Jakob Nielsen

Hawai’i and Memories
Well, this is a bit better. Since I last typed, I jumped off a 40 foot lava rock a few times, swam with 3 honest-to-goodness sea turtles, had some bagels and lox, flew from Maui to Hawai’i (the locals write it out that way. Hawaiian is not a written language, it’s about the sound, and the apostrophe better approximates the pronunciation). I’ve sent a bunch of postcards (apologies to anyone I’ve missed); did some watercolors; lots of snorkling; lots of swimming; walking, and yes, more.

I’m reading the out-of-print A Woman On Paper, a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. She’s a fascinating woman, as illuminated through letters and images and especially her relationship with the author, Anita Pollitzer. One thing in particular I thought fascinating was that when she was a young girl, and doing portraits of people, often she would destroy what she made soon after making them because she said she did not want them floating around to haunt her. I like that notion – of making a piece of art, then destroying. I think of some native arts where at the completion of the art, you destroy it. Sand painting I think of first. And I also think of the part in the film (also a book, but I know the movie) A River Runs Through It—the father has the boys write a theme, he reads it, and then tells them to throw it away. That dedication to craft, coupled with the destruction of it, I find really interesting. In web design much of what I do is designed to be permanent. Jakob Nielsen says that web pages must live forever. But I think of William Gibson’s Agrippa, which was created in 1992, and was far too expensive for one such as I to buy. It was designed to be read once. Then it would be destroyed. Of course, now, the text is widely available.

The internet remembers. It has a long memory. Whether that is the usenet archives or the internet archive. The net remembers forever. If it appears as bits, someone can remember it. Memory, of course, is very much the topic of much Cyberpunk fiction. Blade Runner. Johnny Mnemonic. We Can Remember It for You Wholesale / Total Recall. Robocop.

And memory is, in the end all we have.

Now I will go make more memories in the water.

Onward.

Pranzo con Kynn a Filippi’s
Today was unremarkable save that I had an enjoyable lunch with Kynn at local Pizza joint Filippis’s Pizza Grotto. There is no electronic substitute for good company, conversation, and food.

There are not many people on the planet who I can keep up with and can keep up with me while: eating antipasto and pizza; talking about Justice League, the W3C, section 508, CSS, web accessibility, the Web Standards Project, mailing lists, web.archive.org, DeCSS, Jakob Nielsen, Apple Industrial Design and Anime. Kynn took the train down (he lives north quite a few miles) and used the excuse that he could get some writing done on the train.

Entirely stimulating, and a very long lunch. Thankfully, I have a flexible employer.

I think the neatest thing about today’s lunch is that I realized something core about what’s going on today. That the September 11th events have brought in many web geeks a desire to do something more—to work towards projects and things which matter in ways that maybe can’t be expressed as part of a stock portfolio or balance sheet. I had not put it into words that way, but Kynn’s right. More of my friends and acquaintances who do web work are thinking of it in very different terms.

The other thing that I realized is that The Web Standards Project has not by any stretch fulfilled it’s mission. Kynn made me understand even clearer that the W3C’s role is really as a technical standards body. The W3C’s role is not and never has been one of advocacy. They merely write up “Recommendations.” Well dammit, there’s a need for Advocacy out there, and that’s the reason the The Web Standards Project was born in the first place – to interact with developers, user agent creators, authoring tool vendors – everyone who uses web standards.

Along the same lines, this is interesting: There is no grassroots organizationp taking up the issue of Web Accessibility as something to fight for, and something to evangelize on. There are folks doing lobbying, and writing law, but there’s no independent group serving an advocacy role for web accessibility.

I love passionate groups of people banding together. I’d like to see something more in this area.

Much food for thought for me.

And the pizza was good too.

Mini Brain Dump! wherein, I get rid of links which are crowding the sticky notes on my desktop

A Few Links on Professionalism:
Tom DeMarco: Professional Awareness in Software Engineering
American Society of Safety Engineers: Scope of a Safety Professional
Steve McConnell: Software Engineering Professionalism Website
Philip Greenspun: Redefining Professionalism for Software Engineers

A Few Links on Micropayments:
Clay Shirky: The Case Against Micropayments
Jakob Nielsen: The Case for Micropayments
The w3c: Micropayments Overview
Scott McCloud: Coins of the Realm II
Jakob Nielsen v. Seth Godin in Business2.0: Micropayments Debate
The Industry Standard: Web Publishers Learn to Love Micropayments
The Industry Standard: Amazon’s ‘Honor System’ to Handle Micropayments for Other Sites
NYT: If You Like This Story, Click Here to Pay Me
Current King of Small Transactions: PayPal

A Few Krazy Kat Links:
Krazy Kat: The Coconino County Home Page
“Some Say it With A Brick”: George Herriman’s Krazy Kat
A Krazy Kat Strip Archive

Other old stuff from Google Groups:

* The first time I heard of Jakob Nielsen (1997)

* My first internet posted resumé (1997)

July, 1997, when I first heard of Jakob Nielsen. Probably when I started to smarten up about the web.