After a brief hiatus–hey, I got a 10 month old uber-boy baby, two jobs and a wife– HTB is back with this week’s Friday Night Culture Jam. This is one of my favorite songs and I want to share it. This also helps me share Deezer with you too. Deezer is a music site that’s a mix between Pandora and Last.fm. I’m still checking it out and will tell you more later.
For now, enjoy Nightlights by the Polyphonics.
In my day job I’m a Business Analyst who specializes in application design and usability. So I’m always curious about how people interact with the things in their daily lives and whether those things are well designed or should be thrown into a pit and never see the light of day again.
Over the fourth of July holiday I saw one of the most frightfully designed kitchen appliances that I’ve seen–my mother-in-law’s microwave oven.
Everyone knows from experience the process of cooking with a microwave oven looks like the following:
Simple, right?
Continue reading ‘Everyday Usability: the Silly Microwave Oven’
In just a few days version 2 of the iPhone comes out and man oh man do I have a case of phone envy. I’ve been sitting around annoyed that I spent about $400 on a T-Mobile Wing with Windows Mobile last year and with a new baby boy, I just can’t drop the money to have my iPhone.
So, what’s a guy to do? PIMP HIS PHONE! I’m going to tell you some tricks that I used to get a bit more mileage out of my phone and hopefully help you reduce your iPhone envy.
(Many of these tricks require an unlimited data plan on your phone.)
Continue reading ‘Teach Your Phone a Few New Tricks to Reduce Your iPhone Envy.’
There’s nothing that fires me up more than someone looking at something from a completely different angle and challenging my assumptions about it. This talk from the TED Conference given by Steven Levitt threw me for a loop.
Why should you listen to this guy?
First, because he’s the award winning economist who co-wrote the New York Times Bestseller Freakonomics. And secondly, because he’s about to tell you that everything you think you know about child car seats is wrong.
Just to be clear, I’m neither advocating or denouncing his findings, but I think you should have this information. Especially if you’re a parent like me.
Oh yeah baby. Shatner again. I don’t know when I became such a fan of Shatner, but everyone should love this. This is better than peanut butter and jelly.
From the late 80’s these girls popped up while I was going to school in Paris. I love them because they always look like they’re singing the music phonetically and totally bored out of their skulls. That’s what makes them great. Enjoy.
My wife Cheryl and I were sitting in our living room talking about our family’s blog which we made expressly to keep in contact with our friends and family who are spread out all over the globe.
To varying degrees people are more or less reading it. Mostly less.
It could be that we’re just boring and that our friends and family don’t really care about our lives, but we noticed an interesting pattern.
People will call sometimes to find out what we’re doing and the conversations can go on for quite a while. In fact, recently a friend of Cheryl’s called to find out how she was. She’d just had surgery, but her friend didn’t have a clue about it even though we posted the news prominently on the blog. So our first question was, "didn’t you see it on the blog?" And he said "I don’t have time to check the blog."
Yet that same person is willing to talk to us on the phone for way longer than it would take to just scan the blog to see what’s going on.
My wife and I couldn’t understand why someone who didn’t have 5 minutes out of their day to just look at a web site had an hour or two to talk to us over the phone. We didn’t have that kind of time and we believed that we were being efficient by creating a feed of information that people could come to on their own terms. Some were doing exactly that. Others weren’t.
So we wondered if people tended to prioritize their personal styles of communication over what might seem to be logical or efficient and why. What affect does the channel itself have on the communicator and how does his or her preference of channel impact the message.
From our conversations came this model for how these communications may work.
I want to share with you the details of this model of communication which I believe might be useful in looking at social networking, blogs, texting, instant messaging and many forms of communication that we use to get through our day to day lives in the Internet age.
I am going to do this as a series. Otherwise you’d have to wait quite a while before you get any of it at all.
Next we’ll take a look at the problem in a more down to earth way.
I found this gizmo that is a timeline of Internet memes.
What is an Internet meme you might ask?
At its most basic, an Internet meme is simply the propagation of a digital file or hyperlink from one person to others using methods available through the Internet (for example, email, blogs, social networking sites, instant messaging, etc.). The content often consists of a saying or joke, a rumor, an altered or original image, a complete website, a video clip or animation, or an offbeat news story, among many other possibilities. An Internet meme may stay the same or may evolve over time, by chance or through commentary, imitations, and parody versions, or even by collecting news accounts about itself. Internet memes have a tendency to evolve and spread extremely quickly, sometimes going in and out of popularity in a matter of days. They are spread organically, voluntarily, peer to peer, rather than by compulsion, predetermined path, or completely automated means.
Who remembers "All Your Base Are Belong to Us?", "Chocolate Rain?", "Rickrolling?"
Missing from the list?
I’m actually kind of surprised to not see Admiral Ackbar’s "it’s a trap" which appeared heavily on Fark. We also appear to be missing the infamous "kitty cat dance."
This phenomenon is very interesting and I am frequently surprised at my friends and colleagues who are unfamiliar with even a few of the major Internet memes that have occurred over the past decade.
From this I have learned that there are three groups of people in the world–
Of course, there are also those who don’t even have a connection, but we’re not really talking about them for the moment.
In any case, this is the truest form of "viral" media.
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Aug | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | |||||
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
| 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 |
| 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
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