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The personal web log of Mike Lee, a web information architect, and teacher working in New York City "I surf as much as I eat." curiouslee in...   Hiptop Nation Mirror Project Google Images The City Paper UMBC TechPort email me past monthly... 2000:10.11.12 2001:01.02.03.04.05.06 07.08. 09.10.11.12 2002:01.02.03.04.05.06 07.08.09.10.11.12
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Sunday, September 30, 2001
The onion special issue I love the infographic in the post-attack issue of The Onion. I also felt a healthy glow and smile from the rest of the funny articles. Saturday, September 29, 2001
A cathedral of books I wandered around The Baltimore Book Festival today, and after seeing nothing much of interest in the book piles, I made my annual visit to the Peabody Library with the fisheye lens in hand.  The tourguide called this a "cathedral" of books. Can you think of a more elegant way to store and display 250,000 books? This scene reminds me of the core of the mother ship in the special edition of Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  I composed a closer view of the iron-core support columns which are clad with fire-resistant mansonry. Unlike computer environments, I feel a kind of reassuring comfort when I'm surrounded by large bookshelves. This server room of another era exudes a timeless charm. 13 days Via Camworld, I arrived at the web site of Jonathan Corum, a New York type and web designer who has created 13 Days, one of the best personal photojournals on the attack. The photo series presents views of the neighborhood surrounding the attacks on a more unhurried, human scale. Friday, September 28, 2001
Fiber to the curb A couple workers from Verizon were doing routine maintenance in the cable chamber under 33rd Street in front of our house so I decided to poke the fisheye lens into the scene.  Here's the truck with ventilation hoses and safety equipment deployed.  Looking in one of the open manholes, you can see day-glo orange fiberoptic conduit tubes. Just under them are old 250-pair copper wire cables with bulging splices visible. The cluster of black hoses on the right are air hoses used to maintain positive air pressure in the copper splices to keep water out.  I've had samples of these kinds of cables for years to use in talks. On the left is a piece of fiberoptic cable inside a conduit. The black dot at lower left (which is about the size of a dime) silhouettes one of the 72 plastic coated glass strands. A single glass fiber can transmit something like 30,000 calls. In contrast, the 250-pair copper bundle on the right only carries that many calls. It's been agonizing to know that there's privately-used super-high bandwidth running right in front of my house. Here are a couple links on copper cables: History of Copper in Telecom Evolution of Telephone Cable [early history] Face code The prolific Phil Agre has posted a lengthy essay, entitled "Your Face Is Not a Barcode," that catalogs (and attempts to refute) the arguments for the growing use of bulk face recognition technology in public spaces. After September 11th, we're going to see a decline in objections to these kinds of technologies. Thursday, September 27, 2001
Daypop Top 40 I've been loving the new current events search engine Daypop. Every six hours, their server scans and updates its index of 3700 news and weblog sites. The index is kept back four weeks, and is perfect for filling gaps in your current events knowledge. Just this week, they've added the top 40 hot topics of the blogging community, duplicating to some degree the popular Blogdex. If you're starting to feel like your bookmarks are getting stale, these are great places to get lost in hyperspace again. Wednesday, September 26, 2001
The scream  Continuing my play with the iPix fisheye lens, I made my version of The Scream today as Sean Fenlon looked on. The image silently says it all... Tuesday, September 25, 2001
That darned content A Web Reference Production Graphics column by Wendy Peck introduces some basic ways to structure web page content for easier reading. A second column focuses on content balance and development. After all these years, only a few sites on the web get content right. Monday, September 24, 2001
Google Zeitgeist Buried in the Google press center is the monthly Zeitgeist feature, which tracks cultural trends in search terms. A special look at the week of September 11th is offered. Sunday, September 23, 2001
iPix lens play After over two years, I finally thought to try our Nikon fisheye lens on my camera. We normally use this lens to create frames to compile as 360 degree iPix images. I quickly realized that with this $199 lens screwed on the front of the Coolpix 950, I get a zoom lens that goes from an incredible 180 degree angle of view to a normal wide angle. While the possibilities are excellent, the big drawback to normal use is the seriously front-heavy lens design. If I stick with the 900 series cameras, I'm adding this lens to my X-mas list.  A full 180-view of my desk.  An extreme-wide close-up of our ethernet patch panel. More pix to come in the next few days as I wander ... Saturday, September 22, 2001
A call and a coke In Japan, a prototype service called C-mode uses an i-mode cell phone to buy Cokes from a vending machine. I assumed you would use the phone to send a wireless signal to the vending machine, but a coupon voucher is actually rendered on the phone's LCD screen and then scanned by a barcode reader built into the vending machine. Sighting 911  We had brunch today at Mamie's Cafe in Hamden. On my way out, I noticed some multi-layered symbolism in the entrance. Friday, September 21, 2001
Microminiature sculpture Friend Dianne turned me on to a book about the work of microminature sculpture artist Hagop Sandaldjian. Hagop died before a big retrospective of his work opened at The Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA. The Eye of the Needle is the show catalog and a retrospective look at 33 pieces from the life work of this amazing craftsperson.  Working in between heartbeats with custom tools under a microscope, Hagop spent hundreds of hours assembling miniature sculptures from bits of wax, fiber, glue and paint. The slight mis-directed breath or muscle spasm could destroy a piece in progress. In fact Hagop lost two Napoleons, and gave up his desperate searches on his workroom desk and floor.  Here's one of the more striking examples of his work. Wired has a review of the book from 1996, and Soundportraits has an audio interview of the founding director of the museum. Thursday, September 20, 2001
Designing baby faces Tonight I start a four week flexible studio class at MICA on designing user interfaces for mobile communication devices, or "baby faces." I believe this area of visual and information design has been ignored for too long by publishers and the trade press. Visual designers working in new media should be sensitized to issues related to pixel-level design on small LCD screens if for no other reason than the fact that bad interfaces and usability on cell phones can kill. In the coming year, vendors will gradually add more sophisticated web-based information feeds including graphics and animations, and design for mobile communicators should be a growing discipline. Elsewhere, Jakob Nielsen's current column once again states that mobile devices will soon be useful, and there's no better example than the role of cell phones in bringing people together during last week's attack. Imagine what we would have seen if cell phones around New York were equiped with digital video cameras like the ones planned for release in Japan. A best site? The local City Paper just gave this web log the Best Baltimore-Related Web Site category in its annual Best of Baltimore awards. I thought their review was very fair, but the award somewhat dubious as applied to this "sticky mixture" of content. Wednesday, September 19, 2001
Coping with infoglut: topic maps Topic Maps were, um, a hot topic at the recent AIIM Content Management Conference. They are a new ISO standard for describing knowledge structures and associating them with information resources. I'm reading a good non-technical introduction by Steve Pepper, an Information Architect at Infostream Corporation in Oslo, Norway. The paper is a 21 page PDF file. Caught up!!! Well, I'm finally caught up on this blog, and pushing a massive load of posts and articles out to fill the void from the July 28th onward. There's lots of good stuff below, so be sure to click on the August and September archive links. Hopefully, I can trickle little bits in every day or two. Monday, September 17, 2001
Back to work: taking inventory of life and inventorying web content The daze is fading a bit, but today we watch as the stock market and airlines are rocked. Just to get back on track with other interests, and since web site inventories are what I'm doing all week, here's an article about how one information architect does comprehensive web site content inventories. These should be standard practice when mirgrating exisiting content from one or more sites into a new web site or content management system. Sunday, September 16, 2001
Soaking in the sun and patriotism We took in this beautiful day at Fort McHenry, which is a 15 minute drive from home, and five minutes from the office.  At an unfurling of a replica of the Star Spangled Banner Flag, U.S. Park Service Historian Scott Sheads, talks about a simpler kind of war, and a purer form of patriotism. The image I made of the standard flag flown at the fort works great as a desktop wallpaper:  Here's the file at both 1024 x 768 (84k), and 800 x 600 (54k). Right-click on the link, and choose "save target" to transfer it to your hard drive. Saturday, September 15, 2001
Baltimore at arms We walked around the Harbor today to survey the changes that the current state of hightened security brought.  Concrete barricades block pedestrian paths around Baltimore's World Trade Center.  A policeman stands guard in front of the barricaded Baltimore Police Headquarters. These scenes are disturbing to me as I've always thought of Baltimore as the little wannabe town in the shadow of DC. That we have to worry about terrorist activity here is a sign of the gravity and magnitude of recent events. River view of the attack  Jim Rooney, a much-missed former student of mine, was on the ferry approaching the World Trade Center when the attack happened. Jim's web site has a picture gallery and personal story of his unusual perspective from the boat. The image thumbnail I show here illustrates the immense plume over the skyline. If you've ever been on this ferry, you'd understand the scale. He made it back to the Jersey shore OK. Also take a look at some of his pre-attack shots of the same ferry ride. Friday, September 14, 2001
Lights of rememberance  The normally trashed frat house down the street from our house showed some civic awareness tonight. A chilling account and some personal digital photos Photographer John Labriola gives his personal account of the evacuatation from the World Trade Center 2. What's amazing is the gallery of digital photos (the photos have been removed since this post) he took as his made to 50 minute journey down the stairwell. CNN is also offering an edited version of the images. Thursday, September 13, 2001
Our sign and symbols  Our flags at half mast ... I'm still dazed, even though I didn't personally lose anyone in the attacks. Wednesday, September 12, 2001
Protected meeting  You know things are very wrong when a Coast Guard Cutter stands watch over an evacuated Baltimore Harbor. Some of our managers are in a circle on the promenade trying to have a normal meeting. Clearing the skies USA Today has an interesting Flash animation with an FAA data visualization showing the unprecidented grounding of all civilian air traffic. Tuesday, September 11, 2001
Darkest day I was immobilized today from the moment one of our lead developers told me about a plane crashing into The World Trade Center as we walked into our building. Minutes after the first impact, we watched the attack unfold on our video screens. A couple of us were going to drive out to a client meeting, but cancelled that when we heard the Pentagon was under attack too. All the possible words to describe these incredible events will be used up today, so I'm making pictures for the next few days.  Our office lobby's video wall view of the NYC attack.  Others watch in our conference room. Monday, September 10, 2001
New atlas of cyberspace The Atlas of Cyberspace is a new book by the authors of Mapping Cyberspace. Apparently this book will compliment its more scholarly predecessor with more lavish illustrations. Amazon has it cataloged, but it's still on pre-order. Sunday, September 09, 2001
Military map symbols font Following up on my earlier post on symbols used by the military to represent the movements of personnel and equipment, I found a site that offers a free Truetype font of the symbol standard. Wednesday, September 05, 2001
Tuesday, September 04, 2001
The trouble with ubiquitous technology Here's an interesting back issue of the NetFuture newsletter on the trouble with ubiquitous computer technology. Saturday, September 01, 2001
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