Brainstream for the week...
40 years ago today Martin Luther King was assassinated at age 39. Wow! Local angle - The Night James Brown Saved Boston on VH1.
Twitter is a very interesting way to keep up with friends, colleagues, partners, and customers. You really do get to know people. Like what they had for breakfast and stuff - you don't even get that kind of info at Lotusphere!
I've seen the future of television viewing. We're finally caught up on Lost Season 3 DVDs from Christmas and needed to move on to Season 4 - what to do? Download from iTunes at $1.99/episode - easy enough....got the cable to hook to TV - works! Better? Watch for free streaming from abc.com! Got that cable too for the MBP - works great! It turns out that all the media companies are getting in on this and have figured out how to monetize the opportunity instead of ignoring it (see music industry). I'm sure they are even sniffing our ip address and targeting ads based on your location; and if they aren't, they probably should be.
Speaking of TV - just finished up In Treatment, another excellent HBO offering that we watched "on demand", since we could never seem to get it together to watch every night at 9:30 or whenever it was on. Anyway, I hope there is another season! Right up there with Six Feet Under and Sopranos. I also like Deadwood and Carnivale, but those never made it back after relatively short runs.
The RIT Innovation Lab co-ops are doing some great work. We had a review recently and after some churn, they are getting it together and are on track. Hopefully, I can talk more about the individual projects later - I'm not sure what is public and what isn't so I'll err on the safe side. My assumption is that we'll figure out a way to release some of this stuff, esp. for Symphony. We're planning and recruiting for the next round of students already.
Bruins - don't care. Red Sox - still too cold. Celtics - yes! I hope I can get playoff tix.
Logged on to the bleedyellow.com Sametime Advanced installation. Good stuff, Lotus911 - I can definitely see the usefulness of those persistent chats. As Carl said in a tweet, twitter is kind of like a persistent chat that's public. I'm thinking of ways that we can use ST Adv. in our daily work routine, like for project teams or maybe a 'secret managers chatroom' etc.
Speaking of communities, our team (with my pointy-haired encouragement) has started an internal to IBM Lotus UX Community in order to increase our effectiveness as a design team working in multiple locations. We're using Connections, of course, and also have a group blog. First post was on Simplicity. This will be a good test in a number of ways since we're just starting up the process. Everyone is busy, so it'll be one more thing to do. However, I truly believe that the benefits individually and organizationally will be worth it.
I finally gave up and we're going to see an accountant on Monday!
Our team did some excellent heuristic evaluations recently (not on Notes, another product) that were quite well done and served to rally all the stakeholders around a common set of problems to solve. We used a combination of Neilsen's heuristics and Gutwin, et al, applied to a set of tasks. Good stuff by Eileen, Sandra, and Velda in user research.
Picked up an iPod Touch for my wife. What she really wants is a PDA for her calendar and contacts, plus an iPod music player update. Now, I have to figure out how to have it synch to her Macbook Pro for calendar and contacts and get music from our other Mac desktop where all the music is. Any clues? I'm just going to try doing a manual synch somehow (or just copy to the iPod disk). Hope it works, or I'm in trouble!
That's it for tonight - enjoy the weekend and the week ahead.
Chris
Chris Reckling | 4 April 2008 10:28:32 PM ET | Home | Comments (0)
