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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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Wednesday, October 31, 2001
Workflow introduction Dealing with massive amounts of web site content eventually leads you to the issue of workflow. The Workflow Management Coalition offers this definition for workflow: "The automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules." There's also a meaty introduction to the topic in PDF format (24 pages, 365k). Tuesday, October 30, 2001
Hockney: masters used camera lucida Famed artist David Hockney has published a new book that throws out a controversial theory that the old master painters used the camera lucida to trace image compositions. Here's the Booksonline review, and another site has detailed instructions on camera lucida setup. Look at the instructions and decide for yourself if the masters would have bothered with the gadget. Monday, October 29, 2001
Terrorist network visualization Network visualization guru Valdis Krebs is at it again with this diagram of the network of 19 terrorists involved in the 9-11 attacks. He also describes the social network analysis methods used to create the diagram. I imagine there are even higher tech visualizations on huge screens in super-secret CIA command centers. PopTech! 2001 video archives  Streaming video archives of the recent PopTech! conference are now online. The conference speakers and attendees are a who's who of tech glitterati. So far I've listened to the John Perry Barlow session, and another on "When Everyone Goes Mobile." If you're on broadband, it's worth running these in the background while you do other work. Sunday, October 28, 2001
A flight of fancy under toy balloons The BBC reports on a man who lashed 600 toy balloons together and took flight under them to reach a record-breaking 11,000 feet. I love these kinds of backyard scientist stories. I find surfing around that there's a site dedicated to the art and science of cluster ballooning. This has come a long way from the plight of Larry Walters who was probably the first to pull this stunt back in the '80s. He was fined by the FAA, and a few years later committed suicide. Son of pumpkin  In this second pumpkin carving effort, I ended up with a cheery, patriotic (or Elton-like) face. In a nod to these dark times, I see the Islamic crescent and star when I tilt my head to the left. Saturday, October 27, 2001
Mossberg on the last 10 years of consumer electronics In his Tenth Anniversary Personal Technology column, The Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg marvels at how far consumer technology has progressed over the years, and at how some things haven't changed. Thursday, October 25, 2001
Romancing the box My wife opened the first of the two Audreys we ordered, and commented on the nicely designed packaging and documentation. So I photographed the unpacking of the second one a couple days later to use in a future talk about OOBE or Out-of-Box Experience. OOBE (not to be confused with Out-of-Body Experience) as it might apply to a computer product is the holistic coordination of packaging design, product component packing, instruction manuals, and user interface to provide a friendly and informative introduction to a newly purchased product. IBM has a great web site on OOBE. It was worth the $89 just to have a well developed OOBE artifact. Having a color touch screen web surfing terminal for that price is awesome too. Here are a few photos from the undressing of Audrey:  Audrey's real box was protected by a plain corrugated cardboard box unlike my Powerbook which arrived in a box with scuffed-up color graphics and covered with shipping labels. The plastic handle on top made it easy to pull the inner box out.  About the only flub along this process was figuring out which flap to open first. It's labeled in faint purple-on-purple lettering, and sealed with a transparent tape dot. My wife didn't open the correct flap, and her Audrey fell out into her lap.  Opened correctly, Audrey's box presents a pleasing silver-framed panorama of the instruction manual and parts inventory.  I liked how the foam packing clearly displayed the small parts around the Audrey. You can see the clear plastic stylus is right up front, and following counter-clockwise, you see the batteries for the wireless keyboard, the keyboard itself, and the AC adapter. I've unpacked many a gadget only to find the batteries hidden in the bottom of the box.  The Audrey came together pretty quickly and easily. She was designed to boot up as soon as she had AC power, and a welcome screen provided callouts for all the buttons around the screen. The software set-up process was progressively revealed in a series of well-designed screens, and the printed manual showed the same steps with more detailed narrative. Within five minutes I was surfing the web on our office LAN.  Here's just one of many beautiful spreads from the over-sized instruction manual. Soothing neutral and pastel color tints were used throughout to highlight the simplified photos and graphics. If you take a look at IBM's Elements of OOBE design, it's obvious that IDEO, the industrial design firm, followed this or a similar methodology almost to the letter. Lately, I've been thinking about how little OOBE there is in web development services. Sure, customers get manuals and training, but we need to make the unveiling of web sites more enjoyable experience. Excellent OOBE didn't save Audrey from a market that didn't need a product like this at a price of $499. The internet appliances market has cooled in the last year, and it will be a while before we see something like Audrey. For some more background, see ExtremeTech's Internet Appliances Survey. Wednesday, October 24, 2001
Selling information architecture I spent the last couple days doing information architecture talks to our entire company. My warm-up was a showing at DCIA's deliverables night of my information architecture blueprint document prepared for The National Academy of Public Administration, along with a 17-foot-long scroll illustrating what 14,000 web pages looks like. The next day, with copies of the same deliverables to distribute, I spoke to our project managers, sales people and app developers in separate sessions. I probably spoke directly to about 50 people total. It was very valuable to get feedback from everyone, and they all agreed that IA is essential to web development. Now we just have to make clients understand that. More in a later blog post after I write up my feedback for internal circulation. Tuesday, October 23, 2001
Monday, October 22, 2001
The news must go on  I heard on NPR Friday that despite anthrax attacks and its sister papers reporting more hard news, the Weekly World News rolled out an editorially consistent headline. Sunday, October 21, 2001
Artbeats: the reopening of The Walters Yet another beautiful day arrived today, so while Amy decided to stay home to bake stuff, I went downtown to take in Artbeats, the reopening celebrations at The Walters Art Museum. The museum has been closed for three years for a $24 million renovation. The area around Baltimore's Washington Monument was enlivened by two days of cultural displays, street performances and concerts. I spent the most time at The Society for Creative Anachronism's jewelry making demo. Artists demonstrated bead-making, specifically in the Viking style.  Shortly after leaving a rod of glass stock, a dollip of molten glass hugs a piece of wire called a mandrel.  The bead is rolled while still soft over a metal plate to create the ridges of this "combed" style.  Finished Viking beads shown about 2x actual size. I went into the museum next to take a quick look at how they've remodeled the interior.  The showpiece of the renovation is a four-story spiral staircase enclosed in a glass lobby which is the result of scooping 200 tons of concrete out of the old entrance.  Inside, they've re-designed all the exhibits, and added some new galleries. But this statue seems to say "talk to the hand."  The new manuscript room debuts with the show Expanding World Views: A Millenium of Maps. One of the most interesting artifacts is this 15th century astronomy book created for the German King Charles V. The concentric checker-patterned rings are actually discs cut out of paper called volvelles functioning as a circular calculator that presents dates of the phases of the Moon. After a quick walk through some of the other galleries, I headed back out to see the end of the live entertainment.  The Gospel Grand Finale featured The Bethel AME Church Choir dressed in a sea of purple singing spirit-cleansing songs. Saturday, October 20, 2001
This farm land is home land We took a ride on this gorgeous day up to The Stahl Family Farm outside of Flemington, NJ to join in a pumkin-carving party and reunion with a former student, Jenna Stahl. Jenna took my web design class back in 1995, and is now in charge of the art department of Nordstrom.com. The farm is run by her dad and two sisters.  This is the Stahl farmhouse. You can easily understand how this place would leave deep memories of the comforts of home.  Jenna chows down on a helping from her big batch of corn chowder.  After sunset, Jenna and I judged the 30+ pumpkins giving recognition in a bunch of categories. Jenna's sister Jess won best overall with a meticulously planned stars and stripes-themed masterpiece.  Amy's pumpkin won the "most unique" category. Friday, October 19, 2001
Another spoke in Apple's "digital hub?" Apple has alerted the media that it will release some kind of new non-Mac device Tuesday morning at 10am. They are calling it a "breakthrough." Speculation is flying on what it will be as no information has leaked out. Here's a good analysis of Apple's Digital Hub strategy. Another article observes that smaller consumer electronics products might be the answer to the slump in PC sales. Thursday, October 18, 2001
New syd mead site Syd Mead, the legendary industrial designer and "visual futurist" who worked on Blade Runner, has redesigned his site and released a new monograph of his work titled Sentury. I've admired his work since I was introduced to it during an internship at The National Air and Space Museum in 1977. Even the work from that time retains a fresh, futuristic look. Here's a nice fan site with some scans of Syd's work. This powder could set you off I remember from the days I worked in print design going to inspections of jobs as they came off the press. To keep sheets with wet ink from sticking to each other as the cut sheets stack up, a series of nozzles blow a starch or mineral powder called anti-set-off powder all over the surface. Most of it falls off in the bindery, but once in a while you get a sheet with a blob of it, or a thin residue. I wonder if this will freak people out now because of the anthrax attacks. 11:45pm: Amazing! I've been thinking about set-off powder for a couple days and tonight I stumble into a Salon story about a woman in San Francisco who had white powder drop into her lap when she opened the New York Times Magazine. A footnote to the article has a response from RR Donelly & Sons about the powder. Wednesday, October 17, 2001
Another beautiful map of the internet To compliment the now classic Peacock maps poster of the Internet, 3Design has released a map of 25,000 lines running between 7,000 network nodes and 54 major world cities. I'm placing my order this week! Tuesday, October 16, 2001
Storm squall  The massive squall line of a cold front rolled across the Inner Harbor tonight. While it didn't pay off with a heavy storm, the cloud convection patterns were otherworldly. Monday, October 15, 2001
Greetings from Audrey  ...but not from mine! Ours are arriving tomorrow. Adam also sent a voice email greeting from Audrey's built-in e-mail client. IDEO's site still has a case history and some clearer photos of the product. Sunday, October 14, 2001
Low-rez pumpkin  Inspiration or desperation? I was the last to carve a pumpkin at Marcie and Sean's party, so I came up with this pixelated pumpkin face. It's also lit from inside with cyalume glow-sticks. Xenu Linksleuth Xenu Linksleuth is a zippy little utility for Windows that checks links internally and externally on an entire site or sub-directory. It has URL path filtering, and can combine different hosts into one scan/report. It can check sites that are live on the web or local on your hard drive or LAN share. Best of all--it's free. The utility will create a printable HTML report (albeit with an ad banner), and more importantly, it can save a tab-separated text file for import into Access or Excel. You can to use this text file to create web site page inventories for production purposes. I wouldn't run the scan on huge web sites, but it would be extremely useful to do checks on medium to small sites and sub-directories. A scan of NEA.org's 18,000 page site took several hours. The HTML report that it generates also answers the common sales estimating question of how many pages there are on a static site. There are a few gotchas: it doesn't follow Javascript or DHTML links, it can't get into password protected pages, and it can't find orphaned pages hidden in directories. Please read the docs and review all the preferences before scanning. Xenu Site Xenu Download Page A review of Xenu at The University of Washington site Saturday, October 13, 2001
Pictoplasma  Pictoplasma is a collection of over 2800 contemporary character designs from 306 artists, designers and companies world wide collected on a web exhibition site and as a book. This came via Tricks and Trinkets, which I need to visit more often. Friday, October 12, 2001
Chunky human interfaces Interface Mania is starting a good series of articles to introduce software developers to good user interface design practices. The "chunk" metaphor relates to grouping or clustering menu commands in a logical way so users aren't overwhelmed by long lists of tasks. Thursday, October 11, 2001
Hacking audrey  Adam e-mailed to alert me that the discontinued 3COM Audrey, mentioned here a year ago, has been hacked. More exciting is that fact that Tiger Direct is selling them for $89! My wife beat me to it and ordered two. Wednesday, October 10, 2001
Tuesday, October 09, 2001
10,000 writes A few days ago, my digital camera wrote its 10,000th image to the flash card after a year of continuous use. That's the equivalent of 277 rolls of film which would have run about $3500 in transparency film and processing, plus trips to the photo lab. There are many photographers who have a religeous devotion to film, but the Nikon Coolpix 950 allows me to fit in imagemaking at zero material cost as I move through my work day. I can evaluate image series and composition on my laptop almost immediately, and share the images via the Internet. Plus after 10 years of using Photoshop, I can perform any kind of traditional "darkroom" manipulation. All the images on this blog are digitally enhanced with the same care I would have applied in a chemical darkroom. I archive my images twice a month on multiple CD-ROMs. Many of my casual snapshots are compiled into self-running computer slideshows that I mail or give out to friends. What's not to like? Well there are many annoying quirks in digital cameras which I will save for a rant in the near future. Mapping black death  Cropped in from a large image in a PDF file, and reversed in Photoshop for effect, this new genome map of Yersinia Pestis, otherwise known as the bubonic plague or "black death," catalogs the raw functionality of this bug in an almost visually pleasing way. Wired has a circular representation of all the data, along with some information on the research effort. 3,000 people a year still die horribly from this disease, and now The New York Times is reporting on a paper by two scientists from the University of Liverpool who believe that a hemorrhagic (even the word hemorrhagic creeps me out) virus, like Ebola, caused the 25 million deaths in the 1300s. That outbreak is distant history, and the annual cases are out of our view, but it's scary to hear that an outbreak of one of these nasties is happening right now to Afghan refugees coming into Pakistan. Monday, October 08, 2001
The heart of photojournalism The Digital Journalist has just posted a massive special issue on the photo coverage of the attacks. The photo galleries are interspersed with personal stories of the photojournalists who rushed to the scene. I enjoyed Bill Pierce's random thoughts, and this image by Jim Graham of a bird in flight over the new New York skyline is especially powerful. Beware of the horrific images of people jumping from the towers if that kind of stuff gets to you. Aurora dazzlus Today's Astronomy Picture of last week's aurora is pretty nice, but a few clicks past at Spaceweather, I came to the incredible images of Phil Hoffman. Phil has a gallery posted at PictureTrail. This frame of a spiral of glowing whorls is hauntingly beautiful. It probably lasted just long enough to make the 15 second time exposure. Look at the rest of his work for a while and you'll be reminded that the universe doesn't care about our human squabbles. Sunday, October 07, 2001
The great 8  As the town prepared for Cal Ripken's last game Saturday night, I took this shot of the Legg Mason building, which proudly displays Cal's soon-to-be retired number. Saturday, October 06, 2001
Escape to New York  I stayed up late Saturday night veg-ing out on TNT's New York City romance movies. The first was Sleepless in Seattle, and since we had the DVD, we played that instead. Towards the end of the film, Meg Ryan sees this fanciful image of the Empire State Building as a "sign" to go meet Tom Hanks on the observation deck. The image captures New York's charm with graphic simplicity. I can't wait to get back up there now that fall's here. Preserving online news about the attack Unlike print media, the web is ephemeral and sites that are up now can disappear at random for a variety of reasons. As the Web reached a new level of importance in delivering news in the post-attack days, people have begun projects to preserve web pages for historians. Interactive Publishing of Switzerland has compiled a massive screenshot gallery of news-oriented web pages from the day and days after the attack. Take a look at the non sequitur page from The Irish Times and the blunt headline from The Village Voice. The screenshots are in PNG format and will require a recent web browser or QuickTime. At Wired, I see that The Internet Archive and The Library of Congress are starting a similar, larger-scale project to preserve attack-related web pages. Thursday, October 04, 2001
Flag men  It's interesting to see that the men offering to squeegee your windshield on New York Avenue in D.C. have become or been replaced by flag peddlers. Wednesday, October 03, 2001
NOAA Remote sensing of the WTC site .  Via Follow Me Here, one of my new favorite blogs, comes this amazing radar map of ground zero produced by NOAA. The data informs the rescue efforts by providing extremely accurate elevation data so that engineers can keep track of where they are above sea level to avoid flooding the basements and tunnels as they dig. A press release at NOAA provides more background. Mobile devices cause involuntary drooling Nooper has posted a batch of images from The Createc Show in Japan. The mobile devices and prototypes they show always cause involuntary drooling here. An added bonus are the galleries of images taken by the new Panasonic 3G "FOMA" phone which has a built-in digital camera. The pix we emailed back to co-workers from the phone! Tuesday, October 02, 2001
From fly to fly  I think I've been on a kick showing orifaces and cavities lately. Here's another: I always thought it was an urban-legend that painting a picture of a fly in a urinal increases aiming accuracy by 80%. In John Cato's book User-Centered Web Design, I finally found this photo. Monday, October 01, 2001
This blog at one year Here I am after a year of almost continuous web log posting. I still have no driving need to make this more than just my personal notebook and photojournal, but some have brought up the utility of describing more of what I do on an "about" page. I'll work on that. Besides searching for elegant examples of information visualization, I continue to have an interest in things macro and micro, and the human signals of life in between. Besides the links, and bits of observation, people enjoy the photography the most, so I'm going to present more imagery in a more organized, bandwidth-friendly way. In the coming year, I'm going to work to grow my art to better balance my activities in technology and commerce. And it will all be documented here.
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