vanderwal's miscellaneous stuff

The one or three second lag between clicking to trigger an action was painfully noticeable on a Nokia, but rather imperceivable on Apple devices. A longer delay is perceivable and painful no matter the interface and relies on engineering to resolve those issues. But, it is that resonance and understanding the design and crafting of it is what can separate a good experience from one that is more rough for the people who desire to use it and could find it of value in their life.

Google reports that 77 percent of searches from mobile devices take place at home or work, only 17 percent on the move.

I’m an ambivert—more introverted than extroverted but with some extraordinarily well-developed faking skills.

This stretch of living with future technologies as a regular part of our lives and those who are not there yet, or even living a generation of reality behind all while living in the same culture is something I’ve called the everynow.

Based on Larry’s answer to the next question, it’s clear he wants more openness in the industry instead of a “zero sum” game. Microsoft now supports Google messaging in Outlook, but Microsoft didn’t reciprocate, he says.

Every story I read about Google is us versus some other company, or some stupid thing, and I don’t find it that interesitng. We should be building things that don’t exist.” — Larry. “Being negative is not how we make process. Most important things are not zero sum. There’s a lot of opportunity out there.

During his off hours, he finds Charlotte easy to navigate thanks to his smartphone, which helps him plot routes that blend biking and mass transit options. “You don’t have a lot to figure out,” he said. “We all have navigators in our pockets.

When both PageMaker and MacOS (Classic) went to heaven (a generous ending considering that their last iterations belonged in bug hell), I lost access to my self- written, designed, and published journal on educational software, a total of about 200 pages of reviews. It’s not as if my journals were going to land in a museum, but I put a lot of work into them, and I would have liked to have permanent access to my efforts. Following that experience, I decided I would never use use writing-tool formats other than plain text. Since, except for a few business-related forms, I’ve used only mark-up for formatting: LaTeX for print, and HMTL, Textile, and Markdown for blogging.

I learned in my 20s that there are a lot of different ways to look at things, a lot of different filters that people put on, partly based on how they analyze the circumstance but also based on their own history and perspectives and biases and instincts and so forth. You have to be open-minded about that and listen to what’s being said — but also to what’s not said sometimes. Those discussions can lead you to different places.

I would stay at home for days at a time. My phone would die, and nobody could get ahold of me. At some point my parents would get fed up with wondering if I was alive, and send my sister over to my apartment to check on me. On the internet it was easy to assure people I was alive and sane, easy to collaborate with my coworkers, easy to be a relevant part of society.