(...excerpts from Heather Mallick's column in The Globe and Mail, Saturday April 10 2004. I first read this whilst high as a kite; I revisited it sober and it still blows me away.)

Home is the place where they have to take you in, Robert Frost wrote. In the case of the American army deserters now arriving in Canada, home is the place where they want to give you a lethal injection. So all they're asking of Canada, their new home, is a bed in the spare room of a Quaker family, and all we ask of them is that they never complain they can't see the puck. That remark makes Canadians crazy.

These young men--there have been at least two so far, and probably women to come --are different from the Vietnam lot in that they weren't drafted. The United States itself is different in that it's worse. Such is the huge divide between rich and poor that these young people signed up so they could afford to go to college. They thought that National Guard duty meant, say, guarding supermarkets against looters during the next Mississippi flood. Then they were in Iraq with American soldiers and mercenaries and some pissed-off troops from Poland and Italy.

Little did they know that the man who stole the 2000 election would boast with that unnerving, uncertain grin that he was "a wartime president." Osbert Sitwell once wrote a poem about Junior's very situation: "I think, myself,/That my new war/Is one of the nicest we've had;/It is not war really,/It is only a training for the next one/Besides, we have not declared war;/We are merely restoring order." Trouble is, Mr. Sitwell wrote this in 1919. How embarrassing for Mr. Bush, a Chihuahua chewing the pant leg of history.

Read economist Paul Krugman's The Great Unravelling about how Dick Cheney's army of the radical right has given the rich tax breaks the way you pump food down the throat of a fat goose until they flap their wings to signal they're full, thanks, and you keep squeezing the bulb. The poor and middle class got comparatively nothing to such an extent that for the first time in history, Americans on average are becoming shorter than their European counterparts, who are raising ceilings and lengthening beds. Americans, through the 19th and 20th centuries, were two inches taller than the peasanty Brits; now they're half an inch shorter, the result of bad food and no health care for the poor.

I'm not saying the deserters signed up as part of a long-term plan to avoid having short children, but that's how it worked out. You may think the United States won't execute them if Canada sends them back. But the U.S. Army no longer even recognizes shell shock (a soldier who had anxiety attacks after seeing an Iraqi sliced in half was recently charged with cowardice, which means a firing squad). Even Bill Clinton, in 1992, upheld the death sentence of a man so profoundly brain-damaged that when he was given his last meal, he said he would save his pecan pie for later.

(...)

You must now believe in peace, order and good government. Don't pursue happiness; let it find you.

(...)

If you want to understand politics, grab the whole range of American politics and move it left. Our current Liberals are conservative Democrats, our New Democrats are Naderites, except younger, cooler and not getting Democratic death threats; our Conservatives, who used to be Reform, are Radical Right Republicans on Nyquil. They don't like immigrants; I'd vote NDP if I were you.

Religion: If you have one, don't mention it at parties. The subject does not arise here. Army deserter Jeremy Hinzman is a Buddhist; you can talk about that, Jeremy, because people think it's yoga. Jeremy's a nice name. None of the deserters so far have been called Billy Ray. If you are, change it to Jeremy-- there's a good Canadian.

Learn the name of our PM. Then tell us, because we forget. Don't refer to breasts as hooters, headlights or a great rack. Just call them breasts.

(...)

Recycle like you mean it. Read Fire and Ice by pollster Michael Adams about how Canadians are growing ever more different from Americans. Then read Margaret Atwood and Doug Coupland, shop at Roots, stop in at Tim Hortons for a pile of Timbits (...). Arrive in a Prius or a Smart Car, which shouts, "I care about the environment," and you, short Buddhist, are a shoo-in for citizenship.

Finally, a bit of justice is served in the Boeing 767 Air Force scandal. This history of this thing was so extreme, that it looks like not only is somebody going to jail, but the somebody is the Air Force official who signed the checks on the terrible deal in exchange for a cushy Boeing job after she retired. They had to put the squeeze on her also-guilty daughter to get a confession, but maybe they can get the Boeing guy who offered her the deal. Then they could get all the Boeing execs who must have known the illegal details but went along with it because it's how business is done, and then they could court-martial all the Pentagon folks that have been doing this for years, and the civilians (civilian = Pentagon official who has retired in order to cash out her connections in the defense sector) they could just kidnap to Guantanamo. And then maybe everybody in Washington who profits from selling machines for killing people to international murderers would be in prison, and the US would not be the world's biggest arms dealer any more.

Ah, I may have gotten carried away somewhere in that last paragraph. Anyway, to focus on the actual positive, one highly placed criminal has confessed. It's a start, I hope.

Friday I got to class a few minutes early, as I usually do, so I could go across the street and get a hot dog before class. There's a halal hot dog vendor on the other side of Norbrogade from the school, and he has vegetarian hot dogs. It's a very high-traffic street, even though it's only one lane each way plus one bike lane each way, so a lot of the time I get trapped waiting for traffic and it takes more time than if I'd walked to the light at the corner. But that didn't matter Friday, because even as I was turning in to school something odd and something's police escort were brewing up the street. By the time I locked up my bike in the courtyard and went back to the street, it was full of a few thousand Muslims chanting, "Allahu akbar" and "Down with USA." Of course I support an immediate end to the US occupation of Iraq, but as an atheist Jew and supporter of the ideals behind the US, I wasn't ready to join in the march. And more importantly - I won't join any march where the men are segregated from and placed in front of the women. I eventually got across and ended up talking to a Palestinian guy next to the hot dog stand for quite a while ("we welcome the Jews to Palestine, as guests. But then they make us get out of our homes. Is this how a guest behaves?") but never got my hot dog.

Level 2 is going better the second time around. I think half of the improvement is that I understand enough vocabulary to be able to focus on grammar, pronunciation, and the rest. The other half is that the teacher is a nice guy instead of an abusive martinet. He has yet to issue any instructions on when we may or may not go to the bathroom or on how to take off our coat first if entering the classroom late. And when you make a mistake, he makes a slight grimace and says, "næste," (I think), which means, almost (I think). And then you try again. This is much more pleasant that the shouting and fist-banging that accompanied mistakes in the last class.

Assorted quotes and tidbits from class:

I have in my notes that "if you put [pronounce] an l on that, Germans in black coats, raincoats, will come for you in a black car on a rainy Monday" and take you away, but I don't have in my notes any reference to which word he was talking about.

I've found one word in Danish that shares an obvious root with the English but is simpler: neighbor is nabo.

The Estonian girl whose name I thought was Xena (as in the warrior princess) is actually Signe. In Estonian the gn is pronounced as in English, "zeen-yah," but apparently Danes can't manage that so it's just "zee-nah" here. So now I've learned how to pronounce Signe and Solveig. Who says travel is useless?

During a grammar exercise I added a clause in the wrong place (Jeg bor i Danmark meget længe nu, or Jeg bor meget længe i Danmark nu). The teacher thought about it for a while and decided that that word order sounded as if the speaker were on acid. Lars looked at the sentence and declared that there was no problem with that word order. Draw your own conclusions.

Under pressure during a listen-and-repeat exercise, one student mis-repeated thusly: "Jeg sidder og tænker på, hvad jeg skal tænker på." I'm thinking about what I will think about.

There's a rumor that the Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was caught in women's clothing. A rumor I'm happy to repeat here.

But my primary objection isn't the totalitarian potential of national IDs, nor the likelihood that they'll create a whole immense new class of social and economic dislocations. Nor is it the opportunities they will create for colossal boondoggles by government contractors. My objection to the national ID card, at least for the purposes of this essay, is much simpler.

It won't work. It won't make us more secure.

In fact, everything I've learned about security over the last 20 years tells me that once it is put in place, a national ID card program will actually make us less secure.

(many potential problems described)

Proponents of national ID cards want us to assume all these problems, and the tens of billions of dollars such a system would cost -- for what? For the promise of being able to identify someone?

What good would it have been to know the names of Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, or the DC snipers before they were arrested? Palestinian suicide bombers generally have no history of terrorism. The goal is here is to know someone's intentions, and their identity has very little to do with that.

Finally some good holistic advice on how to actually go about the process of writing:

When you wake up, come back to the computer. Sit and stare at the screen. Do the "sitting up at the computer" posture: Sit straight in your chair and place your hands on the keyboard. Make sure the computer is turned on. Make the "opening a word-processing program" motion with your hands. Then stare at the screen. Make sure your back is straight and your hands are on the keyboard. If you start typing, don't worry. It's just your fingers moving over the keyboard. Pay attention to the screen. Did some words appear there? Good. That means you are writing. Don't worry what the words mean. Just keep making them appear on the screen. If you find yourself slumping over, tense your abdominal muscles to keep yourself sitting up straight. If your legs become uncomfortable, place one ankle under the opposite thigh on the chair. Alternate ankles. Breathe. Let the tension go out of your shoulders. Keep moving your fingers over the keyboard, making words appear on the screen.

The LA Weekly has a delightful set of articles and interviews with some grand master studio musicians.

[Drummer Hal Blaine] recalls the amazement in a music supervisor’s voice when the Wrecking Crew — as Blaine dubbed the top session players — ripped through the cues for a Love Bug session at Disney, having patiently endured a patronizing lecture on the fundamentals of film scoring.

"He says, 'We're going to slowly play a click track. Now, a click track is just something that keeps you - ' like we didn't know. And as soon as we heard eight clicks - boppadoppadoppadoppadang! - we played the whole thing, 10 or 12 bars, something like that. And he says, 'My god, I wish we'd have taken that! That was perfect. How did you guys do that?' And Tommy Tedesco, may he rest in peace, one of the most famous lines in Hollywood, he said, 'Well, sir, we practice a lot during the day.'"

The closing titles for Two for the Road are very short, and I was seated near the door, and the audience was all film lovers and mostly old people, so they tended to stay for the credits, and so, by rare happenstance, I was almost the first out of the theater. Walking to the door, the one lady in front of my commented, and if she was speaking English she was saying something about the times in the movie.
"Hvad?" I replied, instintively.
She said something that was almost certainly in Danish.
I said something indistinct, even to me, which I think might have contained the word "Engelsk."
She said something and I had no idea what language it was.
I said "what?"
She said, "never mind," which I understood quite clearly although I couldn't tell you what language she said it in.

The weather this morning was so perfect that I had no choice (after breakfast and a few chapters of reading in bed) but to put on the new, almost unworn running shoes that I bought after I decided not to enroll at the kung fu school on the next island and go for a jog to the giant, centuries-old timber loading crane at the end of Christianshavn in what can only be described as perfect jogging weather - brisk but dry and sunny, about 10 C, with air so clear that the buildings across the harbor could have been on the next block, although perhaps professional marathon runners prefer a bit of haze to the direct sun, but those people scare me so I haven't approached one to ask, and look at the old track-mounted cannons just past the crane at the end of the island, pointed north towards where seaborne invaders from the Atlantic without the wits to take a different route might come, and in fact there's so much low-slung littoral industrial plant on multi-kilometer jettys that open water is not actually visible anymore from from the cannons' hillock, and after the jog, which was short but enough to leave my legs leaden, I headed into town on the Metro on what I am pleased to report was a successful, albeit tardy, excursion to take advantage of Saturday's retail opportunities in my continuing - some might say, neverending - quest to assemble a quiet music server in my home; tardy because Thursday and Friday were holidays, during which (surprise!) almost everything is closed and I spent most of my time on client crises on two continents anyway.

Speaking of my home, I have to move out in July because my landlady wants it back. She gave me three months notice, as required by law, but was also kind enough to let me stay an extra 10 days until my vacation starts. So now I have to start apartment-hunting, which is not fun but on the bright side, I'll be able to get a new route to work and a new neighborhood to explore, and I can get away from the grubby hippie trash that swarm around Christiania.

Apropos of nothing but the fact that I'm dumping my accumulated notes into a belated blog entry, I want to tell you about my ordbog. A month ago I bought a big red cloth-bound book, "Danske ordbog," or Danish Dictionary, which despite the 500 crown price (USD 80) was a pleasing purchase because it featured full phonetic spellings of all the words and represented a recommittment to learning Danish despite my Danish teacher at the time and was a handsome tome which looked forward to referring to for many years. Only days later did I notice the spine of the book, which featured this symbology: "2 E-H". I had in fact purchased one sixth of a danske ordbog. After retrieving the receipt from the garbage, I was eventually able to return to the bookstore and exchange the book for "Dankse udtale" - just the phonetic spellings, but for all the words, and the new Neal Stephenson, in paperback but still heavy enough to represent an ergonomic challenge in the reading.

The Iliad, Homer, E.V. Rieu I've read a lot fewer of the classics than I feel I should have, and the main reason is probably that I don't like reading classics. I forced my way through the Divine Comedy - I liked Inferno plenty but experienced diminishing returns - and I've been stalled halfway through Paradise Lost for a year. My reading habits, I suspect, are ill-suited to epic poetry and I'm not one to welcome change. But I would still like access to and familiarity with source material. So the second edition of Rieu's translation of the Iliad was a particularly pleasing find - Homer, translated into extremely readable English by E.V. Rieu last century. With this edition, Peter Jones adjusted the language to restore some idiosyncracies of the original text, which was basically a transcript of an oral text, without hurting the readability. So you get the best of both worlds; it's a page-turner that makes you feel like you're getting the real thing. It contains the only lengthy introduction that I've read in its entirety and referred back to repeatedly. My only regret is that, after the Odyssey, I don't know where I'll find more classics like this.

The Power of Babel, John McWhorter McWhorter lays out a series of interesting points, sometimes a bit repetatively, through an array of examples that gives the impression that he has mastered the vocabulary and grammar of every language on Earth. I learned, or was convinced, that:

• Languages from lower-technology cultures, such as the Native American languages currently expiring, are usually incredibly complicated. I guess all that brainpower not being used by the complications of modern life went into language.
• Normal behavior for a language is to change substantially with each generation. Stasis due to the influence of writing is the exception.
• Languages exhibit continuous variation over time and space, to the extent that it is more accurate to think solely in terms of clusters of closely related dialects than of core languages with peripheral variants.
• Most people in the world are exposed to at least two dialects from a very early age. The majority of monolingual Americans are a stark exception. This should be our excuse for not learning other languages well - we were shortchanged at birth.
• Written language is innately different from speech to the point that it should (in my opinion - I don't think the author argues this in these words) be considered a dialect as well.
• Whatever is considered the "good" version of a language is whatever random dialect the last region/class to sieze power happened to be speaking at the time.
• Massive language death is an inevitable consequence of modern politics and economics; if we are to preserve any of the dying languages it must be by inventing stable new roles for languages, probably as secondary, ceremonial, cultural languages instead of as mother tongues.

Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie Big and messy. I put it down for a few months partway through, but later felt the urge not just to finish it but to read it for its own sake, so I did. But I like The Ground Beneath Her Feet more.

Previously posted at http://joel.westside.com/wsContentPublisher/story.view?RowId=7

A report from Day One of the CHI 2001 conference (Computer-Human Interface, pronounced kie, rhymes with pie), in Seattle. Some general comments: apparently, SIGs (Special Interest Groups, essentially 50-150 hands-on professionals discussing topics, led by a small panel) are seriously second-class; presentation of papers is the big thing. Some of the SIGs got bumped to smaller rooms after people couldn't get into the rooms where they were presenting papers and were screaming and pounding the walls. Go figure. I'm skipping the papers because most look pretty dull and how can you tell in advance if the authors can actually present or if they're just going to recap the paper?

I saw IBM's 200-pixel-per-inch, 3840x2400 flat-panel monitor. It's gorgeous! The demo cycled between x-rays, high-altitude photography, and similar stuff. It looked as sharp as, or sharper than, high-quality printed paper. I asked to see some text, and the guy brought up a full page in a three-inch-high window. It was completely legible! Amazing! $30,000!

Keynote:

Chairman Bill was the keynote speaker; I showed up early and got a good seat. I've never seen him speak in person before; he has an eerie, Buddha-like calm which is totally at odds with all the descriptions of his persona. Has he always been this way on stage? Most of his time was taken up by other people's demos (Reader; Priority manager; Tablet). He did acknowledge the irony of Bill Gates keynoting a conference on usability and computer interfaces ("Microsoft has had its share of failures ... the paperclip ...").

First session: Tips and Tricks for a Better Usability Test

Very well run. Covered three areas, about half of the 90 minutes was taken by people in the audience asking questions and making generally useful comments. Pretty much as well-done a SIG (Special Interest Group) as I could imagine.

International testing

• At a minimum, a native, living in the target country, should review the product/site.
• When you do usability testing for another country, that testing must be done in the target country, with natives of that country, in that country's language (even if the product is in English). Also check references for whomever you contract to do testing.
• Date formats: only formats in which the month is in letters, not numbers, are safe.
• 25% of usability issues are different across different countries (example was a user quitting after getting a useless error message when they tried to buy 2 kg of coffee from a site that wanted "Quantity ____ lb")
• To make a business case for I18N testing, simply translate your web site to that language and back and present the results to management.

Testing with experienced users

• They can help build usability specifications (no idea what these are; will follow up)
• Have experienced users watch novices do usability tests; the experienced users will make plenty of great comments/suggestions
• Test with data sets that are as big as your users typically use
• Differentiate between domain expert and product expert; try to get people who are both
• granting access to developers can be a better incentive than cash for getting experienced users to participate
• Differentiate between ease of use and ease of learning

Test Results

• Put a fridge with beer in the observation room to attract developers
• Use the KJ method to analyze results (collaborative method) Developers who observe just a few usability tests will be much less likely to create new usability problems
• Someone should observe the developers who are observing the test
• SIG presenters have stopped using questionnaires - not getting useful data and marketing kept abusing the data. Exception: interview the user while they are filling out the questionnaire; then burn it once they're gone
• Open issue: store usability results with bugs or separately.
• What severity scale to use?

Second session: Current Issues in Assessing And Improving Information Usability

Run by two academics, who do this SIG every year. Promising start - we shouted out possible topics to add to the list they proposed, then voted as a room on what four topics we were going to talk about, for 20 minutes each. Topics I voted for included "Does incremental usability improvement work?" and "Migrating Windows applications to the web." Unfortunately, neither made the cut. We spent a lot of time on stuff I wasn't very interested in. I heard a lot about card sorts, which are apparently a pretty common IA technique: write down lots of subjects on index cards, shuffle them, and then give them to users to organize into groups. Variations include: using category names; using blank category cards ("separate these 50 cards into groups, then name the groups"); having content owners and IAs do separate card sorts and then comparing the results; including actual content on the cards; doing heterogeneous card sets. infodesign.com is supposed to have good one-page instructions.

Book title "Minimalism since the Nuremburg Funnel"

In short, this session was borderline useful. Oh yeah, and we spent about an hour on (or rather, wandering off from) the second topic and didn't really get to the third or fourth. Annoying.

Third session: Practicing information architecture

Run by two consultants and an IA from CapitolOne. Pretty close to a total waste of time in terms of learning anything about the details of information architecture. Fairly informative (in the last 30 min) about the politics and nature of IA. What I got out of it was: Information Architecture is essentially a fancy version of library science: how to arrange and index information so that it can be found and retrieved. Extending the label past that, to include navigation, usability, interaction architecture, and other closely related disciplines renders IA a meaningless label. This SIG set the trend that anything having to do with IA included a half-hour argument about what IA is. Book title: Paco Underhill: Science of Shopping

Show of hands: who's working on a web application, not a web site? 90% from a room of ~100.

Also cruised the poster room and saw some interesting stuff: PARC survey of what people use the web for; Wichita State study of where on the screen 304 participants expected to find titles, links, ads, etc; Graphical User Profiles. will summarize later.