in Ann Arbor, MI 48103
{ Monthly archives }
Towards the end of December, we’re going to be spending eightish days between Seattle and Portland. I’ve already started pinging people, but if you’d like to try to get together, let me know. There’s a bit of wiggle room in our itinerary, but it’s also a busy time of year, so who knows what’ll happen?
Standard suggestions for places to go and things to do are also super welcome.
DowntownYpsi.org is a new group blog about, well, downtown Ypsilanti. Thus far shopping is the primary topic, but it’s moving towards a more general focus. It’s interesting reading, with the likely prospect of us living in Ypsi for six plus months next year.
Carfree Ann Arbor has been around since August, but I don’t think I’ve talked it up enough. Tools and hints for navigating Ann Arbor in ways other than an automobile. Lots of bike and public transit content.
Donald Rumsfeld sez: “we fight with the Finder we have, not the Finder we want to have.”
Finder is the OS X file manager. It is essentially useless. Grievances against the Finder range from the aesthetic (brushed metal; ugly colored labels) to its oddball interaction design (modal icon, list, or column views; unsound importance of the oval toolbar button) to technical (lack of recovery from a disconnected network share; .DS_Store file pollution). This is just a random sampling; any Mac person will have his or her own list of questionable Finder behaviors.
Over the last few releases of OS X, Finder has changed, but it hasn’t improved: hence FTFF, a slogan coined at Ars Technica.
If you don’t want to wait for Apple to fix the Finder, there are some alternatives (from best to worst):
For everyday work, I use Finder in column view, with four columns and a floating information palette (⌥⌘I) as the “fifth column.” For anything more complicated, find and xargs are starting points.
Interested in bringing quality rapid transit to southeast Michigan? Want to help push for commuter trains from Ann Arbor and Ypsi to Detroit, metro Airport, Chelsea, and Livingston County? Curious about the latest findings from the Southeastern Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG) on transit in our area? Come to a meet-up with Transportation Riders United (TRU), a non-profit group working to improve public transit in southeast Michigan.
I have a standing class meeting during this time (Dan Klyn’s information architecture preachment), so I’ll hope for a write-up in an arborblog or on arborwiki.
Remember the BrianKerr Bliki? I do. It was way more fun to write over there than in this blog, mostly because of InterMap. Anyways, I’m cleaning house on my crappy virtual host, so the bliki has seven days to live. The only thing worth borrowing is likely the bliki CSS.
QFT: History of the Button on Pressing the Reset button:
The metaphor is coming full circle. Where buttons onscreen were originally metaphors for physical buttons, the functions of onscreen buttons are now becoming metaphors for moments in our daily lives … Digital and analog are blending. How we conceptualize the two are merging. That is the power of the metaphor. I bet that if the original onscreen metaphors weren’t so strong (desktop, trash can, undo, file, folder), they wouldn’t be coming back to reinforce and expand their original daily meanings.
The following works out to 12 credits, and I need 13 to wash my hands of the department. Any suggestions for an exciting 1- or 1.5-credit seminar?
