Monday, January 18th, 2010
it’s finally started to rain here in Sonoma County. good rain. the kind that begins early in the morning.… and ends in April.
Rain in wine country is all about timing. too early and there’s mold, too late and there’s ice. but this year it all came at the right time. grapes are off the vine, and the autumn-like colors washing willingly down stormdrains to the sea.
for me it’s a return to childhood and puddles and birch trees shivering and shimmering guiding late night walks through fields lit only by moonlight and imagination.
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
I’m a big fan of the photographer Walker Evans. A piece of his biography points to a period that he worked for the Resettlement Agency during the Great Depression. His job was to document small-town life in America, and to demonstrate how the federal government was attempting to improve the lives of rural communities during the Depression. Evans was less converned with the ideological agenda or the suggested itineraries and instead answered a personal need to expose the essence of American life from the simple and the ordinary.
When I look at some of his work I’m struck by the lack of ‘ordinary’. And the more time I spend digging through some of his less seen work, I feel a closeness to the period that I didn’t have before.
Maybe it’s because I’m a journalistic photographer, and a portraitist, so I experience the images from both sides of the lens. In particular I sense Evans seeing the exact meeting point between the things that you see every day, and the extraordinary.
That makes me think of our current economy, the talk of the “next Great Depression”, and the affect that it has on ordinary people. Where are the Walker Evans of today? Who is measuring the change through the affect it has on Americans? We want to think of populations as numbers, and friends as people, but as the world continues to shrink do we begin to see people differently?
Does a man selling leather belts in Pisa Italy have an impact on our economy?
I think so.
I think that it is through these kind of images that we measure ourselves, as a country. When I read about 1 in 50 American children being homeless, I realize that others may need to see that in order for it to be real. I understand that as big as we are as a nation, the measure of our people occurs over fences, at little league games, and coffee shops everywhere. Where are the Walker Evans of our day? What have they pointed their lenses at?
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
This is a Novena from Mother Theresa that started in 1952.
It has never been broken. Within 48 hours send 20 copies (Or as many as you can - God does know if you don’t have 20 people to send it to.)
I received that in an email this morning. Kinda heavy, first thing in the morning like that. I mean that kind of responsibility… So if I get this right, I have somewhere around two days (Is that from the sending or when I opened the message I wonder…?) to send this to as many people as I know. But now I’m a little worried about that last part - God knows if I don’t have 20 people to send it to. Damn. (No pun intended) Can he actually read my contact list?
I mean I have a lot of contacts in that list, some I haven’t communicated with in years; others I only have professional relationships with, and I don’t think I want to spam them with a chain-hail-Mary!
Do you think that God knows the difference? Will I get a break if I send it to 10 friends and family, but skip sending it to my boss and that guy I bought the Giants tickets from on Craigslist? This thing started in 1952 for chrissakes, I don’t want to be the guy who screwed it up!
So as I’m sitting here contemplating whether God knows the difference between my personal and professional relationships I’m struck with the question “Does it matter?” Does God conclude that everyone could use a little salvation? And who am I to stop God from doing his thing on the guy from Craigslist, maybe he needs it.
And what does it mean if God can check my contacts and calendar? Does He/She know that when I blocked off all of Thursday as ‘heads down on a project X’ it was so I wouldn’t get dragged into endless/needless meetings again?! And then I’m thinking how he feels about the whole ticket scalping on Craigslist thing. Jeez.
I suppose at the end of the day God can find a way to work around me. He/She has to have better judgment than to put this critical dependency on ME, Right?!
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
Someone shot at the bus I was riding in yesterday.
It hit the window, about 10 feet up, shattering the glass. Nobody was hurt directly, one guy got sprayed with glass. As the bus waited for the CHP to come on board and question everyone I started to think about randomness.
The CHP said that they think there were some kids on the hill adjacent to the freeway playing with a .22 rifle. Screwing around. Randomly shooting at big fast things that must have seemed a challenge at that moment. Only I was ON that bus.
So as I mentioned it to a couple of people it’s the randomness that scares them the most. The idea that kids shoot at each other over turf wars or the color of their shirt or the mistaken glance of a gang hand signal… that seems somehow to shelter most people from the risk. But randomness.. that’s grounds for freaking out.
If you think about it, it’s the presumed state of obscurity that protects most of us. Whether it’s a drive-by shooting, the collapse of a building hit by a plane, or the burning down of your home while you’re asleep, we all feel somehow that our anonymity is the separation between likelihood and improbability.
I was seeing a psychologist for a while after my mom died and he presented me with the notion of possible versus probable - that people that are suffering from some forms of anxiety have problems differentiating the two. That made sense to me, and I found it helpful when feeling generalized anxiety. And what’s more, it left me feeling kinda safe after what happened yesterday.
The possibility of anyone getting shot, or being in a building when it collapses - these things happen to people. Other people. And randomness gives us some protection from the likelihood of it happening to us. It isn’t likely that you are going to be shot on your way home, but it does happen.
Will it ever happen to me again? It’s possible. Just not probable.
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
So I’m working on a little project for Microsoft, when I’m asked to provide a faceted search element to a content portal. Sure, sounds great, right?
Faceted search is a relatively new approach to a relatively old problem, where typical search paradigms start to break down. You’ve seen them most often on airline ticketing interfaces. Here’s an example from Kayak.com:
Kayak has what I consider to be one of the best faceted search controls out there. I’m only showing the top part of it here, but even in this you can see how useful it would be. This interface appears after you have searched for a flight; In my case from Oakland to Seattle. From this result set I’m able to adjust the parameters that make this flight best for me. And the interface affords me that ability by previewing the outcome of my choices, right alongside the selectors to modify those choices. Sweet!
Notice how I can quickly tell that there’s actually NO benefit from my accepting more stops, but if I want to use American Airlines for my mileage program, it’s (only) going to cost me about 9 bucks more.
Some of the other controls more directly affect the results (not shown), like the flight times scrubber, and the checkboxes next to the airlines selector.
All in all, this makes the job of tuning results an intuitive and informed process. Good Stuff! But why does this work so well? And when might it not work as well?
Faceted search works by providing the user with the ‘facets’, or characteristics of the information objects. With flight information this includes some obvious things like airports, dates, and number of stops, and also some things that you may have thought about searching for, but are a pain to try to build or modify your query for, like multiple airlines, departure times, or neighboring airports.
So for faceted search to work, you have to know your data pretty well. You have to provide the user with the tools to do the thinking, without doing the thinking for them.
I think that this is where us information architects and usability designers can (or can’t) help the user the most. Dumping a table of results on them isn’t really doing them a favor. But providing them with the ability to work the data - that’s value added.
So the thing I’m working on for Microsoft was challenging to make useful using this approach. Further complicating things is the lack of familiarity with what faceted search actually is. So in looking at the content metadata for this project it became clear that there wasn’t much to facet. In fact, there were initially only two characteristics of the information - audience and product. (If you’re familiar with MSDN and TechNet, you are familiar with this problem already).
So in order to make it easier for the user to find the specific thing that they are looking for we need to do some thinking ahead… If a user searches for SQL Server, they are going to get a pretty big dump of results. How can I facet that result set to make it useful to the user? Given that this is a content portal, media metadata seems obvious, like media file type and duration.
But taking it a step further, couldn’t we also prospect some of the existing data, and what we know about the bigger problem, into a more fruitful exchange? In this example - SQL Server - the data in the result set itself has some interesting characteristics - like version numbers, content creator, and abstract.
To make the faceted search interface optimal it should look at the similarities and differences in the data, and organically adapt its facets to the results. If in our example the file names include terms like “SQL Server 2000″, and “SQL Server 2005″, shouldn’t we be smart enough to pick off that information as a facet of the data? Wouldn’t it be incredibly useful if the search interface could tell that there was a thing called duration, and that the numbers that fall under that characteristic or attribute range from 30 minutes to 90 minutes, so here’s a scrubber that lets you adjust the duration parameters f your search?
I believe that an organically generated faceted search is probably going to happen. Imagine mashing Google to facet ANY result set - you search for 94101 restaurants - it sniffs the data set and finds that most of the results are using terms like Style, Price, Ambiance, and Quality… Sweet, just stick those off to the side and give me some scrubbers to play with them, and you’ve made me more aware and in control than ever before.
Search for Coffee Table, and the result set is littered with size, style, color, material, manufacturer, shipping location (and more). Perfect, just give me some way of controlling those parameters, and you’ve made this not only easier, but you’ve also taught me something about the information I’m seeking.
That’s useful.