Do you remember the movie “UHF“?  Remember that part where Stanley congratulates the kid who won some game on his show “Stanley Spadowski’s Playhouse” and tells him that the prize is that he “gets to drink from the firehose”?  And then the firehose is turned on and the kid gets blasted across the room by the jet of water?

Between all of the news sites, all of the industry and personal sites and blogs that I follow, twitter, skype, instant messages, email, texts, RSS feeds, the online video conference room that I “hang out in” with remotely located colleagues during the workdays, and all of the rest… most days I feel like that kid, getting blasted across the room by the deluge of information that is always on and always flowing.  Every day there is more of it.  Every day is a struggle to keep up with it all.  Every day I worry that I am slipping behind.

Do I have a solution for that?  Not really.  Do I have any ideas for how to even begin to deal with the information overload?  Again, not really.  I just deal with everything as it comes, try to concentrate on the stuff that seems most interesting and/or important, and try not to fret about the rest.

I also write a lot of notes to myself and stick them all over my workspace.

If you have any better ideas, I would love to hear them.

…when a UX Specialist’s fancy turns to site redesigns.

I am still tinkering with it a little bit – adjusting fonts and hex codes and the like – but this will basically be it for the next year or so until I get the itch to overhaul everything again.

When I look back over all of the iterations of this site from 2003 up until now (or think back over them, since I didn’t always bother to take screenshots for posterity’s sake) it seems like it has been one long, slow march toward minimalism.  That first site design back in 2003… man, was it busy.  And colorful.  The way that I have been trending lately, I wouldn’t be surprised if, in a couple of years, this is nothing but black text centered on a white page.  Then, who knows, maybe I will loop all of the way back around to busy and colorful again.

I really love the treasure trove of mobile devices that my group at work has access to.  This time I was able to snag an iPad for a test run.

I am already not happy with the iPad experience.

First of all, you can’t just turn it on and get started.  No.  First you have to synch it up with your iTunes.  This is mandatory.  No getting around it. Argh!  And if you don’t have iTunes (which I do) or if you don’t have the latest version of iTunes (which I don’t, because of my 3 year old iPod which chokes and dies and refuses to synch on modern versions of iTunes) then you have to either install or upgrade.  Double argh!

I only hope that I can roll back my iTunes version with a minimum of fuss when this is all over.

Once that is over, then you have to manually enable the 3G.  And then the Wi-fi.

I thought that Apple was supposed to be all about out-of-the-box functionality?  Apple does have very nice hardware design, no getting around that, but the software… eh, it has been a while since I was impressed by their software.

The iPad, for all its small size, was heavier then I expected.

I was annoyed to see just how many of the websites that I visit on a regular basis use flash, which iPad won’t support.

Bottom line, it is a big iPhone (or Nexus One, or whatever flavor of app enabled smartphone that you have) that can’t make phone calls.  Web browsing is about the only thing that I found that the iPad can do better then a more conventional smartphone.

Does the Nexus One have a nice camera?  Yes, it does.  My current mobile (Pantech Duo) has a shitty camera.  Even the cheap clamshell phone that I had prior to this one took better pictures.

As one does when one (or at least me) has a new camera to play with I ran around taking a lot of photos.  The plants, the house, the cats… lots of photos of the cats.  Mostly because they can’t really complain about the paparazzi treatment, all they can do is ignore me or walk away.

Merlin sitting on my desk chair

Dogwood blossoms

Lilac

Merlin at the window

They aren’t great photos, but they are fun photos.

There are more at my flickr site.

Don’t think, however, that if I got a Nexus One that I would abandon the DSLR.  Because I wouldn’t.  But I probably would start to take and post more photos on a daily basis because the Nexus One makes it so easy and quick to do so.

So I have had the Nexus One for a few days and have played with it extensively.

The touch screen is very nice and quite sensitive.  There is a trackball underneath the screen for people who are anti-touchscreen, but I never needed to use it.  Actually the touchscreen was so  sensitive  that I occasionally accidentally selected things when I was only trying to “flick” the screen in order to scroll it.

There is some nice feedback  when you touch-select something one of the function buttons below the screen – a nice little buzz beneath your finger to let you know that you hit the target.

The screen does have multi-touch capability (standard now, I suppose) and you can use several fingers to pinch or spread whatever you are looking at to either shrink or expand it.

The touch screen keyboard which I was so concerned about (I felt that I would be much more comfortable with a physical keyboard, which is why I was looking initially at the Droid) was not a problem at all.  It took me less then five minutes to get used to it.  The predictive typing was also a nice feature, though it did take me a little while to get used to it.

The apps.  I liked the apps.  I could get very very used to using a lot of apps.  Some apps I especially liked (that I need to remember for when I get an app phone of my very own):

• FxCamera: All kinds of seriously cool camera filters that mimic classic polaroid, holga, and diana cameras and their effects
• Aldiko: eReader and access to all sorts of browsable/downloadable libraries of free and public domain books.  Free books!  That I can read on the phone!  Can it really get any better then that?
• ColorNote: It should not surprise anyone at all that I found an app for to-do lists
• flickr by pixelpipe: upload photos right from the phone to flickr

Honestly, my only complaint would be about the lifespan of the battery, which was woefully short.  I had to plug it in to recharge over night, and it needed to spend a long time during the day powering off of my laptop.  Of course, I was playing with it almost constantly, so I am not sure how loudly to complain about the limited battery life.

Oh, the screen… I also have a complaint about how the screen looks when you are out using the phone in bright sunlight.  Basically the glare reflected off of the shiny, shiny screen overwhelms everything and it is tough to see what you are doing.  This is not a unique problem… it is shared by pretty much everything with a screen (laptops, kindles, GameBoys, etc…) and the people who want to use them outdoors.

Verdict:  Yes, please!

Really, it has been a while since I got this excited about any kind of new tech gadget.  I looked at the iPhone and while I thought that it was really interesting, I didn’t feel any drive to go out and get one (of course, I also didn’t get a chance to play with one for several days either).  I liked the Kindle a lot (I did get to play with one of those for a few days) and I want a Kindle, and I know that I will get one eventually, but I never felt the urge to run out and grab one.  This phone?  I want to run out and get one.

I think that the Nexus One is a great multi-tasker, I think that the user experience is great, and that it is a very simple and intuititive device to use.  I think that I could use some of the camera apps to really invigorate my photography and that they will give me the opportunity (and excuse) to do a lot more of the playing around and exploring that I wouldn’t necessarily do with my DSLR, because the DSLR is so much more of a serious tool.  I think that if I had this phone I would never again need to look at a purse and think “but can I fit a book in it?”.

Do I really have to wait until my AT&T contract expires in late July?  I don’t know if I want to wait more then three more months.  If the penalty fee isn’t too high, I might look into breaking my contract early.

I have in my possession a Nexus One.

I have been thinking about (more like planning on, really) upgrading my current phone considerably when my AT&T mobile contract is up in July and taking advantage of the “new contract discount” on a new phone.  (Because I am thrifty like that.)

I had had my eye on the Motorola Droid.  (Which would mean that I would need to dump AT&T in favor of Verizon and port my current phone number from the one mobile carrier to the other.)

One of my co-workers, who runs the mobile working group at work, told me that I should consider Google’s Nexus One.  He has a very nice “library” of mobile devices that he uses for testing/developing mobile applications.  Including a Nexus One.  Which he gave to me to try out.

It is mine for the rest of the week.  I can set it up with my Google account, add apps, and in short act like it is my own phone for the rest of the week.  At the end of the week, I will restore it to its factory settings and give it back.

All I have to do in exchange is write up a review of it for him.

It looks like Dayton is marketing itself heavily to be one of Google’s fiber test cities.

Check out the website for the project. I especially like the “Average” page on the site.

Of course I indicated my support and added myself to the map… what else could I do?

I hope that this project comes through… It would be pretty awesome.

John and I both prefer to listen to NPR when we are driving anywhere.  This can make road trips (to see his folks, to see my folks, to go to SCA events) interesting since here in the midwest good radio can be hard to come by.  There are a lot of country-western or Jeeeezus! radio stations, however, if that is your thing.  It is not our thing.  (We also have no real interest in getting satellite radio, which would also solve our problem.)

Inevitably, somewhere half-way through a trip to where ever, punching the station seek button on the radio over and over in the hops of finding something worth listening to, one of us will comment on how we should have downloaded a bunch of NPR podcasts for the trip.  We do this every time, and up until the most recent trip, always forgot about the podcasts until we were already in the car, and about half-way to somewhere.

I had resolved that we wouldn’t fall into that trip for the trip to NORAD, and the afternoon we were leaving I emailed John at work to find out his podcast preferences, and then left my office a bit early to download podcasts, pack, and other assorted last-minute chores.

I managed to download 4 Radiolab episodes and 1 Car Talk episode to my iPod before we had to leave.

Radiolab is awesome.

Everyone should listen to Radiolab.

After we got back I downloaded every single Radiolab episode that I could find.  (Warning: the Radiolab download server is about as quick as molasses, so I recommend downloading in the early morning.  It seemed to work best then.)

We have finally gotten into the wide world of podcasts.  I cringe at how long it took us.