January 2008
Dear 2007: You were a stupid, stupid year. I just thought you should know that.
December 2007
Links for 2007-12-30 [del.icio.us] →
Practical Guide to Controlled Experiments on the Web: Listen to Your Customers not to the HiPPO
Stuck in the Tampa airport for the next 8 hours, but I have an electric outlet and free wi-fi so I don’t even care. I am so easy to placate.
“In sports, the only thing a player or coach can truly control is effort. The...”
– Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and serial entrepreneur
My top 10 albums of 2007 (sort of)
I thought about making a list of my favorite albums this year, but I don’t want to figure out what I loved this year that was actually released in 2007, and what was released earlier and I just discovered this year. So here is a list of my top 10 most-listened to albums for the year according to last.fm:
Modest Mouse – We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank
Wilco – Sky...
Note to self: do not ever try and fly with a barely expired drivers license again
My hair is now shorter than it has been in over 6 years
“I don’t understand why the whole UX world isn’t awash in skepticism over an OS...”
– Christopher Fahey, co-founder of Behavior on the design of the “One Laptop Per Child” project
Blog Archive Visualization →
Innovative archive visualization on the Death by Architecture blog. It gives a good sense about what is going over time.
Design - a web development tool →
“Design is a suite of web-design and development assistive tools which can be utilised on any web-page. Encompassing utilities for grid layout, measurement and alignment, Design is a uniquely powerful JavaScript bookmarklet.”
Writing upside down with my new Space Pen - thanks Josh!
Best Blogs of 2007 That You (Maybe) Aren't Reading →
Don’t have enough good stuff to read on the Internet? Now you do.
“Uniforms are special. They serve as the primary bond between fan and team....”
– Paul Lucas, in the best defense against sports uniform logo-creep ever
Displaying product review scores →
Summize has a nice way of showing how people feel about a particular product. I couldn’t capture them, but the mouseover tooltips are a nice touch. The bottom rating is “wretched.”
How on earth did I become addicted to E? (the TV network, not the drug)
“There are plenty of arguments in favor of creating user-friendly enterprise...”
– Nick Bradbury, creator of my three favorite Windows applications ever
I Think You're Fat →
After reading this article about a month ago, I vowed to start practicing “Radical Honesty” (in contrast to my normal practice of “Extreme Aversion and Passive Aggressiveness”). I decided that I’d start on my birthday, which gave me a couple of weeks to prepare myself. Within two hours of starting the experiment I was back to my normal, cowardly self. Still, I...
Amazed at how much longer my new macbook pro battery lasts than the defective one I had
WatchRun Lola Run Lola Run Lola Run Lola Run (via Vimeo)
“There’s no better call for minimalist designs than the recent infestation...”
– 7 Critical Considerations for Designing Effective Applications, Part II
I don’t have many natural talents, but I drive better in the snow than almost anyone.
Instead of going to the Iron & Wine concert, I stayed home and watched “Teen Wolf Too” tonight. What is wrong with me?
Pillage The Village →
Flash game where you crush and throw villagers.
“I think the inclusion of enemies like ninjas, robots, arabs or nazis could have...”
– Commenter in a post about Passage. Have you played it yet? You really should.
Links for 2007-12-06 [del.icio.us] →
flot
Flot is a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery. It produces graphical plots of arbitrary datasets on-the-fly client-side.
Datejs
Super clean javascript library to parse user-submitted dates
tagthe.net
API that creates tags from any text or URL
GeoNames
Impressive web service API that creates geolocations from text inputs.
Songza →
Songza (designed by humanized) is a web-based mp3 browser that aggregates music from YouTube. The navigation is unique, although I don’t know if I really care for it. There is a discussion about the UI at IxDA.
Feeling like I might be on the verge of a giant Talking Heads kick
Harvest first-run screen →
The dashboard you come to right after you create an account in Harvest.