ned has also written a clip2 review.

i just received another email from someone contacted by my psychic friend. it seems to be an ongoing scam. but at least i got to look at some cool watercolors.

so why hasn't anyone just come out with a better browser? obviously the current ones aren't doing such a great job. thanks john.

true art. thanks lindsay.

john has created a blog counter to track growth.

rogers was kind enough to remind me that one can still get fired for stuff published on the web. cam's story is certainly proof of that. but i don't want to work for someone who would fire me for what i write. so i guess it's a win win situation. although it's definitely something one should keep in mind.

omniedit is another in the steadily growing list of free online page editing tools. it resembles blogger in the fact that you provide your ftp info. but from the example page, it appears just to be a single textarea with all the html for your site. simple, basic, useful, but there's more powerful stuff out there. it's interesting how much this area has exploded recently.

john finally put up his review of clip2 and blink.

i clearly did not do a good job negotiating, i never got a bmw z3 as a sign-on bonus.

sometimes i wonder how stupid i can be. i'm not having email receiving problems, i'm having sending problems. namely not resetting my outgoing mail server after the weekend. sigh.

an article on info-architects about trends describes /. as a "collaborative portal". funny 12 months ago /. was a collaborative weblog.

i think i internalize too much of my information design when i read an article like this one on what is an information architect?, i see a lot of paper work that i never want to sit down and do. the story lead me to info-architects.net which is a mailing list i haven't run across before. via webword.

suckdot. because i hadn't seen it yet and laurel was nice enough to point it out. speaking of laurel, she wrote a wonderful rant about writing weblogs and feddback (you've got scroll down quite a ways). thanks to dan for sending me there.

i have the horrible feeling i'm not getting all of my email. i forwarded something to myself yesterday and still haven't got it. so, if you've been wondering why you haven't heard from me, that could be it. you can always email me at work: brig@clip2.com.

dave brought up on the egroups weblog mailing list "I assume her employers are so clueless that they don't know that she's dis'in them in public." i want everyone to know that the chief clipper is an avid reader of my weblog, he reminded me of that fact today. (hi kelly.) which means i will be much more careful about who i 'dis from now on. not.

i don't know if i can explain this to people who don't get it (i've been unsuccessfully trying to explain it to jason for the last 6 months), but this weblog (and my journals before it) are an expression of myself. in the same way that i vent to friends and family, i vent to the world through my weblog. i see no difference between this written conversation and the spoken one i have with a friend (other than the obvious onesidedness), i have a right to voice my opinion in both. it's called freedom of speech.

salon had an article on andrew's diaryland.

i'm feeling better about life today. probably because i've vented to the right people and can at least assume that my problems will be considered if not solved.

losing the startup gamble.

did martian's steal the mars probes? this and more in the latest rcfoc.

i am so bitter right now. after fielding criticism for an hour because my ui didn't cater to new users, i pointed out that, when i designed the ui, our users were expert users. if they wanted a ui that was designed for new users, i could certainly build them one, but not in 3 weeks. then i had the pleasure of people saying how nice and aesthetically pleasing the creative director's mockups were. if i ripped out half the functionality and randomly replaced text with meaningless graphics and made up buttons so it would look good rather than function, i could make a @#$%^&* aesthetically pleasing ui too, it wouldn't work and would be completely unusable, but damn it sure would look good. how far away is jan 12? me thinks the golden handcuffs just aren't big enough.

there's nothing worse than coming in early for a meeting only to discover it's postponed until a reasonable hour. unless of course it's the discovery that your creative director needs hand-holding throughout the design process and really has very little knowledge of how the web works.

i'd say something snide about a journalist proclaiming guidelines for web design, except most of what he says is true. via webword.

elan has very eloquently captured one of the joys of working at a startup. i wish i could have said it so well myself.

i just finished alan cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum today. i can honestly say that this book took me to a new level of understanding the problems of interface design. although i did get a little tired of the endless repeating of the mantra "engineers shouldn't do interface design", really, the first 50 repetitions were enough. i'm now planning on incorporating the personas, goals, & scenarios that cooper describes in the next rev. assuming i can force it down everyone's throats. actually, spec'ing out personas will solve a lot of the confusion that seems to be rampant right now. anyway, definitely well worth reading, if not a must read. i wish i hadn't waited so long.

john was crazy enough to want to interview me for webword.

in case anyone has picked up on it and wondered, i've been reading several books from the earlier part of the century when people still used "one" instead of "you". i've come to the conclusion that it's a valuable word and have started making use of it a lot.

victor has just realized that "a weblog is a cowardly way of expressing" oneself. it's true, i admit it, i talk to hundreds of strange people whom i've never met in the same way that i talk to only my closest friends. most of them don't reply so i now know what i've assumed for a long time: i'm always right. actually, all joking aside, it's incredibly liberating to know that one will only be judged by what one says, not by how one looks, one's gender, or race. i just assumed everyone already knew there were better ways to spend one's time than reading weblogs.

wow. i've made it almost to the top of the bloat list. which reminds me, i have to update my reading list...

you know something's really bothering me when i have to vent more than 3 times. thursday night i sent out prototypes for the latest version of the ui. yesterday, the creative director sent out mockups for his new look & feel. i saw them and almost had a coronary. random aspects of the ui had been removed, shifted around, changed and redesigned with clearly no understanding of how the product worked. the homepage mockup looked like icq at its worst (eye drawn everywhere at once, no organization, no heirarchy). and on top of that it looked very similar to a major competitor, so we'd instantly be accused of imitation. sigh. i guess i'm most offended by the assumption that my ui hadn't been thoroughly thought out and organized and therefore was malleable and open for such drastic changes. sigh. i can't wait 'til monday.

is the web getting smarter? with nate oostendorp's everything, it just might be. via tomalak.

dot com dogs.

i'm doing usability testing today, so no updates. (unless i get bored, that is.) thankfully, it's going pretty well. so i guess we did something right.

a refreshingly balanced article on weblogs. this one points out both the good and the bad and gives a nice mix of weblogs as examples. via rebecca who found it on kiplog.

hmmm...an interesting next step from third voice, i predict zBubbles will cause a serious uproar in the ecommerce community.

well it's not quite a recommendation from someone who's read the book, but steve outing's interview with jakob nielsen about his new book is interesting.

brainwaves, what's in the web's future? interviews with tim berners-lee and others. it's interesting to see how everyone's future predictions are influenced by what they work on currently. via tomalak.

ugh. another early morning. at least this time i'm sitting at home, expecting to get conferenced in. trouble is, i forgot to bring home the number of the conference room. and i've never put anyone's numbers into my palm, not even the main office number. so i'm relying on an email i sent to pam, who probably won't check her email before the meeting. sigh.

i just found heaven for a caffeine junky!

admittedly i haven't actually seen these applications, but doesn't anyone else find shopping from your cell phone unrealistic? there's not enough room for the data you need to make a purchase decision.

ugh. big brother is monitoring your email.

goodexperience comments on the kenneth cole design (12/6). "A good experience for a fashion site communicates the brand without slowing or confusing the customer." yeah it's mildly overdesigned, but i had no problems using the site, finding the shoes i wanted and buying them. i think it's a bit excessive to be predicting a redesign "for the customer within a year, once they learn the importance of a good experience." it already is a good experience.

it appears that in my visionary lapse yesterday i was just crawling along behind others. jorn has already written a manifesto on parsing information.

pam was swearing today because she couldn't convert an email to a note to herself. which got me thinking about standards. if we had a standard for information content, we could take an email, make it into a note to ourselves with added comments, convert the note into a word document which we then elaborate on to create a spec, then convert it all back to an email. yeah, i know i'm dreaming, but applications that use a standard "information format" may just be the next killer app.

e-christmas at yahoo and amazon, an interesting look at the usability of both sites this christmas. via webword.

an interesting take on the "boy-culture" of the workplace. i completely disagree with her generalizing her reaction to include all women. i, for one, fit right in to that atmosphere (my nerf wildfire just arrived today). but, then again, i've always been a tomboy so maybe i'm unique. via screenshot.

in one of my rare trips to the supermarket yesterday, a story on the cover of the inquirer jumped out at me "stevie wonder gets miracle surgery to restore his sight". and i thought it was fake.

someone on the chi-web mailing list mentioned cancelling their order for jakob nielsen's new book designing web usability. funnily, i'd cancelled my order the same day, for that reason and the fact that i'd been waiting 1.5 years. now it's actually going to be released and john is excitedly awaiting release. but, is it worth it? anyone know yet?

the latest rcfoc is out. seems like i've heard most of this stuff elsewhere but a few interesting bits.

apparently workexchange is a little late to the field.

the computer makes students poorer writers? it's made me lose capitalization and abbreviate words a lot, but i have to say i'm a better writer because of the computer. via tomalak.

this web informant piece is very similar to what i was ranting about (titled clueless) back in october. at least i think it was october. damn, i should put dates on my rants.

red herring predicts trends for 2000. most of them are pretty safe bets but still interesting.

the site i worked for on the side earlier this year has changed it's name (although they didn't take the old site down). what i find amusing is that honesty is one of their key values, yet they still haven't paid me for the month that i worked without a contract. oh check out the head rollovers too. bitter, who me?

sigh. email's building up, too much work to do, not enough surf time. maybe more tomorrow.

my impressions of manila: it's easy to use, and easy to customize (except for the stupid calendar thing, i want to move it around the page and can't), but the format doesn't work well for a weblog. or i should say it works, but it's not intuitive how it works. it took me a long time to figure out that i couldn't put multiple stories on the homepage and i was required to 'flip the homepage' everyday. interesting tool tho and probably extremely valuable for a news site that actually links to separate articles. jason has some more comments.

i did, however, get a solution to the problem. manila was inserting paragraph tags after all my divs. causing netscape to barf. so i put in close paragraph tags, and it's all better.

so i played around with editthispage yesterday, had some troubles and gave up (ultima9 was calling). this morning i come in to find that dave has asked people to help me with my stylesheet issue because i'm a vip. scary.

as dave pointed out, i completely missed the fact that frontier 6.1 is what costs $899, manila is just one of frontier's features. so theoretically, someone could start up another site like pitas, and let people build weblogs using manila for free. which is what dave's doing (at least for 60 days) with editthispage.

the little things are always the most amusing, i will never use metafilter's surfmenu, but i could spend a long time paging up and down to watch they way it moved.

i discovered this morning that if i forget to change my outgoing mail server between work and home, eudora pretends to send the messages but just lets them sit in my out box. i had to go through and send about 10 messages from thursday (sorry dan). why can't eudora automatically use a different server if i'm docked?

ok, i lied. i couldn't possibly stay away from my computer until monday. i have to catch up on all the information that i missed yesterday. besides, my other computer is in the process of installing win98, and it's got 108 minutes to go. did you know that if you have a fast processor say over 366 98 likes to crash during install? the only way to install is to slow down your processor.

i just spent 8 hours straight in a meeting. i'm burnt. be back monday.

i've just discovered one of the ironies of being a late riser. when you make the effort to get up early (5:45) and get into the office early (8:30), you find a deserted sea of desks. all those people who rush out the door at 5:00pm as if they'd been slaving away for 8 or 10 hours are actually just slackers, who cruise in much later, like around 10am or so. sigh. i hate getting up early. i also hate getting in for a 9am meeting when noone else arrives on time.

another weblog tool enters the fray, velocinews. what makes me very happy, is that we've been struggling with how to demonstrate the numerous ways to use clip2 to our users, and not succeeding very well, but velocinews presented a very elegant solution.

with velocinews, pitas, blogger, and grokSoup being free, how can manila charge $899 and expect to compete? is it that much better than all the rest?

well my decision has been delayed at least until tomorrow, people seem to be listening, whether they act upon it is another story. unfortunately, it means i've got to come in for a 9am meeting tomorrow. ugh!

brain.com has several tests including memory check, attention & reflexes, and iq. i did great on the iq and memory tests but suck at everything else.

oh no, we've all been shredded.

my home desktop computer has been broken for a while. i think it got hit by lightning. jason took it in today and found out that the motherboard, cpu, and video card were all blown out. so now i get to have a 500mhz piii to play ultima acsension on.

finally, someone has noticed the discrimination against late sleepers. there's even a bill of rights. via scribble.

i don't think pr people should limit their holiday gift giving to just journalists. i'm sure many in the weblog community would appreciate the opportunity to receive these products, and you never know, we might just feature your site...

wow. $7.5 million. and i thought the days of selling domains for high prices was over.

amazon acquired a toy store to strengthen their position against eToys.

my entries have been much more journal-like lately. seems to happen when i've got problems. just skip them if they bore you.

it feels so good to just hit that tolerance wall, where you know that if you are asked to something, you'll just quit. i've done a complete restructure of clip2's ui twice now. every time there's been issues, they've been fixed, but i keep telling them it's not the ui that's preventing conversion, it's the messaging, the packaging. but the ui needed improvement anyway so i gave in and redesigned. they're doing it again. they are "discussing" reverting to a different paradigm, one that has already been done and didn't work, and we haven't even done any user-testing yet, it's only been up a week! it's all based on certain people's opinions, people within the company. sigh. there's a meeting tomorrow where a decision will be made. i guess that's when i'll make mine.

copyright 1997-2000, by brig.