It is easy to support your team when they are winning. The Seattle Sounders lost their first game tonight. It was a tough one after captain and goalkeeper Kasey Keller got sent off for a handball. Now we just need to accept the lose, support our Sounders and move on. Go Sounders!

Technology is amazing. I am realized this as I was writing a post last week. For one month I have been writing this blog. Around 100 people have seen it. It cost me nothing, and took very little time.

 Contrast that to communication the last couple of centuries. I don’t know how long it would take to write 100 four page letters. Not to mention the cost. I love how two of the leading blogging platforms pay homage to Gutenberg with names like WordPress and Movable Type. The ease and speed at which we communicate is incredible. If I know someone’s contact info I can basically contact them instantly.

 That also leads to a problem. Getting a letter from someone is entirely different than receiving an email or a text message. A letter is very personal. We see their handwriting on the address and can see their pen strokes. It seems that communicate moves so fast today we don’t take the time to be personal. If I want to invite my friends to a party I just send out a mass invite on facebook.

 The funny thing is that while I love getting letters, I don’t take the time to actually write them. Now if you’ll excuse me, I am meeting up with a friend today. After a couple of text messages and a phone call we have it all worked out. I wonder what Gutenberg would think.

One of my favorite movies this summer was Wall-e. I especially loved the different designs of the characters and the environments. Jay Schuster is an industrial designer that works for Pixar. He was the lead designer for the character Wall-e. Here is the internal schematic that Jay made for Wall-e. In an interview Jay said that they cheated a little in the fact that when Wall-e folds us, in real life, there wouldn’t be enough room for all his parts. But I love the attention to detail and intense creative processes that Pixar goes thru when they make their films.

So I was watching a friends YouTube video and commented. I guess YouTube doesn’t want too much participation from their users because I got a comment limit exceeded message. That wasn’t the fun part. The best part was there was a link you could click on if you “Can’t read” My question is how would I know where to click if I couldn’t?

I know that the link refers to the CAPTCHA but I still found it funny.

We learned about Jackson Pollock in my History of Creativity Class. So i decided to make my own work of art at http://www.jacksonpollock.org/

This is a presentation that I gave today about industrial design. I wrote a research paper exploring if industrial design contributes to product success. I found that it does if the design is grounded in business principles. The theme is based on Nancy Duarte Redux.

I just read an interesting article in Quality Digest. Here is the quote that sums it up.

 
The battle is raging in the world marketplace, and there’s no single, external foe. But we have in fact met the enemy–and he is us. Self-righteousness is our bête noir, and whining and mediocrity cripple us.

 Day and night, in India, China, and across the rest of Asia, there’s a passionate focus on learning, improving, and succeeding. There, the question isn’t, “Why are quality methods and organizational improvement the means to success?” They only ask, “How?”: How to get better, how to get faster, how to do what we Americans thought we did best. They have seen what we have, and they understandably want the same for themselves and their families. They’ll learn as much and work as hard as necessary to get it.

 In my history of creativity class we saw a slide show of some of the most impressive buildings in the world. They are all in China or Dubai. This one for example, the Dubai tower, tallest building in the world upon completion.

 The rest of the world is catching up and we don’t seem to care. Our TA in the class told a sad story. He is a 9th grade teacher, and whenever he would assign a reading and give a quiz, all 35 students would fail. Even if he did the same thing 10 days in a row, they would all fail. Sometimes he said, 1 or 2 kids would realize that they might actually need to do something, and read, but most of the time they would all fail.

 And that is what is going to happen if we don’t get to work. We are going to fail. America is amazing. A land of opportunities. But are lazy. Things are easy and so we do the minimum possible. If we don’t get some urgency and motivation, we will fall behind.

 Here is the link to the story.
http://www.qualitydigest.com/magazine/2008/jul/article/while-we-are-sleeping.html

Finally. The ratings on the App Store used to be kind of a joke. First anyone could rate any app. Apple then restricted the ratings to someone who had actually bought the app. Now we get a Amazon style breakdown of the number of people who rated each star.
 
I like it. There are always the disgruntled users who rate 1 star without understanding or really reviewing the app. This artificially pulls down the ratings for quality apps. Now we can see and remove such reviews.
 
I find it interesting how the reviews are subcategorized into versions. I don’t know if it is that important to rate each version. Unless an update breaks the app, it should theoretically only get better.
 
What I really would like to see is a way to demo the apps. Right now publishers revert to releasing “Lite” free versions. This is clunky and should be addressed. With in game transactions in version 3.0 coming, maybe you could download the full game for free and then buy it if you want to go past a certain level.

but i do not endorse graffiti