Seattle.BloggersPub

I really enjoyed Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices by Dan Saffer. It was an interesting yet fairly easy ready that does a terrific job of introducing interaction design. It’s not a long book and as such doesn’t go into great detail at any point, however it does go deep enough to pique more interest and there is enough interesting information in there for anyone but the most seasoned interaction designers.

I really enjoyed Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices by Dan Saffer. It was an interesting yet fairly easy ready that does a terrific job of introducing interaction design. It’s not a long book and as such doesn’t go into great detail at any point, however it does go deep enough to pique more interest and there is enough interesting information in there for anyone but the most seasoned interaction designers.

Well, ok, I may have done a fair amount of work on this one. But I tried to use a guiding hand rather than take over.

Hiromi got hooked on Eggs Benedict after we made a stop at Fremont’s 35th St. Bistro for brunch early in the year. I’ve made Eggs Florentine or other vegetarian variants at home, and when we’ve found ourselves at brunch at a place which offers Eggs Benedict, there’s a fairly good chance Hiromi will order it. Her favorite so far was made with a sort of truffled hollandaise with mushrooms at Volterra in Ballard.

Hiromi wanted to learn to make hollandaise sauce before leaving, so I walked her through one of the effective “cheating” methods that involves melting the butter with the warmed egg yolk and lemon-water mixture. I’ve done the traditional method, the blender method (particularly effective when a rescue effort is required), and  this approach, and I think it’s the most fool-proof.

I had blanched some rapini for ohitashi the night before, but we had a bit leftover. The slight bitterness of the rapini is a good way of balancing the luxurious richness of the hollandaise and poached egg.

We also had some crispy fried potatoes, which I oil-blanched and fried like frites.

I’m confused about this, but I wanted to highlight it because it’s very important to Flash, and I’m hoping someone out there knows a bit more than I do. I saw today via Mashable that Bunchball, a Flash game company, raised $2 million dollars in venuture funding. Taken by itself, it’s great to see […]

This past weekend, my brother and I escaped for an overnight backpacking trip in that rare gem, Olympic National Park. We saw scarcely another soul, but throughout the trip there was evidence that human civilization persisted: the sound of aircraft overhead. Not loud. But often enough that we remarked on it.

So it was apropos that this morning I discovered an article about a project called One Square Inch of Silence, which takes place in the Olympics. It’s the work of an “acoustic ecologist” (who knew there is such a thing?) named Gordon Hempton.

To make a long story short:

“I’ve circled the globe three times in pursuing silent places,” he said. “Olympic National Park is the most sonically diverse, and is the national park that has the longest periods of natural quiet that I have observed.”

On a recent hike, Hempton stopped along the trail at various times, holding up his sound level meter. At one spot, the decibel level was so low — just 26 decibels — that he observed, “Probably the loudest sound was a few drops of the alder leaves back there.”

Hempton takes his project so seriously that he actually designated a spot–a square inch to be precise–that is truly quiet. I think that’s pretty cool.

The place Hempton designated is, apparently, in a part of the park that’s mostly undisturbed by the distant roar of jet engines. It’s the sort of place that I suspect many of us would benefit from getting to know, silently.

Want to find that square inch? Read all about it on his website, here.

(The backpacking trip was grand — thanks for asking. Nothing but crisp autumn sunshine and bears working their way through salal bushes in anticipation of their long nap.)

Seems like more and more people — even conservative economists — are going on record in support of higher gas taxes.

From an economists’ point of view, it’s a bit of a no brainer. Like just about any addiction, our gasoline habit carries lots of “externalities” — ie., costs that fall on everyone, rather than just the person who uses the gas. (Think climate change, oil spills, air pollution, security vulnerabilities, international military entanglements, economic risk from oil price shocks, etc.)

If we consumers had to pay those costs every time we filled our tanks, then we’d tend to use gas a little more sparingly — and we’d create fewer externalities as a result. Plus, the taxes could provide a source of revenue to deal with the problems created by energy consumption — say, a source of revenue for energy efficiency, to ramp down our contribution to climate change

But that begs the question — just how high should the taxes be?

There’s no easy answer to that question, since there are so many uncertainties involved. Estimates of various military costs of petroleum vary by as much as a factor of six, for example (see this pdf for a summary). But taking a limited look at just the climate impacts of gasoline consumption, I’d say that a tax of, oh, about 25 cents (US) per gallon is a reasonable place to start.

That works out to roughly a penny per mile. 

Applied to both gas and diesel, that tax would raise about $2 billion per year to fight climate change in the Pacific Northwest alone.

You might have heard of FUD before, but you might not have heard of FID. FID is a very serious form of depression that is currently sweeping the whole of Western Washington in the beautiful Pacific Northwest.

“Why is FID so prominent there?” I hear you ask…

Well, there was a time not too long ago when a certain pro team won all its home games and nearly all of its away games. Farther back in time, there was a certain college team that annihilated its opponents and struck fear in all corners and reaches of its division. Then that team began losing, and losing consistently, which allowed Western Washingtonians to focus on the aforementioned pro team almost exclusively.

2006 is a new year, though, and that pro team has lost some of its titans to injury. In their absence, the team’s defense has decided to boycott tackling. At the same time, the college team sprung up unexpectedly like a rose from a sidewalk (historical pun intended) only to lose in dramatic fashion over and over again against the teams from the aforementioned corners and reaches.

It hurts to be a football fan in Seattle right now. The supposed curses and false hopes are too much to bear.

Here’s to finding a cure for FID.

Editor’s note: Guest contributor David Kershner is a land conservation consultant who did research for Sightline’s book Tax Shift.

In case you haven’t noticed, environmental tax shifting is receiving
national attention, thanks in part to Al Gore. Last month Gore gave a
speech at New York University in which he proposed replacing the
payroll tax with a carbon tax .

Last week Time Magazine columnist Joe Klein wrote that he
asked Barack Obama “why [Obama] didn’t support an energy-tax married to
tax relief for working Americans” in a recent speech to members of MoveOn.org.
Klein refers to it as Gore’s “tax swap idea.” Obama responded later in
the interview that, “It’s a neat idea. I’m going to call Gore and have
a conversation about it. It might be something I would want to embrace.”

Meanwhile, former World Bank chief economist and Nobel Prize winner
Joseph Stiglitz has been promoting tax shifting as part of his current
book tour. In an interview on KUOW’s The
Conversation about two weeks ago, Stiglitz lent his support to the idea
and said that leaders of the Conservative Party in Britain are now talking about the benefits of lower
taxes on labor and higher taxes on pollution.

From the October 25 issue of The Guardian:

On Conservative plans for ensuring how yet-to-be-defined [carbon reduction] targets were met, Mr Cameron reiterated that his own party was committed to rebalancing the system through a system of “taxes on things that are bad,” such as pollution, and [”]tax reductions on things that are good,” such as free parking for battery-operated cars.

Maybe tax shifting’s time has almost come?

Doesn’t seem possible, does it? How can four very different applications work together?

With one unique application.

TeamDirection Project 2007 has the robustness of an athlete, the wherewithal of a concierge and the communication skills of a diplomat. But perhaps most importantly it brings project management to a more human level.

We realize there are people involved in projects. This is why we integrated Instant Messaging right into the project view. We made it behave very similarly to SharePoint integration with MS Office apps so SharePoint (and Groove) users will be right at home.

But the real benefits are for team members who don’t need a project management tool. Rather, they just need their browsers to point to SharePoint workspaces. Or if they have the newest MS Office family member, Groove 2007, then join Groove workspaces that take advantage of forms. The important thing is these team members need no additional software to participate in the project and complete their tasks.

We also aim to make the project manager’s life a little better too. It’s now very easy to move data from MS Project into TeamDirection, and from TeamDirection back to MS Project. Not import/export, but full synchronization. And not necessarily the entire project.

For example, while a project manager may be perfectly at home in a 1000 task project, sometimes its easier for a team to work on smaller pieces. TeamDirection Project lets the project manager identify a summary task as the piece of the project to share. Once in the TeamDirection system, we maintain a link to the summary task’s origin and allow it to be published to either SharePoint Task Lists or Groove Task Lists. TeamDirection Project will then gather task data as people update their assigned tasks and synchronize that data with original summary task (and its children) in MS Project. It may sound difficult, but we’ve got it down to two clicks.

The result is any summary task can become a shared task list.

And not just MS Project summary tasks, but also topics and subtopics. The observant readers may have recognized the simple diagram above as a MindMap. We’ve found MindJet’s MindManager is not only a great way to conceptualize a project but a powerful way to communicate it to a broad audience. TeamDirection Project takes it one step further– it gives you a simple way to connect projects and tasks to individual team members, through SharePoint and Groove, so you can now execute and track them too.

Finally, we’ve made a few project management enhancements we’re proud of. Things like an improved, interactive Gantt chart and a better Task grid. Useful features like multi-level undo, multi-project views with filtering, a very handy project organizer to group projects and ’smart folders’ to quickly identify late ones.

Our philosophy at TeamDirection is ‘The Right Tool for the Job.’ We could spend years trying to make a project management solution do everything anybody ever wanted. But then it would end up looking something like this.

We believe in the right tool for the job. One of our jobs is making project management easy, accessible and useful. But our other job is to make sure the task data you need is in the application you want. MS Project, MindJet, SharePoint and Groove are a few such applications, but there are many more out there. Most of the world’s projects are started with Excel. More and more task lists are executed with next generation web applications like BaseCamp and @Task. TeamDirection helps you make sure your projects are completed with the right tool for the right audience.