So today was a good day. I woke up, finished the presentation poster for my team's UI project (apologies to those not using Explorer), and found out that we were chosen, out of the fourteen teams, to be one of the four who gets to give our oral presentation in front of "40-50 industry leaders, design specialists, and venture capitalists" during the class's project fair. Woo-hoo!

The big dealio is tomorrow (Tuesday) and the irony is that, despite having given presentations dozens of times while in the industry, this is the first time I'm going off powerpoint slides.

In other news I got word that this Spring I'll be the TA/tutor for IS213, the graduate school Interface Design course for the School of Information Management Studies. This is something I'm really looking forward to.

All in all, not bad for a Monday.

I went to the Dickens Christmas Fair today at the Cow Palace. I'll try to post the pictures tomorrow. I had a fantastic time waltzing at Fezziwigs, having traditional English Tea with Ammy and Emily, and getting to dance with so many of my friends.

It's truly a fabulous experience, a recreation of Dickensian London, but if you want to check it out, next weekend is the last weekend of the season. If you have the time, (and are in the SF Bay area) go do it! They'll teach you how to dance, you can watch bawdy stage shows, eat Yorkshire Pudding, and get a jump on that Christmas shopping!

If there's any way I can get enough of my finals studying done before next weekend, I'm going to go again on Saturday, before going to the Gaskells Ball.

Which isn't to say I'm free and clear, but my next final exam isn't until Friday the 15th, so for once I feel like I'm out from under the heavy, pointy rocks.

Our UI Design class project fair is on Tuesday, which will be a nice catharsis for a class I've really enjoyed. There's a chance our project will be picked as one of the three that get to make our presentation in front of the esteemed attendees, but even if not we still get to show off our stuff, and get to fill up on nice yummy hors d'oevres. Really, it's just like Open House in elementary school, with our drawings on the wall. Makes me wish my parents were in town. It occurs to me that neither of my parents have ever met any of my college instructors, though they've probably met all (or at least most) of my grade school teachers. I guess that's probably true for everyone.

Still, open house was far preferable to parent-teacher night, when the kids stay home, waiting up in terror until the parents come home then pretending to be asleep. Ahh, to be young again!

I had a television interview today for a segment for Japan's Television Tokyo Channel 12! They're doing a two-hour program on artificial intelligence, psychology, and the internet, and they wanted to talk to me about AOLiza. Three of them came in from New York and I was interviewed by Chika Yoshida and gave a demo of AOLiza.

Special thanks to Noriko Takamatsu for producing the interview and not insulting the tiny pieces of Japanese I inflicted on her. ("Watashiwa Kevin-san. Hajimemashde, dozo irushku!" Okay, so I never got to Romanji.)

The special is two hours long and will air at 7:30am on January 3rd on Tokyo's channel 12. Noriko said she'll be able to send me a tape once they send her one in NY, so probably some time in February. I've got to find someone who speaks Japanese so I can get a translation of what they dubbed me saying (try running a term paper through babelfish and then back the other way sometime...).

How many bytes are in 15 minutes?

Who is the intended audience for obituaries? Who are you really talking to when you write one? The vast majority of people don't read obituaries on a daily basis, but at their origin they served as the trunk of a social information dissemination tree, so everyone who needed to know would know about the passing and the memorial services.

Reading the obituaries at SFgate, it looks like some sort of DeathBlog. Come to think of it, Craig's List looks like a blog too... Maybe I'm on to something here. Maybe all temporally relevant information sources will eventually settle into the inevitable blog format. (Note that this last one just changed to inverse temporal order yesterday!)

Maybe the obituaries are speaking straight to the future. I've gone to microfiche a few times to access old obituary records, when I knew what I was looking for. Maybe obits will soon go the way of the aforelinked police blotter, serving only as a trace so historians can recreate our present.

If you were found dead tomorrow and only your family was notified, how many of your friends wouldn't find out through that phone tree?

No, no. I'm not being morbid. Just thinking too much about information dissemination.

I'm so frustrated. Why? Five years ago I left college midstream because of a great opportunity designing and implementing web sites for Ikonic Interactive. Now I've returned to finish my degree, and I'm paying a price for it.

In the four years after leaving Berkeley, I architected, built, and lead development of three online stores from the discovery phase to maintenance hand-off (Levi's Canada, Levi's USA, and Petstore.com). At the same time I learned user interface development, heuristic evaluation, and information architecture skills from some of the brightest in the business.

Somewhere along the way I decided that my career was doing so well that I was unlikely to ever go back to school to finish my degree unless I did it as soon as possible, so I left my career and came back to Berkeley to finish up my cognitive science bachelors degree and either continue my career interrupted, or get a masters degree in HCI and do the same.

So now I've been back at Berkeley for a year, and will be graduating inthe Spring, and I'm starting to look at career opportunities at the same time as I'm applying to grad school, giving me a little more time to make my decision. One of the companies I view most favorably for employment is Quidnunc. An old coworker of mine is in their New York office, I saw their recruiting pitch on campus, and I went down there to talk to their head of interface design. All in all it seems to be a great place, and I kept in touch with their recruiter to set up interviews around February or so, for employment in June.

Talking to her yesterday, I found out that they see me as coming in at the lowest level (minus a 6 month 'trainee' phase most entry personnel have). As I had feared (though never given real weight to), having gone back to college, I'm now seen as a 'recent graduate' instead of a person with 5 years of top-flight interactive development experience who should be interviewing for senior architect positions.

The funny part is that if I had finished my degree 4 years ago and then proceeded to get the experience I have now, I would be a great fit for one of their level II or level III positions, but going back to school equates to taking two steps backwards. To further the irony, the education I've received over the last year in user interface design, usability, information management, and visual perception didn't even exist at Berkeley when I left, so the education I would have received 4 years ago wouldn't have been as valuable as what I have now.

Now I'm stuck playing the game I avoided so well before: having my value as a potential employee measured by the letters after my name and not the real-world experience I've picked up. Now I'm being told that my best course of action is to get a masters degree because they're looking for masters degrees right now more than bachelors degrees, but if I were applying straight from the industry looking to jump ladders, the degree that I have or didn't have would be of secondary importance to my immediate work experience and capabilities.

Of course, this is just one experience with one company but it's still very discouraging. I suppose when I apply for positions (should I choose not to go to grad school next Fall), I'll put my degree on my resume, but omit the dates to get away from being pidgeonholed as a 'recent graduate' and all the immaturity and entry-level-ness that it entails.

I admit it. I have fetishes. I think one of my unsatisfied fetishes is definitely silverware. I have a really high standard for what I consider to be excelent silverare, and I don't think I've ever seen a fork or knife that I'd say is truly spectacular. Yes, balance is key, visual design is vital, and the piece that feels organic in your hand is essential. Still, whenever I'm going shopping for wedding gifts I give Macy's or Crate & Barrel or Nortstroms a chance, but I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

I'm fully aware that I'm a freak, but I won't let that stop me from bringing up some of my more oddball (and tasteful?) fetishes.

Even usability experts have to learn somehow. This is an amusing story proving that anyone can be dangerous with an email program and an archive of old mail.

This reminds me of the time I wrote an email that said something to the effect of "we don't spend enough time together, and I'd love to have lunch if you'd like to today" and sent it to the entire company I started working for 4 weeks earlier. We used Quickmail at the time (this was pre Internet-proliferation) and I could unsend it, but not before about 30% of the company read it. If I made the same mistake today, I'd play it off like I meant to do that, and make a big lunch of it!

Thanks to Frances for passing this one along!

I'm about to leave for my Philosophy class, but I'm still trying to figure out the strange dream I had this morning. I dreamt I was in a courtroom, lugging my Juno-6 keyboard (which I don't even own. I have an XP-10) to the defendant council's table, and setting it up, while the prosecution was setting up an upright piano at their table.

I was helping to defend Weird-Al Yankovic, and all the arguments for both sides were to be in the form of piano solos. Weird Al couldn't afford (or otherwise bring) a keyboard, so I was saving the day by bringing mine for him, even though it was somehow certain that he would lose.

I think I watch too much Ally McBeal...

Anyhow, horray for last week of classes! If I can just hold it together a few more days, then I can breathe, spend a week studying for 3 more midterms, and enjoy a winter break filled with panicking over reccomendation forms and grad school applications!

Specifically for Emily, Ray, and Aimee, this article epitomizes the reality of tech support. Read a day in the life of a PacBell Internet teir 2 tech support worker.

When I was a freshman at Cal, I had the opportunity to take a year off school to intern at Apple's Customer Assistance Center. The idea of $28K a year amazed my green self and I almost took it, but deep down a little voice that I don't listen to enough told me that I was more attracted by winning the competition (getting selected from the interview process), than by the actual opportunity. I still listen to, and sometimes battle, that little voice. Sometimes I simply can't understand it. Is it telling me that I shouldn't go to grad school, that the attraction is simply in trying to be accepted by Carnegie Mellon, or is it all about seeing what kind of position I could get at Quidnunc immediately after graduation? At least I get to listen to it ramble for a few more months as I compete for both.

Anyhow, I was going to write this one up yesterday, right after I read it in this week's East Bay Express, but I got sidetracked by classwork and before I got to it, I found someone else posted it on Slashdot, so forgive me if the link is a little slow. I'll try harder to bring you the cutting-edge stories before they hit the mainstream netpress.