The Largest Illegal Arms Market in the World - The Gun Markets of Pakistan

Suroosh Alvi says it all, with an entertaining in-person visit to the largest illegal arms market in the world - Pakistan backwoods towns "they live in caves, have no tongues, and make guns with their bare hands," says Suroosh -- showing us the locals still engaged in making guns since the Turkish empire. Suroosh won't believe the war is over until people have some other industry besides manufacturing 1000 guns a day for 70 years.

The math?
1000 guns a day for 70 years - hmmm
1000x365x70=25,550,000

more that 25 and a half million guns!

And check out the drive by image - the Heroin Kingpin’s house probably two blocks long - as one commenter said "Scarface Afghan style".

Also notice how few woman you will see in this video, quite a cultural difference from the West.

U2 playing - Pride (In The Name Of Love) for President OBAMA

U2 Lyrics - Pride (In The Name Of Love)

One man come in the name of love
One man come and go
One come he to justify
One man to overthrow

In the name of love
What more in the name of love
In the name of love
What more in the name of love

One man caught on a barbed wire fence
One man he resist
One man washed on an empty beach.
One man betrayed with a kiss

In the name of love
What more in the name of love
In the name of love
What more in the name of love

(nobody like you...)

Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride

In the name of love
What more in the name of love
In the name of love
What more in the name of love
In the name of love
What more in the name of love...

---------------------
Performed for the inauguration of our President OBAMA

---------------------

Personal opinion - U2 shows their love for the world and OBAMA with such enthusiasm - you have a feeling that if they could instantly become even greater musicians they would out of the sheer force of love and admiration.

Stevie Wonder Playing Highest Ground for President OBAMA

Usher and Shakira taking the stage with Stevie Wonder on keyboards -- to perform his classic hit Higher Ground for then President-Elect OBAMA

People keep on learnin
Soldiers keep on warrin
World keep on turnin
Cause it wont be too long

Powers keep on lyin
While your people keep on dyin
World keep on turnin
Cause it wont be too long

Im so darn glad he let me try it again
Cause my last time on earth I lived a whole world of sin
Im so glad that I know more than I knew then
Gonna keep on tryin
Till I reach the highest ground

Teachers keep on teachin
Preachers keep on preachin
World keep on turnin
Cause it wont be too long
Oh no

Lovers keep on lovin
Believers keep on believin
Sleepers just stop sleepin
Cause it wont be too long
Oh no

Im so glad that he let me try it again
Cause my last time on earth I lived a whole world of sin
Im so glad that I know more than I knew then
Gonna keep on tryin
Till I reach my highest ground...whew!
Till I reach my highest ground
No ones gonna bring me down
Oh no
Till I reach my highest ground
Don't you let nobody bring you down (they'll sho' nuff try)
God is gonna show you higher ground
He's the only friend you have around

---------------------
Performed for the inauguration of our President OBAMA

Personal opinion - even in this concert Stevie Wonder showed how he can rock a song - all smiles over having change come to America. Man it is beautiful Stevie, I wish you could see it. Next time man; if what you say about your prior lifetime is real - then you have paid the price and you will be free of blindness. I hope science can eradicate blindness for all.

At Last - The First Couple Dance to Beyoncé Singing Etta James' "At Last"

At Last Lyrics by Etta James

At last, my love has come along
My lonely days are over
And life is like a song
Oh, yeah, at last
The skies above are blue
My heart was wrapped up in clovers
The night I looked at you
I found a dream that I could speak to
A dream that I can call my own
I found a thrill to rest my cheek to
A thrill that I have never known
Oh, yeah when you smile, you smile
Oh, and then the spell was cast
And here we are in heaven
For you are mine
At last

---------------------
Performed for the inaugurational dance of our President OBAMA and his wife Michelle

---------------------

Personal opinion - stunning, it does not get any more romantic and to the point of achievement than this song performed by this diva for this couple.

OBAMA Is A Worldwide Hope Sensation - U2's comments

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

People will wear small flexible OLEDs on their face as jewelry and advertising

Here's another person who mentioned the same idea:
http://w1.siemens.com/innovation/en/publikationen/publications_pof/pof_fall_2003/light_articles/oleds.htm

"There could even be costume jewelry with OLED displays."
- Norbert Aschenbrenner, 2003

It is likely this could be used in space travel in ways we don't know about now such as a digital readout of emotions, heartrate, translation, and even spacesuit protection.

CNET Android apps review for James Gramata's FireWallet

Positive CNET review for the user interface I advised on for James Gramata's FireWallet for Google Android:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10110623-2.html

"The more sophisticated FireWallet works with budgets inside various accounts and protects your information behind a four-digit pin you change from the all-zero default. It's a bit trickier to navigate, but also shoehorns in more options. In addition to a more refined interface, FireWallet has graphs and charts to help visualize your spending, and a rudimentary tool to alert you of upcoming bills. Both it and Personal Budget Droid are missing templates and more powerful features to optionally suck in real-time data from your checking, savings, and stock portfolios. Time for a mobile version of Mint?" - Posted by Jessica Dolcourt

link to download:
http://www.androidforums.com/market/finance-21/firewallet-92/

Universal Responsibility in a Matrixed Economic World

I am concerned that Obama and his staff are not aware enough of the danger and that his planned policies do not go far enough. Reading up on America's depression era New Deal of the 1930's and the times leading up to it are remarkably like the times we are going though, except no one bailed out the fat cats then (as you know). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal

Agreed bailing out the rich will help prevent some suicides like Adolf Merckle, the German billionaire who slipped from #44 most wealthy person on the planet to number #77 or Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet, a fund manager who invested with Bernie Madoff and apparently committed suicide at his office - to me these people's deaths are no laughing matter - not any different than those overleveraged investors who committed suicide on Black Thursday in 1929 or thereabouts by jumping from the buildings they were in. And what is it that Merckle could see that was so scary?

Some people actually laughed in 1929 to see or hear of the suicides, as if those folks deserved it or were somehow different than they were - a few months later, out of a job -- they stopped laughing.

My feeling is that we may be lucky by the end of Obama's first term in office to see any real strides. The only capital that he can really bank on is who he IS, and that the government at least is out of the hands of incompetents (from our standpoint) and warmongering profiteers. Ugh! the sick thing is industrial war complex oldsters really don't get that the world has changed - we ARE in this together just as HH the Dalai Lamas and HH the Popes as well as other religious and secular leaders have long preached. We communicate on an entirely different level, more frequently and around the world. Arguably there is universal responsibility and we are just getting a clue.


For just one example every night that I post a new image on Flickr - I know, no, no, I expect people from around the world will comment on it by the next morning - in one day - all around the world. And the comments in foreign languages I will translate to read and my reply I will translate and respond with - nearly instantly in their language. Even my requests are posted by Flickr in the native language of the person I am requesting their photo from - all with a drop down menu - no effort on my part.

Another example is that of the late Mr. Oscar Grant III, an unarmed African-American man shot in the back and killed in Oakland by the police (by accident or purposely) is instantly seen over the Web from every recording cell phone present - police authorities - placed in their roles to "serve and protect" absolutely can not hide any more behind some story when everyone anywhere can see what occured. And by the way - happy, satisfied people don't protest.

Franklin Roosevelt tried a lot of things to stabilize the economy. The stuff FDR did which was recently dismantled appears to be the root cause of the suffering in the country now, as the rich continue to amass profits while the lower classes lose a place to live. Political leaders can't hide any more either and the results of their efforts for good or bad will be known sooner and in more detail than ever before.

There is also an issue more complex than it first appears, of the average age of baby boomers, as they retire and there are not enough educated people coming into the working social system who can earn enough because education was gutted --- either to make sure that there was no opposition to the will of the wealthy greedy or because self-serving politicos were also too short sighted to see what the results of not funding education would be.

Not everyone is like us, not everyone takes joy in educating themselves, and some education, like primary research is beyond the costs of a single individual to bear, or one person to complete.

Poorer middle-classed housing such as San Francisco's Daly City has inexplicably one of the highest forced foreclosure rates in the country. Economists are researching why but *hey* that is way, way past a dollar short and a day late.

When I asked a religious leader about the causes of being out of work he said "stabilize your mind" and I think that to a large extent - that is the basic root cause of the US current troubles. The fears we have are based on tainted emotions. "The only fear we have is fear itself" another realization by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt that sounds like a call to arms once again with deeper meaning.

We really have to get rid of tainted emotions such as greed and the desire by even those with education and money to willingly inflict pain and suffering on others - such as by torture or slavery - where we can not root it out of ourselves we need to legislate it and make it clear that it is a common goal, a community of the world standard to commit to rid ourselves of afflictive emotions; we need to root out fear itself, greed, and ignorance.

We can’t stand aside and look any more; stabilizing our own minds, taking universal individual responsibility - that is where the future is really at; only then we will have something we can rely on, ourselves as well as each other.


"We'll forward in this generation
Triumphantly ...
Emancipate yourself from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds"

Redemption Song
-Bob Marley

Dr. Sir Ken Robinson says industrial age education kills creativity

There is this speaker, Sir Ken Robinson, who spoke at the TED conference in 2006, and I was so overcome with emotion I nearly cried listening to his videostream. Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity ... and there are things we can do about that ...

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

He says--
"Intelligence 1st is diverse, 2ndly it is dynamic/interactive 3rdly it is distinct."

Here's my favorite story of Dr. Robinson from the TED conference transcript:

And eh, anyway Julian and I had lunch together one day and I said, ‘Julian how did you get to be a dancer?’ And she said it was interesting; when she was at school she was really hopeless. And the school in the thirties wrote to her parents and said, ‘we think Julian has a learning disorder.’ She couldn’t concentrate, she was fidgeting. I think now they’d say she had ADHD, wouldn’t you? But this was the 1930’s and ADHD hadn’t been invented, you know, at this point, so it wasn’t an available condition, you know. People weren’t aware they could have that.

Anyway, she went to see this specialist in this oak panelled room and she was there with her mother and she was led and sat on this chair at the end. And she sat on her hands for twenty minutes while this man talked to her mother about all the problems she was having at school. And at the end of it (because she was disturbing people and her homework was always late and so on, a little kid of eight) In the end, the doctor went and sat next to Julian and said I’ve listened to all these things your mother has told me I need to speak to her privately so he said, ‘wait here we’ll be back. we won’t be very long’ And they went and left her.

But as they went out of the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk, and when they got out of the room, he said to her mother, ‘just stand and watch her.’ The minute they left the room she said she was on her feet moving to the music and they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, ‘You know, Mrs Lynn, Julian isn’t sick she’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.’ I said, ‘what happened? She said, ‘She did. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was. We walked into this room and it was full of people like me; people who couldn’t sit still. People who had to move to think.’ They did ballet, they did tap, they did jazz, they did modern, they did contemporary.

She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School. She became a soloist. She had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School and founded her own company; the Julian Lynn Dance Company, met Andrew Lloyd Weber. She has been responsible for some of the most successful musical theatre productions in history. She has given pleasure to millions and she’s a multi-millionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down."
http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=ken_robinson

Dr. Sir Ken Robinson gained his PhD in 1981 from the University of London for research into drama and theatre in education. His first book, Learning Through Drama, was the result of a three year national development project for the Schools Council, Heinemann 1977. He was principal author of The Arts in Schools: Principles, Practice and Provision, the report of a national inquiry 1982 Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. This is now established as a key text on arts and education in Britain and internationally. He was editor of The Arts and Higher Education, 1984 Gulbenkian and the Leverhulme Trust, and principal writer for the Department of Education and Science of The Arts in Further Education published in 1986.

He was author of Arts Education in Europe, an international study for the Council of Europe of provision for creative and cultural education in 22 European countries. He completed consultancy reports for the European Commission on the socio-economic importance of the arts to the development of the European Union. Facing the Future: the Arts and Education in Hong Kong, a report on the training of professional artists and on arts education in schools for the Hong Kong Government.

In 1998, he was invited by the UK Government to establish and lead a national commission on creativity, education and the economy. The Commission brought together leading business people, scientists, artists and educators. His report, All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education (The Robinson Report) was published to huge acclaim.

He has published widely on creativity, innovation and culture. His 2001 book, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative (Wiley-Capstone), was described by Director magazine as 'a truly mind opening analysis of why we don't get the best out of people at a time of punishing change.' John Cleese said: 'Ken Robinson writes brilliantly about the different ways in which creativity is undervalued and ignored in Western culture and especially in our educational systems.' His new book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, will be published worldwide in January 2009 by Penguin.

He is an advisor for a wide range of national and international bodies. These include:
The Education Commission of the States
The Girl Scouts of America
UNESCO
The Arts Council of England
The national inquiry on The Arts and Disabled People, chaired by Sir Richard Attenborough, and the Carnegie Council
Chief Examiner, Paul McCartney's Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts
Member of the UK Council for Dance Education and Training (CDET)
Board of the Birmingham Royal Ballet, Chairman of the Education Committee
Governor, Central School of Speech and Drama
Oklahoma Creativity Project
Advisory Council of the Independent Television Commission
Council for National Academic Awards
Hong Kong Council for Academic Accreditation
IBM Foundation
New York International Arts Festival
Royal Shakespeare Company
Other advisory and consultancy roles have included:
The Blue Man Group
The National Foundation for Educational Research
The British American Arts Association
The British Council
The Royal Court Theatre
The Young Vic
The South Bank Centre
The Design Council
The Royal Academy
The National Theatre
The Royal Ballet

Notable books authored by Ken Robinson include: Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative (Wiley & Sons) and The Arts In Schools (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Ken_Robinson

Because he is a great creative speaker some may dismiss his work as 'infotainment' but it does not dismiss his ideas or ideals, nor his credentials. He is speaking about what I experienced from elementary school, junior high, high school through to the University of Washington, what needs to change in education...

Creatively Speaking, Part One: Sir Ken Robinson on the Power of the Imaginative Mind

http://www.edutopia.org/sir-ken-robinson-creativity-video

I think Ken will be speaking at this years 2009 TED conference.

Celebrating Alaska Statehood 50 Years January 3, 1959 - 2009 - A Personal Reflection

I remember it like it was just a few months ago - I was already 2 years old and my Mom, a second generation Alaskan - Dee Lane, and my Dad, a third generation Alaskan - Chic Lane, took my sister Lisa and I over the few blocks from our house on the corner of 3rd avenue down to the Park Strip to watch the bonfire in celebration of hard won Alaskan statehood.

There was a great huge pile of wood, and the fire was well underway -- men would run up with all kinds of wood, spare or not, and throw it on the fire. And a whole tree was thrown in too!  The tree being dry burned really fast with a great sputtering noise mixed with the festive scent of painted wood all together.  The United States Senate had voted to make Alaska the 49th state on June 30, 1958.

Just as we arrived from the north side a couple of men were dragging a large wooden box, the size of an outhouse or larger and throwing it on the fire, which was growing quite large. People stood around the fire in a huge circle and it was obvious there had been a bit of drinking going on. Part of a fence was thrown in, sometimes a couple of two-by-fours, or a 8 by 10 sheet of plywood, but mostly old sections of some built things.

My father ran up with his camera just as my Mom was buttoning up my sister's jacket, I think he had parked the car, having just gotten off of work as an architect. She wanted to know what had taken so long. She was pregnant with my brother Ward, born in July of 1958, we girls were born only 11 months apart.

The crowd was growing as the evening was coming in, and singing and hollering and whooping and dancing jigs, in groups of people cheering whenever a new item was thrown on the fire. It was pretty wild and I didn't see many children on the park strip.

Notably the people greeted each other by name since they knew one another! There were a lot of people there.

Later I was taught the "Alaska Flag" song in school. The flag was said to have been designed by Bennie Benson, but the truth was his school teacher designed it to help him submit something, and I think she was happy he unexpectedly won the award with her simple design; she didn't complain when her student got credit for her design.

My mom showed me the Anchorage Times newspaper which read "WE'RE IN!" we kept a copy of that paper for more than 20 years. The heat from the bonfire was so hot it burned our faces and kept us warm - finally my sister Lisa began to get too cold so our folks bundled us off to the house our grandparents built on the very corner of downtown Anchorage where the legal buildings are now, near the statue of Captain Cook.

"8 Stars of Gold on a field of Blue..." I had wonderful teachers. I stayed true.

From the time I was a babe in arms we had a visitor by the name of Yule Kilcher. He was a state senator and one of the most fascinating people I have ever known. I asked him once how many languages he spoke and he took a minute to count them all up and said - "if you include the dialects - it's 47." 47!!! Yule helped to write the Alaska State Constitution, and he stood for liberal causes in a conservative way. People now have forgotten that Alaska was once a liberal state, and it was the conservatives who opposed statehood.

When I turned 13 years old Yule took me to visit his farm down in Homer, driving like a mad man around each curve of the road which he knew every bit of from memory. Every where we stopped Yule spoke to the people in their native languages - and what a diverse set of people he knew - it was just everyone - speaking in Norwegian, Lap, Danish, Finnish, German, Russian, and French, and everyone was so happy to see him and asked us to stay if only for a bite, or tea, or sometimes a sauna! It was one of my most memorable life experiences as I met people from all over the world visiting Yule at his ranch, and his children and other family members and neighbors. I credit Yule with changing my world view completely.

So this photo was taken of the US Flag and Alaska State flag in front of the top floor fireplace in the Anchorage Pioneer's Home with the Christmas tree, when I was visiting my mom for Christmas.

Myself if I were to die today I could honestly say that I have lived a completely unique and unusual life due to being raised in Alaska, and knowing the people I have been fortunate to meet like Senator Bob Bartlett, who was greatly responsible for Alaska becoming a state of the United States of America, and Alaska State senator Yule Kilcher, his children, and Karin and Judge James Fitzgerald and family - Dennis, Denise, Debra, and Kevin, Glo and Victor Fischer and family - Yonnie, the Listons - Bill and Helen, Mike, Mary, Lissa, Gene Guess and family, the O'Malley's, Ernest Gruening (Governor Alaska Territory), Wendell Kay - Eddy Kay, Nick Begich and his family, Alex Duff Combs and his family, the Selkreggs, Gov Bill Egan (who remembered everyone's names and family), Jill Smythe, the Arns family, the Rosenthals, the Jensen family, Kathy 'Willow' Graves, and later folks such as the Browns, Judge John and 'Mama' Kay Reese, Nancy Byrd, the Fairbanks crowd; Drs. Forbes - John Forbes, Rob, the Deans - Doug Dean and Steve Dean, Nick Boseck and his family, the Hale family - Ed, Fred, and Billy, Jim Chase and family, Dennis Savage and his family, Dennis Hartley; the teachers at Orah Dee Clark and East High School, Anchorage Community College and UAA, and other notable people with enormous personalities and strong love for their fellow human beings. Really too many to write about here.

Having left Alaska to seek out world culture I became the student of Dagchen Sakya, a senior Tibetan Lama, where my Alaskan childhood served me well - as I traveled Thailand, India, Nepal, and studied what I believe is the real final frontier, not Alaska as the saying goes, but the innate nature of our own minds.

On January 3, 2009, Alaska will celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Alaskan Statehood, and I will be there in spirit remembering a fairly warm day of June 30, 1958 when my mom buttoned me up and said "Look at the bonfire Linda, remember it, because some day when you are much older, you will be able to say, I was there for the first one, when Alaska became part of the United States of America." I remember her black cat eye glasses frames, and the look of joy, pride, and concern on her face as she told me this with her dark brown hair pulled back, she looked into my eyes so closely. And I remembered the bonfire.

Someone told me recently that my life stories are like the movie Zoolander except real, so what's not to enjoy?

What I did not understand at the time was how rare my experience is, and how few people would be alive 50 years later who shared that experience. But I can honestly say, 50 years later, that I have lived because of Alaska, and because of the Alaskan community who raised me and infused my life with personality and love.

Happy 50 Years to Alaska, to Alaskans every where, to Americans, and to the World in which we live together - congratulations! To my relatives who are now raising the 6th generation of our family in Alaska - congratulations on the twins!

For a historical outline see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Statehood_Act

Respect goes out to my elders - Great-grandfather who resurveyed the Alaska-Canadian Border based out of Eagle in 1896, my Grandmother raised in Ketchikan, my Grandfather Billy Murry who was a tailor and owned the New Method Cleaners and the Murmac Bar in Anchorage, my Grandmother Marion Murry who played organ during the silent movie era, to my parents Roland and Darlene, thank you to everyone who made Alaska more than just a beautiful place, but an amazing event.

CHEERS TO YOU! GREAT LOVE -- GREAT PEACE! Do Seek The Treasure!!!

Looking for The Drifters White Christmas?

http://wonderlane.blogspot.com/2006/12/white-christmas-animation-set-to.html

Space is the Final Frontier

Hi Dad,

One day at our favorite little coffee shop in lower Wallingford you showed me your cell phone and your digital tape recorder and said - "this is my office - every where I go - I just place ads take calls and make notes and I am in business."

I have to let you know you helped me out with something - that is recognizing that if I reduce the stuff I own down to a minimal amount I can be more mobile and flexible.


So you are in a virtual business as a real architect meeting people and then doing the design and drafting at home (on paper but so what?). This virtual office ideal you were already living. While I may have considered myself hip and with-it as far as technology goes the reality is that isn't as true for me as it is for you.

Of course I had read about this kind of lifestyle, I knew it was possible. Working in technology companies, I helped to make it possible. What I knew about I hadn't integrated into my personship - although I am always looking for projects and design work to help people succeed, it had not occurred to me that in order for me to be happy, flexible, and carefree I have to dump old ideas even about what a job or an office is, and the accompanying stuff I have saddled myself with for so long. Sure I loved the stuff. But it's mostly gone now anyway having moved to a new flat on average once a year my entire life.

So I had saddled myself with a bunch of old ideas along with electronics and clothes and things to cook with and paperwork that I don't really need anymore. Arguably I don't even need my art supplies because I just digitize the resulting images anyway, and other than that in our age art is really a moving medium or a conceptional framework rather than something you hang on the wall. The things we hang on the wall are really more of artifacts any way.

What finally broke me through to your side - my 85 year old father's revolutionary mobile office of one highly skilled professional? I wanted to see the beach and take photos of people surfing the same day I was working, I wanted to watch the sun set, I wanted to be outside. It's not that there aren't enough photos of people surfing in the world, it's that I wanted to be there and I wanted to upload my images to Flickr immediately so that others world wide who follow my photostream - like a little movie of "What Does Linda Lane See?" - could view them right then, and any subjects could see their images right away!

But I had work to do, a design to get out, so instead I stayed home. Finally late at night it dawned on me. My laptop has wireless, I have a car, I can do the design work (which is all digital) on my laptop, turn it in from a beachside coffee shop, and shoot the photos and publish them to the Web the same way. Duho!

So now I want you to know I am combing through all that remains to see how much can be donated to charity or shredded or dumped. And I won't be collecting more - I will collect things like a couple of lens and bodies for the camera, a video camera, and another laptop cause this one was never intended for the kind of traveling I plan to do. Life is too short to sit at home any more. It's going to take a while but I am going to live up to my name.

I love you Daddy! Thank you!
-Linda

A Myth to Live By

Sometimes realities must be visualized before they are manifested. To do this it is helpful to draw on mythological paradigms, which make it possible for true transitions to be inacted with out the pain and sorrow that comes from cutting the film in one place and splicing on another reel with clear tape. Clear tape editing is out of style, and transitions that involve gentile trades in a way that suits modern art vehicles as well as real human needs is the style.

This in mind, our production art company promisses transitions between the creative
visualition of an artistic, architectural or environmental change from one thing to another using every available vision to make the changes virtually unnoticable to those who do not have a real insight into the transitionary principles we use, hermetic quicksilver. We call ourselves Star Shift Enterprise. Count on us.


Chris Wilkinson

Jessie's Favorite Song- The Coasters Down in Mexico

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEUuC-twZGM

"How is designing a service different than designing a product?"

Good question - what are we talking about? See Dan Saffer's Designing for Interaction interview with Shelley Evenson:
http://www.designingforinteraction.com/evenson.html

Shelley Evenson is an associate professor and director of graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design.

"When designing a product, much of the focus is on mediating the interaction between the person and the artifact. Great product designers consider more of the context in their design. In service design, designers must create resources that connect people to people, people to machines, and machines to machines. You must consider the environment, the channel, the touchpoint. Designing for service becomes a systems problem and often even a system of systems challenge. The elements or resources that designers need to create to mediate the interactions must work on all these levels and at the same time facilitate connections that are deeply personal, open to participation and change, and drop-dead stunning."

Don't you love that? Person to person interactions to gather the information you need, not just looking through tons of Web sites and pages to get what you need? And here's a non-typical answer from an academic - she is talking about real business interaction needs and uses the term "drop-dead stunning" - don't you love it?

And from the images available by querying her name on Google - Ms. Evenson has a sense of humor ... as posted on ahn.sang-soo's site - http://www.ssahn.com/archives/2006_03.html.

Also check out - Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design site -http://www.design.cmu.edu/

Revisiting the 2008 Intranet Design Awards

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/intranet_design.html

A couple of things stand out about Dr. Jakob Nielsen's 2008 Intranet Design Awards that are worth revisiting, as 2008 draws to a close.

Here is his summary:
"Consistent design and integrated IA are becoming standard on good intranets. This year's winners focused on productivity tools, employee self-service, access to knowledgeable people (as opposed to "knowledge management"), and better-presented company news."

The Award Winners for the top 10 best-designed 2008 intranets are:

"1. Bank of America, US
2. Bankinter S.A., Spain
3. Barnes & Noble, US
4. British Airways, UK
5. Campbell Soup Company, US
6. Coldwell Banker Real Estate Corporation, US
7. IKEA North America Service, LLC, US
8. Ministry of Transport, New Zealand
9. New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, Australia
10. SAP AG, Germany"

First, the technologies Dr. Nielson mentions are best in class:

"The most-used products were SharePoint and the Google Search Appliance.[emphasis mine- Ed.] Other frequently used products were Red Hat Linux, Lotus Notes and Domino, and Oracle databases.

No single product made the list of most-used products for all of the four most recent Design Annuals (2005-2008). This simple fact reinforces the point that intranet platforms still have a long way to go. That said, the following products made the most-used lists more than once during this four-year period:

3 of 4 years: Google Search Appliance, Microsoft SQL Server
2 of 4 years: Apache, Documentum, IBM WebSphere, Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), Lotus Notes and Domino, Oracle databases, SharePoint"



The second item that Dr. Nielsen points out is the use of Microsoft's Silverlight for interactivity:

"In addition to these widely used intranet technologies, we constantly see new ones applied. For example, the Ministry of Transport is already using Microsoft's Silverlight technology to add interactivity to one of its intranet areas."

For 2009 expect to see more Sharepoint, Microsoft SQL Server, Google Appliance, and Microsoft Silverlight in use on intranets, in addition to the other things Dr. Nielsen mentioned.

The Five Planes of User Experience

When working with a user interface designer, or a ui designer is working with a client, there are 5 levels of looking at the ui design:

• 5: Surface Plane: web pages made up of images and text.
• 4: Skeleton Plane: the placement of buttons, tabs, images, and blocks of text.
• 3: Structure Plane: abstract structure of the site.
• 2: Scope Plane: features and functionality.
• 1: Strategy Plane: what the owners and users of the site want to achieve.

The five planes build from bottom to top.

The planes have slight nuances, depending on whether the (part of the) web site under design is task- oriented or information-oriented.


Stagger Work on Planes
Do not wait for work on one plane to finish before starting on the next. There must be some degree of
iteration (feedback loop).
Work on a particular plane cannot finish before work on lower planes has finished.

Prof. Dr. Keith Andrews
http://courses.iicm.tugraz.at/iaweb/iaweb.pdf
Information Architecture and Web Usability
706.041 Information Architecture and Web Usability WS 2007/2008 3VU
Graz University of Technology
Inffeldgasse Austria

Raising the F.D.I.C

These people on Wall Street are moving fast. Trying to push legislation that, they say, will save the world. Today's plan is to raise the Federal Governments insurance coverage of bank deposits. The present level of coverage is $100,000 per account. Lots of people, businesses have several accounts as it is.

Really! Who is being saved, here? How many people do you know that have over a $100,000 in the bank? How many people do you know that are surviving month to month? How many people do you know that are just not making it? Hungry kids. Homeless families. America?

Why should the people of the United States endorse or support a Congress that is being lullied by Wall St., and the Treasury, into insuring the cash of the rich -- while watching the public – the citizens of our country -- go under?

This is NOT America, not the land of democracy and freedom.

The issue all of us are facing, I think, is that our money has become so dependent on the credit system, most of the money we think we have simply doesn't exist. Numbers in machines transferred and traded globally, without any backing except blind trust. People are starting to see. We see our country and our world being hoodwinked by lawless entities that don't care whether we live or die.

The thing governments must do, at this point, is to take care of their people. The false overvaluation of all things commercial must normalize into a real value system, one where the price of the thing is actually based on what it's worth -- not an elaborate scheme to maintain unethical practices.

Insurance, basically, encourages its customers to gamble on their fears. The omnipresence of fear, and the "security" afforded by insurance, along with bad lending practices and god knows what other banning problems, seem to have brought our people into a forced decision to insure the failures, promise them a bail out,. These entities failed because they were not sound. Does the citizen have any guarantee that they will be bailed out? I doesn't look like it. Why should we pay our blood and sweat, everything we and our forefathers and mothers ever worked for to help out a bunch of losers?

Chris Wilkinson

Image: Tony the Misfit
Location: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonythemisfit/2862138437/
Creative Commons License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

You are #1 ...

My office is 2 blocks from the US Federal Reserve Bank and The Bank of America in San Francisco, California.

Walking between them next to the US Fed Reserve Bank building I noticed the sidewalk is very sparkly with black mica embedded in the concrete, right then a young chicano man walked by me, wearing a sparkly black shirt with the words "Big Money" in a large cursive script emblazoned across his chest as he dragged his long levis along his ankles original gangster style. (Yah, by the way Ice-T you make it look good.)

As I passed by the Fed's high security entry gate for vehicles an enormous breaker bar of massive steel suddenly and quietly appeared from a steel panel in the ground with a yellow bar at the top of it. Nobody driving anything is getting in that gate, not even Batman. They'd have to come from above.

Rounding the corner, three guys in a tiny white car passed me, one stuck his head and chest out the window and bellowed out in my general direction "You are #1 Bitch." I think those were the words to the song.

Being the research geek I am I looked it up in the Urban Dictionary - but You are Number 1 Bitch is not defined yet. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=number+one+bitch. There you have it.

Well of course I should reserve judgement, but I prefer to think at the street level in San Francisco at least, being ichiban is surely royal like. Now that I could find as an American made t-shirt for your Ichiban Dog - http://pets.cafepress.com/item/ichiban-1-dog-tshirt/22320213.

So I offer this to the #1 Ichiban Federal Reserve Bank -

"She's a Brick-house,
She's mighty mighty,
Just lettin' it all hang out.
Yea she's a brick-house,
That lady's stacked,
And that's a fact,
Ain't holdin' nothin back,
Oh she's a brick-house,
Yeah she's the one, the only one,
Built like an Amazon"

List of Creative Non-Flash Websites Which Aren't Boring

When looking for new and exciting websites, I check out the webby award sites, including older years -
http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/

which also has a "Non-Flash" category listed. Here is 2008 -

http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php?season=12

As a technical designer one of my fave sites has long been Crate and Barrel's ecommerce site because of the structure, and clean look'n'feel (and their use of the golden mean/ aka golden rectangle)

http://www.crateandbarrel.com/default.aspx

I believe they design the site themselves - because of postings such as this one in Northbrook, IL.for a Senior Internet Art Director at Crate and Barrel - http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/4380
In part I am impressed with their work because it was early on one of the best ecommerce sites I reviewed in a study I did for Microsoft in 2003 to discover best practices in UI / UX for an internal product.

IMHO - (ha ha) - it is frequently good to have a "boring" yet clean site design if what you want people to look at is the content - there you can have the exciting stuff. Look at Reuter's site today for just one example -
http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSTRE48O77420080925
it's the photo of Marilyn Monroe that makes it exciting!

Also look at the differences in http://www.CNN.com 's site over for example the http://www.MSNBC.com site - their users are different - the MSNBC appears to draw a hip younger crowd now, often with many more comments on technology articles and far fewer photos of dogs dressed up as clowns. (ok, ok, when I need a laugh I check out this year's winner in the Weird catagory - http://icanhascheezburger.com)

So when you get right down to it, we come full circle back to the USER. Who is your USER? What do you want to provide for your USER? How can you do that effectively?

Because there are some sites I consider very interesting, very exciting, or challenging that are not for general use - they serve very specific users, including sites critical of webdesign itself. Not that many people want a site to take over their browser – a browser - which is itself a boring framework - a boring design itself - (think Google Crome) - but can present some genuinely astonishing stuff!

Love ya! Don't ever change!