Daily misery

say what you want about post-processed photo but he takes photo like no other.

seriously. Seriously?

oh who am I kidding. I will still go and watch it.

Back in the days when we were really poor, my uncle gave me a roller blade for my 9th birthday. It was made with a combination of discarded plywood, alligator skin and olive oil. He would teach me all these wonderful tricks which I had, over a period of a couple years, mastered well. We didn’t have the money to buy a video camera back then to record all my moves but they are pretty similar to this video. It brings back memories from those glory years of my childhood.

Bright sun and beautiful day. Went to rogers.com and tried to pay my wireless bill. First attempt trying to sign in:

Hmm after a couples times doing the ‘page refresh and try again’ sequence, I decided to use IE. Maybe rogers is just one of those primitive site that doesn’t support firefox, accessibility and section 508. So sad.

Nope, that didn’t work either. Ok let’s try password recovery. Got new password in email. Followed the link in email.

Three different URLs for post sign in action. All were error messages.

I was losing patience. Went to google and searched for ‘rogers customer service’ and clicked on the first result…

I surrendered.

Are you male? Do you watch porn? If your answers to these questions are ‘yes’ and ‘fuck yes’ respectively, you are more likely to objectify women. I am not assuming you do, but the likelihood is strong. The likelihood is correlated with how frequently you watch porn and how frequently an orgasm follows each viewing…..

…Are porn viewers the only ones who are to blame for such a dissonance? I say that chick flicks are far worse than porn in this sense. Those sappy romance flicks give females a delusional notion of what romance is in reality. Some females who have been romantically desensitized by Disney films growing up won’t settle for anybody less than prince charming. Those same females grow up to watch other flicks like “The Notebook,” and “Titanic.” They enter the dating world thinking a man will sweep them off their feet..

Read the rest of the post.

Not every airport chase scene ends happily. But still this doesn’t justify porn addiction. *looking somewhere else*

my girl friends used to tell me how hard it is to get the perfect bangs. I think I’ve found the girl that has one.

amix: hates dr. phil, he is such an asshole. he probably beats his wife in his sparetime :D
alvin: dr phil is never wrong! never!
amix: maybe it’s not dr. phil that’s fucked, but his audience. they come to the show and cry - - wtf :)

A man who consistently voted against gay interests, but turns out to be not just gay but the kind of gay who likes to get it in public restrooms. Don’t people like Larry Craig and Ted Haggard and Mark Foley prove that being gay really is a hard-wired thing — not, as the conservatives always claim, a “lifestyle choice”? If anyone could choose not to have gay sex, it would be these guys, since their whole careers are built on not having gay sex.

Proceed to read ‘The 13 “Dickheads of the Year” According To Bill Maher’.

web site/application developers should grab himself/herself a copy of this study by Nielsen Norman Group titled Beyond ALT Text: Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilities.

From the site:

The retail value of this report is $124, but it is free as our holiday gift to our loyal readers, as our thanks for your support over the years.

:)

Recently Andrei Herasimchuk posted this entry to the IxDA’s mailing list.

I’m not sure it’s “important.” I only distance myself from the likes of Nielsen simply because he has never built or designed anything in his life (that I’m aware of) and seems to go out of his way to make my job as a designer harder, not easier, by making absurdist proclamations to executives who want to believe his brings the truth because they have paid him a lot of money. If he actually took the time to practice what he preaches with useit.com, or even took more time to learn what kinds of compromises, solutions and constraints designers have to work with in order to actually build digital products, I might think differently. But he doesn’t. He’s still basically hurting the design profession more than he helps it, imho, so he reaps what he sows.

However, outside of that, you have to recognize that designers are the most exposed people in companies in terms of their work. It’s the one thing people can criticize and toss around opinions about all the time. So evaluation tends to make our lives even more stressful than it already is. To the degree that most of us have a really hard time learning to dealing with it.

Let me put it this way: When I was working InDesign ten years ago (wow its been that long) , I was managing the next versions of Photoshop and Illustrator at the same I was doing the design work on InDesign. The team was in Seattle, so I had to literally wake up at 5am every Tuesday, drive to San Jose Int’l Airport, catch a 6:30am flight to Seattle, drive to the office in downtown Seattle and get to work at around 9:30am. I worked all day, caught the evening 8:30pm flight back home and got back home around 11pm, only to have to do more work on stuff I missed that day. I did this every week for almost nine months straight.

When I was there, we’d often have a 3pm review meeting, where… I kid you not… there were 9 to 12 people in a room to review the design work. Product managers, QA, engineers, even tech support folks. The purpose of the meeting was to do nothing but provide “feedback” on the design work I was doing. So basically, it was 9 to 12 people all giving me their opinions and I had to sit there and listen to them. Week after week. Needless to say, it got a little much for me to deal with, especially when their opinions or ideas went counter to the longer term design strategy I was implementing to make the Creative Suite possible.

I don’t care if people have opinions or evaluations of my work. Everyone has an opinion and part of the job being a designer is to deal with it, but it doesn’t make us happy campers when its not done in a way that supports designers and their work. What I need are people who can not only give me feedback, but feedback I can actually do something with, or ideas that can be implemented or meet the same design constraints I have to use in designing the solution. Feedback that I can’t do anything with comes across as complaints, and listening to complaints day in and day out can make one about as likable as the folks who sit at the DMV processing paperwork.

So in order to get feedback from evaluations that a designer can actually do something with, the person providing the evaluation needs as much understanding about the problem as the designer. And I don’t mean just the “user” understanding. I mean the business, the technology, visual, interaction, project deadlines, etc. I’ve worked with plenty of researchers and usability folks who get this. The ones who don’t generally don’t like me.

This rings so true at home. Not everyone will or can express critique/opinion when it comes to evaluating program codes or the inner mechanical working of a nuclear generator in a submarine. But everyone, I mean even the janitor, can and boy will they give you a piece of their thoughts regarding your design work. I am not saying that’s necessary a bad thing, but there’s no argument, as Andrei pointed out, that designers are the most exposed people in companies in terms of their work.

yeah.

mildly NSFW.

and there’s no way to turn off your friends application updates. MAMAMEIA!

Kauro Amane is the last celebrity to make it into the holy list. :)

Persepolis (review).

best christmas present ever from my sister. These are my childhood all time favorites.