June, 18, 2004 archives

the new beastie boys album (to the 5 boroughs is $13.49 from amazon, and $14.85 from the itunes music store. i hope that makes sense to someone. (i’d love to get the album, but reportedly the cd is copy-protected, and i don’t want to deal with that.)

it’s bad enough that buying things through the itunes music store isn’t that great of a deal when you consider you’re getting a lower sound quality than a cd (not that i can tell the difference) and no physical media, but more expensive is just absurd.

i made the giant monkey head in my latest design iteration by taking a picture (with my camera phone) of one of my stuffed monkeys (a tchotchke for monkey madness) and using it as the model in illustrator. it’s not a very fancy giant monkey head, but it’s my not very fancy giant monkey head. (except, well, it’s in the public domain. so it’s also your not very fancy giant monkey head.)

here’s the eps version of the giant monkey head.

as always, the design looks best on my computer. (although it should pretty reasonable on any mac os x machine using safari.)

i think i may have elected to attend the wrong event at the convention center. (the mistake i really made was of heading over to the downtown means business event early. now that i’ve gotten back and seen the seminar and discussion group schedule, i realize i should have been there now, instead of earlier. oops.)

defensive design for the web: how to improve error messages, help, forms, and other crisis points by 37signals is a fantastic book with loads of great tips about how to make better web applications and sites by handling the edge cases well. it’s the book that every programmer who has written a web application that rejects credit card numbers not written in a specific format should be beaten with. it’s also a good companion to don’t make me think by steve krug.

one thing i wish the book had covered a little more is the localization aspects of defensive design.

(i think zak promised i’d write a review of the book when he scored a free copy for me, so here it is.)

it’s almost hard to believe that i’ve gone this long without donating to an organization like the international primate protection league. but i’ve rectified that this month. the check is, as they say, in the mail.