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Assange, Snowden, and Stallman as, um, heros?
(Photo of Richard Stallman and Julian Assange holding a propaganda photo of Edward Snowden) Bruce Sterling wrote up a long-winded editorial “The Ecuadorian Library” that covers a lot of ground and ends up posing Richard Stallman, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden as moral heroes against the State Department and NSA as antithetical to democracy. Here’s…
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UX described by Socrates
Lately I’ve been reading from Philosophies of Art & Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger, edited by Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns, and read a passage that sure sounded a lot like a premise of user experience work. This is from Plato’s The Republic. Socrates is dialoguing with Glaucon about art. Of…
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How to write better personal work goals
As managers, we require our employees to set goals, and then we measure them against those goals during annual performance reviews. While this is common and sounds reasonable, the goals often end up disconnected from real performance. This is a waste. (Managers: it’s okay to nod your head in grim agreement.) Why does goal-setting fail,…
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This blog is 10 years old
Hey, I just realized that I’ve been blogging for ten years now. That’s some kind of milestone. From hand-crafted to Blogger to MovableType to WordPress Back when I started in 2003, it was really a learning experiment on my part. I was a consultant at the time, and felt that I needed to get first…
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1st try at the LCP challenge
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Thinking: Taxonomy of shooting ranges
I’ve been overwhelmed by feedback from a side project of mine, rangelistings.com, and am working on upgrading it so that site visitors can make some updates on their own without having to go through me. It’s great how even seemingly little projects like this raise information architecture questions so promptly. Wait…what the heck does “access”…
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My new .22 target pistol, Marvel and Springfield Range Officer
Over the past couple months I’ve worked out the kinks on a new .22 target pistol, and I figured I’d share the details. The new gun: Marvel Unit 1 conversion on a Springfield Armory Range Officer frame After much consideration, I decided to go with a Marvel Precision Unit 1. That is a conversion unit…
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Excluding a site in a Google search
Want to get search results from Google that aren’t from a specific site? Put a minus sign to the left of “site,” as in this search query: “reliability of wikipedia -site:wikipedia.org”
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LinkedIn UX groups, data and questions
Doesn’t it seem like there are a lot of user experience groups on LinkedIn? I’ve joined a few of them in hopes of staying up-to-date on topics, but after joining a couple groups, I quickly realized there were many more possible groups, and they all started looking pretty similar to me. Why would I join…
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Attitude-adjusting pointers for professionals
Over the years, others have shared a few attitude-adjusting pointers with me about work. They’ve stood the test of time for me in a number of different jobs. Here they are. 1. Remember, you don’t need this job. You need a job, but not this one. In my first full-time, salaried position, my boss shared…