Picture My World

Lior was inspired by the walking kids at Oakridge Mall’s Scream Pit play area yesterday.  I caught some of Lior’s first steps on my crappy phone camera.

(Note: She did not cry after the crash at the end.)

This YouTube video makes it clear why camera lenses are so expensive.  (ht to daring fireball)

I was just reading Joshua Ledwell’s blog where he wrote:

User experience is an organizational value. Either the organization understands and values UX, or it doesn’t … and it can be very, very difficult to “bubble up” a corporate value. Now, you may still choose to do usability at a company that doesn’t hold the customer experience as a core value.  The important thing is to recognize that going in, and temper your expectations accordingly.

Truer words could not have been written.  The challenge for those caught in companies or organizations like this is to choose your course of action carefully.  Either path may lead to gray hair, so be prepared.

For those of you who decide to fight to make UX a core value, you must take that fight up the corporate ladder.  It’s not enough to woo the engineers and designers, though it helps.  Management has to be on board and supporting you.  All the usual advice applies — start small, communicate clearly, and set excellent examples.

We are kicking the TV out of our house. It’s not that it’s done something wrong — instead, it’s simply time to give it to someone who can take better care of it. We’ve been neglecting the poor thing for too long and it deserves better.

Neither my wife nor I watch much TV although we have been briefly addicted to various shows. I have a current addiction to Battlestar Galactica and my wife was recently watching Desperate Housewives. What we find, though, is that once we miss a few shows (easy when kids are in the mix), we don’t miss them. TV is probably one of the easiest addictions to kick - just turn the thing off.

It will be nice to rid the living room of the box. Have you noticed just how the TV or “home entertainment system” dominates the room? If you have enough space for a dedicated entertainment room, perhaps that’s fine for you. We just have one room big enough for guests and a 27″ TV. We’d like to shift the focus back to people.

We are not banning all video entertainment from our home. We just signed up with Zip.ca (Netflix for Canadians) and will watch the movies on our computers. The subscription offsets the cancelled cable charge, so in the end we are entertainment neutral, I guess.

If you got rid of your TV would you miss it? For how long?