Bad Design Hell

I’m back in the Playground of the Baby Giants this August, this time, with my new MacBook in tow. We decided to buy and install a wireless router at my parents’ so we could work untethered. We drove down to the nearest Staples, and ended up choosing a Linksys model, the best selling WRT54G. Brought…

Microsoft Hell

Haven’t been inspired to blog much. I’ve been too busy with work and my new life. I’ve been translating a lot, on my new MacBook, which has worked flawlessly so far. The only problems I’ve run into are Windows bugs, « features », and general bad ergonomics, hallucinatingly complex workflows to achieve the simplest tasks, etc. Besides…

iMac HD update & a software gem

So as I said I would in my recent post on the bad blocks on my internal hard disk, I went out and bought a third external Firewire hard drive. This purchase was long overdue, because no matter what, I need to be able to backup my system, not just my data which is on…

mini Radio Vince

As an experiment, I’ve added a built-in, mini Radio Vince Flash application at the top of sknoblog. I’m not sure I like the idea: For one, I’m not so comfortable adding a Flash app to sknoblog, but at least, until you hit « play », it won’t use any CPU power, and even then, it shouldn’t be…

Meltdown follow-up part I

Now that I got my « How I spent my summer vacation » paper out of the way, here’s a little progress report following the meltdown of my 20 year old MIDI keyboard… Being deprived of any way to input notes into my Mac via the MIDI protocol forced me to look for and discover possible alternatives.…

The true value of Blogging

Blogging true believers like to hype the communal virtues of blogging. They claim that blogs are a new form of interactive communication, that the value of blogs are the « blog-rolls » (list of links to other blogs) and the commenting (which, you’ll remember, I had to turn off due to comment spam, although my recently installed…

www.dontclick.it

www.dontclick.it is an experiment in user-interface design which aims to do away with mouse clicks. While I’m far from convinced of the evil of mouse clicks, this is for the most part quite nicely done and thought-provoking (in the narrow realm of UI design).

Coming up for air

Haven’t had any time for sknoblog or any other artistic activity lately. I’ve been doing software localization and translation work to feed the kiddies. Most translation work in the Internet age is outsourced by software companies to China and India, and translation rates have fallen dramatically (generally to a few lousy cents per source-language word).…

March madness

March has been a crazy month, what with my trip to LA, the subsequent jet lag (someone gave me the following formula: 1 day of feeling like shit for every hour difference. I can pretty much confirm that I felt like shit for the 9 days predicted by the formula!) Have a lot of translation…