Radio with heart

Walking to BART, I listened to this story about a 17-year-old girl who does a lot to take care of her autistic younger brother (in large part because her parents don’t speak English) It was a little awkward, because my eyes teared up. It’s a remarkable story. Listen for what her younger sister has to [...]

Talented bad web design

In the early days of the web, it was common to find examples of really bad web design done by obviously talented designers. As folks were learning the medium, they tried all kinds of things, many of them which lead to terrible experiences for users — overwrought splash screens, clever interfaces too difficult to use, [...]

Please someone please make a t-shirt from this

There was a man whose tears could cure cancer. His name was Jesus, not Chuck Norris. – Chuck Norris From here.

The World as Game, continued

A bit back I wrote a post, All the World’s A Game, about how all manner of aspects of life are turning into games, whether it makes apparent sense or not. And now I just read about Chore Wars, a way to make doing chores fun, by creating a game-like competition around them. I must [...]

Panorama of San Francisco, 1971

If you have any interest in the evolution of “Baghdad-by-the-Bay” (funny how no one calls it that any more), view this panorama photograph of San Francisco, taken from atop the second Bay Bridge tower in 1971. You can learn more about the photo here. Things that interested me: those giant oil drum things out in [...]

Poor dog

Here is a recent photo of mine that’s getting no Flickr love because the detail is too small in the thumbnail: Click to see bigger This poor dog, with the garage door open a crack, wearing one of those cones (which I call a “dork collar”), feebly scrabbling to get out.

Raw fish that ain’t sashimi

Inspired by this story on NPR, Stacy made crudo tonight, and it was excellent. And not too hard (if you have access to sashimi-grade fish). Give it a shot!

Brief Book Review: The Architecture of Happiness

So, after something on the order of 5 months of reading, I finally finished Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness. I read it slowly not because it was a slog, not because I forced myself to get through it, but because it was truly delightful, and structured in a way that invites savoring in [...]

Adaptive Path’s UX Week 2007 – The Best Ever

My colleague Sarah is the program chair for this year’s UX Week (August 13-16, Washington, D.C.), and she’s put together an amazing program. The keynoters are particularly compelling. We’ve got Deborah Adler, who lead the design of the Target ClearRx pill bottle system, Jan Chipchase, a design researcher from Nokia, Lisa Strausfeld and her colleagues [...]

La experiencia ES el producto…

My Core77 piece, which has already been run on BusinessWeek’s site, has now been translated into Spanish by friends of mine in Chile. Fun!

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Links, thoughts, and essays from Peter Merholz