Well, Spring Quarter is rapidly approaching (hi, I go to work tomorrow), and this vacation was much appreciated. Some of the highlights for me include Graham snorting pollen off the hood of a VW, seeing Shannon for the first time in about six years, watching grown men vomit green beer on themselves on river street, watching the Dolly Ranchers rawk and roll, and ripping out my countertops by hand. Not a bad break, if I do say so myself.

Here are some photos.

It always amuses me to watch people using the "self checkout" system at Kroger; I find myself analyzing the absurdity of the dance people are forced to perform as well as reflecting upon the general lack of competency in the target user population. I'm actually quite astounded with how low a level of ability, both cognitive and physical, these devices need to cater towards - some of the people using them can't (or won't) read, don't understand the UPC is the part that needs to be scanned, don't have any idea what their vegetables are called, and are paying with an assortment of food stamps, cash, credit, check, and barter. When usability and simple literacy butt heads, the result is pretty scary.

Kroger is a pretty sad experience, as far as grocery stores go, but does seem to have some advanced technology in place; I was assaulted with some of that technology today. I went on a "meat run" - I wanted to grill tonight, seeing as its 80 degrees and beautiful. It's a rare occasion that Kroger has good looking lamb, so I stocked up and ended up purchasing about thirty dollars worth of lamb, veal and steak. I used the above mentioned self checkout (no, I don't qualify for a senior citizen discount, and no, I don't have any coupons, and dammit would you stop shouting at me), and went to leave the store.

The alarm went off.

The security guard called me back in, and I opened the bag up. "Oh, meat. This won't take a second". I asked him what he meant, and he showed me the little red tag on the steak that says "REMOVE BEFORE MICROWAVING". He scanned it with a reader, and told me that I was all set. I asked him how many times this happens a day, and he rolled his eyes; "Only about a thousand". I also noticed that while he was scanning my meat, about six people left the store - and the alarm was still going off from my non-microwavable red tag.

All of this leads me to the question: what on earth is Kroger thinking, installing expensive security systems, adding the manual labor of attaching the tags (and associated, albeit small, cost of the little red metal tags themselves), hiring a security guard, and then spending thirty seconds "about a thousand" times a day disarming the tag? And why does my $6 steak have a little red tag but my $11 lamb chops don't? And how much meat gets stolen while big eared tattooed freaks ask security guards questions about the usability of their jobs?

I smell a design opportunity.

j's birthday pittures :)

Eek, it's March already! I've finally found a "spare" moment to sit down and write something, and there's so much to write that nothing comes out. Thus, poorly structured thoughts ahead:

J's birthday is tomorrow, and we're planning on hitting up The Sapphire Grill .. The weekend should be fairly uneventful, but next weekend is going to be chaos .. It's quite hard to believe that the quarter has moved so quickly!

My Information Architecture class has been examining wayfinding, and I'm quite impressed with their solutions. Some very interesting approaches, many considering wayfinding in a much more conceptual manner than the traditional signs n' maps. Finding ones' way has such a spiritual quality to it, yet most of the traditional systems focus merely on ease of use. Perhaps experience design smushed with information architecture yields some new form of holistic understanding - good design - bauhaus2004? Yuck.

One of my daily blog stops is Dan Saffer, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon. Although I've never met him or even exchanged emails, I feel a certain attachment as I follow his journey through many of the same lectures, projects and feelings that I encountered at Carnegie. I'm finding interesting parallels between what he's studying and what I'm teaching, which either means I'm on the right track or I'm horribly boring and uncreative. Either way, it's nice to find certain reassuring signs like that. On the other hand, there are some fairly obvious differences between our programs that I'm starting to pick up on. Perhaps it's the brute force way in which we've grown, but our students seem to have a much more blatant ability to dissect a problem. I'm still ambivalent in judging if this is a good or bad trait, but it does seem to be on key differentiator.

Tonight is indian food - I'm going to attempt Tandoori Chicken on the grill for the first time - and then a movie; we've rented Sylvia, and I'm interested to see how her relationship is framed, and in what light they portray her feminist mystique ..