I noticed this last night, as did Atrios:

Some genius at CNN decided that the best way to present results - both on the pie charts and on the map - was to make Romney deep red, McCain light red, Giuliani orange, Huckabee light orange…

Here’s a screen shot from the CNN website:

Gee, it’s been years since I last commented about a logo, but this is too hard to pass up.

Hat tip to Daily Kos, who also adds all the reasons that this logo “truly encapsulates what the Republican Party is all about.”

Wide stance? Check.
In Minneapolis? Check.
Prison stripe-wearing? Check.
Starry eyed? Check.
As for the elephant humping the [...]

Okay, as an old fart, I’m marginally into Web 2.0 stuff. Not so much the networking stuff (MySpace, LinkedIn, etc), but I have been blogging (on and off) since 2001, I love Flickr, and I have even uploaded a few of my own YouTube videos.
But I was recently turned on to Slideshare, and am just [...]

I think CAPTCHAs are annoying…these are the little images with characters on them that are meant to prevent spammers from automating responses to blog posts, site registrations, etc. In order to prove you’re not a machine or spammer, you need to enter these random strings you see.
Word from CNN is that CMU is working on [...]

So, I was doing my regular read of Salon, and came across today’s feature article about American soldiers fleeing to Canada.
The article was interesting, but what caught my eye was this picture:

and this caption underneath (emphasis mine):
Above: Kyle Snyder, a 23-year-old U.S. Army deserter who fled to Vancouver, in front of a map of [...]

Another Beth blogs:
Web Analytics packages are sold as if it’s an automatic coffee maker. In fact, it is more like buying a coffee plantation. You can still get your cup of coffee (eventually), but your [sic] going to have to stick your hands in a lot more manure than you ever knew.
How funny! [...]

Or, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
So I was doing my regular read of InfoDesign, and came across Keith Instone’s Reaction to NextD, which points to this PDF by GK VanPatter, IA’s Unidentical Twins (Revisited), which is an expansion of a recent comment to Peter Morville post on Information Architecture 3.0 [...]

Okay, I probably should be embarrassed that I’m TiVo’ing the People’s Choice Awards (but it is a slow TV night :). But it did allow me to notice a great new TiVo feature, which was that when I selected record, TiVo let me know that this was a live program, and if I wanted, it [...]

Thank you LrdBane for this tip!!!!

LrdBane
New Member
Joined: 28 Oct 2006

Posted: Oct Sat 28th 2006 6:28pm

No need to revert back to the old firefox. The new one has good features. Just re-enable it in the [...]

I find the online Zagat a great resource. And I was pleased to see a new (to me) feature the other day when I was trying to find a place for a work-related thank-you lunch.
I don’t exactly know the technology behind it (tho it looks very AJAX-like), but the functionality is sweet…by dragging sliders (see [...]

If your password has to be at least 8 characters long, include a number, an uppercase letter, and a special character, what would you do once you created it?
You’d write it down.
Duh.

Okay, let me confess, I was the woman the Washington Post quoted many moons ago:
One woman jokingly dubbed Nielsen the “Jerry Falwell of Web design” because he holds fundamentalist design views and rigidly rejects stylistic flourishes. Yet even she came to hear him talk.
Well, to be fair, I actually came to hear Bruce Tognazzini. And [...]

Have I mentioned before that I’m a yinzer?
Loosely translated, that means I’m from Pittsburgh, where they say “you’ns” (yinz) instead of “y’all” as in “Yinz going to the Steeler game?”
Anyways, I was catching up with my many Flickr feeds, including this one from daBurgh (a la “da Bears”) and was tickled to see this shot.
The [...]

I last complained about the problems with contextual advertising this past July. I obviously haven’t come across another good (or bad?) example of this…until today.

First, ads when you mouse over links are pretty horrendous (so much for helpful alt text). And second, bad ads–or at least ads completely irrelevant to the context–make this even worse [...]

The photo on the right was taken with my little tiny PowerShot, so you can tell that I gave up on the idea of doing any real photography while I was at the Aging by Design conference (I decided not to schlep both a camera and a laptop…the laptop won this time, hence this post [...]

I’m off to Boston this weekend for the third Aging By Design conference at Bentley College.
I just went to print my hotel confirmation, and noticed that they apparently were trying to be helpful and give me driving directions to the hotel. Except that the first six directions leave a little to be desired:
Depart Start on [...]

Christina Wodtke (of Elegant Hack) has a very interesting article on Boxes and Arrows about the current state of their (incredibly long) redesign.
The essence of the article is the importance of collaborative iteration. Good stuff.
But what I particularly liked was this little tidbit:
We thought if we wrote nice, semantic HTML all it would take to [...]

Kumie, a former co-worker, shares her pain with iTunes. Her letter to Apple:
While you sh** heads are getting your act together with Itunes 7, maybe you should put a link to download Itunes 6 on the Itunes page in the meantime. Your sh***y program and sh***y new “gapless playback” feature has deleted about 4 gigs [...]

This one went into the queue when I was doing my renewal, but better late than never. I ran across this post from Presentation Zen which is largely about the Tufte vs Powerpoint smackdown.
Re PPT, the highlights for me are those which counter Tufte’s position: Don Norman’s “In defense of Powerpoint” and Jean-luc Doumont’s The [...]

So there’s Don Norman, being ornery. According to him, doing user observations first is wrong:
Let’s face it: Once a project is announced, it is too late to study what it should be – that’s what the announcement was about. …
Field studies, user observations, contextual analyses, and all procedures that aim to determine true human [...]

I’ve written about the problem with SEM and contextual advertising in the past. But today, I clicked into my Google spam folder to see if they have added a “delete all” function yet … a seemingly very useful function.
Anyways, nope, no “delete all” … just this funny ad given the context:

I was in the bookstore the other day, and happened across a book called Stumbling on Happiness, by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert. The author notes that this is not a self-help how to be happy book. Rather, it’s a very interesting look at why the things we think will make us happy often don’t. Or [...]

Yahoo! No, whoops, I mean yippee!! Congratulations to UXnet on the big step: incorporating!
I’m pleased to have had a tiny role in UXnet’s history. I was there in 2001 for the meeting Lou Rosenfeld convened, and for a period I was a member of the Executive Council helping form its strategy.
However, my contributions paled compared [...]