Monthly Archives: February 2007

Mi Viejita

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Hoy Andre cumple 30 años. Se le acabaron los patitos y aunque se que se siente extraña dejando atras los veinte, a la vez esta llena de vida, ideas y entusiasmo por los años que nos quedan por delante.

El entusiasmo que irradia es mas que contagioso. Su alegria y su sonrisa se pegan de tan solo estar un rato a su lado. Asi que eso me hace uno de los hombres mas afortunados.

En tu cumpleaños, mi vida, te deseo toda la felicidad del mundo. Que TODOS los sueños que tienes (y los que estan por venir) se te hagan realidad, y tan solo pido toda la vida junto a tu lado, para poder seguir disfrutando cada dia de verte feliz y llenarme de alegria cada vez que te veo reir creando mundos y haciendo espacios materializarse en tus pinturas y diseños. :)

Te amo!

To Tag or Not To Tag

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That is the question, isn’t it? Well, maybe not that much of a dilemma, I know. But there sure are those (like myself) who find themselves tagging all photos, videos and blog posts they create, before leaving them floating around, right?

At the other end of the spectrum, there are those for whom the term “tag” means close to nothing. Tags (as metadata) were not here a couple of years ago, and the world was just fine without them, wasn’t it?

So, how useful are tags in the end? As food for thought, Luke Wroblewski, Principal Designer at Yahoo!, shares some interesting insights on the utility of tagging in his blog.

Me? I’ve found tagging to be very useful, since I “discovered” it. In Flickr, del.icio.us and my blog, I tag items to help with the easy retrieval of information, giving items tags that serve as metadata. However, I also tag items for a little less selfless purposes.

In Amazon.com, for instance, I also tag items I plan on reviewing with the word “review“, instead of adding them to my Wish List (most of them I alread have in my hands). Think of it as a server-side means of bookmarking my list of “to review” items.

A similar use could be tagging items you think may be a good birthday present for your spouse or a good Christmas gift for your mom. Pretty useless to the rest of the Amazon users, perhaps, but very useful to those creating the tag.

Do you have any other “special” uses for tagging you’d like to share?

Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design

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One of the best and most usable titles on User Experience Design
From 9 to 5 (well, a “little” after 5 most days), I am an Application Development Manager in my company. In my years doing this, I have read a lot of books on the topic of Web and User Experience Design. So far, only a handful stand out above Designing the Obvious by Robert Hoekman Jr. and even some of those, he takes his hat off to (such as the case of “Don’t Make Me Think”, for instance).

Hoekman proposes the “unthinkable” for those entrenched into rusty web design practices, but when you step back and reconsider the experiences you’ve had, his framework makes perfect sense. Here are a couple of thoughts he brings to the table, to give you an idea:
-Design an application that does one thing, and does it very well. For every additional feature, there is more to learn, more to tweak and configure, more to customize, more to read about in the help document, and more that can go wrong.
-People (users) don’t always make the right choices. They make comfortable choices… they make choices they know how to make. To deal with this, he supports Goal-Directed Design (also called Activity-CenteredDesign), as opposed to Human-Centered Design.

Web Design anathema? Violation of User Interface “basics”? Maybe it sounds so at first, but if you read through his arguments, you will find them very compelling and may end up (like myself) reconsidering some of your initial assumptions.

One of the reasons why his proposal resonated so much with me is because throughout the book, Hoekman introduces concepts that are not familiar in the Web space, borrowing them from long-established best practices in manufacturing (where I worked the first four years of my professional life), such as:
-Kaizen: improving things constantly, in little tiny ways that add up to gigantic results.
-Poka-Yoke: software “devices” meant to prevent user errors from occurring.
-Pareto Principle (a.k.a. 80/20 rule): Good, clean Web application design means that 80 percent of an application’s usefulness comes from 20 percent of its features.

For longtime professionals and newcomers into the field of User Experience Design, Hoekman’s book has turned into an absolute must read.

Click here to purchase your copy through Amazon.com.

Arcade Fire Live on SNL

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The release of their new album, Neon Bible is only days away (click here to pre-order your copy from Amazon.com).

Yesterday, I shared with you a video from their performance in NY on Feb. 17. Below you can enjoy two videos from their performance on Saturday Night Live, last night.

Update (02/27): Videos were taken down. I would look for new ones, but I don’t feel inclined to, considering that they could also be taken down, unless they’re uploaded by NBC themselves.

Daiquiri: Chamito Candela

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Se acuerdan de Daiquiri? Su album debut, titulado “Daiquiri” los catapulto a la fama en 1983, convirtiendose en uno de los grupos mas importantes que tenia firmados Sonografica para el momento.

Alberto Slezynger era el lider, junto a un poco de “mochos” de la musica en Venezuela: Silvano Monasterios (teclados), Pedro Vilela (guitarra -era vecino mio en Caracas), Danilo Aponte (bajo -Q.E.P.D.), Manolo Alvarez (coros), el mago Carlos “Nene” Quintero (percusion), Gerardo López (percusion y coros) y Gustavo Calle (percusion). En el tercer disco (Caribe Soy, si mal no recuerdo), agregaron a Gustavo Aranguren (trompeta).

En estos dias supe del destino de Alberto por casualidad. Es dueño de Personal Music, en Miami.

Cual era su cancion favorita de Daiquiri? La mia era “Chamo Candela”, del segundo album, La Casa del Ritmo (1984). Esa cancion y la cancion que lleva el titulo del album son las unicas que tengo de ellos… No se consigue nada de ellos por ningun lado. :(

Google Apps: Should You Switch?

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I love Google! I admit I am a sucker for Google news, and the latest Google tip I learned about has got me as excited as any other one they’ve put out: Google Apps.

Google Apps comes in four flavors: Families & Groups (free, with 2GB of e-mail storage per account), Small Businesses, Enterprises and Schools (these three, at $50 / user account / year, with a free trial until April 30, 2007). The offering consists of web-based products we are already familiar with to a certain degree: Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets, Page Creator and, for users other than Families & Groups, Extensibility APIs.

They have a whole section with customer testimonials, where companies such as Procter & Gamble and GE are featured. In academia, Arizona State University is the biggest school to have adopted their platform. Here’s the intro to a case study about the rollout of Google Apps in ASU:

Oct. 10, 2006 Arizona State University (ASU) makes Google Apps Education Edition available to 65,000 students. ASU configured and deployed Google Apps for Education, Google’s hosted email, IM and calendaring solution, in under two weeks, including integrating it with home-grown single sign-on and user provisioning systems.

This Wired article lays out very well the pros and cons of the Google offering. Still, over time, I feel this is the direction most software will go into. The concerns over offline access and weirdness of working on the web will subside as high-speed internet connectivity becomes even more of a commodity and web-based everything becomes the norm.

As for privacy concerns, extremely confidential matters may still need to reside in local computers, but how many companies are in that situation? And even if all companies were there, there’s millions and millions of users who are not bound by privacy requirements imposed by investors, customers or regulatory agencies.

So, in my opinion, this step by Google is a solid one taken in the right direction. As for Redmond, I think the Office team at Microsoft should be very concerned.

Novelas Educational?

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US Hispanic TV network Univision seems to think so, and the FCC didn’t agree, resulting in Univision getting “a 24-million-dollar fine, which would be the largest FCC fine against any company”.

I am not the most objective person to ask this to, in part because I am no fan of novelas, but it seems to me that arguing a case in favor of novelas is a bit too much. What do you think?

Listen to The Arcade Fire Live

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Thanks to this excellent music blog, I found out about a downloadable live track (70 MB of musical goodness) featuring Canadian indie gods, The Arcade Fire during an NPR Webcast recorded in NYC last week.

Be patient with the first few minutes, while the audio quality is not that great. It gets better. Enjoy and, until they come by your town touring, here’s a video from that night: