Yummy or Crummy?

Our big cat Jerry recently got in a cat fight (we think). Two days later we noticed a golf-ball size swelling on his neck. We were kind of worried, but he was acting normal — eating, walking around, whining when he’s hungry and sleeping as usual. The swelling didn’t subside for two more days, so we decided to take him to the vet after all. That was this morning. I thought it would be no big deal — they’d stick a needle or something in there and drain the pus out. Boy, I was wrong!

“His temperature is 105. We need to put him under and drain the abscess right away.”

Um, what? I felt like a really bad parent, letting him suffer for a few days with a high fever….

Anyway, they performed the draning procedure pretty fast, and he was home in the afternoon.

Be careful if you click on the photo above. I also uploaded a close-up shot of his wound. It’s pretty gross.

Understandably, Jerry hasn’t been in the best mood since he got home. But he’s being sweet enough to come up and rub on me, etc. And he wants to go outside! What a trooper this guys is. Sorry, Jerr — no outdoor adventures for you for at least a few days.

Apple to pay $100 million in iPod patent disputes

Part of Creative’s patent is not specific to the technology related to their music player itself, but how the information is categorized. The method in
question is commonly called faceted classification, because an item could belong to multiple categories.

There is an interesting discussion starting in the IA community, because this seems to suggest that you can patent a way to organize information. Peter Merholz began a thread on the IA Institute’s mailing list, and someone posed interesting questions — perhaps somewhat rhetorically:

If information architecture creates mental models that frame a user’s experience, can you patent that? Or is the patent on the IA in use on a specific device? Is there a difference? Is IA a gateway to experience that you can patent?

I didn’t read the patent or anything, but the idea is rather unsettling. I think it’s easy to see that it’s a very slippery slope.

Does this mean Red Envelope owes Creative some money because their customers can choose to shop by recipient, occasion, or price? What if Webster decides to patent the way a dictionary is organized — A to Z! Want to sell clothes online? Better pay Gap — they patented organizing clothes by men, women, and kids. Ingenius!

I admit I have close to zero knowledge on this subject, so I’ll be interested to hear an expert’s take on this…

Oh boy — where do I begin?

Back in April of 2003, I started a blog out of curiousity, just to see if I would have enough to say about anything. Just to see what the fuss is all about, to be able to say, “yeah, I have a bog.” With a little help from my friend, I installed MT 2.6 on my site, and there I was, perhaps the most average blog on the internet. There never was any sign that anybody out there was reading what I was posting.

Today, with hundreds of thousands of new blogs popping up everyday, I somehow feel the urge to start this up again. Perhaps it was the energy I felt at Webvisions 2006 in Portland. Maybe it’s because I realized that there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the folks up there doing the talking and the people like me sitting, listening, and taking notes. We are all web professionals, doing a reasonably good job — nothing that innovative or new. I realized that the main difference is that they learned to talk about what they do. Me, I just do it.

Not that I ever want to be invited to talk, but I realized that being able to summarize what you do, and share what you learned with others is an important ability, especially if you work with other people.

A lot has happened since I stopped blogging in November of 2003. Lucretia and I got married. We bought our first house. Career-wise, I freelanced with Getty Images for 8 months, and for the last two years, I’ve been with POP, now as a senior information architect.

I work with many talented people, and they’re all extremely good at what they do. But even then, we struggle from time to time with internal communication. We make assumptions, or maybe we get stuck in old ways of thinking, because we are so busy from working on so many projects. There is an increasing need to share what we do, and how we do it — how we feel about a certain trend, the best way to solve the problems A, B, and C.

Yummy or Crummy? is my way of making a habit of doing the sharing. It’s also a way for me to play — with a cool product like WordPress, for example. I’ll feel better knowing there is always a place for me to do whatever I want to do.

The name is just another way to say thumbs up or down, and from time to time I will talk about something, and say that it’s either Yummy or Crummy. I thought having a format that allows me to take a side on an issue in a catchy way would be an interesting feature. It came out of a brainstorm session with Lucretia, because she calls good-looking men “yummy,” and I tried to turn that into a twist on the famous Hot or Not. Whether you agree or not, I think it’s catchy, clever, and cheesy. I think it’s perfect.

I manually brought back most of the pre-November 2003 posts. I chose to make minor edits to a few posts, and I also deleted some posts that were just links to no-longer-live sites. You can view them under one category.

Considering how they were playing before the Confederations Cup began, everybody will agree that Japan played better than expected. But the goal was always to advance to the next round, and now that was not achieved, will JFA act to make some changes, or continue to sit on their asses, proclaiming the blind support for Zico?

NBC has been airing arena football games on weekends. Just the fact that it’s on national TV would have you believe that the sport is gaining popularity in this country. I mean, how else would the game be broadcasted against such powerhouse program as golf??

Arena football, I realized, is quite the opposite of my favorite sport, soccer. It is a derivative of American football, but all the rules that inconvenience any effort to score have been changed to promote high scoring. The game is fast paced, and rarely do you see a team execute a running play, so all elements of surprise and strategy are removed from the game. It’s just a series of throwing, catching, and guys who aren’t good enough to play in NFL celebrating in the end zone before you know what really happened. It probably would be a similar experience to watch a modified basketball game where the hoop is 5 feet high and about 20 feet wide.

It is no surprise that this ridiculous excuse for an athletic event gets a national coverage, while U.S. men’s national soccer team — the guys who represent this country in the most popular sport in the world — almost never receives bigger exposure beyond ESPN2. In fact, the only place that I could find showing the friendly match against New Zealand this past Sunday was a Spanish speaking channel.

The American public has no patience for soccer. The American public is unable to respect and appreciate the beauty that the rest of the world somehow manages to fall in love with. The American public is embarrassingly ignorant about its position in the world and how it is regarded by everyone else. The American public deserves arena football, all day, everday.

If you’re at all like me, you like to research the products before you buy. You take full advantage of the Internet, surfing to get product specs, user opinions, whatever information you can get your hands on. You make the purchase confident that your decision was the best one that could have been made — you feel like a smart consumer. By the time UPS drops off the new gadget, you’re ready to wholly accept it into your life — it’s your new toy, something you can show off to your friends. You tear open the packaging, barely read through the instructions, start playing by pushing a few buttons, then what does it do?

It advertises itself.

Our new all-in-one device has a “Wow!” option that can print a sheet that “demonstrates the remarkable output qualities of your printer!” Our also new stereo, when left alone with the power turned off, runs a fancy light show displaying all its features on the screen. Isn’t it enough that we committed ourselves to these products after long hours of comparing features? I just want to say to these guys, “It’s OK — you’ve done your job! You can stop now.”

Just as I begin my weblog, I find a post like this. While I agree that there are way too many echoes and dumbass rants, I’m not worried cuz I’m here to neither help nor hurt the situation. It’s the good ol’ “tree in the forest” concept — if nobody is listening, the silence hasn’t been broken….

Also, with or without huge audience, each blogger is an individual and it’s good to keep in mind that whatever is expressed is one person’s opinion. To me it’s a bit silly to take yourself so seriously that you assume whatever you’re breaking the silence with has so much impact. Yes, people need to think before they open their mouth, but censoring yourself before your words have a chance to be judged? I can understand if this was television, radio, etc — but it’s a freakin Internet, man. The whole beauty of the medium is that a little man could be heard. We all have our own minds, so let the people be the judge of if you’re improving on the silence or not. I’m probably spending way too much time thinking about this already… anyway he should check himself if he thinks he’s doing a huge service to the world by either posting or NOT posting. Whatever, dude.