BLOG by zaiss

May 29, 2005

My True Music Love

Filed under: REVIEWS — zaiss @ 9:53 pm

I whipped up an About page today and listed Splashdown first under my favorite music groups. But simply listing them first isn’t enough to explain how I truly feel about this band. I decided a post was in order.

Blueshift
Blueshift Album Cover

I was exposed to Splashdown in high school when my debate partner and her boyfriend at the time went to one of their concerts. 89.7 The River, a local independent radio station operated out of Iowa Western Community College (my favorite station in Omaha), sponsored the Boston band to come to Omaha. I’m so glad they did. Because of that move, I was exposed to this awesome band, and I’ve gone on to expose many others. You’re next. -grin-

Splashdown defies classification, so asking what genre they fit in or what type of music they are won’t really do the band justice. I found another blog post with a good description. It made me chuckle. But more accurate is their bio page from their time with Lilith Fair.

If I’ve piqued your interest, even a little, then check out some of their music. You can listen to it here (scroll down about 1/4 of the way) and here. The first website is maintained by one of the former band members, so there aren’t any copyright issues here. The short explanation is this: Blueshift, Splashdown’s only full album, was shelved by the record company that produced it, so Splashdown wasn’t allowed to sell it. As I understand it, that’s what led to their breakup. However, they are allowed to give out the music for free. So enjoy it!

If you take the time to listen, comment here and let me know what you think.

May 28, 2005

Exploring My Roots

Filed under: BREVITY — zaiss @ 5:06 pm

I went clicking around the website for One Innovation Place, or OneIP, today. For those of you who don’t know this little chunk of my history, OneIP is the follow on of VIA Design, a small student-run initiative founded by three other students and me under the tutelage of Dr. Jerry Wagner at UNO. One of them is still working there. After going to the website, can you tell who it is? I’ll give you a hint. Most of the projects listed in the gallery are hers, and she’s second in the line of “current members” under Jerry himself. In fairness, she is pretty talented. Scope out some of her work.

Anyway, the website is still in progress, I think, so shame on me for linking to it at this point. There are some images not in place yet, so use your imagination. And try not to freak out that my head is 10 times the size as everyone else’s under “Past Members.” I actually have a regular-sized head.

Adventures at Ikea

Filed under: REVIEWS — zaiss @ 4:51 pm

I know most people would blog about anything before they would blog about Ikea. But so many people in my MHCI program are shocked that I had never been to Ikea, that I feel my first adventure there deserves an entry.

In all, if I could avoid it, I wouldn’t go back there. There are good things there, don’t get me wrong. And it was a good place to go to get some things for the “Creative Corner” of our new Project workspace (which rocks, by the way. I have a window!). I imagine it is also a good place for single people to go to buy cheap furniture that they don’t intend to last past the duration of their graduate program.

blue chair
Cozy… but is it classy?

But when you start getting to the upscale parts of Ikea, I am steering clear. “For $1,300 this bedroom set could be yours!” That’s a lot of money for what I saw. This is the benefit of being from Nebraska (and yes, there is more than one of those). Nebraska Furniture Mart has nice furniture in the price range of a little higher than Ikea. The furniture can be quite nice, and if you know where to look and how to barter with the salespeople, it doesn’t have to be that expensive.

Their website states Mrs. B’s motto: “Sell cheap and tell the truth.” While some people have occasionally had difficulties with NFM, I think they are running a solid business that gets better over time. But hey, I might be slightly biased. All of my furniture, TV, and PS2 are from NFM. So there ya go.

My official policy, then, will be to furnish my home space from NFM. If I need cheap add-ons for my office (to make it more “Creative Class,” shall we say?) then perhaps I’ll indulge Ikea with a tour around the floor.

May 25, 2005

Silly Blog Bugs

Filed under: BREAKDOWNS — zaiss @ 7:30 pm

Apologies to PC users who might have recently experienced a funky phenomenon with my blog. Apparently, if I emphasize something for too long (across a line break), it screws things up in Internet Explorer. Who knew? I know I didn’t cause this breakdown, but hopefully I can go about fixing it sometime soon. In the meantime, I’ll keep my emphases brief.

Another Season of 24 Ends

Filed under: BREVITY — zaiss @ 5:30 pm

Sadly, I wasn’t quite the 24 enthusiast this year. I think it has to do with not living with Vince and Eric… without them to remind me of the importance of 24, I seem to have lost the faith.

I wasn’t even able to catch the season finale. Gosh I feel like a slacker. But if you happened to catch some of the season, you might check out Jenn’s List of Lessons from season 4 of 24. Even if you only caught a few episodes, you should get a couple laughs from it. I thought it was hilarious.

I hear a season 5 is in the works. Holy cow. I guess I’ll try to be a better fan next year.

You Want to Stomp on These Cans?

Filed under: BREAKDOWNS — zaiss @ 5:22 pm

Communication breakdowns are, by far, the most frequent kind of breakdown plaguing my life. I think the same can be said of many people.

The incident inspiring this post happened to me last night at Whole Foods. I arrived 20 minutes before they closed, so I was already kinda flustered and moving quickly. I move to the checkout line, and the employee starts ringing up my food. Here is how the conversation went from my perspective:

Employee: “You want to stomp on these cans?”
Me: “Excuse me?”
Employee: “You want to stomp on these cans?”
Me: -blank stare-
Employee: “Your order, does it stop at these cans?”

Those types of events tend to be funnier than another type of communication breakdown that has been plaguing me lately. People always talk about how constructive criticism is, but even constructive criticism can be worthless. Take this example from my recent adventure to California. Someone was taking me to my hotel, and on the way, said:

Gee, there are a lot of hotels closer to campus than yours.

What am I supposed to do with that piece of advice?! My management company pulled something similar on me the other day. My mom sent my lease to me (it sucks to need a cosigner), and I picked it up from the management office. When I opened the package and gave the lease to the management lady, she said:

Oh, she could have just sent that directly to us!

Good call there. Why don’t I mail the lease back to my parents so they can send it to you this time. Grumble. I suppose there’s nothing to be done about these kinds of communication breakdowns.

The first type I mentioned is a bit trickier. I have pretty good hearing (I can hear a cell phone ringing across the room that is inside a purse buried under tons of things when the person sitting next to it doesn’t hear it), so I don’t think that’s really the issue. I think the problem lies in not expecting someone to say what they are about to say to you, and then your mind filling in the blanks with what seems logical at the time.

So the story from the start of this post makes sense (sort of). I was at a Whole Foods store. Whole Foods is about natural food, the environment, things like that. I recycle to help the environment. When I recycle cans, I crush them. So, it could potentially make sense for a Whole Foods employee to tell me to stomp on cans. Right?

May 21, 2005

This is the Word of Beyer & Holtzblatt

Filed under: THOUGHTS — zaiss @ 7:01 pm

And then the audience said, “Thanks be to contextual inquiry.”

So the presentation wasn’t quite that awesome, but I will say it was worthy of my excitement from my post yesterday. My co-presenter and I were in our element; while we are far from experts in deliberative polling or participatory democracy, we know what we’re talking about when it comes to HCI and Design. I think it showed.

It also becomes increasingly difficult for me to sit through presentations about some “amazing (and usable!) new interface” – a frequent comment among these presenters (as I mentioned last night) is: “We put our system in front of users. They liked it. We asked if they wanted anything else. They said no.” Or, trickier, is self-proclaimed usability. One thing that the MHCI Advisor, Dr. Bonnie John, drills into our heads is our HCI mantra: “The user is not like me.”

My HCI Project professor once said that HCI people were arrogant. I don’t think that’s true. I think that HCI practitioners learn rigorous methods of interface investigation, and report the results that they find with confidence because the methods used allow that level of confidence. That’s why it was so gratifying to stand up, report results from the research methods that everyone in my program busts their butts to learn, and have everyone respond so favorably. It indicates that the theories and research in HCI can make an impact on discussions in a variety of forums and subject areas. That’s pretty cool.

Movin’ On Up!

Filed under: BREVITY — zaiss @ 12:58 am

I was chatting with Alex tonight, and he said:

Good plan getting zszaiss higher in the google ranking with the blogging.

Plan? I had a plan? It wasn’t really intentional, but a Google search on Zaiss reveals that I’m currently at #6. That’s pretty amazing, because I checked (out of curiousity) a couple weeks ago, and I was at #16. I’ve made it above the Zaiss family crest; now, I’ve just got to make it above those crazy German sites. Bet you didn’t know Zaiss was German, did ya! Well, you do now.

CONFERENCE by zaiss

Filed under: THOUGHTS — zaiss @ 12:54 am

It’s Friday night, and I’m chilling outside the student center at Stanford pondering my talk tomorrow. For those of you who aren’t very familiar with what’s going on, I’m attending (and presenting at) the Second Annual Online Deliberation Conference, which is also the 10th DIAC (Directions and Implications in Advanced Computing) Conference. I’m here with Dr. Robert Cavalier to present findings from my work that I’ve done on PICOLA, a multimedia tool that is used to conduct a Deliberative Poll (per Jim Fishkin’s model) in an online environment.

Phew! That was a bit condensed. What you should know is that the conference contains about 100 people from a variety of disciplines (I just met a NYU Law graduate who’s waiting to take the bar exam), who are all obsessed with using technology to make a real impact on the world. Interestingly, it’s not about a bunch of “smarter than thou” political philosophy professors trying to figure out how to make people participate in their conception of a better democracy. Instead, a lot of the talks address getting people to participate somehow, and not so much what they choose to participate in.

The quintessential example of this feeling came in a panel discussion about blogging (is it weird for me to blog about a talk on blogging?). A few people (especially the anti-bloggers) made the comment that the signal to noise ratio is so very low when it comes to blogging, so why should they even bother getting involved? After all, they don’t want to read about some teenager describing his morning tooth brushing routine in detail (this was a random example of a boring blog topic that stuck throughout the talk). One panelist in particular had so many good responses, that I want to share a couple of her ideas. Please note that these are just paraphrases unless quoted.

  • Say what you will about the tooth brushing blog, but I think you’d be hard pressed to say that it’s a bad thing to have a teenager writing and expressing himself or herself. In blogging (about whatever), a teenager is expressing himself or herself, practicing writing skills, and in essence, developing their discussion skills and priorities.
  • “Saying you don’t read blogs is like saying you don’t read books.” What a good point! There are crap authors and good authors, and sometimes authors write about the same topics, and sometimes ideas are stale. That doesn’t mean that all books are bad. Admittedly, it is far easier to set up a blog than it is to publish a book, but the point remains – there are some people with interesting ideas, unique stories, entertaining ramblings, and to discount all blogs is to discount their voice.

In the end, this is getting down to a fundamental question that was instilled in me far before I came to CMU. How do we make an experience with (a piece of software, a website, an application) engaging for those who use it? As we would say back at VIA Design at UNO (now called OneIP), the experience matters. The reason I’m enduring this intense program at CMU is so I can learn more about designing engaging experiences that keep my user population happy.

At first I had thought that I would be out of place at this conference. But if my hypothesis above is correct – if indeed we are aiming to design more engaging environments to promote participation – then perhaps I have more to offer here than I originally thought. Tonight, at the official conference kick-off, Robert gave a talk about PICOLA, and two other people gave talks from other angles. What fascinated me is that there was little agreement about how best to represent a discussion online. Robert mentioned how much people enjoyed using their voice rather than typing. “The computer disappeared,” he said. Meanwhile, another presenter, Vincent Price, contended that typing was better than having video / audio telepresence. “Participants say things under the cover of anonymity.” The third presenter, Beth Noveck, took what I felt was a middle-of-the-road approach. She didn’t jump on either bandwagon, instead suggesting that the important thing was to have a representation of the group itself, and to utilize technology to its full potential to aide in the visualization of the group, its processes, establishment of roles within the group, etc.

As a perpetual fence straddler, I tend to gravitate more toward Prof. Noveck’s view. Now, while my talk is relatively minor, and my attendance rate will likely be low, I’m left with a fun decision of how to incorporate these talks into my presentation. In HCI at CMU, we are taught that our users know some things very well, and other things not well at all. So, when Robert’s users told him “the computer disappeared,” and similarly when Vincent’s users told him “don’t add video or audio,” their comments were fully justified in the context of the system they were working with. However, it is very difficult for people to imagine a hypothetical system that could be better than what they were using at the time.

Maybe both Robert and Vincent are wrong (not trying to discredit my professor). Or maybe one is right, or maybe they’re both right under different contexts. However, in the beauty that is the HCI discipline, I can present contextual research that describes what the user does rather than what the user says. Based on what the user does, the designer / HCI practitioner abstracts out good design practices. Is an audio / video telepresence worthwhile? I think I’m going to take a stance on that issue, and argue against points made by my superiors. It’s a little intimidating, considering these people have gone through much more education than I have. But then, this way is bound to be a lot more fun.

May 18, 2005

Space Wars

Filed under: THOUGHTS — zaiss @ 8:28 pm

I’m sick of being kicked out of spaces. It happened twice this week, which brings the total to four times since I’ve been in Pittsburgh. Three of those times have been at CMU. Today, my Project team was told that we needed to clean up the Project space that was to be dedicated to us for the entire summer because we were being moved out. Someone else wanted the room.

People are petty about space, and that saddens me. They inevitably think about the space they aren’t getting or should be getting, and pay no mind to the person or group that gets caught in the middle and put out by their selfishness. In all, it frustrates me, because people seem to stop behaving rationally when it comes to their space. Inevitably it trickles down to someone, and apparently that someone put me on the “Likes to be Relocated” list. My apologies to my Project group who is now on that list with me. Our room situation is in limbo until the end of the week, which is fabulous.

So imagine how I felt when I left school today, passed by the new CMU building that is almost finished, and saw this sign:

Space Available

I told this to the Project Manager in the group, who said, “That space is $33 a square foot.” To which I replied, “Our Project team is collectively paying $70,500 for the privilege of taking this course.” Holy cow. With that much money I could buy a house on the South Side and have money left over. Add to that the fact that CMU gets money from our client as well, and I start to wonder why this is a difficult problem.

In fairness, my academic advisor and her assistant are working hard to get space. I applaud them for taking on a task that should have been handled by others weeks ago, and I appreciate the connections they are using to get us space for the summer. In the meantime, I’m asking the reader for a favor. Next time you are in a conflict, step into the other person’s shoes and think about what the situation means to them. It really doesn’t matter if it’s space-related or not. Taking two minutes to consider someone else’s feelings is what makes the difference between a terrible week and a salvageable one.

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