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If you were to look at where people in CMU’s MHCI program came from, you’d see heavy concentration of students in the northeastern and western United States. In fact, I can count the number of people from the South and Midwest on one hand (well, if I had a hand with six fingers that is, but who’s counting?).

As such I thought it was necessary to talk up Omaha a little bit and prove that its just as good of a city as any other city out there. Omaha has a population of about 801,000 people, which puts it at about 1/3 the size of Pittsburgh population-wise. Admittedly, we don’t have a major league baseball team or pro football team in Nebraska, but we do have the College World Series, which is pretty sexy. Omaha is also home to the Henry Doorly Zoo which is very cool.

Speaking of the College World Series, if you’ve been following it on ESPN, you might have caught an ad showcasing Omaha that was done by Zaiss & Co. While I can’t find the spot anywhere, a local news station covered the advertising campaign.

This is all part of a push by the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce to up the hype about Omaha (… hey, it is too hype worthy!). They’ve created a website at www.ososurprising.com. I encourage you to check it out if you want to learn more about Omaha.

…What’s with that domain name anyway?. Cognitive Psychology fact: when we see a word that seems to be misspelled, our brain shifts letters around to help it make sense. There is an essay floating around out there with a bunch of misspelled words that tries to show this phenomenon empirically. So I suppose it’s no surprise that every time I look at that domain name, I wonder why Omaha is being promoted on a website about OSU uprisings. Oh well, I guess you can’t win them all. Did I tell you about the zoo?

It’s amazing how you can pair two disparate things and come up with a killer post title…

When I moved to Pittsburgh, I joined DSW’s “Reward Your Style” program… what did I have to lose? Another random value card to put in my wallet, and I’d occasionally get some free shoes.

About a month ago, I got a postcard from DSW in the mail advertising the sale:

Now I’m not sure what this ad says to you… but to me, it says, “Hey, females, shoes are on sale, come buy them all.” Admittedly, I don’t know what percentage of DSW Rewards customers are females, but I know for a fact that there are males in the prorgram (me, perhaps). Even if women are 90% of DSW’s Rewards customers, the stereotype that women buy lots of shoes is trite and frankly, somewhat sexist. Plus, am I really supposed to be motivated to go buy shoes now? The least they could do is put some nice men’s shoes on an alternative advertisement and send that out the males in their program. They should keep track of Rewards customers’ gender, right?

After all, they track credit and debit card numbers used in Rewards purchases.

Let me back up. This post was originally going to be center around the silly, ineffective ad that DSW put out to its Rewards customers. Hilarious antics would ensue. Surely. But tonight, I got a letter from the DSW execs. Apparently, the company has recently joined the group of companies who have had their customer records stolen by identity thieves. The estimate is that 1.4 million customer records were stolen from the store.

The letter informed me that I was one of the lucky 1.4 million. As if my day wasn’t stressful enough…

So DSW is serving up a side of identity theft with their crap advertisements. But the DSW execs apologized for the inconvenience, and pointed out how quickly they had notified me of the debit card number theft. Forgive and forget, right? Hardly. First of all, why is DSW tracking my debit card number whenever I make a purchase? All they need to do is assign me a number, track how many shoes I buy, and give me free shoes when I buy sufficiently many shoes. That doesn’t involve any personal information whatsoever – if all I was to them was a number, I’d be quite happy with that.

Secondly, why on earth wasn’t DSW’s customer database secure? Is that how highly they think of their prized Rewards customers? For that matter, what are they doing to rectify the problem now that it has reared it’s ugly head? They mentioned that they are tracking down the offenders and will “prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law” (I’m holding my breath), but that doesn’t do me a whole lot of good. I’ve already taken steps to fix DSW’s sloppy mistake. They need to be bending over backwards to assure me that it won’t happen again. A free pair of shoes wouldn’t be so bad either.

Enough ranting and raving, time for some facts. Readers, pay attention. As of the receipt of my letter, Visa and MasterCard had notified DSW of the names that went along with the stolen debit card numbers. If you have been to DSW since November 2003 and paid with another credit card (or with a check), your information might have been stolen too.

If you find that your records were stolen, the first step is to call the number on the back of the card. I ended up cancelling my debit card and ordering a new one to prevent the number from being used fraudulently. Then double and triple check recent transactions to make sure nothing has fallen through the cracks since the theft. And finally (thanks to Braden for this suggestion), check your credit report in a month or so and make sure that nobody has opened a new accounts in your name. Apparently DSW didn’t link personal info to the card numbers, but the letter clearly states that stolen information “included debit and credit card numbers,” which implies that more information was stolen. Better safe than sorry.

I have a passive interest in branding strategies that corporations use and the messages they convey to the audience. Originally, I had planned on exploring marketing and its overlap with HCI while at CMU. But alas, things changed, and I got sidetracked.

Speaking of getting sidetracked, let’s hurry on to the topic at hand before it happens again. I’ve lived in Pittsburgh for almost a year now, and I’m starting to get a good idea of the image they portray to residents and visitors alike. A few months back my car registration expired. I decided to renew in Pennsylvania since it is about $100 cheaper (even after the mandatory car inspection) than registering in Nebraska. So I went for it.

It has always puzzled me that some state governments decided to put their official website on their license plates. Who do they think reads them? If I’m close enough to read the website on your license plate, I’ve probably rear-ended you. Plus, it seems as though you can access any official state website via www.state.[state abbreviation].us or www.[state name].gov. Plus, there’s always Google. But maybe I’m missing something.

Like other states, Pennsylvania has traditionally had their state website on their license plates. But I was intrigued to find that my license plate had visitpa.com on the bottom. They knew I was from Nebraska - was there a rule that people from other states got tourism plates? Did they expect me to go home and drive around my home state so that others would see my license plate and suddenly be stricken with the need to visit Pennsylvania?

It turns out that I wasn’t being singled out (shocking, I know). The visitpa.com plate was just the newest version of the Pennsylvania license plate.

Now, that seems a little odd to me. True, Pennsylvania was the 4th-most-popular travel destination in 2003. True, the outlook from 2004 was quite favorable. But how much of that tourism capital is really coming from within Pennsylvania? When I’m driving around Pittsburgh, am I supposed to see other “visitpa.com” license plates and be stricken with the need to visit the state that I already reside in?

But, OK - let’s operate under the assumption that these license plates somehow encourage non-Pennsylvanians to visit Pennsylvania. Let’s also say that half of these people decide to fly in, and they fly in to Pittsburgh. What would they see on their way out of the terminal? Multiple ads for Yesterday’s Airport of Tomorrow exhibit (um, would that be… today’s airport?) and a big honkin ad for Heinz ketchup.

I think airport advertising can be a good way to show what a city is all about to people who may not be familiar with it. The San Francisco airport has a tram that goes around the various parking areas and to the terminal. On some of the storage buildings, there are giant ads for handheld palm devices. That tells me that San Francisco is all about state-of-the-art, forward thinking technology. Omaha’s airport has a number of ads about unique commerce opportunities to be found in the city. Surely Pittsburgh has more to offer than… ketchup.

In fact, they do. As you proceed down the escalator to the train to baggage claim, you discover another large ad… for a hair salon. This just in - mass exodus of Americans to Pittsburgh to get their hair cut. How does that make sense? While I could see this ad potentially being effective for returning residents, a haircut is by far the last thing on my mind when I’m returning home from a trip. I’m desperately trying to remember where I parked my car so I don’t spend 30 minutes wandering around the parking lot in the rain looking for it (yes, that happened last month. -sigh-).

So won’t you please come visit me in Pittsburgh? We have fabulous things to do, like eat ketchup… get haircuts… and travel to other places in Pennsylvania. But truly — what else is there in life?

On Friday, I hopped a plane to Houston to spend Father’s Day weekend with my dad. It was a low key weekend, but we watched the new Star* Wars movie, which was good. I think Star* Wars viewing is exemplary of Father-Son togetherness activity, but anyway, I’m rambling. That’s probably because I’m not so good at talking about personal matters, so I might as well dive right into it.

My dad has cancer. Cutaneous T-Cell Lymphoma, to be precise. I won’t go into details about it here, but here are the Google results if you’re curious. He’s currently starting week 5 of an 8 week chemotherapy treatment. If all goes according to plan, he’ll get 2 weeks rest at the end of the treatment, followed by one intense week of chemotherapy to kill his immune system. He’d then get a bone marrow transplant in mid-August.

My dad’s been a serious trooper for the past month, and the good news is that he’ll have someone with him almost all of the time from here until he’s recovered from his transplant. Even still, I want my dad to know that people out there are rooting for him, so here’s where the favor comes in.

As part of my dad’s blog I’ve set up a contact page by which you can contact him. If you have two seconds, swing by and send him your well wishes. If you have more time, you should read his blog. If you’ve laughed at my blog once or twice, you’re sure to laugh at what he has to say. My sense of humor had to come from somewhere, right?

When the MHCI program touted the real world experience I would gain in this program, I didn’t realize that they pursued it with such gusto! I’m keeping quite busy this summer, which is why my blog entries have been somewhat lacking. I promise they’ll pick up come August, and I’ll try to keep the entries steady in the meantime.

Till the next one, I thought I’d give you an update of the projects that I’m working on. As they wrap up, I’ll be posting them (or demos, or websites, or something relevant) for you to look at. I promise I’m not slacking. =D

• My Portfolio Site: Look for this in the coming week. I’ve had a domain name for over a year now, and still no website to show for it? Except this one, of course, but that’s beside the point — I’ve been doing lots of work and I’m not showing it off! Hopefully that will change very soon.
• PSLC Data Shop: The Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center commissioned a Project group to aid in the development of their Data Shop. They need their data organized, and more importantly, visualized! We’ve started designing some of the reports, and it’s going well so far. We should have a cool product come August!
• PICOLA: This is the project that sponsored me to give a talk at Stanford last month. I’m doing some of the Flash development for the computer interface. We also just got our mobile devices in! Yes, my sponsor here is dreaming big, and we’re already building a mobile interface. The perk — the mobile device that I’m testing on is mine to keep! I’m now the proud owner of a Dell Axim Pocket PC. Hmm… I wonder if it will network with my Mac…
• Calc Study: My research sponsor’s philosophy for research questions is like her philosophy for applying for grants: the more the merrier. Aside from trying to answer a slieu of questions about how people learn Calculus (and exactly what the mechanism is for learning), the Calc Study is serving to gather dialogues between participants and tutors / peer learners to provide a basis for a natural language tutor in Calculus. That’s a great lead-in to…
• TuTalk: The idea behind TuTalk is to make it easy for a layperson to build a conversation-based tutor without a whole lot of technological know-how. I’m slowly ramping up on this project, but it will likely be my life come August. That’s OK, at least Project will be over.

As these projects wrap up, I’ll post more and show you the work we’re doing. Till then, I hope you enjoy the interim posts!

The number of the day today is 4. Four is the number of million dollar budget cuts keeping our Federal Government from contributing no federal money to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Be careful how eagerly you count up to 4, Count… once you get there, you might get cancelled. At least in rural areas of the United States who can’t rally support for public broadcasting on without federal support.

A Washington Post article from last Friday (linked through moveon.org) details the circumstances surrounding the vote from a House subcommittee. According to the vote, the federal government would cut 1/4 of the federal money going to CPB (that’s one million dollar budget cut) in the first year of the plan, then eliminate it all together the next year (and there’s two, three, and four). The measure would also greatly reduce the amount of our tax dollars going to CPB.

I’m not going to use this post to try and refute the ridiculous statement that public broadcasting is giving liberal bias to our media (whoops, that just slipped right in there…). Even if you buy the argument about liberal bias, suggesting that cutting funding will fix the problem is like saying that destroying all roads will end car accidents. Yes, you might be right, but there’s probably a more sensible approach that doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater (I’m just full of analogies tonight!).

As someone who watched Sesame Street as a kid (I was right in front of the TV smacking my nose along with The Honkers… just ask my parents…), I think it worthwhile to discourage this measure. Even though the chances are high that it won’t pass through the House proper and the Senate, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t vocalize your opinion. Moveon.org has a petition circulating; I’d encourage you to sign it if you agree with the principle.

My friend Lisa got me hooked on Diet Snapple Teas (I’m a fan of the Peach and Lime Green Tea varieties), and part of the pleasure is that you get a random Snapple fact under each bottle cap. Today, I learned that snails can sleep for up to three years. And how nice would that be? I’d like to leave all my cares behind and go sleep for 3 years. Although, I think I’d wake up with one heck of a backache.

I’m also amused that beavers used to be the size of bears. Look out trees, it’s a giant beaver! Raar.

Yeah. He either used to have my phone number or submitted the wrong phone number to the phone book. I’d think he’s a shady character because of all the phone calls he gets from shady people with restricted numbers, but I got a call from one of his students once asking for help on homework. Whoops.

If Ronnie from Omaha, Nebraska ever reads this blog entry, please update your phone number!

In the Methods of Human-Computer Interaction course that I took last Fall, we learned about a number of Discount Usability Methods, including Heuristic Evaluations, developed by Jakob Nielsen. The thing about HEs is that if you get enough people together, you can find a majority of basic flaws with any given interface. The training is really cheap, and the evaluation itself shouldn’t take too long either. In all, it’s pretty inexpensive, especially compared to some of the other methods out there (bringing in “real users” can get expensive, as I’m learning this summer).

As such, I was shocked to learn that you can commission Nielsen to do a Heuristic Evaluation of your website or interface for $35,000! That’s not very “discount,” is it? On the upside, you get experts from the Nielsen/Norman group conducting your evaluation. But still, according to the literature I’ve read in this program, a group of 5 Heuristic Evaluators will find about 80% of the issues present in an interface — not 100%, but is that extra 20% worth tens of thousands of dollars? It’s not that good of a method…

I’m quoting my mom’s recent post on my dad’s blog:

I was so happy to read that… it’s like Men’s Health is right there behind my dad sayin, “Keep it up.” That’s so cool.