Entries in Site Admin (10)
New coat of (blog) paint
A new look for the blog, I was getting a bit tired of the “web 2.0” look of the previous design. This one is pretty stripped down and simple. I’ve removed the photo header (all the photos I’ve used there have been ones I took myself) and instead am hoping to boost the number of photos I include in posts themselves, now that I’m doing more photography.
Adam
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PrintHappy Second Birthday!
This blog just had its second birthday! Thanks to everyone who continues to read my sporadic, random ramblings - for better or for worse you can look forward to more of the same in 2008. I really enjoy getting your comments and emails.
Here are some of my favorites from the past 12 months, in chronological order:
- Competitor for the Worst User Experience
- Spreading Doubt About Climate Change, By Mistake
- Extra! Extra! Designers Suck!
- Do We Really Change Users?
- Business, Meet the Design Stereotype
- The Myths of Design Thinking
- The Importance of Invisible Processes
- 37Signals Jumps the Shark
- The value of old-fashioned ways in a Web 2.0 world
- The Surprising Energy Consumption of Glade Plug-Ins
- Will OLPC be the TiVo of PCs for emerging markets?
At CES Next Week
I’ll be at CES Monday through Wednesday, and will be blogging about it on my Cnet blog. If readers of this blog are going to be there drop me a line (email form at left) and hopefully we can connect up in person.
Looking for two old acquaintences
There are a couple of people I’ve been trying to catch up with for a while who I’ve lost track of and can’t find them via the usual means. I figured I’d try crowdsourcing here, if you don’t mind.
First person is Jonathon Hayes. He was the industrial designer on the Xbox 360 but has since left Microsoft and I think is now an independent consultant. He interned at Sun Microsystems while I was there in the early 90’s.
The second person is Takuya Kawagoi. Last time I was in touch with him he was creative director at Sony Ericsson in London, but I believe has gone back to the Sony mothership and may or may not be still there.
If any of you happen to know how to get a hold of these guys, please email me at richardsona at mac dot com.
Thanks!
Blog Address Simplification
I finally got around to the various technical hurdles required to combine this blog with my personal domain, so now you don’t have to type in the “squarespace” part of the address. Just go to richardsona.com. Plus it makes it easier to tell all your friends!
I have to say that while Squarespace made it pretty easy to do this, and has an arrangement with a domain registration/web hosting company to do it automatically, it was still a rather complicated process. A large part of that was because I had to first transfer the domain to somebody that would allow me to do the DNS trickery to get it to work (my old domain registrar wouldn’t, so I transferred to Squarespace’s suggested provider). This by itself was a convoluted process requiring several chat and phone sessions with the old providers technical support.
It’s one of those computer things where just because the customer (me in this case) includes a couple of acronyms in their request for help, the tech support people assume you are a fellow geek, and they start spewing jargon-filled requests at you. While I’m pretty tech savvy overall I don’t spend a lot of time reading manuals on DNS settings and such. The fact is I really didn’t know what I was doing, I was just parroting what the Squarespace tutorial told me to say, I didn’t have much clue what was going on under the hood. So when things didn’t work the way I expected I had no idea why and didn’t know who to ask which questions.
The internet still has a long way to go before it becomes consumer-friendly.