Meme-Tagged  Thanks to Joe, I've been tagged. So, why not? It's all fun...

Four Jobs I've Had
1. fry cook (shortorder cook)
2. radio DJ
3. blues band road manager
4. soldier

Four Movies I Can Watch Over And Over
1. Casablanca
2. Sullivan's Travels
3. The Quiet Man
4. Almost Famous (the extended version)

Four Places I've Almost Lived, And Still Plan To
1. Brussels
2. Austin
3. San Francisco
4. Amsterdam

Four TV Shows I Love
1. Curb Your Enthusiasm
2. Combat!
3. The Daily Show
4. Arrested Development

Places I've Vacationed
1. the Canary Islands
2. Nag's Head
3. Trento
4. Le Canal du Midi

Four of My Favorite Dishes
1. Carolina Barbecue
2. Red beans & rice
3. Sushi
4. Soft Chicken Tacos

Four Sites I Visit Daily
1. Wildguzzi's forum - sometimes fun, especially when you can't ride
2. Myway.com - my news site, my TV channels, & my movie times
3. keane.com - actually, the Web mail part for internal users
4. Army Knowledge Online...


Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now
1. Working on a billable project
2. Riding my Moto Guzzi Breva 750
3. Sipping a mojito on the beach
4. Hamburg

Four Bloggers I'm Tagging
1. Heiko (who's probably been tagged way too many times, but still...)
2. Brutally Honest (hey, I'm an equal-opportunity blogger)
3. Girlwonder (Molly probably has no time, but still...)
4. (I'm workin' on it)

Murder in the Ville  So another person is murdered in Richmond. Not necessarily a big deal, in that we constantly appear in the top 10 murder cities of the U.S. Yet this one was a block from my house. So when it comes into your neighborhood, yeah, it's a big deal.

It's Still About Usability  So Heiko blogs about usability. That's nice, 'cause he does get it. But what's not so nice is that products still aren't designed from a user's perspective. I've been trying to get this message across, yet except for New York, Chicago, and the Bay area, most places don't seem to get it. Instead, they hire business analysts instead of user-experience analysts...with the result that the products' designs reflect the desires of the business, not the needs of the users.
Same old story, same old song and dance.

Nice Day for a Ride  It was a nice ride. I met Bob at 9:00 a.m. at Ashland Coffee & Tea, then left around 9:45 (after coffee & cigarettes—Bob had a smoke, that is). Then we took 54 to Hanover CH to 614 east to 30 to 360 east to 14 east to 17 south to Yorktown. Lunch at the pub. Then down the Colonial Parkway & up Route 5. Got to the Dairy Queen at 295 & Rte. 5 around 4 p.m. Not a bad ride. I was pushing it a leetle—about 5-8 mph above posted limits, except on the parkway (I stay pretty much at the 45 mph limit, maybe pushing it to 48).

Ah, yes...January in Virginia. How sweet it is!

Obfuscatio  So I ran across this sentence on a list I subscribe to:

In general, feminist theorists seek renewed social status
for non-analytical ways of knowing which, it is has been
argued, most eurowestern projects of modernity reject.

Is it just me, or is this a Macbethian sentence (full of sound and fury, signifying nothing)? At least it is, to my thinking, a further example of what's wrong with academ.

2 Charged as Monsters  So two guys have been arrested in connection with the destruction of two families: the Harveys & the Tucker/Baskervilles. Seven people brutally murdered in seven days...and the details seem to be out of a movie like Seven. Let us hope for justice--but not for mercy.

Annus horribilis already   Horrible way to begin the year. And he was an acquaintance/friend from the 80s. So mind-numbingly sad.

Ein gute Rutsch!   A Happy New Year to all—may it be full of peace and happiness.

Quam diu redux  Here's what Bush's illegal wiretapping comes down to: "..[T]here is only black and white when it comes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a 1978 law that specifically requires warrants for any NSA wiretapping of U.S. citizens. "If you want to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens, you go to court. If you don't, you go to jail," Bamford says. "If you want to change the law, you go to Congress."
O tempora, o mores indeed.

Bitter Arrogance  "The president acted in clear contravention of a criminal law enacted by Congress, and a Supreme Court precedent, both directly on point."

Happy Holidays  Christina and Tom the Dancing Bug weigh in on this nonissue.

Ugh...  America's shame. Not defendable other than under the First Amendment. They have the right to hate....

When Help Doesn't  Sometimes software ships with online help that doesn't help the user at all. Either the prose is turgid or it belabors the obvious...or it doesn't answer critical questions. Apparently the new ThinkPad has problems For example, "Teaching the laptop what your fingerprint looks like requires a good bit of effort, no thanks to the colorless prose of the online help screens" indicates that not only is the hardware design flawed, but the help doesn't. Too bad. I bet that when Lenovo bought the ThinkPad line, they didn't hire IBM's writers.

New Version of Windows  Now we're getting new windows for the house! O Frabjous day! Calooh! Callay! They are Milgard windows that Best Windows of Mechanicsville, Virginia, installed. Best is a local firm that has a good rep. I like the fact that we're helping out the local economy...not just paying some conglomerate to do it. The windows themselves come from Fredericksburg. Pictures soon....but right now, it's cold cold cold, what with no front windows & all.
Indeed, these are the only Windows I'll pay for ;)

Tagging  No, it has nothing to do with graffiti. It also doesn't have anything to do with marking animals in the wild...at least not in the context I'm interested in. Instead, it's about adding markers to pieces of content to make them easier to retrieve.
Flickr probably does it best. Not only do they have an extraordinarily great user experience design, they enable individuals to create their own sense of meaning through tags to each photo. The approach is gaining acceptance and notice: Even Cnet has found out.
One key effect is that users don't have to depend on an info priesthood to dictate what terms and thesauri are available.

Marketers Just Don't Get It  Joe Lamantia describes a particularly aweful experience he had online. Seems the marketing heads just went waaaay too far.

Deutschland War Sau-Geil!  Still getting back into the swing of things after 10 days in Germany. First it was Hamburg, then Wiesbaden, and finally Königstein im Taunus and Bad Homburg. So good to see folks there.
Too, the conference went well. More later on that.

History, of a Sort  If you're curious or nostalgic about the past 10 years, check out Salon's retrospective. Well-written like all their stuff, it does encapsulate a lot of the past 10 years' business history.

More on Motorcycling  Well, I went on another trip this weekend. Ostensibly I was going to visit my brother in Lawrenceville, GA...but as it turns out, he was out hunting (a very Gawja thing to do thse days). Instead, I ended up riding around in the South Carolina Highlands. Next day I rode up through Highlands, NC to the Dragon...Deal's Gap. Instead of riding the Gap, though, I hung around a little, watched the packs of bikes come & go, and then rode to Cherokee, NC. I rode the first part of the Blue Ridge Parkway, but I had to jump off it before Waynesville to make tracks to get to Boone, NC. Seems I had sorta screwed up by making a nonrefundable reservation there.
So I got to Boone just before twilight. Next day it was 33 degrees...and I had to drive. I wanted to get home before the rain...but it was not to be. Instead, I ended up running into rain around Oxford, NC, and rode in it till Richmond. Ugh! But the bike worked well for the most part, despite its lighter size. The wind certainly pushed it around.
So, mostly, I love the bike. Still, the Griso or the Breva 1100 might, just might be in my future...next year.

I'm Back  From Italy, of a sort. Plus, I did a two-day motorcycling school this past weekend. More later about that.