The VMA’s were held in Miami this year, and it was a little bit of a mess. It was pretty good, but it was in a big arena like your standard concert with 6 stages randomly placed around the floor and a big crowd of 16 year-old girls dancing in the middle of it all.
Mase must’ve been pretty drunk, because if he had said, “Welcome back” one more time when it didn’t make sense, I was going to start a letter-writing campaign to tell him he’s no longer welcome on television and has to go back to being a minister.
Here’s something I hadn’t seen before: when Jessica Simpson performed, all the kids dancing in front of the stage were given MTV Kyocera cell phones so that they could open them up and wave them slowly in the air like lighters. Ah, marketing.
At least a dozen of the performers and presenters told me to vote, which was fine with me. But when Kerry’s two daughters (in person) and Bush’s two daughters (via satellite) told people to vote, both were drowned out by some booing and a little cheering. No matter what the Drudge report says, the booing was about even between the Democratic and Republican daughters.
Dave Chappelle was supposed to be the “host” of the show, but that amounted to him walking on stage exactly twice, once just to show a video as a tribute to “retiring” rapper Jay-Z. They didn’t play it like it was a joke, but if you ask me it was just a dare to Jay-Z to actually retire.
Best line of the night: Big Boi saying, “Okay, now for the millionth time, ‘Hey Ya’ goddammit.”
With one round to go, Judges scored South Korean Yang Tae-Young with the wrong starting value, and if they had it correctly and the next rotation’s scores turned out the same way, Paul Hamm wouldn’t have won the gold medal. Now the International Gymnastics Federation is asking Paul Hamm to give back his gold medal.
The rules go like this: if you don’t get your score settled correctly before the start of the next rotation, it stands. After they started the final rotation, there is no recourse for the South Koreans to fix the score.
It’s the same way in Golf if you’re playing match play (one-on-one against someone else): If you don’t get a mistake fixed or a penalty assessed for one hole before teeing off on the next, then too bad, you can never change it, even if it costs you the match.
The thing is, that rule is written in the same rule book and has the same importance as the rule that says it’s a 2-stroke penalty for going out of bounds, or equivalently, a 0.100 deduction for falling off the high bar. Just because it doesn’t have to do with skill or what you do while the ball is in play or the judges eyes are on you, it doesn’t make it any less of a rule.
And the spirit behind the rule makes sense as well. What you do depends on the standings right now, whether you’re going on to the next hole or the next rotation. You’re not allowed to claim that everything would have been the same had the standings been different before going on.
There’s nothing South Korea can do. They didn’t catch it in time, so they lost. That’s the way it goes.
Olympic volleyball falls under the category of “Things I Can’t Do,” but I’ve mostly watched both men’s and women’s Volleyball, Swimming, and Gymnastics so far in the Olympics.
First of all, Logan Tom is really, really good. She’s been on the Stanford volleyball and basketball teams for a long time, and even though I’ve recognized her a few times at the Stanford Treehouse, I almost didn’t recognize her with short hair on the US volleyball team. She served up more than her share of kills and aces as the US beat Cuba 3 sets to none to stay in the competition.
Secondly, the camera angle they use for indoor volleyball makes it pretty hard to tell what’s going on. The way you tell who won a point is by looking to see which team puts their arms in the air and goes into a quick huddle immediately after the ball hits the ground. It’s the same kind of celebration they do in hockey that lets the people at home know that the ball went in the net, exept it happens every 10 seconds instead of every half hour.
Also, when they do the fake swings at the net to make the other team think one person is going to spike it when it’s really someone else along the net, I think the only people they’re faking out are the people watching at home on TV. From our angle, the ball goes straight up, and it could be anywhere along the whole length of the net. When your on the other team, obviously it’s going to be the guy at the far left, not the far right.
Anyway, it’s so easy to get emotional about who to root for, all because it’s the United States. And it’s also easy to see why you hear so many people rooting for all the other teams too. It’s the best and most understandable and least dangerous kind of rivalry.
I’ve been busy lately, because I’ve been working on a new project in my spare time. Chad had a great idea for his Master’s thesis project at CMU, called Apeer, but it was in .NET, and he asked me if I could help it work on more platforms. I started moving it to Java for a few hours, but I realized that if people were really going to use it, like for sharing design mockups, that it needed to be easier to use than running a Java application at your desk all day, every day.
And so, I rewrote the client as a web page. You can see a sample image above. Three people are logged in, and each column represents a conversation about something. The initial message is the big bubble, and subsequent comments are the small bubbles. Messages that you haven’t read yet get a white highlight.
It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever done with PHP, since it auto-refreshes in the background using javascript to load data from the server. It uses XmlRPC for communication with the server, and the page itself never reloads.
It’s also about the coolest thing I’ve ever done in CSS, because I can do all the bubbles and comments with extremely minimal html. The markup for the bubbles looks like this (topics, the bubbles, are called “fads”, and the u’s are the colors for different users):
<div class="fadcontainer">
<div class="fad u1" style="top: 100px">
<div class="view u3"></div>
<div class="comment even u2"></div>
<div class="comment u12"></div>
</div>
</div>
It’s not quite done yet, but it’s basically usable. More detailed information about Apeer is on the site of Chad’s partner on the project, Neema Moraveji, here and here.
It feels like almost everything I do on my computer these days is inside my “web browser”:http://www.getfirefox.com. I use “Gmail”:http://gmail.google.com for email, I basically use “Bloglines”:http://www.bloglines.com as my bookmark manager, I get all my news from the web, and I’m writing this inside my browser right now. When I need to write myself a little note, I send myself an email. When I find a link I want to save, I post it to this site. Which brings up the question: what _don’t_ I do inside the browser? Or better yet, what’s keeping me from having a completely portable electronic life?
If everything I did on a computer happened inside the browser, I could sit down at any computer with internet in the world and have my entire computing environment available to me. I could use any operating system, because it wouldn’t matter which one I used. And I could, potentially, use a computer or device that was nothing but a web browser, a so-called internet appliance that a few companies tried 3 or 4 years ago but never caught on because, well, you need more than a browser.
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Tonight I went to the monthly BayCHI presentation at Xerox PARC. It was my first time going to a BayCHI event or Xerox park, so I was interested to see what it was like. The talk was about rich internet applications and the breakthroughs and challenges that they present for the future of web interfaces. The panel included a senior vice president at “Macromedia”:http://www.macromedia.com, a co-founder of “Laszlo”:http://www.laszlosystems.com/demos/ (which I hadn’t heard of, but it’s a rich platform built on top of Flash, which is the only good way to do such a platform, because with any other method, browser compatibility sucks), and the two guys who founded “Oddpost”:http://www.oddpost.com. The majority of the presentations were demos of various rich internet applications that each presenter’s team had built.
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I now have both “Tivo”:http://www.tivo.com and “XM Radio”:http://xmradio.com. These two services completely change the ways television and music are parts of my life. In fact, I watch TV more like I used to listen to music, and I listen to music more like I used to listen to other people’s music. Let me explain.
I’ve had Tivo for almost one year, and I would gladly pay them twice as much money for their services if they asked me to. Seriously, everyone says this, but I love Tivo. I have West Wing episodes saved up, the latest Daily Show, the latest PTI, and hours and hours of primetime TV at my fingertips. And I don’t watch commercials anymore. I don’t even remember if commercials use to bother me.
I’ve had XM Radio for three days, and I’m about ready to ditch iTunes. Not that I use iTunes all that often. I long ago stopped downloading a lot of music, not because I thought it was immoral or illegal, but because it was a lot of work and a waste of my time and I sucked at finding good music. That wasn’t a technical problem, that was the fact that I don’t know who good artists are besides the artists who are always in the news, and I don’t know the names of good songs. I’m not a “music aficionado”. I know what I like when I hear it. Eventually I would just have my 4 or 5 full CDs that I listen to from start to finish, and 4 or 5 mix CDs that I would also listen to straight through. When I wanted to listen to one of my CDs, I’d put it in and I’d know I was going to like it.
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Here’s a comic and article at OK/Cancel about Open Source Software and how it has poor usability because of its nature (a programmer, or several, creating software because they have a passion for filling some need, almost always their own). The developers aren’t people who would do user-testing or UI iterations based on research and refined methods, and the lack of widespread adoption of open-source software is often blamed on poor usability (see “Slashdot”:http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/04/04/12/1757244.shtml?tid=117&tid=126&tid=156&tid=185&tid=99).
As someone who has made a smooth transition from software engineering to UI Design and Human-Computer Interaction, I think one of my strengths is putting myself in the user’s shoes while still knowing exactly what’s possible and how long it will take to build. I’ve also figured out what it is that I like about both of these sides of software development. Software engineers get to do amazing design work, but that design work happens before they write a line of code, before anyone draws a picture of what the application is going to look like, and before there are any users. Well-designed class structures and object communications are lots of work and reap huge rewards in maintainability and ease of implementation, but they take a lot of time. It’s the same time that also needs to be spent designing user workflows and scenarios and appealing visual designs. And so with limited resources, one or the other suffers. With limited time, engineers put together the easy solution instead of what might have been more scalable or easier to fix, and designers throw in elements that could have been clearer or easier to use.
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