good vs. mediocre

So by now you know I have teenagers, and with such an age comes unlimited curiosity. Combine that with the internet which never sleeps and it is just not a good thing. If we would let them, our kids would stay on the internet all night long either surfing the web or playing games with the internet connected XBox 360. Just to help them get to sleep, I had to limit their access to the internet. Plus is helps me get to sleep instead of hearing them all night long! So the big question is now do I limit the time they spend on the web?


I recently upgraded to a new LinkSys router as I saw they advertised a new access restriction feature that I did not have on my previous router. It does indeed let me limit the time, but it has an interesting bug in their traditional approach to user interface design and implementation. What I would really like to do is force the kids to go to get off the internet at 10pm every evening since they have to get up around 6:30am each morning to get to school on time. Easy enough as all I have to do is set the time from 10pm at night until 6am the next morning. I am sorry, you cannot do that since the UI has a check that 10pm is not before 6am. Well it turns out that it is if you are a human, but a non-human programmer decided to start the clock at midnight! My only work around is to start at midnight and go until 6am. Too bad, such an easy concept, but someone got a little too smart for me.

I actually called Time Warner as I thought maybe they would have a way to help me out. No such luck on that one. We had a DVR from Time Warner when we lived in San Antonio and it had all kinds of nice security and access restrictions built in, but the problem with that is it only affected the single connection through the DVR. We had other TVs in the house and the DVR settings had no affect on those TV sets.


When my wonderful Apple PowerBook died I did not have the funds to buy a new Apple model, so I temporarily bought an Acer laptop. It was the cheapest laptop I could find at the time and was on sale and I also had a discount that covered sales tax. I had heard bad things about Microsoft Vista and this was my first experience with using it. For the first several months I would get 2-5 daily patches to Vista updated on the laptop. In the past couple of months that has trailed off considerably. One of the nicest things about Vista is the built-in Parental Controls. It lets me do all kinds of wonderful things like define a web filter to allow/block websites and downloads, define time limits, control games allowed by rating and content, and allow/block programs from being used. I find a completely different UI under the Time Limits page. I just highlight the hours that I want to block and click OK and I am done. That sure is easy as it should be. What is sad about it is that this same interface could easily be done on a web page, which is what LinkSys uses for their control page pages.

Yet another example of how design works when done well and the effort is made up front to understand the intended audience.

The big move : one last time

Nearly two years ago we completely the big move yet one more time, and hopefully for the last time. Moving half way across the USA just is not fun any more. It was hardly any fun the first time, but three times just is not acceptable. We learned a lesson from our Raleigh to San Antonio trip about using U-Haul trucks, so this time we picked ABF U-Pack movers. It was the best moving decision weever made. For a couple of hundred dollars more than renting our own truck, we paid to have a huge container delivered to our home. At our leisure, we packed the truck by walking the boxes into the container. When we were done, we called ABF and they came and hooked up the tractor and pulled away. We drove our van and car across the country, without any animals like cats this time and the trip was actually enjoyable.

Once back in the Raleigh area, we stayed in an extended stay hotel, while I worked and my wife looked for a house. We moved into an apartment with a short term lease so would not feel pressured to buy the first house we found. All of the kids wanted to go to the same schools they had attended previously in Fuquay Varina. We finally found a house just two miles from where we used to live! One thing the boys wanted to do was build a shed like music room, so we had to find a house with land so we could tackle that project. That will be a future post as that was quite an event.

A really good friend of mine found a job for me at GSK with a group he already had in their RTP location. I was a usability specialist working at a contractor through Role Model Software. One of the things that was appealing to me was trying to incorporate usability with Extreme Programmers, of which the Role Modellers were the best I have ever met. Usability and interaction design could appear to be contrary to pair programming and XP, but the whole year I worked at GSK with Role Modellers was the best experience for me. It can be done and I am proof that it can succeed. The business owners at GSK benefitted as well.

email subscriptions

I am currently subscribed to 2 different email groups.

One is discuss@ixda.org, where I am currently receiving around 50 emails per day on the new Apple iPhone. Normally I receive around 10-20 a day on some hot topic as it seems like someone always has something to say. This group is for Interaction Designers.

The other is agile-usability@yahoogroups.com, where people talk about trying to integrate traditional up-front design into agile development methods. I like the term Just-In-Time-Design as it describes what takes place. I have experienced this first hand on a project I worked on for 6 months last year. It was definitely hard to get used to as I wanted to observe users and run usability tests, but instead I had to give in to the fact that the design was getting better every week and sometimes daily instead of trying to create the perfect app up front from user observations and tests. I really like the quick iterations and putting something in front of users as soon as possible. I don't like the lack of time thinking about design as it always seems like I am rushing into a decision. But the app does get better over time...