NYC Nostalgia
More lego cleverness here. I’ve also been listening to this song a lot lately, which just makes me ache with stupid nostalgia. How I miss New York.
9 months ago
More lego cleverness here. I’ve also been listening to this song a lot lately, which just makes me ache with stupid nostalgia. How I miss New York.
9 months ago
How awesome is this bird costume? It makes me wish that I had a little pint-sized friend to dress in one. Or that it came in adult sizes.
10 months agoThis is an inspiring wish list from design blogger (and my big sister) Jen Buley. To think I’ve been undermining my own wardrobe with low expectations for so many years. All I’ve ever asked it to do is make me look thinner.
10 months ago


I was in an old post office in central Indiana today snapping these pictures with my phone when a mustachioed man approached me and said in a stern voice, “Excuse me.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, and shuffled a few feet over, assuming I was blocking him. “No, EXCUSE ME,” he said. “I’ve been watching you. It is illegal to take pictures in this building. This is a government building. You can’t take pictures here.”
Some things that went through my head in quick succession…
I tried to smile and apologize and say that I didn’t know, which only seemed to make him want to talk about it more. This was the last thing I wanted to do, because I felt mortified, jittery, and liable to cry.
Is this just nascent, genetic Catholic guilt making me feel so wrong and naughty? Was I really doing something unacceptable? Whatever it was, I felt instantly, profoundly wrotten. Like I didn’t belong there. In that post office. In that town. In the whole damn state, really. I’m sure this could have happened just as easily in a public building in San Francisco, but I think because in my photo-taking I’d been making subtle, private commentary on the otherness of it all, my encounter with the Mr. Mustache made me feel resentful, out of place, and also kind of like a jerk. All kinds of awesome feelings. The whole thing just made me want to float away and dissolve in the atmosphere.
10 months ago
Why do I want this so badly?
10 months agoHad the spiciest meal of my life at this Thai restaurant on Friday night. Lemongrass snapper drowning in peppers. Runny nose. Melty ears. Mouth afire. Good stuff.

I know I’ve been neglecting you. It’s been a busy month. I’ve thought of you, from time to time, with your stale, flip joke about a baby being lifted by its head. That’s no way to leave things with you. Blog, you deserve more from me. Baby, I’ll never neglect you again. Yes, naturally you wonder what I’ve been up to. What can I say?
This and that…

Nearly killed myself for a virtual seminar

Rode a horse for the first time
Off to New York this week for Thanksgiving break. I’ll tell you all about it. I promise.
11 months ago
I have no idea what this is about, but I love it. I absolutely love it.
1 year ago
One of my heroes just turned me into a neologism. That’s right! Buleyesque. Meaning, I think, kinda hand-drawn looking. This is a good day.
By the way, yes, I realize that it’s ridiculous to introduce to the world a new word meaning “kinda hand-drawn looking” in Edwardian Script, but damnit, a fancy word calls for a fancy font!
1 year agoThis is awesome. One more reason to wish I were Jewish. Or, more precisely, to wish I were Sarah Silverman.
1 year agoJonas Löwgren have a really lovely description of interaction design in a discussion currently underway over on the IXDA discussion list.
The gist is, good interaction designers “sketch” out interactivity (often by making interactive prototypes), and they think about aesthetics. Or, to put it another way…

I’m not actually sure if I agree, but I like the focus on making things that demonstrate the interactive stuff, and also the understanding that how it looks matters.
The problem is, by this definition, a lot of the interaction designers that I know are not that “good.” Many of them don’t have a very sophisticated aesthetic sensibility. And even more of them don’t regularly sketch out their ideas in a form that’s interactive. (They fall back on static wireframes and then use their words to try to create that sense of interactivity instead.) And of course, by they I mean me.
So maybe I’ll take this as a challenge. Start getting dirty with the concept of clickable sketching. And also, uh, get more, um, aesthetic? Yikes, I think I need to take some typography and color theory classes.
1 year agoNot long ago some folks at my office got excited about Wordle, a tool for making word clouds. You put in the text. Out comes a word cloud.
One smarty pants at work used it to analyze her own writing for bullshit corporate words. You know, “utilize,” “collaborate,” “synergies.” Damn words. They creep into my diary, my thoughts, my dreams.
Another person used it to analyze card sort results, actually. Very clever. We had a client who kept arguing for “professional” sounding labels rather than intuitive ones. Wordle demonstrated rather irrefutably that the professional labels were not obvious choices for people.
And here, in this Pew Research Center survey on words used to describe the U.S. presidential candidates, clearly Wordle works its magic again.
Except this time it sorta makes me sad. I don’t want the biggest word next to Barack Obama to be “inexperienced.” “Change,” “intelligent,” “hope,” those words are pretty alright. Real small, in blue, on the right, I see “socialist.” What the hell?
1 year ago6:30 am research interview from home. At work by 9am. Two slow-as-hell buses. Feeling cranky.
1 year agoWow, I am having some trippy flashbacks to being a sad, skinny kid in Denver in the 80s. Except, thanks to this rad discussion on Boing Boing, I feel sort of happy and sentimental about it all. In fact, now that I think about, Denver was just the sort of weird, down and out place where really interesting kitsch and counterculture flourished like mold in a petri dish. Ah, petri dishes! Now I am thinking about the science unit in 4th grade, when we grew spores and did experiments with mealworms. I named my mealworm Ben, after my next door neighbor / boyfriend Ben Thompson.
I think I may have just this moment passed through some critical adult rite of passage when childhood memories suddenly go from being embarrassing and painful to nostalgic and bittersweet.
(Thanks to Chris for the link.)
1 year ago