"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Comedy Night Live II

"While some make a conscious effort to try to forget about the camera's presence, it's impossible to forget you're being watched. Freydenson says that while he has become less concerned with his appearance, weird ticks, or hand movements, he plays on the fact that his hands often find their way near his nose, but not into it. He always catches himself before the mining expedition takes place. It has now become a game for his fans to try to screen capture images of him picking his nose. Some have gotten close, but so far, no gold."

"When you ask somebody for a lot of personal information, you have the right to expect that they're actually going to use that information." He [Harley Manning] recounts some research by Forrester colleague Paul Hagen. According to Manning, Hagen registered at the online drugstore PlanetRX and indicated in his profile that he was allergic to aspirin.

Despite the choice, Manning says, the Web site showed Hagen an offer to purchase the Aleve pain reliever, and allowed him [to] submit an order for Aleve--even though people allergic to aspirin shouldn't take Aleve.

Manning compares that to what Hagen found on Garden.com. When he tried to order a particular plant, the site warned him that the plant didn't suit the area where Hagen lives. "Garden.com wouldn't let him kill a plant; PlanetRx would let him kill himself."

One is the loneliest number
That you'll ever do
Two could be as bad as one, it's the loneliest number since the number one
"No" is the saddest experience that you'll ever know
Yes, it's the saddest experience you'll ever know
Because one is the loneliest number
That you'll ever do
One is the loneliest number that you'll ever know

Liberty and freedom, there is a difference between the two, but most people don't know what it is.
   Liberty is a condition of our environment. I have the liberty to pursue happiness in the United States. The only control the government has in my acheiving happiness is in the environment in which I live.
   Freedom is a condition of my internal state of being (emotional and mental). I have the freedom to choose my internal response to any situation. I can be happy, sad, angry, pissed off, etc. I have freedom even though I might not have liberty. I could be a captive in jail in a third-world country, but I have the freedom of choice to be happy or upset about it.

Optimism And Longevity
One of the keys to long life may be an optimistic outlook. That's the finding of a Mayo Clinic study, which suggests that optimists tend to live longer and enjoy better health than pessimists. The study, published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, is based on questionnaires answered by Mayo Clinic patients and over 800 residents of Olmsted County, Minnesota, between 1962 and 1965. Follow-up questionnaires showed that regardless of age or sex, the more pessimistic participants tended to die earlier than the more optimistic participants. In fact, every 10-point increase on the "pessimism scale" indicated a 19 percent increase in premature death, The Associated Press reports. The researchers say the study shows that the mind is able to strongly influence the body, although they cannot say exactly how this works. They say that pessimism can be considered a risk factor for early death alongside other health concerns such as high cholesterol or obesity, the AP says.

"The term 'work' to me is a pejorative term. If you have to do something you don't like it's called work. Ditch diggers do work. You do work, work, work so you can take a vacation. So vacation and work have become opposites. As opposed to the idea that work is joy. As a designer, I think that the big design problem is designing your life. And if that's what you mean by hobby and that's what I mean by hobby, then my work is a collection of hobbies and things I want to do, that's part of designing your life."

"But why is it bad to integrate work life and home life? On the contrary, one could argue that it is an unhealthy deviation from human nature to designate a special location as the 'office' and insist that all work take place there. In most of human history, people lived and worked in the same location and work efforts and leisure activities were intertwined. The need to have assembly line workers report to a central factory to crank out Model Ts is the only reason we temporarily had the notion of work being a separate part of life. Industrial era concept."

"... to get a website to work, you also have to get the backend of the company to work right. That is where we have to work hard, because what we're really arguing for is the end experience the user has. But people often think what we're doing is merely making the screen easy to read."

The bird probably sees its own reflection in the window and is trying to chase off what it thinks is a rival since it's mating season. This can be bad because birds sometimes smash into the window doing this and kill themselves. Your bird sounds pretty smart though.

Mr. Loser: This hurts. Stop riding. You need to drink. You can't make it. You're not in good enough shape. You're hungry. You're going to cramp. Your friends already left, stop racing to meet them. It's hot and humid. You won't make it. Your pushing too hard, you won't make it to the end at this pace. Why are you still trying? Just give up. Give up!

Mr. No Mercy: Shut the fuck up. Don't stop, finish the race and be proud of it.

"Fifty percent of the penis is actually inside the body. When a man sits on a bicycle seat he's putting his entire body weight on the artery that supplies the penis. It's a nightmarish situation, " explains Dr. Goldstein.

Casio QV3000Plus
Amir has this camera. It is quick, expensive, and produces great pictures and animations. I want to use it to add pictures to this web site. Holding the 340MB IBM Microdrive makes me giddy.

Food Combining for Health: Get Fit with Foods That Don't Fight by Doris Grant
Last year, I learned that it is important not just what I eat, but how I combine the foods I eat. There is much to food combining that I want to learn with this book.

ClearVox Over-The-Ear Headset Model ES-300-NC
I use the cell phone in my car to catch up with friends on the way home from work. I bought an Earhugger, but the person I call and I have to scream to hear each other. Amy wants me to be a safe driver and use a headset.

Relaxing, spiritual CDs
I own a few Enya and Enigma CDs, but I need more. I relax and feel more at peace when I listen to them, but I get tense when I have to listen to the same songs repeatedly.

Gift Certificates for:

• a massage -- I need one desperately and like every two weeks
• a private dance lesson – I want to reenact John Travolta’s famous dance scene in Saturday Night Fever. When I do I'll share the video here.
• a stretching trainer – I am inflexible, but I want to be like a pretzel

Frisbee
I want a good Frisbee, not one of those trade-show freebees. My friends play Ultimate and I want to learn to throw better so I can join them. I also want to have a Frisbee around for random throwing urges.

Aeron Chair
I spend too much time sitting. I feel too much discomfort in my neck and back. I think one of these chairs would help remedy part of the problem. Reality is, though, that I need one for work and one for home. :)

Hello,

This email is in reference to your DSL order that you placed with Flashcom. We have attempted to reach you several times without receiving a response. Please inform us if you wish to continue with your DSL order. Thank you

"An adult is only one who has ceased to grow vertically and started to grow horizontally."

- American Proverb

Dear IBM Tech Support,

Thank you or taking the time to look at Buddha, my ThinkPad. He is a strange ThinkPad. Buddha works great. Buddha has a big screen, fast processor and a long battery life. But sometimes (like me) Buddha acts up. Buddha's screen turns cyan. Well, not the whole screen, but everything that used to be white on the screen becomes cyan. Cyan makes for very hard reading and lots of squinting.
   You may benefit by knowing a few things. This cyan-effect, as I like to call it, doesn't appear on a monitor when I connect one to Buddha. You probably don't want to hear this, but I can make the cyan-effect go away by dropping Buddha or hitting him. I hate hurting Buddha because I'm afraid of damaging his long-term memory, but sometimes I just need to keep working.
   I can't make the cyan-effect appear. Cyan-effecting happens pretty randomly. The only pattern I can work out is that I move or carry Buddha shortly before he turns cyan. I suspect some of Buddha's internals aren't very sturdy or well connected.
   As instructed, I removed Buddha's long-term memory and pumped his stomach (err, removed his battery). I ran out of bracelets; so when you read this letter, please put one on Buddha that says Case # 22T2GHF.
   Please take good care of him and if you could, return him to me in better health as soon as you can. Thanks!

Buddha's Master and Servant,
Elan Freydenson

"Britney Spears' songs and her persona, in fact, seem to be all-too-authentically Lolitaesque: Her appeal hinges on a confusion between, and an overlap of, sex and violence. Her secret weapon, as it were, is in some frightening and unspoken but also real way, abuse."

"We like sex, but we like it better when it's wrong. In fact, its very wrongness makes it even hotter. And what's more wrong, in a sense, than a girl in an abusive relationship -- who likes it? Who thinks it hurts, as another shamelessly commercial but conflicted pop star once sang, so good? And so we like a girl like Britney, who allows us to have our cake and hide it too: She'll give it to us, but she'll never tell."

"It's true life alright, stumbling upon moments, media and otherwise, that are the exact opposite of what they promised to be. And it may not just be odd, it also may be dangerous. In fact, it's supposed to be a leading cause for schizophrenia -- being sent mixed signals, being told (or, in this case, sold) one thing, and shown another. It screws with your sense of reality. It makes you, in a sense, split right down the middle. It cracks you in two.

And so we have Britney, a girl for our times. A virgin and a whore. A girl who doesn't know what she's doing, but boy does she do it. A girl who lets you hurt her, and who pretends, and maybe even believes, that she likes it. A girl whose pain is our pleasure. A girl who gets even, but only as long as it's hot. A Mouseketeer turned near-kiddie porn star. A girl, finally, who feeds something black and blue in all of us, but who wraps it up in a pretty pink bow."

Replaced LCD and LCD cable and corrected your display problem. Thank you!

i've discovered that an aisle seat is infinitely more pleasant than a window. if you're at the window, and the plane is full, you have to disturb two people whenever you need to use the loo. i hate to bother people like that. not that i mind in the least when i'm on the aisle and the person at the window needs to get out, but still, it seems such an imposition.

• Windows Magazine's Essential Guide to Install Windows 2000
• Paul Thurrot's Installing Windows 2000 Professional
• Active Network's Windows 2000 Major Upgrade Issues

• #82 Bring cap to Mardi Gras and exchange it for cool beads.
• #26 Glue caps all over your suitcases to find them more easily at the airport.
• #14 Use your cap as a nifty snow sled for your hamster. Be careful.

Good-looking men may be better in bed. Research presented at the American Psychological Society conference in Miami suggests that women are more likely to be sexually satisfied by attractive men.

The researchers say that women may have more orgasms with attractive partners because there is an evolutionary link between attractiveness and better quality genes, and the female orgasm may have evolved as a strategy to select better quality sperm, the paper says.

• Appropriately scaled metal stem-type thermometer not provided or used to evaluate temperatures of potentially hazardous foods during cooking, cooling, reheating and holding.
• Vermin or other live animal present in food storage, preparation or service area.

• Apple Computer human-interface alumni page - lists many Apple alumni from their design group, their positions at Apple, their current web sites and current jobs. Quite a few alumns are in high-level user experience positions.
• Presentations from ASIS's recent Information Architecture (IA) conference - American Society for Information Science held a conference to try to define what IA is. The presentations from leaders in the field (such as Peter Morville, Jeffrey Veen, Mark Hurst, Seth Gordon and others) are available for online viewing.
• Argus Center for Information Architecture - This online center (or portal) tries to store resources related to IA: white papers, links, articles, indepedent research and more.

"There is no reason there should be trash in this car. It is a nice car; we made it and it should always be clean. So, let's impose some good habits on our drivers, we'll make them empty the potentially smelly astray every week or, even better, we'll make them throw new trash out when they reach their next destination."

• pictures of people picking their nose
• are there any specific test that could take that will inform me which is the best career goal for me?
• pretzel's yoga
• gefilte variations
• pictures of slaves

Website usability review: $30,000
Keynote speeches: $25,000
1-day usability seminar: $35,000
3-day usability workshop: $70,000

• bags in trees
• fiancee's sister love
• organizational change training exercise free
• irate customers activities
• wassup constipated

• Keys to Drawing
• The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

Science is not truth, Elan. Never believe that. Science merely presents the best hypotheses to fit the facts as they are currently known. They may be presented as truth, but they're not. It's only truth until it gets disproved.

WHO: Yungchen Lhamo, Lama Gyurme & Jean-Philippe Rykiel
WHAT: free concert! The word as an instrument of pure magic. Chants, laments, hymns and songs of Tibetan Buddhism. An evening of compassion and determination. A quiet moment within the busy city. Clear and stirring.
WHEN: Thursday, July 27th, 2000. 7:30 PM.
WHERE: Central Park Summer Stage, Rumsey Playfield, 72nd St., mid-park enter park at 72nd street, east or west.

... "Don't be so predictable," which has also been translated as, "Don't be so trustworthy." It's an interesting one. It's getting at how predictable we are, as everybody in the advertising world knows. They know exactly what to put on those billboards and those ads to make us want to buy their products. Even intelligent people like ourselves are sometimes magnetized by this propaganda because we're so predictable.
      Particularly, we are 100 percent predictable in that if we don't like something we'll run the other way, and if we do like it we'll spend quite a lot of time and effort trying to somehow eat it whole. If someone does something nice for you, you always remember it and you want to repay their kindness. But if somebody hurts you, you remember it for the rest of your life and you always want to get revenge in one way or another. That's the meaning of this slogan "Don't be so predictable." Don't always react so predictably to pleasure and pain. Don't keep taking the wrong medicine for the illness.

Karyn: The Internet is about shifting customer interaction from something that occurs between humans to something that primarily happens between a human (e.g., a customer) and a web site. In such an interaction, what customers need hasn't changed much; how it gets delivered has. Information architecture addresses the how.

Most companies know what their customers want; otherwise they wouldn't be in business. But traditionally companies employed humans (e.g., salespeople) to deliver on the customers' needs. And these humans essentially had an information architecture in their heads, and existed to sort it out for customers.

But in network-enabled businesses you remove the human being from the delivery. As an industry, we're just beginning to understand the impact of this. After all, salespeople didn't just walk into a customer's office, drop a brochure with a list of product features on the desk and then leave. As an industry, our sites need information architectures that meet the needs of users the way a human did in business past. This is most definitely a paradigm shift and something information architects can help address.

• female yoga pictures
• female orgasm mp3
• increasing weight of britney spears

• Proposals using sans-serif fonts (e.g. Arial, Helvetica) for headings were rated more competitive than ones using serif fonts
• Proposals submitted early, relative to the deadline, were rated more competitive
• Proposal authors that referred to themselves by "we" as opposed to "I" or in the third-person were also rated more competitive

But even the best personalization is no match for good, old-fashioned *word of mouth*. David Weinberger, author of the Joho newsletter, gets this quote in the article:

"If you go to Amazon.com and get a list of relevant titles, is it more accurate than getting advice from your friend? Friends who know you will always be better judges of your tastes than will masses of people who behave like you."

• It is at a point in the schedule where I can make high-level recommendations and they can actually be put into the schedule.
• It is before any customers have used the site, so we can make a good first impression.
• The client is sensitive to design concerns and a regular practitioner of discount usability testing.

• I am moving to California next Wednesday (September 27, 2000).
• I am renting an apartment in Menlo Park.
• My roommate is Jason Williams.
• I will be a Designer for Cooper Interaction Design in Palo Alto.
• My friend Max has moved to Silicon Valley, too.
• I want to change my life.
• Expect some changes around here.

Moving across the country requires patience and a sense of humor. First a separate story... My grandparents went to Europe last month for a two-week vacation. They borrowed a suitcase from my parents. On the way back, their suitcase was lost. It had a lot of their clothes and all the gifts they bought. They were upset and my mom was ready to go shopping with them for undergarments and what not that were lost. About a week after they returned, the airline found the suitcase in Las Vegas. The airline brought the suitcase to my house a few days ago and my grandparents took out all their stuff.
    My mom's theory was that the suitcase went on a joy ride because of the Free Tibet sticker that I put on it. I have trouble imagining somebody redirecting the suitcase at an airport in Europe because of a sticker. Strangely enough, the suitcase was returned to us with the sticker on the inside. There may be some truth to her theory.
    Nevertheless, the suitcase made it back to my house in time for me to fill it with all my clothes, CDs and other stuff. I packed it today and took it with me to California. Well, I arrived at the airport, the other suitcase I traveled with came out, but this mysterious green suitcase never showed. So, here I am at my new place with a missing suitcase.
    Wait, there's more! I ordered my new queen-sized Select Comfort air mattress three weeks ago. Before I ordered, they told me it would take four days to arrive at any destination in the U.S. That made me happy. My landlady would sign for it and it would be here when I arrived. Well, the first sign of a problem was when they called me the next day and told me they shipped it to the New Jersey address. They told me to reject it when UPS delivered it and the boxes would automatically be redirected to California. This sounded strange, but I believed it.
    I called my roommate yesterday and asked him it if it arrived. Jason said it never did. I called up the guy in the store (who made the original mix-up) and he investigated. He learned that they didn't know where it was and that they would overnight another one so it would arrive here today and be here in time. Well, sure enough, it never came. I thought I was being smart when I put everything I needed for my first night in my carry on bag. I packed the bed sheets, pillowcases (the pillows were coming with the mattress shipment), a few nights of cosmetics and clothes to sleep in. So, much for being smart. Now I have a bed sheet and pillowcases with no bed or pillows, and no new clothes to wear for tomorrow.

1. It is the high holiday season
2. There are no longer a lot of Jews around me