The winter off-season can’t end soon enough, although there are several car upgrades I aim to do, budget permitting (race seats & harness most likely although then I’m out of SCCA stock category but I plan to autocross with PCA principally due to time constraints).
Watching the chefs at Le Pigeon is watching artistic craft in action
Tumbling panes at Seattle’s sculpture garden
Give it up for Broken Bells
My super-sweetie girl, four going on who-knows-what
A goal evaluation scale design artifact
I thought to share this artifact from a recent Devise project in the area of reporting solutions. I developed three goal evaluation scales to be used alongside various financial & operational metrics in dashboard-type web application contexts. The defined goal evaluation scales 1-3 emphasize display of the star symbol to reward on-goal metrics. The middle zone of an “OK” metric having no icon is preferable to reduce visual noise onscreen, although scale 3 provides for a specific warning state icon if the metric is a very important one and even small trends off-goal need to be addressed with action.
There was internal team discussion of the last goal evaluation scale labeled “do not use”. This scale reduces the happy occurrence of the star symbol; also, since it directly conflicts with the chosen default scale 1 it had to be explicitly banned from use in the system. If visual noise was the primary consideration for the selection of goal evaluation scales, the “do not use” scale would have more merit as it highlights only the more-unusual states of being off-goal and above goal. What do folks think?
November Dusk
Purple corpuscles
congregate on trees
as violet evening
slips into place
between branches
bulging with import
It slides around
stiff cold fingers
reaching toward sky
(shaded with slate
and uneven clouds)
Limbs around my house
are afire and alight
lit with sunset
here in the valley
of the trembling,
certain fall
My little flapper fairy girl
Sean Hayes exorcises our demons
Design definition (oh no, not again)
The fields of user experience design are suffering through a transition of terminology, at an inflection point of becoming a discipline comprising a set of related fields that many other major professions have gone through before. For example, marketing went through such a change in the early 1900’s, according to Steve Sato, well-researched individual I talked with recently at CHIFOO. It occurs to me that engineering likewise is a large profession that’s faced up to the range of titles that necessarily exist, from mechanical engineer to civil engineer to electrical engineer to software engineer…to software architect, developer, etc.








