You may (or may not) have noticed that I bumped the font size for

posts to 12px. (Don’t argue with me about using pixels, they resize

just fine in Mozilla Firebird.)

Truth is, I was finding it hard to read my own posts.

So T.M. breaks down and gets a cell phone, but not without [ranting for a few fun paragraphs

first](//www.tmcamp.com/). He says it looks like a “robotic apricot,” although I liked

Tracy’s description better. I

believe she called it a little “pussy-assed” phone. They’re both

right.

Halley gets blogrolled for pointing me to a wonderful Emerson essay:

Self-Reliance

“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the

conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he

must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though

the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can

come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which

is given to him to till.”

From Good Experience: [ The

Most Important User Experience Method](//www.goodexperience.com/columns/03/0620.org.html).

“Changing the organization is the most difficult and most important

part of user experience work… said another way, you can give the

smartest answers in the world, make the most brilliant

recommendations; but if the organization doesn’t actually change the

user experience, it’s all worthless. ”

This ties in so closely to some of the issues we’ve been dealing with at

the office, and points out where I should be focused while sharpening my

user experience discussion skills. Learning to make better paper

prototypes or finding better ways to recruit test users may not be

nearly as valuable as the ability to teach clients to recognize the

benefits of user experience work. Teach them to fish.

A [first

hand account](//hbsworkingknowledge.hbs.edu/pubitem.jhtml?id=3533&t=innovation) of the meeting where Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos were

introduced to the Segway. Jobs said he lived seven minutes from a

grocery and wasn’t sure he would use Ginger to get there. Bezos agreed.

Jobs: “I think it sucks…Its shape is not innovative, it’s not

elegant, it doesn’t feel anthropomorphic.”

One of the things that I didn’t like about tabbed browsing was that I

couldn’t rearrange the tab order in Firebird. Funny you should mention

that, the [tabbrowser

extension](//texturizer.net/firebird/extensions.html#Tabbrowser%20Extensions) solves that problem, and many more, quite nicely.

This would be so cool hanging in the office at Fusionary! C’mon, it’s only 35K!

GWB makes yet another task look easy. [Read the

article](//news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2989000.stm)

Only 101 Lies Men Tell Women? Tracymust’ve only seen the first volume in what certainly must be a series.

[Dave

Shea writes](//www.mezzoblue.com/cgi-bin/mt/mezzo/archives/000152.asp):

“HTML will die. TodayÂ’s internet is obsolete, and anyone still coding

in HTML 4 is planning the obsolescence of their own code. ”

There are many references in the ensuing conversation to the CSS Zen Garden. After reading

Dave’s piece, be sure to check out the Zen Garden for a look at what’s

possible today.