and it's a bit redundant. I stopped wearing a pager when I got paging srvice on my Nokia. Soon PDA/Cellphones and PDA/cameras will be commonplace (and more capable than current offerings) and I'll wear less tech, while in effect having more tech. And of course, we'll all become more dependent on our technology.

I'm reading Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, a hard sci-fi book set half a million years in the future. I'm fascinated by one of the alien races, Skroderiders. Skrodes are a race of what are essentially palm trees that have reasonable judgement and decision-making capabilities but virtually no long-term or medium-term memory (anything more than 20 seconds). To push them to a higher level of sentience, another race long ago built the Riders, motorized vehicles and computers which the Skrodes communicate intimately with, and use as their medium and long-term memory, amongst other things. Over time the Skrodes become inseparable from the Riders (basically their PDAs) until they're eventually seen as one entity: Skroderiders. This seems to be the way we're headed.

Next week I'll write up a piece on exactly how some of the wearables folks at MIT are progressing toward this goal, and how the same tech could be used to help people with a variety of cognitive deficits.

Am I the only person who thinks that Finding Forrester and Save the Last Dance would make a kick-ass yin-yang double feature?

Its Thursday (for another hour, anyhow) and that means new AOLiza conversations! Every Thursday AOLiza will get five new conversations, in addition to a site refresh in the coming weeks. Have fun!

Okay, I wrote up a whole thing on computer equipped recliners, but since Netscape decided to take a dive as I was finishing up, I'll simply post a few links and say how amusing it was that as I was writing it Flemming & John's 'Comfortable' randomly came up on iTunes, singing "You're my La-Z-Boy recliner..." Perfect.

Links are here.