TechEd

I am at TechEd in Orlando and it is super cool. First of all, the entire conference is extremely well planned and executed. Second, the content is really good. Third, regardless of what people may think about MS I think DevDiv and Server spit out one fantastic product after another.

All the WPF stuff including the VS support, Blend, Design, and latest Silverlight is just pure plain awesome.

Server 2008 is great. System Center Essentials is mega cool. heck, loads of good stuff.

And we also have stuff that just suck or products with really exiting technology wraped in a horrible UI. But I think our new products have decent to great UI and there are fewer and fewer of the "arrg, that sucks" products. All goodness.

The constants of life

The principle of non-contradiction
is
a constant
in my and your life
despite what people say
They just do not understand
that it is a constant
like reorgs.

Designing for Interaction

I just finished "Designing for Interaction" and will say it was a really good and relatively fast read.

Most of the content should be known to most of you. Like chapter 6 that goes through various controls and their usages. The author does however draw some good analogies between physical and digital controls.

Interesting moments of the book:

The epiphany in chapter 4 on design research. I keep calling us a "design team" even though I know it annoys some of our user researchers. I think it would make sense to rename the user research profession in MS to Design Research. What we ultimately do is to conduct the research necessary to drive, inform, and challenge the design. A lot of that has to do with users, but not all of it. I think renaming it to Design Research would change the focus and expand the focus in a healthy way.

Chapter 7 and the discussion of "hackability" and of "adaptive" UI. It was an interesting read in general and furthered my long held belief that "you are always designing a platform" i.e. you have to assume that your product will be used in ways you did not imagine and you should embrace that and encourage that. Offhand (and I would be happy to discuss off-line) it led me to some thought about how we need a community around Models (additions and changes to CML) and how we can (mis-)use the CMDB and the Local CMDB to move personalizations, explicit and implicit, around in an environment. Suffice to say it could be done with policies J

Chapter 8 on Service Design is really interesting from the perspective of what the UX discipline could ultimately become once we start being more active in the design of how we sell servers, the SKUs, and all that stuff.

Throughout the book there is food for thought on the difference between user centered design (personas), activity based design (scenarios), and I must say, that I currently believe in the role based design approach , and I see that as a good unifier for user & activity based design. User centered design is too concerned with the goal of the user and activity based design is too concerned with the scenario sans-role. My role is Exchange admin. Because of that, I have some goals and some activities I need to complete. But sometimes my role changes to just ordinary server admin or to security admin and those secondary roles require a different UI for me than they would for a person with the primary role of server admin or security admin.

The beauty of Scripting languages

Just learned about xkcd a faboulous comic.

John Bolton on John Stewart

I am watching Jon Stewart on Comedy Central and his guest is John Bolton and this is super interesting. I may not agree with Mr. Bolton but he is one of the few guests on any show that has survived well. I would say that for once the host did not destroy the guest. Quite unexpected.

Bolton has some interesting views about democracy that basically goes along this line: You vote for a president and hence a way of running the country in other words you should expect the president to replace everyone in the administration with people who agree with him. John Stewart disagrees and thinks that the president should suround himself with people who can question him. It goes on into an interesting and equal discussion.

Interestingly enough this reminds me of the destinction between Denamrk and Sweden. In Sweden the leading party has a history of replacing people in the administration with people of the same political orientation. In Denmark, this is much less common, and usually happens on a smaller scale.

Looking back

When old men look back
They don't
Regret not
Spending more time in the office

I know this now
Not old
Just know That
I shall regret other things

But today I choose to spend more
Time in
The office
Because I like the drug

Like the coffee and the candy
Instant
Self esteem boost
Work needs doing and work needs me

A good cause

Live messenger has made a really cool marketing push. Everytime you use messenger you support a cause of your choosing. You can choose from 9 causes. At least you can in the US.

All you have to do is add the cause' tag to your name in messenger. Instructions


Yes it is marketing but it is also so much more. And it is well in line with Microsof tbeing the company in the world tht donates the most amount of money to all kinds of causes.