Category: Uncategorized

A new ice cream and candy shop has opened on the East side of Ann Arbor – on Washtenaw, East of Huron Parkway, sort of across from Arborland. We are very excited, as we needed a good ice cream shop for my family go walk to. They also have daily-made flavored popcorn and nostalgia candy.  See the article in Arbor Wiki for details.

My children will give me “remembering things” when I leave the house in the morning.  “Something to remember me by,” my daughter would say.  Now it’s usually only my son who gives me a remembering thing.

Dave Pollard, author at How to Save the World set some of Loren Eiseley‘s prose to verse.

a difficult re-entry

The nature of the human predicament
is how nature is to be reentered; how man,
the relatively unthinking and proud creator of the second world —
the world of culture —
may revivify and restore the first world
which cherished and brought him into being.

For what, increasingly, is required of man
is that he pursue the paradox of return.

Yet man does not wish to retrace his steps
down to the margins of the reeds and peer within,
lest by some magic he be permanently recaptured.

Instead, men prefer to hide
in cities of their own devising.

– The Philosophy of Loren Eiseley, in Verse

In the past few years, I’ve noticed I had been considering books a burden of promises.

Though books by themselves don’t make any promises, I have been using them as a sort of lifeline to the future: that I’ll read that book, and some magic will happen, like I’ll know some important bit of information that will make all the difference. Or I realize some secret path. Or I’ll be able to offer some new way for my family to interact, or for my neighborhood to become more vibrant, or my experience of nature to be more intimate, or my understanding of history or human society will become profound and I’ll be able to …

Book sellers, authors, and book lovers encourage the mystery and promise of a book, but I’m now finding the majority of the books in my possession feel like items in a to-do list that are always in the low priority group.

After realizing I was doing this, I started to watch for other ways to relate to books. I often encounter situations for which there are not handy words – or even that there might not be words for. I’ve read enough Heidegger to have tainted my thoughts as to how new language might emerge. Recently I read an article that mentioned the use of a certain theoretical framework, and they called out that framework as something that allowed conversation on a topic.

Once employed, the framework provided by the book “gives us a grammar to…” talk about topic X. I like that.

So, now I find I’m starting to think of books a bit more like a toolset, or vocabulary framework, to employ when thinking about or discussing a problem.

Do I need that tool on the shelf there? If not, should it move aside to make space for tools I do need?

The shift from “unfulfilled promise” to “framework tool” is a great relief.

A reminder that news about user experience events in the Ann Arbor area are regularly posted to UXnet Ann Arbor page. If you want to see a different city, click the “Locales” link at the top, then on the locales page, choose a city close to you.

If you are itching to go to a local developer + UX conference this spring, try Kalamazoo X conference – just a few weeks away.

Dave Pollard at How to Save the World has a fine post applying his framework for finding people to work with, to the challenge of finding people to live with, assuming living in an intentional community is attractive. Cool. Feels like a post to refer back to.

Was getting directions to go to a thing.
Went to Google Maps.
was goin’ from Ann Arbor, MI to 2600 S Telegraph Rd # 100, Bloomfield Hills, MI 48302
It gave me this:

View Larger Map

Now, if I was doing w/o the benefit of this sufficiently complex magic mapping tool, I would have taken 23 to 14 to 275 to 696 to Telegraph. Sounds simple, compared to what they suggested.

Turns out the path they sent me on was probably a bit faster, wasn’t very complex, and had nice scenery.

I had the distinct impression that this was the route a person local to my destination would have suggested. It even had us coming up to the driveway to the building from behind the building, so we didn’t see the business sign – just trusted the directions given.

I was impressed by this. And I wasn’t alone. A couple other people had a similar experience – taking the same route suggested by The Goog. My favorite comment came from Les Orchard who said “I feel like I just gained experience points.”

It was freaky. A revealing of what would have otherwise been “localized knowledge”. I like benefiting from that. But it does make me feel drawn in, and this triggered some defenses. Do I trust somewhat wacky directions in the future? When I get this information from a human who lives where I’m headed, I trust. When it comes from a data crunching machine, what then? Trust?

All these roads we drive on are connected (other than some closed, corporate road correlate to the “dark web”), so it makes sense using that assumption that one should be able to just find the shortest path based on knowing the localized rules. So, I guess trust of certain advice coming from computers is bound to increase as it improves. Slippery road, trusting computer advice. Thar be dragons. (…but dragons give good experience points, hmmm…)

I have some old paper material to deal with. You might notice it if you look closely at the right side of my desk.

My hope is to finish going through the last 2ft of this in the next couple hours. I don’t expect to succeed.

See, many of the little bleached paper sheets here are also the articles and papers I kept from grad school. But it’s time they either serve a new purpose or get to know our local recycling program. Still, I like the topics and I keep getting drawn in.

One of the papers that stopped me as I tried to let it go, was written by one of my professors at the school, “Understanding Electronic Incunabula: A Framework for Research on Electronic Records” by Margaret Hedstrom. Not having known much about archives when I started at SI back in 1998, this was what alerted me to the awareness and forsight some were bringing to the archive field. This brought on the respect for the archivists that has only increased to this day.

ok, back to culling the stack.

The Google Consumer Response Tag + newer smart phones seem to be finally the right sort of combo to fulfill the vision of physical items leading to online information or webpages – first grasped at by the Cuecat, which was shipped to WIRED readers about 8 years ago.

I have an older Sony Ericsson that isn’t really up to efficient websurfing, so it’s not something I’ll try out now, but certainly a new opportunity space.