Time passes slowly at the old folks home in Amsterdam. If you don’t have anything special to do all day long, a molehill can turn into a mountain. A person’s time must be filled with something; one’s attention has to have a focus. Nasty character traits need an outlet. In contrast to what you’d expect, …
Category Archives: Readings
Kindle links: Kindle Unlimited, reading experience
The new Kindle Unlimited campaign is smoking out new opinions on Amazon’s strategy [1]. I liked this comparison of the Kindle to the iPod’s early days, and the evolution from buying single songs to streaming music services (Songza is my favorite). The lack of privacy is of concern to the writer, though buying a Kindle …
Continue reading “Kindle links: Kindle Unlimited, reading experience”
Miss Marple
Before we left on our England trip, I loaded up the Kindle with a few hundredweight of e-books thinking, “Oho, eight hours on the flight over, eight hours on the flight back, three weeks of travel — I’ll certainly rip through more than a dozen books!” When I write up my lessons learned from the trip, …
Robert Hughes (1938-2012)
Like many other Americans, I became aware of Hughes through his “Shock of the New” documentary and considered myself lucky to snag a copy of the hardback from a remainder table at the (long-gone and lamented) Intimate Book Shop in 1983. Most people can name critics of movies, music, and books because we hear those products …
Examining the unlived life
Alex has a wonderful essay up this week on the unexamined life vs the unlived life. I recognized so much of myself in his description of his early college self. And i would say it’s only been fairly recently that I’ve decided to bias myself towards action — even fidgety action — over excessive rumination. …
The Suck Fairy
From Jo Walton at Tor.com comes the idea of The Suck Fairy, that scourge of re-reading that somehow curdles fondly remembered books upon second reading. Working alongside the Suck Fairy are her siblings the Racism Fairy, the Sexism Fairy, and the Homophobia Fairy, according to Walton. One might add the Bad Writing Fairy; sometimes re-reading …
Lavers on The Simple Life
My previous post Fred Stutzman and Facebook reminded me of an essay from the May/August 2000 issue of North American Review. The essay I tore out and kept in my “Essays” folder lo these many years was by the writer Norman Lavers, now retired from teaching English and enthusiastically maintaining a site on The Robber …
Unit Structures
Image by Getty Images via Daylife Fred Stutzman is a PhD student at SILS and the creator of numerous good things, among them ClaimID and the Mac-based Freedom (which I used today to good effect). He has a blog, Unit Structures, and tends to post announcements of upcoming events or good ‘n’ chewy postings related …
Is grad school a good idea?
Penelope Trunk trots out one of her regularly visited themes: why grad school is a bad idea. It rankled me a bit but I do have to remember that she’s talking to twenty-somethings and I’m a forty-odder. Her advice would be right-on to my 23-year-old self: I had very little direction, a graduate degree would …
Drafting scenarios and stories
This post discusses the following readings: Gruen, D., Rauch, T., Redpath, S., & Ruettinger, S. (2002). The use of stories in user experience design. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 14(3&4), 503-534. Head, A. J. (2003). Personas: setting the stage for building usable information sites. Online, 27(4), 14-21. <<In class, we wrote sample story/scenarios, and I …
Brownstudy's Blog 