Kirk – Page 10 – Home of the Bridgers

Great Poem From The Bus

Translink has a few feet of ad space on some buses dedicated to getting Canadian poets “published” or at least noticed. One day last summer I read this poem and thought it absolutely wonderful. Now I think I’m going to add the poet’s book to my list of interesting books to buy.

Excerpt from “Had I Stayed On The Farm” by David Zieroth

I married the skinny girl

and our kids ran free as chickens

one of them, the second boy

moving along the ditches for days

trapping muskrats and living on chokeberries and bulrushes

sleeping by a little fire of sticks

wrapped in his jacket, and we hardly noticed

he was gone until he returned

as someone else, burnt and smoky

his sisters silenced by the strides he took

to reach the pump, his hands

a mesh of little nicks and cuts where

the cries of the animals had entered him

LEGO Design Wheel

Interesting approach to capturing a high level view of a user’s experience with a product or service from LEGO. Visual, easy to understand – not sure how to capture value in it though. Perhaps the little “i” and “<” icons are the key.

Kano Model Resource

A year or two ago I heard about Professor Kano’s model on user experience expectations at UI12. Here’s a nice little article on it, including a graphic.

Stain Removal Without Chemicals

Use baking powder on a damp sponge to remove kitchen stains.

If marks remain, try soaking the stain with a solution of baking powder and water first, then wipe.

Make Your Own Soap Pump Refills

Make your own refill for soap pumps: dissolve a bar of soap in boiling water, allow to cool, and fill up.

Weevils Hate Bay Leaves

Keep weevils out of flour, rice, and dried beans by placing dried bay leaves into opened bags and storage canisters.

Rodents Hate Peppermint

Peppermint oil is an excellent deterent of rats and mice. Sprinkle peppermint oil in crawl spaces, inside cabinets, and around exterior walls.

Happy 4th Birthday theBside … Now Grow Up Already!

Wow, look at that. I’ve been blogging here since March 2005 – a full 4 years. 292 posts about … stuff.

So Happy Birthday theBside – you’re 4 years old!

Now it’s time to talk turkey – I think it is time for a change. Anyone who’s tried to blog on their own will agree that it actually is a bit of a time sink. It takes time to find and vette interesting things, time to compose a post, and time to inject some degree of intelligence or thought into it. I aimed at posting at least once per week and I think I accomplished that for a large majority of the 200-odd weeks I’ve been posting.

Today there are a few other blogging things around that didn’t exist in 2005, or at least were not as prevalent or popular back then. For example there is Facebook, a service that you frankly have to ask how they plan on making money. There’s also microblogging services like Twitter, and I can understand why microblogging is so popular. It allows you to skip all that time I mentioned above, as you don’t need to inject intelligence or humour or anything into the posts. It is much more stream of concious, simply posting about your rumbling tummy.

I think the microblogging phenomenom will fade soon enough, as the lack of substance in anything eventually catches up to all fads. Twitter will morph into something else though.

And that’s what I’m thinking needs to happen to theBside. It needs to morph into something else. I’d like to spend less time blogging, and more time being productive in real life. However I find the blog useful for looking back or keeping track of resources for later reference.

Since my audience is currently minimal, I’m not sure the change is important to anyone other than me. But I’m officially giving myself permission to post things with less thought, less commentary, and less … well … time investment. I’m not ruling out thoughtful commentary posts, but I’m also going to start putting things up that really will just be things I want to keep track of for later.

Since my inaugural first post under this new regime is now nearing record-breaking length, I’ll sign off.

Let’s see what the 5th year holds for theBside.

What’s For Dinner?

Hands up those of you who have come home after a long day at work (or play) and have said to yourself “What the heck am I going to eat for dinner tonight?”

OK, hands down.

Now hands up if you think I could see you when you put your hands up.

OK, hands down.

A neat site I’ve come across is designed to help those of us with little creativity in the kitchen – Cooking By Numbers.

Just mark down what you have in your fridge and cupboard and the site returns a variety of recipes that you could use with just those ingredients you listed.

Now the computer can be creative for you! Oh wait, that can’t be good …

AOL Leak Results In “I Love Alaska”

Who is user # 711391?

A few years back AOL published the “anonymized” search history of hundreds of thousands of its subscribers. At the time I wrote that it was rich with potential for interesting stories – and it appears I was not the only one to believe so.

Here is a series of mini movies called “I Love Alaska.” It tells an interesting tale using solely the search criteria of one user from the AOL data dump.

Isn’t the digital age fun?!

I Love Alaska – Episode 1/13 from SubmarineChannel on Vimeo.

A high definition version is available here.

At first this seems mildly interesting, until you realize that this was a person’s real life at the time. Voyeristic? Yes. Interesting? Definitely. Proof that anonymity doesn’t really exist on the Internet for most of us? You bet.