Shortlog - a log of everyday things

2010-09-21

Today was pretty great. Of interest:

• I got to play psychologist, observing other people and how they interacted and communicated when making junk prototypes, then report on my observations
• Upon senior advice, I ordered massive amounts (15 people's worth) of sushi for BiD lunch. This week we're preparing papers for submission to CHI, the premier conference in Human-Computer Interaction. Since about 12 people showed, I got a giant lunch and sizable mid-afternoon snack.
• I also got to give real, detailed, tangible experience feedback to Wes, my labmate who ran the study I recently participated in, for his CHI submission.
• My CMOS battery for my desktop arrived in the mail (yes, the one that was cheaper to order on Amazon than buy from the local Safeway)
• I went to a great talk on Design. I met Alice Agogino, a professor at Berkeley who helped design Computer Software Engineer Barbie; Ame Elliott, an IDEO human factors specialist; and "Jofish" Kaye of Nokia Research Center Palo Alto. Also, there were CupKates.

I did wind up spending over 12 hours on campus today, though, which was tiring.

UPDATE: bonus cool thing of the day: Jofish wrote a paper that includes a graphic (Figure 7) that I saw as a 7-foot tall poster on Julia Grace's door when working at IBM this summer. You too can have such a poster.

In other news, I'd like to get around to writing an Atom/RSS feed for my blog. Spec-reading is in progress, and I'm limiting the features I'm implementing to things I can do that require no server state information that is not provided by either the text file backend or the filesystem upon which it sits. This may make proper UUIDs impossible, since the only way I can think of to generate the same UUID for an entry is to hash it, which has the problem of changing in value should the contents change. And just hashing the file timestamp or something also is a bad idea, in my opinion - too easy to wind up with a collision somewhere if someone else does the same. An interesting problem.