Astoria, OR – The Good and the Bad
Last night, we stayed in Astoria, OR, after a day of driving from Seattle.
Washington proved a little disappointing to me — we didn’t have the time to head north up the Olympic peninsula, so we headed due West to Aberdeen and then Long Beach, which were just not all that interesting. Though Long Beach [...]
IA Summit 2006: Closing Plenary
Yesterday, I had the honor of presenting the closing plenary for the 2006 IA Summit.
You can download the slides, with notes. (6.5MB PDF)
I had tough shoes to fill. Andy Dillon’s closing plenary last year was excellent.
Giving a closing plenary is a nerve-wracking experience. I realized I had a hard time relaxing and enjoying [...]
What You Don’t Drink, Serve
I’m in Vancouver for the next 6 or so days. The first four are devoted to the IA Summit, and then Stacy and I plan on staying a couple extra days to look around. (If you are a Vancouver reader of peterme and want to get together, email me.)
Anyway, this morning I wandered into the [...]
Off My Chest
Maybe it’s the forthcoming IA Summit. It’s also probably my role as president of the IA Institute. But I feel obliged to stand up for my peeps (information architects), who have been oddly denigrated in this passage from 37Signals’ “Getting Real” book:
Go for quick learning generalists over ingrained specialists
We’ll never hire someone who’s an [...]
BSG + FSM
So, I finally got around to finishing the season finale of Battlestar Galactica, and…
SPOILER ALERT
there they are on New Caprica, and Chief starts rousing his union members with a speech that sounds oddly familiar. And I realize, Hey! That’s the speech Mario Savio gave standing on a police car during the Free Speech Movement protests. [...]
Bruce Sterling dissects me
In a highly entertaining post on his blog, Bruce Sterling has at a passage from my conversation with GK Van Patter. It’s a remarkably bit of linguistic and conceptual insight; Bruce is like a cat with a toy, bouncing it between his paws, picking it apart, not out of malice, but because that’s what he [...]
R&D&Apple
So, an article on The Street.com worrying about Apple’s relative lack of R&D investment, spurred commentary by 37 Signals and Victor that, hey, maybe that’s okay, which echoes something I wrote over two years ago, which is how interaction design innovation for the Mac (both from Apple and other software vendors) occurs not from R&D-fed [...]
South by Southwest Afterthoughts
A few takeaways from the 2006 South by Southwest Interactive conference (other than my head cold):
It’s not about the content
The last time I attended SxSW was in 2002, and I stopped going for a while because I was so upset at how poor the content had gotten. This year, I didn’t let it get to [...]
Bruce Sterling doesn’t use key commands
I sat next to Bruce during a session at SxSW. He was typing like a demon, but when he wanted to move what he’d written between apps, he selected “Copy” from the drop-down menu, and then “Paste” from the drop-down menu in the other program.
Slip of the finger
In an IM chat to a colleague, I almost typed it as “sanctum santorum.”
Which strikes me as deeply oxymoronic.
