Disqus - Friends of mleis

Re: Mysterious Fires in Queens and SoHo

Whitney Hess — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 14:56:33 -0000

I can't believe that the fire was on Spring and West Broadway. From my north-facing 20th-floor apartment on Murray Street, the smoke seemed to be coming from just behind 40 Worth Street. The black plume of smoke wafted over Lower Manhattan and off to Brooklyn for more than 30 minutes. We could hear lots of firetrucks, and at one point we could even see the red-hot flames above the roof of 40 Worth.

Did anyone else think it was much further downtown?

Re: Chris Rock on Election 2008

Whitney Hess — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 10:01:26 -0000

Chris Rock made the same joke on Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday, and it was a lot funnier then...

Re: Ten Best Things and Five Worst Things About the BlackBerry

Whitney Hess — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 12:42:12 -0000

Of course you can!

Re: CrowdVine Schedule problems

Whitney Hess — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 21:34:14 -0000

Wow, now that's service!

Re: Skitch!

Whitney Hess — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:45:25 -0000

I haven't had a chance to yet, but I definitely plan on it!

Re: 10 Ways Digital Can Help You Thrive in a Recession

Whitney Hess — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:20:39 -0000

This reads like "10 Ways Digital Can Help You *Avoid* a Recession" ;)

Very insightful, thanks

Re: 10 Ways Digital Can Help You Thrive in a Recession

Whitney Hess — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:20:39 -0000

This reads like "10 Ways Digital Can Help You *Avoid* a Recession" ;)

Very insightful, thanks

Re: Who is Temboo?

Whitney Hess — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 08:14:35 -0000

Ha! Yes I suppose I could do that. But I'm not looking for a job, just curious about what they do. Hoped someone in the blogosphere had worked with them before.

Re: You like us, but do you know who we are?

Whitney Hess — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 08:58:24 -0000

Can't forget this one from July 07

http://www.nytimes.com/2007...

Re: Nine Reasons Why I Love the Roomba

Whitney Hess — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 16:09:25 -0000

Matthew -- He's helped me be neater in general. I keep fewer bags and boxes lying around so that Roomba has room to do his thing.

Re: TwitterBerry was mean to me

Whitney Hess — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 16:58:51 -0000

Joe, your wife plays the accordion?! That's the opposite of Twitter.

Re: My Twitter Karma

Whitney Hess — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 18:26:33 -0000

Jason, thanks so much for the add. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

mcwflint, I've definitely heard of people who keep multiple Twitter accounts. It makes sense to me from a personal brand perspective, but it seems like an awful lot of upkeep.

To your point about feedback, perhaps Twitter could add a textbox to the Unfollow flow that lets the user explain themselves. It would need to be optional, of course ;)

Re: Formatting my blog for the iPhone

Whitney Hess — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 18:44:54 -0000

Dan, I completely agree. When it comes to readability, performance and recognizability, it's in your best interest to ensure that your blog/website/content of any kind can be accessed on any browser, particularly one as popular as Safari for the iPhone.

If it works without any special love, all the better. If not, do what it takes to make it work.

As you and Eduardo both pointed out, the best solution would be to tweak the iPhone theme so that it closely matches my current theme. Perhaps I'll take a crack at it some rainy, lonely day in the future. For now, I'm sticking with Cutline.

Re: Ten Things We Hate About BlackBerrys

Whitney Hess — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 20:18:09 -0000

Just happened upon this article and wanted to share a blog post I wrote recently titled, "Ten Best Things and Five Worst Things About the BlackBerry." Hope you enjoy: http://whitneyhess.com/blog...

Re: Twitter Blocks

Whitney Hess — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 22:15:08 -0000

Martha, thanks so much for the kind words. Keep reading! I look forward to your comments.

Re: Send e-mails verbally with Jott

Whitney Hess — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 23:11:59 -0000

Case, you're right. The fact that there's no multi-select is just plain wrong. It's an inbox. You should be able to take batch actions.

Jott actually just redesigned their interface. Read more about what's new here: http://jott.com/jott/whatsN...

And yes, Remember the Milk rules. I use it for all of my to-do lists. I had been using 37 Signals' Ta-da Lists, but was thoroughly annoyed by the absense of a due date for each task. Then my manager Josh recommended RTM. I'm much happier with it, and their mobile site isn't bad either.

Re: The catch-up obligation

Whitney Hess — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:03:24 -0000

Danny, I know exactly what you mean. Even when I'm doing yoga or getting a massage, I'm thinking about the stuff I'm "supposed to" be doing. It's like we're still children and going to get in trouble if we don't finish our homework. Yes, vacations help, but I usually bring reading with me so that I can catch up. And when you get back, there's always a huge pile of crap waiting for you.

Clive, I'm really touched by your comment. Thank you so much. And you're right, it really is about discipline. The web has an infinite number of paths and things to distract me, and I often find myself going off in directions I didn't mean to go off in when I sat down at the computer. Narrowing my focus would certainly help, but I'm not sure I have the will to do it!

Alex, yes yes yes, it's definitely about the output pressure as well. I was outrageously tired last night, and as I was reading in bed, something was nagging me that I hadn't written a blog post yesterday. I actually picked up my BlackBerry and started to create a new blog post on my phone! But then I realized I had nothing interesting to say and my time would be better spent sleeping, so I put the phone down. I'm making progress!

Yes, I *only* read 42 feeds. I had about 100 until a month ago when I switched to Google Reader and realized that I can't possibly keep up with them all, and more importantly, they weren't actually interesting to me. I decided that if I wasn't moved by at least 1 in 10 posts, I didn't need to be reading the blog. So I pared down. Additionally, there is definitely some content on the web that I just prefer to read at its site of origin -- like the New York Times for instance. RSS is great for quick scans, but separating the content from the style doesn't always work for me.

You can see a list of the UX/Design blogs I read in the sidebar here, under "People I Really Like." I also have a few others I don't publish here because they aren't related, like Curbed and Gothamist. I've been reading Gizmodo for years, but I think I'm going to stop. They generate too much content! It would be great to be able to subscribe to a specific tag or category though.

Where is your list of 210 feeds?

Re: Blog of the Day on Logic + Emotion

Whitney Hess — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:16:27 -0000

Thank you everyone! Deeply appreciate your support

Re: TwitterBerry was mean to me

Whitney Hess — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:20:36 -0000

Adam, I've never tried Tiny Twitter. When I first got into Twitter in January, I did a search for BB apps and only found Twitterberry. Are there others?

And why does your BB only check email every 10 min? Are you using an IMAP server or something?

Re: Dare to VMware

Whitney Hess — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 08:38:42 -0000

Melissa, unfortunately Bootcamp only allows you to boot into Windows, but not use the Windows and Mac OS simultaneously. Since we have important software running on both sides, we needed a virtual windows solution. VMware seemed like the best option, though I have heard great things about Parallels, too.

Re: Triangulation

Whitney Hess — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 02:13:27 -0000

Funny that "triangulation" meant something to you the *third* time you used it. Coincidence? I think not.

Re: Adam Greenfield to be Nokia’s new Head of Design Direction

Whitney Hess — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 09:08:27 -0000

Thanks for the book recommendation. I've added it to my Amazon Wish List.

I took a course on Ubiquitous Computing in grad school and still find it to be one of the most fascinating topics in technology today -- not to mention among the most difficult design problems for user experience professionals. We go out into the field and conduct research to see how people use certain tools in their typical environment and devise solutions that will be successful given the context. But what happens when that environment is constantly changing and our users' goals, motivations, behaviors, expectations change as a result? Our designs need to adapt in a seamless way that almost goes unnoticed. So do we create five solutions for five contexts and piece them together in a cohesive way, or do we need to think much more broadly and attack the problem holistically? Where do we start?

Re: Do you have a soft spot for the Information Design of transit maps?

Whitney Hess — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 09:22:06 -0000

I share your love of maps in general. I think being a cartographer must be the second-best job in the world, after UX designer of course. Have you played with the interactive map on the Downtown NY website? http://www.downtownny.com/?... It's one of my favorite online.

Re: Quotably: The Perfect Tool To Make Sense Of Twitter

Whitney Hess — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 07:01:26 -0000

Michael, like others have noted, when I have multiple @reply conversations simultaneously, the threading breaks. I'm guessing it's because Quotably is based on timestamp and not actually content or any other logic.

It might be worthwhile to isolate a series of @replies between two people and thread those outside of any other conversations. Might fix the problem.

In any case, thanks very much for the link.

Re: Quotably: The Perfect Tool To Make Sense Of Twitter

Whitney Hess — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:40:45 -0000

What's the deal? How often does this get updated? It's been 2 hours since I wrote some tweets and still not seeing them on Quotably