Still unpacking, I found the small bound book I used to keep track of my expenses in Vienna a decade ago. Every day for over three months I wrote down every shilling I spent. Never before or since have I been so careful with my money.

Looking through it gives me a good idea of what I was doing on any particular day. Here’s my expenses for October 20. The units are in shillings, where 10 shilling = 1 dollar:

• Meinel (snack stuff) 30
• Falafel ( :) ) 25
• Trampoline!! 20
• Opera 20
• Almdudler 18

The only atypical expense was the $2 for the trampoline, which as I recall was on a floating barge over the Danube (we went back the next week, we had so much fun the first time). Opera tickets were standing room, and cost nearly as much as a glass of Almdudler, which is crazy Austrian ginger ale.

The book also covers the trip from Vienna to London. as my friends and I pushed through Europe, ending with a $5.50 order of nachos at the Chicago airport on January 11, 1996.

The first snow of the year! And, as can be seen, we got a temporary mailbox courtesy of the builders.

As of this writing we have a giant hole in the ground where the steps leading to our house used to be. The contractors who built our back porch are, I assume, formulating a plan as to how to turn said hole into a new flight of stairs. The biggest drawbacks so far have been no mail for the past four days and one very confused deliverywoman who finally made her way to our back door.

Technology has its scary moments. It seems that for some time, Xerox’s color laser printers have been embedding the time, date, and printer’s serial number on every page. Apparently this is supposed to stop counterfeiting, but it doesn’t take a great logical step to see that it’s rife for abuse. When the government starts amassing documents on groups that don’t align with their outlook, and those documents are tagged, well. Nothing to fear if you’re not guilty, right?

The EFF, my charity of choice, has more information here. They’ve decoded some of these codes and are working to find and decode others. They’re asking for money and/or printer samples, but I post this here mostly for awareness’ sake.

I did not create this image (though I did clean it up a bit); I found it as as newspaper clipping five or six years ago. I found it again in my own things when unpacking, and it’s been hanging on my fridge ever since. If anyone has an attribution for it, let me know, as I’d like to give proper credit.

Coming out of the haze of Human-Information and Human-Computer interaction, all I think is “this music had some serious usability issues.”

Working at the Diesel this morning to avoid the onset of stir-craze. Autumn snuck in during the past week of rain, and it’s just right. The air is wonderfully crisp, and the combination of the mellow cafe tunes and mug of chai is making the world feel fine.

But why am I more interested in getting my workspace together than working? This must be some sort of backlash from the brutal productivity of last week, this endless organizing, prepping, and priming.

The phrase “chillin’ like a villain” is coming to mind, and begs the question: do villains chill? Is there some point at time when, having double checked the spike traps, robot spiders, and death rays, they sit down with a cup of cocoa and a book before their plan springs into action? I think that would be a lot nicer than chillin’ like a hero, because they are always going to get interrupted in the middle of their snickerdoodle by some bank robbery or whatnot.

Somerville, MA

I love mugs. You’ll usually find me with a mug in my hand or at the ready, full of coffee or tea. There’s something comforting about them. I also love mugs because of what they represent; they are craft objects, honed to a traditional shape over the centuries. Mugs feel good and work well because over the years, all the stuff that doesn’t has been jettisoned in ceramic Darwinism.

Now, I like good mugs, and I also like to make fun of bad mugs. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of drinking from a stupid mug; glass mugs with metal handles (a part of ‘mugs with unusable handles’, mugs with no handles at all, and my least favorite, the giant mug with a teeny handle a huge aperture, resembling a soup bowl. Most mugs have the same aperture, and there’s a reason; it needs to be big enough to let our big homo sapiens schnoz into it, and no bigger. Anything larger than that invites the precious liquid inside to cool too quickly. If it’s smaller than that, it bumps into your nose. I have summarized my argument for proper mug aperture into the diagram below, complete with coffee swilling Frenchmen:

Handles have their own set of considerations besides not being made of conductive material. How easily do they let you pick up the mug? Can you even pick up the mug (stupid giant latte mug, I’m looking at you)? Is it a balancing operation where you are in danger of spilling? There are some cups that are made difficult to pick up or require extra concentration to properly wield. Sometimes this is on purpose, but sometimes this is because the designer was trying to be fancy and forgot about the main point of the object being designed.

This smacks of “break conventions because they are conventions,” a position that doesn’t get a lot of sympathy for me. When I was teaching music theory, we’d go through the conventions of 18th century voice leading (think Bach, then Bach again). No parallel fifths, resolve your leading tones, contrary motion. I explained that these conventions were pretty much made by looking at what Bach and friends did; following conventions sounds good, and breaking the conventions generally sounds bad. The clever students broke the rules, and guess what? Their progressions sounded bad.*

By way of conclusion, a) it’s not enough to be clever, you’ve got to be clever at the right time. Part of cleverness is figuring out what should be changed, and what shouldn’t; b), taking a moment to look into why things are the way there are adds appreciation to the simplest things, and informs cleverness (see item b); c)I like mugs enough to write a post about them.

*If there’s anything worse than a grumpy theory teacher, it’s a grumpy and angry theory teacher who just spilled scalding hot coffee on himself because he was using a stupid mug. It’s a bad idea!

I’m running the same course in two directions at once. One way, I’m working to get things “under my fingers,” as musicians say. Taking things I don’t know yet, learning them until I don’t have to think about them. Learning my craft better; they’ll be there when I need them.

The other way, I’m taking things that I’ve known for so long that I don’t even think about thinking about them, and trying to figure out the distinct steps I go through to perform that task. This is like my signature; at one point it was something made up of letters, but now it’s a gesture of the hand, indivisible.

There’s a soothing balance gained by engaging in both of these things at once, in slightly different areas. It keeps things fresh, like mental crop rotation.

Deadline met, Jeffrey relaxes. Or tries to, until the brain realizes it doesn’t have to be primed for fourteen hour days any more. It just can’t take a hint.

I’m reading up on usability, findability, other -abilities.

Cambridge, Mass

I rode my bicycle down to Davis Square this morning for a meeting, and had a hard time of it. I was pouring sweat by the time I got there, and very down on myself for spending so much time working at the computer this past week and falling so completely out of shape. The trip back to the apartment is mostly uphill, and I was practically dying by the time I got home. It’s not me, it’s the bike. Right? Something has to be wrong with the bike.

Yes indeed. Looking over things when I got inside, I found that my rear brake pad had been pressed tightly against one side of the wheel. The wheel wouldn’t rotate more than a few inches if I spun it with my hand, and I’d been riding with the extra resistance.

My legs hate me now.

A curious language phenomenon is the z-shift. We have “files” happily waiting for approval or filing or ignoring, but apply the z-shift and we have “filez,” something else entirely. “Wares” z-shifts to “warez”, and skills to “skillz.” Victims of the z-shift gain instant underworld cred, becoming more than a little dubious.

One might scoff at this as a travesty of language, but looked at in another way, it is quite useful; the z-shift adds a interpretive level, a trope of sorts. Thus wielded, we can create have lobbyistz, senatorz and cabinet memberz. Friendz, romanz, and countrymanz.

I’m making buttons for our shopping cart makeover. The vast majority of changes are underneath, but a few bits of polish on the UI are long overdue. The Polyphonic Spree are keeping me company today, having relieved Franz Ferdinand, who played all day yesterday as I integrated and refactored.

Beth came over and shared some chinese takeout with me last night, a most needed break, and some human contact as the Cartledge women are being a part of it in New York City. And for much of the rest of the evening I was haphazardly superimposing “rage face” onto various photographs, because it’s a wonderful transformation from mundane to ludicrous with just a few polygons.

Sometimes there’s nothing quite so exhilarating as a schedule.