"Hey, Man. That's a NAS-Car You Got There." (05/02/01)
I know. It's positively shameful how long it's been since my last update (about 3 months, actually). In the interim, I've eaten my own dog food, in a move to Atlanta, GA and have begun work on a new project.

Although the majority of NASCAR fans aren't exactly the type that'd go to polo matches, they are truly diehard and that is something I admire. My access as an employee of the official website is unbelievable. We're able to get right up within 8 feet or so of the pit wall. This is equivalent to standing on the sidelines of a NFL game. I found this out a couple weeks ago when I went to my first race in Talladega, AL. I got so excited that I shot three rolls of film.

My role here as information/interface designer is really a great gig. Here's this high-volume website (4 million uniques/month) and it's my job to make it easier for everyone to use it. NASCAR is an extremely statistic-intensive sport. It's kind of like baseball, in that, it can be like watching paint dry to the uninitiated. The more you know, however, the more engrossing it becomes. So it is with NASCAR.com. We have all this data and the current site does a less than perfect job of delivering it to the users. That's where I come in. So I hope to make more regular updates now that I'm back in a groove.

We Get Letters... or 'Yes, We Have No Gearboxes.' (01/23/01)

Some people just refuse to read. About every 4 months or so, I recieve an email like the one I did today. I don't know how they find me. I don't know why they think that I have them for sale. If they'd just read, they'd save themselves (and me!) a lot of time. It really is quite laughable. Usually, the emails will be from people in Taiwan, or Siberia or India or some place where I don't expect them to speak English. In those cases, I'll write a polite reply, and do my best to translate it into a language they could understand.

The poor, misinformed bloke that sent me the message is from Canada. For him, I have a special reply. I sent him a link to the Canadian version of this site. You can see the email I got below:  
 

Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 16:22:49 -0500 From: Joel Lemay <"machinerie"@slemay.qc.ca> Organization: Machineries Serge Lemay To: info@speedreducer.com, john@gearbox.net , mecanic@escotrans.be Subject: gearbox Do you have this gearbox

click image to zoom in

Life will send you little hints sometimes, reminding you that you're just a small part of the universe. Well, if this email is a message from Life, maybe I should be reading more into the attachment's title."

How to Save Yourself MILLIONS In Web Con$ulting Dollars.
I have found my new favorite book. After plowing through a few thousand pages of web design, information architecture and usability texts, I have landed on one that I think flattens them all. DO NOT pass GO, DO NOT collect $200, run (don't walk) to Amazon.com (or your favorite book store) and buy Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug.

This book handles some of the more whip-weary horse corpses of usability and web design with a fresh, nearly irreverent tone. It's actually interesting to read for anyone interested in what makes good sites into GREAT ones. A short read at just over 150 pages, the author claims it was designed to be read 'on a long flight.' As his wife so clearly says in the introduction, "when something's hard to use - I just don't use it as much." The book goes on to show you exactly how to make your site easy to use so people will use it. This is starting to sound like a plug, so I'll stop right here. I mean it though, get this book. Now. Are you still here? Go buy it now!

2001 - A Year Fraught with .. Promise? (01/08/01)
[update 01/09/01 11:30am]
Some of those 'Half-Baked Pieces of Gadgetry' Came Out This Morning!
THIS is exactly what I'm talking about. Wow. Apple's new iDVD software is so impressive. This is the kind of innovation I'd hoped would come now that PC's have reached a saturation point. Not only is DVD desktop authoring cool, check out MacOS X. This thing impresses me more each time I see it. Did I mention that OS X is cooler than pretenders to the throne?

It's seemed lately, to me at least, that for all the hang-dog doom and gloom surrounding the economy and the tech sector, 2001 is going to be a really great year. I've been called an optimist before, but arguably more often a pessimist(I'm a realist! I guess I'll never teach those people.) I can't say that I have any real facts or substance to back up my feelings of good cheer; they're just that - good feelings. I would be remiss if I didn't share some of my ideas about what will be so good, however.

You may have read, or heard, that PC manufacturers (Dell, Compaq, Apple, etc.) have fallen on hard times lately. It has been reported that the reason sales have been so sluggish is that nearly 7 in 10 Americans have a PC. 7 in 10. That's quite a figure. I seem to remember just a few years ago when that number hung down in the low 30th percentile. That means that not only do people like yours truly have a PC (or multiple PC's) at home; but even my distant cousin Cletus the slack-jawed yokel is propping up his kitchen table with AOL 6.0 cd-roms.

What does that mean for our teeming, melting-pot of an installed base? It means consensus. For years, those in the habit of designing web sites have been entirely frustrated with moving targets like browser version, screen resolution, color depth, plug-ins, etc. A slow down in PC sales means that people could be catching up. It means the moving target just might be slowing down. It means that maybe, just maybe, the wired world could begin to focus on things like value, functionality, and content- instead of whatever whiz-bang, half-baked piece of gadgetry came out this morning. If that happens, then those of us who have been pounding the table for years over putting steak, and not sizzle in web projects may get an ear. That would be a happy moment indeed.

As always, you can nag or worship me at john@gearbox.net " title="Send me an email."> john@gearbox.net .

Happy New Year! (01/02/01)
I hope that you had a fun and safe New Year's Eve. It was certainly a switch for me after last year. I just barely managed to stay awake for the ball drop. Elsewhere in the world, it seems like the Y2K bug bit a little late -- and while some people drank themselves stupid to welcome the coming of the REAL millennium, some people WERE just stupid.

Instead of making any predictions for this new year, I'll just let you follow life's silly events as they happen.

Only in San Francisco (12/29/00)
I just saw a homeless guy with a cell phone. You know, this kind of thing could only happen here - at least so far. It's been very interesting living in a place that, in many respects, leads the country (sometimes even the world) in connectedness. Even with the connected proliferation of AOL, WebTV, PalmOS, etc, adoption in the realm of hardware still takes a while to filter down. Atoms are just so much harder to move than bits. Will it always be this way?

What point am I trying to make here? I don't know, I just had to write it down. Look for more annoying cellphone conversations coming soon to a homeless person near you.

P.S. Here are some cool words that I wanted to drop in this post, but couldn't manage the context, considering the homeless cell phone guy: haptics, camera obscura, iconoclasm, semiotics. There - I used 'em. :)

Hawai'ian Honeymoon Photo Gallery Now Up 12/19/00
I just finished scanning nearly 300 photos from my recent honeymoon in the hawaiian islands. I've uploaded them all for you to enjoy. As a result - I'm really tired of this computer thing today. I'll be back at it tomorrow.

Patience is Adverse, too 12/14/00
I think Peter Pan and the "Lost Boys" said it best, "I don't wanna grow up." Sometimes, as a spoiled rotten child of the information economy, it can be easy to find play that gets paid as work. This being said, when any 'real' or 'grown up' attributes of work come across one's path, it can be disorienting. Such is the case today as I found out an opportunity I'm working on may take an additional few months to come to fruition.

This has made me reflect on the strange information society whose attention span has been weaned from the pesky world of atoms that we all really live in. Some of us who have had access to the 'Refresh' button for the last 7 years or so have come to develop a rather impatient outlook on society and life. When things don't happen just like we want - or at least when there isn't any real news about every 15 minutes - I find myself becoming irritated. This impatient behavior presents itself in the myriad tickers and other info streams that have invaded the dashboard of the modern worker. This can't be healthy.

Microsoft Powerpoint : 'Instrument of Satan' 12/12/2000
In the interest of helping a friend with a project, I spent 15 hours this past Saturday messing with a horrible program called Microsoft Powerpoint. The promise of this little 'gem' is the ability to let any half-wit, used cheese salesman with an idea and a laptop share his 'vision' for changing the world in glorious color. The problem with Powerpoint is, it delivers. Many companies have banned its use to promote 'real' work. So insidiously easy is this program to use badly, so difficult to truly master, that an entire cottage industry has sprung up over the last few years to support the legions of used cheese salesmen who dream of out-powerpointing their competitors. Ugh.

One of the <sarcasm>BEST</sarcasm> things about Powerpoint is that people (executives especially) absolutely LOVE to print these presentations out - to the exclusion of any live or digital communication - sometimes to the tune of 50-60 slides. This will not only aggravate the most seasoned designer, who would have loved the opportunity attempt a properly designed print piece; it will also bankrupt your toner budget.

I was reminded of this last night, I was reading a transcript of a lovely roundtable discussion in the latest issue of WIRED. The roundtable was made up of 10 or so of the world's most prominent industrial and interactive designers. One of the quotes was (and I love this) "Today's Internet has staggering promise, but it looks like a research project from the institute for the aesthetically challenged." Desktop publishing and the advent of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) has liberated many an idea and this event holds much promise for the human race; but it has also surely unleashed a veritable torrent of ugly slide shows on a world already overrun with too much noise, and not enough signal.

My, this is starting to sound like a rant. I guess it is. Anyhow, if you have free time, and a copy of Powerpoint - do yourself a favor and go for a walk instead.

Rebuilding (slowly) 12/3/2000
Gearbox.net has been my "on again, off again" home as I've gone through periods of dizzying work (freelance, contract and full-time) as well as small episodes of ponderous recharge. Currently, I am exploring the latter. My former employer, Masterkey.com, was recently aquired by Public Storage, Inc. in a deal meant to enhance the 30 year-old company's internet product offering. The past 12 months in the dot com industry have been interesting, to say the least. My story is not unique, however.

I need to re-establish my identity out here on the 'net. Since I am now working full-time as the Sr. UI Architect for Public Storage, it may be slow going. They're definitely keeping me busy. So, keep checking back if you're interested. I try to put more up every day. As for this week, I'll be posting the portfolio stuff. I'm keeping the design totally bare until I get all the content up - it's better to have a home with no wallpaper than a house with nothing in it.

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