Who is handling safety/quality at NASA these days? This just brings to mind a painful-to-watch Simpsons episode involving ironic and painful crashing, cracking, breaking, and hurting.

full story

With the countdown for Discovery in its final hours, NASA was dealt a setback Tuesday when a window cover fell off the shuttle and damaged thermal tiles near the tail.

The plastic-and-foam cover on one of Discovery’s cockpit windows fell at the launch pad and struck a bulge in the fuselage that houses an orbital-maneuvering engine.

No workers were nearby when the window cover fell off and dropped about 60 feet, the space agency said. It was not immediately clear why the cover – which was held by tape – came loose.

Here’s an article about NPUC 2005 at IBM (the second part is here.) I attended part of the event, never having been before. Professionally, I think it’s good for me to spend time at different types of conferences. In the past few years I’ve gone to events for advertising, licensing, design, and of course user research folk. The method of discourse is so different at each of these, the values of the community so blatantly different, that I often find it so disquieting that it’s hard to engage sufficiently to learn something about the content. I keep trying, I keep attending, but I’m honestly not sure if the returns are worth the effort.

Yesterday was dramatically academic, with people from the various R&D institutions (PARC, FX/Pal, IBM Almaden, Ricoh etc.) having PhD level discussions of what technology could provide. And these are the user-centered technologists! Yet there’s no focus on the demand side, only on technological or interactive innovations that could solve known problems. Maybe some of those problems aren’t real (a whole discussion about how we need to move 5G of our own data around seemed strangely decoupled from the reality of ordinary people), or maybe they are real, or maybe that’s not even the point – that you let the big brains focus on big problems that don’t affect typical people but eventually those solutions trickle down or can be applied as needed.

My fave quote from the first article above

Smith asked how many people know about Dodgeball? Three souls raised their hands. It’s an SMS app that lets you check in and see if your friends are nearby. Googled recently bought the startup. It has 15,000 users, mostly centered in New York (and a bit of San Francisco), with about 1,500 users a day in NYC. ‘It’s too early to know how sticky it will be.”

Maybe people were just being shy (doubtful) but how they could not know about Dodgeball? Ah, because it’s something new in the marketplace, not in the technologyspace and I guess this group doesn’t care about that. It was a pretty disconnecting (ironically) experience, although nice to run into a few friends. I had serious flashbacks to my earlier days as an interaction guy, attending CHI conferences back in grad school/undergrad, because I ran into a few people I hadn’t seen in 15 years or so, although there was not an opportunity to say “hey.”

I showed up late, and I left early, but I got a bit of flavor, and a chance to reflect a bit on where I need to be focusing or diverging my own techo/culture scrounging.

The London Bombing story

seems to be evolving crazily, with so much information being revised. First, the bombers were amateurs. Then CNN’s timeline of the explosions was radically revised from the original stories. But timers were used not suicide bombers. Then we were told the bombers were experts, given the quality of the bombs themselves. Then we hear that some people were arrested. Then that is denied, but we hear that the bombers did kill themselves aboard the trains and bus.

I’m sure this post will be out of date before you read it.

Obviously there’s a balance between keeping the public informed and getting the story straight. Personally, I find the shifting facts and emotions that those facts engender to be unsettling, leading to more of a feeling of being out of control – that the authorities are out of control and that we the public are increasingly helpless. Others may take a Law-and-Order like comfort from the narrowing in onto the truth.

Collision Course is a ridiculous movie starring Jay Leno as a slick cop in a convertible. Imagine seeing him act? Yikes. About as horrible as Bill Maher as a hero-in-the-future cop.

NPR’s Marketplace does a feature on ethnography. It’s the new reality TV, I guess. A market research trend, they say. It’s kind of a snide piece, isn’t it weird that people use products this way and they tell us? Eyeew!

I found this page about the main ethnographer they profile

david grzelak
Columbus OH: Advertising agency Ten United recruits David Grzelak for the unusual position of director of ethnography. Previously marketing research manager at Hallmark and a consultant, Grzelak heads a newly formed Behavioral Insights Group that works with clients to gain a deeper understanding of their respective target markets. His degrees are in anthropology and business anthropology from Wayne State and Purdue, respectively. Ten United has roughly $185 million in billings for clients like Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Limited Brands, OhioHealth, Perkins Restaurants, Time-Warners Communications, Hoover and Prestige Brands including Murine, Comet and Prell.

As usual (this is one of my frequent comments) the press will focus on either advertising or product development, but won’t acknowledge both. This one is about advertising.

Today I was at the library, and so I picked up The Dark Tower, the 7th book in Stephen King’s long-running series. A 770 page tome.

I’ve chewed up the previous books quite happily, as they’ve grown longer I’ve managed to make quick work of ’em, even. I have memories of reading this series going back many years (I could tell you when the first book came out, but I see that Amazon lists the 2003 edition so if they are going to make it tough for me – whatever – suffice to say it was probably in the 80s).

The amount of complexity and jargon jammed into the first 30 pages was overwhelming and hard to take seriously. And of course I remember very little from the last book in the series from about 2 years ago. Anyway, I see that Mr. King himself is a character in the book.

I put it down. No thanks. Not only is there an attempt to combine dozens of mythologies from previous books into this super-story, but the author himself is appearing? How daring! How circular! How post-modern! How poorly executed and frankly…annoying. And you sir are no Charlie Kaufman. Heinlein did something like this when he was well past writing anything good but was still marketable. Blecch.

It’s a drag that I won’t have the sense of completion that I imagine could come from having “read ’em all” – but I guess life’s too short to put the time into this. There’s certainly no shortage of stuff that I’m more eager to read.

Have you seen this trick?

When using a website to report a problem (in my case, there was a new feature in Blogger that wasn’t working properly), you are asked to enter all your information (name, email, system used, description of problem), and then will receive an automated email almost immediately.

Sometimes those emails are simply acknowledgements. We’ve got your request; it’s in our system, a real person will get back to you ASAP once we’ve had a chance to look at it. Have you looked at our FAQ? But more often I’m seeing a little phrase stuck in at that bottom warning casually that if you STILL need help you have to do something (click on a link, hit reply, etc.). It’s very easy to skip over that warning since it’s buried and not part of the standard dialogue, in which case your request for help will be discarded.

I went through that with Blogger (or “Google” as they are also known) and many days later they posted on their status page that the problem was fixed (in fact, the problem had been in existence for several days but this hadn’t appeared on their status page, the fix announcement referred to the issue appearing briefly which was rather optimistic of ’em). Several days after that, they send me a generic email in response to my support request, suggesting that the problem may be fixed, or it may be solved by a fix listed at a website they point me to (not relevant to my problem), and if it’s still a problem, I should just submit a help request again!

Wow. I mean, really the problem has been solved and that’s great, but to suggest I start all over again when it feels like I have to jump through so many hoops to get them to even acknowledge my request – yikes. Talk about frustration.

I acknowledge that Blogger is free for most, and there are some millions of blogger pages, and when a piece of the service goes down they are likely to get an incredible number of support requests, and so the logistics of actually providing support are tremendously demanding for them. Fair enough. But – just looking at the customer side of it, the chipper tone in the email doesn’t really help when it doesn’t feel like they are listening to me.

For Blogger support, I’ve mostly been using a third-party site – a community of Blogger users and experts and enthusiasts called BloggerForum – if nothing else, this allowed me to determine that my problem was widespread enough that others were experiencing it, and that eased my concerns significantly – I figured they are probably working fixing it if it’s a bigger problem than just me. But I couldn’t get that reassurance from Blogger (though if they had posted the problem on their status page immediately and not 3 days later, that could have helped), and that’s too bad.

Pretzels are out on US Airways. Besides the bad press this constant nickel-and-diming is creating, there’s the usual corporate press release, where they remind us that they conducted customer research in support of their action

Amy Kudwa, a US Airways spokeswoman, said the airline decided to end the pretzel giveaway after meeting with the carrier’s focus groups.

Amazing this one didn’t include the standard “our consumers tell us that…” line. I’m amazed at how often this appears in press release-driven news stories.

Here’s a nice toy – your very own cuddly facehugger from the Alien movies. I’m sure you remember how it wrapped around the guy’s face and laid an egg in his stomach and then the egg hatched and burst through his chest.

Now you can get your very own.

I saw this in a toy store in Toronto and have been meaning to post it here, but was finally spurred to do so when I saw it on we make money not art via this blog (who points out there is a chest-burster toy as well. Nice.)

But what I’ve got special for you is the warning label on the package.

Choking hazard!

I have previously blogged about my troubles with AOL sending me THOUSANDS of bounce messages intended for my ISP’s admin folk, and how they would not take me off their list despite my calling and emailing and following all their rules, etc.

I guess that blog got noticed by someone at AOL AntiSpam Operations who wrote me directly and offered to help. He told me that he’s taken me off the distribution list for the bounces (and I believe that’s correct) and apologized for my frustration. It’s terrible when the normal channels break down but it’s great there are proactive individuals out there who obviously care about how their systems are running and how they are impacting people and are willing to reach out and solve a problem.

Thanks to the individual who took time and care to resolve this, and boo to AOL for not having a proper infrastructure to allow their staff to take care of these things in the normal course of their work.