Guardian Unlimited | Online | Lazy, stupid and evil design:

“Having a coffee and cake with Jakob Nielsen, the web usability expert from Nielsen Norman Group, I asked him what was holding up progress on the web. ‘Three things, really: I call them lazy, stupid and evil design,’ he replies.”

Oh yeah, those stupid designs. Nielsen mentions those damnable flash intros. Begone with them already! I would add those silly “splash pages” which give you nothing more than a list of word links or, worse, mysterious graphic links, neither giving any hint at all of why you should click and enter the site. Or where you should begin. Or how you’ll be able to navigate once you get there.

deep breath here

I’m a little geeked-up tonight because I’ve made it to page 47 of this book, written by Cleveland Heights CSS maven – Eric Meyer.

Desperate times call for a rotary cutter!

So last night I was so desperate to sew anything at all, that I went upstairs thinking I might try to figure out something to do with this:

I thought of a way to cut it up and insert strips of different color fabric so that I hoped it would look like the blue fabric and the yellow circles were far back, behind a lattice of these strips.

Instead, I cut it one way and was fiddling about and it ended up like this:

I liked this little challenge piece when I made it. Those blue squares were 3″ finished. It was sort of cheery but in a serene kind of way I thought. Well serene isn’t exactly what I’d call it now. And just FYI, it all lays perfectly flat. Amazing.

We’re all planning to “live long and annoying lives” but just in case, you might want to ponder this and blog your own version, just for the record. (Don’t forget to spam all your friends and relatives so they get it too.

Ah the joys of technology!

Me: sitting in the inner bowels of the mall.

George: sitting in the lovely cleveland OH park

What brings us together? Skype, airport and WiFi. What’s not to like?

Note to self – plug in headphones first next time before “dialing”. Now to figure out the whole RSS thing. Hey – no one may subscribe to me, but at least they have the option of doing so or not.

But getting back to the whole WiFi thing for a moment. It may be that George and I never meet face to face but I enjoy his website. How wonderful a moment in time though that we can communicate either in writing, via email or by chat live or not, and as we did this time via Skype. That I can do so means I can communicate easily, cheaply and quickly with people around the world. If we have the broadband we can even see each other face to face.

The world has some serious issues, as evidenced by today’s terrorist attacks in London, but on a human to human basis, we have only to take the time and make the effort. Trying to communicate and understand will always be better than not doing so.