nickd

my bike was stripped last year; they took the stem, rear wheel (which i built, tensioned, and trued all by myself), seatpost, and seat. when i saw the bike next, the handlebars were dangling from the brake housing.

two days later i bought a republic bike which is not bad but is still not the same and also weighs four pounds more and is harder to pedal. i’ve used it since. what was left of my bike, my real actual bike, the one that i love really ridiculously dearly for it being a material possession, sat on the floor of my apartment.

over the past two weeks i bought replacement parts, which are not the same parts (except for the seat) and do not feel like the same parts but still suffice in making the bike feel like the bike, which is very good.

yesterday i put all the parts onto the bike except for the brake cables and housing.

today i installed brake cables and housing; removed the bottom bracket lockring that refused to stay on and was a small, subtle pain in my ass for a year; tightened my rear cog onto the hub; tensioned the rear hub; and rode eight blocks to sultan’s market.

i had no preparation for how good that mile ride would feel, for aforementioned reasons of this being my bike and it feeling perfectly sized to me and handling precisely how i expect a bike to handle now. it was so god damned fantastic that i should just give up on further description on this here tumblr. when i arrived at sultan’s, though, a dude was unclipping his bike from the rack, and told me:

“man, it’s so good to get riding again.”

indeed, dude. indeed.

When I buy a computer, I move in. I change the background to solid black. I run software update (or whatever equivalent) to install the current versions of basic utilities. I tweak its OS-level preferences so it fits my workflow. I open the email program and add in my server. I install a few important applications and utilities. I plug in an external hard drive and load the iTunes library that references my music. Then I get to work.

Some of these apps fulfill basic needs that have become fundamental to modern computing experience: email, iTunes, system preferences. Others move a little more afield: for example, Dropbox is a good example of an app that feels very natural to use on a desktop, but could be done entirely through the web instead.

As a freelance employee who’s hopped around computers a lot lately, I now have the process of moving in down pat, and can get all this out of the way in a couple of hours. None of it is essential, but it is important because it makes the computer a little more mine - even if it isn’t.

Moving in is more than just setting up the picture of loved ones on your desk. It’s having something that fits your flow and allows you to do what you want while being happy.

Moving in is orders of magnitude more crucial on a personal computer. For me, dozens of apps are installed on a fresh OS: Tweetie, iStat Menus, Perian, Growl, Coda, Transmit, LittleSnapper, AdBlock, Things, CS4. Dashboard widgets are installed. Plugins out the wazoo. It’s nearly certain that you’ve moved in more to your personal computer than your work computer, if the two are separate.

So this may vary for you. It may belie my being a “power user.” But I think that this is important, and I’m going to say it, just get it out there, and you can do what you want with it. If the iPad is going to replace one’s laptop - or one’s entire computing system, whatever that is, and however complex that is - and become a dedicated device, it should allow us to move in (and out!) easily. Something that would allow easy download of any sort of media, including transferring between apps; backups (cloud or an external device like Time Machine, it doesn’t matter); and easily transferring information to another iPad.

It may be (and probably is) great right now as an augmentative device: one that you use along with your primary computer. But this is a matter of our stuff now: our music, our email, our work. And the jury’s still out - we are, after all, discussing an unreleased device that only a handful of pundits have seen. But whatever the iPad offers, this remains: over the years, we have all amassed a corpus of information, an array of types of information, that we keep to ourselves, and file away on our computers. We move it from computer to computer every few years, when we buy another one. We back it up periodically. We move some of it (but only some of it!) to the web.

And whether consciously or not, we treat this as our possessions. Our moving into another computer has become similar to schlepping our physical crap into a new place, and decorating it well, so that we can feel more comfortable during our time there.

Considering all that, it would be tremendous (and indeed revolutionary) if the iPad was a place that we could comfortably and casually throw our data on - our electronic possessions, our lives - and call home for a little while.

Subject: PSD slicing
Date: December 29, 2009 11:48:58 AM CST
To: Nick Disabato

That’s exactly what I do. I’m about to start another quarter of school, but come June I’ll have desperate need of a steady-like gig, so please please pretty please keep me near the top of your referral list.

Unless it’s Drupal. Then they can fuck themselves.

Thanks.

couch:

Laura Brunow Miner has some thoughts on magazine publishing:

Robin Sloan was kind enough to call Pictory, my recently launched project, the future of content. But I think what he really meant is that it’s the present. Sports Illustrated and BERG have put a lot of time and brainpower into creating really impressive examples of future possibilities, and rumor has it that Gannett spent a year with IDEO developing the experimental online magazine The Bold Italic.

I can confirm that that’s exactly what Gannett did with The Bold Italic (I know a few of the people who have been working on it first hand in the tower next next to us).

Meanwhile, I’ve been in my sweatpants next to the cat food bowl for the last eight months working on Pictory. They did massive user research studies to discover that online users are missing high design, large photos, and editorial polish on the web, and that people respond to personal, human stories. I thought about what people would care about seeing in an online photo magazine, and we ended up with some of the same conclusions.

And yet, I love Laura’s approach so much more. True, The Bold Italic has different aims and its own merits, but I like lingering over each of Pictory’s showcases to let the photos and stories sink in. I like that I can enjoy the content regardless of where I call home or what experiences I have. I like the thoughtful curation and blatant disregard to that certain absurd idea.

Really, I just want to watch Pictory do nothing but thrive.

so christmas is coming up, and we’re already butt-deep in chanukah. normally i send my amazon wishlist off to my parents every year on black friday, so they have a month to buy my presents. i always overpack it so they can only buy a few things, which keeps the element of surprise intact. it’s a nice little tradition. but i totally screwed the pooch on it this year, waiting over three weeks past the normal time to fire away the email, and i’ve realized that there’s a reason for this, one i sort of unconsciously dodged until tonight.

see, i don’t even think i really want gifts for christmas this year. (my ten-year-old self is crying in his cynicism-grave.) instead of gifts, or perhaps as your gift, i want you to do me a favor. i know i already threw a five-figure campaign to get my book published, shamelessly hawking the concept to you for three months, and you’re probably tired of my asking favors of you. but this favor is different. this favor is both easy to do and free, and it won’t take you too long.

here is why i want this favor: it’s because this was, in many ways, the hardest year of my life. it became uninspiring and blasé in march and a minor hell in may, and hasn’t let up since. two people that i know have died. one of my friends got cancer. another one of my friends spent the entire year wracked with emotional torment because their significant other left the country. dozens of my friends were laid off, and most of them didn’t get their jobs back. i went six months not sleeping well. and while a lot of stuff has resolved itself (e.g. i’m writing a book, i don’t have to worry about its funding, and i took a job that’s more substantially more well-suited to my own interests and beliefs), it’s been two steps back in my personal life, which has made things doubly hard on me.

so here is the favor. ready? i want you to be grateful for the good things in your life. i want you to go out and express that gratitude however you see fit. if you’re one of the fourteen people left in the country that’s all-the-way happy with your job, go and buy drinks for your boss and coworkers. (if your boss teetotals, hug them instead.) if you somehow legitimately enjoy the winters in chicago, throw a snowball fight, or take a walk outside at 2am just because. write thank-you letters to your friends. lazy? shitty handwriting? fine, write emails instead, they will still appreciate them. healthy but uninsured? a minor miracle: be grateful for everyone who covers their mouth on public transit. tip your letter carrier. overtip your bartender. ride the santa train. walk down NMA at 5:30p on a wednesday with the holiday decorations out. send out text messages to the people you wish you connected with more, asking how they are doing. (here is what the text could say: “Hey, how are you doing?”)

but also - and here is the mushy romantic part! get ready! - if you have a lover, here is the most important thing that you can do. you should go over to that lover and tell them that you are grateful for their existence, and their love. because one very, very sacred thing that exists in this rather bleak-at-best world is knowing that someone out there gives such a passionate damn about you, your health, your success, and your well-being, and is willing to take you seriously and meet you halfway in their life.

this can come in any form that you want. sit down and say a few sentences. hug them. it doesn’t matter how you show your appreciation for all they have done for you, but it does matter rather tremendously that you do it. and i think that no matter what bullshit cards this year has dealt you, it’s very acutely worth it to go back and reassess the ways in which your life is charmed and blessed and blissed - and that an awful lot of people in our frayed and anxious generation tend to lose sight of one of the more significant ones.

because my girlfriend and i are awesome, we spent a good swath of yesterday evening discussing a complicated grammar problem. we have no idea how to solve it, so we are asking you.

so let’s assume you have a boa constrictor, and somehow it is sworn in as the attorney general of your state. still following me? okay, good. now assume that that happens again - boa constrictor, attorney general - but in a different state. it doesn’t matter how this happened, and it doesn’t matter whether the respective boas are good at their jobs. every good snoot knows that the plural form of “attorney general” is “attorneys general,” but how do you describe multiple instances of attorney general that also happen to be a boa constrictor? the problem is that a boa constrictor is a compound noun (whereas “general” is an adjective that modifies “attorney”), so technically the plural can be either boas constrictor or boa constrictors.

POTENTIAL CANDIDATES:
boa constrictors attorneys general
attorneys boa constrictors general
attorneys boas constrictor general
boas constrictor attorneys general
attorneys general boas constrictor
boa constrictor attorneys general
attorneys general boa constrictors

etc. there are many permutations of this. probably only one, maybe two, are correct.

i want a pen, but i am very particular about what it does and how it works, so i have decided to “crowdsource” its acquisition. here is what i want:

1. i want the cap to screw off. i don’t want it to pop off, because then it will pop off at all the wrong times.
2. it must be ~3-4” long, any longer and that’s too long. (i don’t really care how fat it is, but it shouldn’t be comically so.)
3. it - preferably the cap - has to attach to a key ring.
4. either black or brown ink. blue ink is used by investment bankers and old people.
5. it should not be flimsy, which means it should not be plastic. in an ideal world this would suffer world war 3 gladly like a rotring or dietzgen, but it should at least suffer the war of being attached to my key chain and biking around a lot.
6. by proxy the clip that attaches it to a key ring should probably not wear over time.
7. the ink shouldn’t freeze at -10F. minus. ten. with a headwind.
8. bonus points if it’s refillable.
9. bonus points if it’s an 0.7mm rollerball.

n.b. that the closest i’ve come is nyuh which fulfills every requirement except for #1, which is a dealbreaker. any suggestions?

so i’m waiting to get a table at some nonspecific local neighborhood dive. it’s nice and sunny out and fall has started and we’ve all got hoodies on. in short order, adam asks me: “so what is it that you… do?”

“well uh i’m an interaction designer…”
“right. what do those do?”
“basically we try to make technology easier for people to use.”
“really! so you design interactions.”
“yes.
pause.
“if i said that i was a designer of interactions, and not an interaction designer, would it have made more sense?”
“yes!”

cask-strength facepalm. fwiw apparently he thought “interaction design” meant a specific kind of design process that was somehow more hands-on? but like, putting all the semantic hair-splitting about our profession aside, i feel sort of like i always need to explain my career to other people in what amounts to five or six paragraphs of canned manifesto - which i have down by now, but hoo boy does it sound pretentious and awkward to come off like you just invented your own career path and now you live in a city where there are, like, five of you. maybe this would be easier in san francisco, where there appears to be more interaction designers than homeless people about 15% of the time. maybe it would be easier if i just said “usability” which is a tiny subset of interaction design. but i have found it easiest to simply say “web designer” which both 1) completely isn’t what i do at all, ever, under any circumstance and 2) even if it were, interaction design applies to the web just as much as it does industrial design or software engineering, and so it’s equally disingenuous to zoom in on only a tiny part of the proverbial techno-fustigatory venn diagram.

but it punts, right? and it satiates the asker, because everybody has their own vision of what it means to be a web designer by now. i say this to construction workers on the el platform, or the 50yo waitress at my favorite greasy diner, or the panaderia baker under the blue line, and they get it: they know what a web site is, they know that people make them. it doesn’t matter the particulars of what that all involves, but if they want to know specifically what it is that i do they can ask and i can tell them that i do usability, information architecture, content strategy, etc.

so i guess i’m writing this because i’m curious whether it’s okay to like start from the blanket term “web design” as a catch-all at most parties or whatever, and then if they want to ask more questions they can? or that this entire post is a tacit confession that i suck ass at small talk. you can probably read it one of those two ways.

as you probably know, i’m writing a book that’s called cadence & slang, due to be out in late 2010. well, i just started a kickstarter project for it.

it would mean the world to me if you donated whatever you could, even if it’s only a dollar. check out the kickstarter page for more information. this book is many years in the making, and it’s somewhat the culmination of many things in my life. i hope that you find it enjoyable once it’s out.