An interesting podcast that describes me as a blogger.
There has been a lot — probably too much — said about blogging and bloggers. This Future Tense podcast, which can be found in the Future Tense: July 2006 Archives gets to the heart of the matter. (On that page, search for “Profile of Bloggers.”)
If you’re looking for a good podcast with short episodes about technology issues, I highly recommend Future Tense.
blogging, blogs, podcast
A book about crossword puzzles?
I used to be a crossword puzzle lover. It wasn’t because I loved words as much as because I had an assignment at my job that gave me lots of free time in the middle of the day. Every day, I’d do the crossword puzzles in Newsday (Long Island’s paper), the Daily News, and the New York Times. When you do three newspaper puzzles a day, five days a week, you start getting good at it. And it starts getting boring. So before that assignment was done — it only lasted about three months — actually started making crossword puzzles. That’s when you know you’ve got it bad.
(A side note here. Around the same time, I used to play Scrabble with a friend of mine’s mother and her friend. They were incredible Scrabble players and I learned a lot from them. I also made a list of and practically memorized all of the acceptable 2- and 3-letter words in the The Official Scrabble Player’s Dictionary. This is the key to winning at Scrabble, as I learned (to their surprise one day). That and having a decent vocabulary, of course.)
Anyway, that assignment ended and I didn’t have time to do crossword puzzles every day. I’d occasionally do them when trapped on an airliner flying across the country, but that was about it.
Time passed. I started listening to Podcasts, including NPR’s Sunday Puzzle, with the New York Times puzzle master, Will Shortz. Will, of course, began plugging an independent film called Wordplay that had just been made about the American Crossword Puzzle Championship. It sounded interesting. Not interesting enough to trek down to an independent theather in Phoenix, mind you, but certainly interesting enough to add to my Netflix queue.
Will also started giving away copies of the companion book, Wordplay, as prizes for the Sunday Puzzle winners. The other day, while in a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Flagstaff, I saw the book on the shelf and, on a whim, bought it.
It was a quick read. I learned a lot of things.
First of all, there are a lot of people that are seriously into crossword puzzles. In my crossword puzzle heydays, I was just starting to approach the fringe of how these people live. I’m kind of glad that assignment ended; I don’t think I’d want my life to revolve around crossword puzzles, as the lives of some of these folks do.
Second, did you know that the New York Times crossword puzzle is easiest on Monday, progressing to a higher level of difficulty as the days of the week pass? Saturday’s is the toughest and Sunday’s, although largest, is only about as tough as one from a Wednesday or Thursday.
How does the toughness get established? Not by the fill — that’s the letters and black boxes in the grid. By the clues. Straightforward, “dictionary definition” clues are easiest. Clues that rely on puns or wordplay are the toughest. That’s Will Shortz’s job — he doesn’t create the puzzles, but he edits them for difficulty.
Good puzzles have themes that are carried out throughout the puzzle. The more theme words or phrases throughout the puzzle, the better that puzzle is. And if theme words and phrases are puns or wordplays on the theme, all the better.
I also learned that crossword puzzles are often created by computer (a sad state of affairs) but that some expert puzzle makers can create a good crossword in a few hours. One puzzle maker actually created an entire puzzle in less than an hour during the competition, based on a theme provided by the audience.
The book includes about 50 puzzles. Some are the contestants’ favorites — you know a person is serious when he can tell you his favorite puzzle by name or date — and others are puzzles used in the competition. I left the book at my place at Howard Mesa so I could fiddle with the puzzles in the evening before I go to bed.
If you like crossword puzzles and are interested in the creation and completion processes, I highly recommend the book.
Now I can’t wait for the movie to come out on DVD so I can watch it.
I finally find it from the ground.
Two years ago, when I was in training to fly helicopter tours at the Grand Canyon, I made daily trips to the Grand Canyon’s old airport out by Red Butte. I don’t know much about the old airport except how to find it from the air. I don’t think its two runways were ever paved.
Oh, yes. It has the remains of a big old hangar on the west side of where the runways were.
I love exploring ruins and remnants of the past. I remembered the hangar last week when Mike, Jack, and I were doing some back-roading in that area. I think we passed near the end of the main runway while driving out toward the Coconino Rim.
Yesterday, while back-roading with Jack southwest side of Grand Canyon National Park, I remembered the old airport again. And since I had to drive right past that area to get back to Howard Mesa, I figured I’d try again to find it.
I won’t go into details about the roads I tried and the wrong turns I took. Suffice it to say that I finally homed in on it. After driving down a two-track road that cut diagonally across the main runway, I parked my Jeep right in front of the gaping hangar door.
It’s a neat old building with a dirt floor and not much else. The shelves are stripped bare and rooms that could have been living quarters show signs of vandalism, including a burned door. There was a picnic table just inside the main door, offering a shady place to have lunch, surrounded by the ghosts of aviation past.
One room in the back corner had fairly new saddle racks attached to the walls; that same room had a Private Property/No Trespassing sign on it from the outside. (Oops!) I guess someone had used it not long ago to store horse tack. There were other buildings nearby that appeared to be in better condition; all of them had the same Private Property signs on them so Jack and I stayed clear. Still, it didn’t appear as if anyone was living there. Since the old airport is in the Kaibab National Forest, I find it hard to believe that anyone would live there. But who knows? The owners of the buildings could have been grandfathered in when the government bought the land.
One thing is for sure: visiting the old airport and looking up at the faded paint over the door spelling out “Grand Canyon Airlines” has given me a real thirst for knowledge about the place. When I’m finished with my road trip book project and trip to Canada (for work), I might start doing a little research.
It would be great to talk to someone who had actually flown there.
Before leaving, I snagged the coordinates with my GPS. Next time I want to find it, I won’t have to wander around until I stumble into it.
[composed on top of a mesa in the middle of nowhere with ecto]
“Don’t defend your interface. Fix it.”
Back in 2000, I read Jakob Nielsen’s Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. This excellent book reinforced several theories of Web design that I had already suspected: simpler was better, Flash animations and splash pages were idiotic, and sites should be built to convey information in a way that was easy for visitors to find and understand.
Nielsen’s book was a summary of thousands of hours of usability testing with people and Web sites all over the world. It wasn’t just the opinions of an outside observer. He could make statements because he had proof that his statements were valid.
I liked his book so much that I mentioned in — and I believe I even quoted from it — in my own book, Putting Your Small Business on the Web for Peachpit Press.
Prioritizing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger revises and and expands the information in Designing Web Usability. Using new test results and taking into consideration new technologies and user experience levels, Nielsen and Loranger revisit many of the problem exposed in the first book, summarizing how important they are today. The goal of the book is to help Web designers create sites that are effective, easy to navigate, and informative. These are the sites that people want to visit and spend time on, the sites that communicate information and sell products or services.
Nielsen and Loranger are not shy about voicing their opinions. The book has hundreds of full color illustrations of Web pages, each with a detailed caption that points out page problems. For example, a caption for Burger King site page begins, “This is an example of the misuse of visual metaphors…” And, for a page on the Montblanc site, “Montblanc makes nice pens, but it’s impossible to find out anything about them on the company’s Web site…”
While I feel that some of their criticisms are a bit nit-picky, illustrating and commenting on what they see as problems gives the reader plenty to think about. You might not agree with what they have to say about a site’s problem, but you’ll remember it when you design the pages on your sites.
As for me, I learned a few tricks I can apply to my sites. But I’m more relieved that my sites don’t have most of the problems their book points out.
Do you design Web sites? Get and read this book!
[composed on top of a mesa in the middle of nowhere with ecto]
Looking for feedback.
I’m thinking about starting a program of yoga for my mental health, physical well-being, and weight loss.
This is a difficult step for me. I keep myself very busy and the program I’ll looking into requires 40 minutes a day. That may not seem like much to you, but to me it’s a lot of time.
I’d love to get feedback from people who are currently using yoga for their health or people who have tried it and have quit for one reason or another. I’d like to learn about successes, failures, and experiences.
Please use the Comment link to share your experiences. I think other people might also be interested in what you have to say.
Thanks.