Chris Hester has way too much time on his hands. Here’s how I know (Nope, not a single image)

Personas: Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Sites

As long as personas are developed with diligence, the planning and development tool has three key benefits for interface design projects of all kinds. First, personas introduce teams to hypothetical users who have names, personal traits, and habits that in a relatively short time become believable constructs for honing design specifications. Second, personas are stand-ins with archetypal characteristics that represent a much larger group of users. Third, personas give design teams a strong sense of what users’ goals are and what an interface needs to fulfill them.

A List Apart’s new design is out, and along with it a few new articles, of which the most interesting is Douglas Bowman’s Sliding Doors of CSS. I’ve been using a combination of techniques for creating tabbed navigation using CSS and lists, but this one tops em all.

A Thousand Kisses Deep Leonard Cohen

The ponies run, the girls are young,

The odds are there to beat.

You win a while, and then it’s done

Your little winning streak.

And summoned now to deal

With your invincible defeat,

You live your life as if it’s real,

A Thousand Kisses Deep.

I’m turning tricks, I’m getting fixed,

I’m back on Boogie Street.

You lose your grip, and then you slip

Into the Masterpiece.

And maybe I had miles to drive,

And promises to keep:

You ditch it all to stay alive,

A Thousand Kisses Deep.

And sometimes when the night is slow,

The wretched and the meek,

We gather up our hearts and go,

A Thousand Kisses Deep.

Confined to sex, we pressed against

The limits of the sea:

I saw there were no oceans left

For scavengers like me.

I made it to the forward deck.

I blessed our remnant fleet

And then consented to be wrecked,

A Thousand Kisses Deep.

I’m turning tricks, I’m getting fixed,

I’m back on Boogie Street.

I guess they won’t exchange the gifts

That you were meant to keep.

And quiet is the thought of you,

The file on you complete,

Except what we forgot to do,

A Thousand Kisses Deep.

And sometimes when the night is slow,

The wretched and the meek,

We gather up our hearts and go,

A Thousand Kisses Deep.

The ponies run, the girls are young,

The odds are there to beat …

After listening to David Foster Wallace interviewed on Talk of the Nation, I remembered to buy his new book, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity. The “Thanks for your order” page at Amazon recommended that I buy a book by an author who’s work Wallace’s is frequently compared to, Don Delillo. And as we all know, Don Delillo wrote a book titled White Noise. Strange and suprisingly irrelevant.

Couldn’t wait to try iTunes on my VAIO since others like MusicMatch are good but not great. Download, fire up the installer and…

…nothing…

…Wait!, nope “1608: Couldn’t do something-or-other”. Looks to be a fairly common problem with InstallShield on Windows. Unfortunately, none of the solutions found after about 3 hours of Googling have helped. Back to using ”foobar2000 for now.

Aside: There’s a good writeup of iTMS good and bad at Page 1 (10/2003)” class=”external”>Ars Technica

Posts like this require that a blog has some sort of commenting system available. I’ll see what I can do about that Tracy.

Confined to sex, we pressed against

The limits of the sea:

I saw there were no oceans left

For scavengers like me.

I made it to the forward deck.

I blessed our remnant fleet Â-

And then consented to be wrecked,

A Thousand Kisses Deep.

–Leonard Cohen

Web Design Practices

“Web Design Practices is a site devoted to helping designers understand what design practices are currently in use on the Web”

podLob, a collection of Flash and DHTML GUI tricks and treats that look great and work very well. Trouble is, with the exception of maybe one or two, using any of these on a “real” site would drive the average person nuts after about 30 seconds.