unfulfilled by order fulfillment

Thinking I was getting a good deal, I ordered TurboTax from Staples.com for $49. At the time, I didn’t realize that I could have walked into the store and gotten the same price. But, what I did know was that Staples always has hundreds of copies of TurboTax on the shelves – so, I figured, I must as well select the “Pick up from store” option and save on the shipping.

My first surprise was that the site informed me (after I paid, of course) that my order will not be ready for two days. Well, OK, I’m not in a desperate rush to pay my taxes, but that’s a bit inconvenient. There was another surprise on the order slip – it said “UPS shipping, free”. UPS? Why would you need to ship an item to a store that already has it?

When I finally showed up to the store, my order was there - still packaged in the UPS envelope. Why, I ask, why? Right next to the checkout lane, there’s a huge display with dozens of TurboTax boxes – couldn’t I have one of those?

Sure, in 1999, online shopping may have been a novelty. But today, can’t Staples.com and Staples-down-the-street realize that they’re the same company? And that I, as a customer, don’t really care which one I shop at, as long as I get a good price? And that paying an external shipping company is probably not the best use of their budget?

we are #1-10!

Every year, the Nielsen/Norman Group compiles a list of ten "best" intranets, and publishes a report that it sells to companies (like ours) eager to take a peek at the competition. Every year, we read it and walk away with mixed feelings: some features are well designed and executed, while others are years behind what we have. Oh, and of course every year there's a submission that consist of a lightly-customized SharePoint portal... and that's it. "Bah!", we say, "We’ve got SharePoint, plus CMS, plus a stand-alone portal, plus a crapload of applications, plus thousands of static collections..."

Surely, our users are just as proud of the hornet's nest of complexity that we call our intranet.

In any case, last year we decided to throw our hat in the ring. A small brain trust from a couple of departments got together to work on the submission. I ended up writing and rewriting sections on our design methodology and usability testing, as well as the "lessons learned".

We sent in the submission, complete with dozens of screenshots, and waited patiently for the result. When it came a few weeks later, we were pleasantly surprised – we got selected! Unfortunately, we were not allowed to reveal that fact until the final report was published.

But that wasn't all there was to it. We thought that we were done with the writing part. Wrong. Being selected into the top ten meant more writing – much more! When we sent in the second wave of documents, the NNG people responded with a draft of the writeup... and let’s just say it needed a lot of work. I can sort of understand the factual flaws and the inconsistent voice, but the amount of grammar errors and typos reminded me of the finest Lee, Kong & Co. work. More revisions, more emails...

Finally, yesterday we got the good word that the report was officially released. You can visit NNG to check out the summary, but getting your hands on it would cost a cool $224. At least we've got our copy for free... regardless, it's nice to be recognized in the same crowd as GE and Wal-Mart.

catching up

Dogs, holidays, house, and everything else have conspired against any blogging activity, but no matter - I still remember a thing or two from the past month.

The highlight was the San Fransisco trip, of course. Kathy was nice enough to host us for a couple of days after our poorly-planned arrangements with Hakeem fell through. On Monday, Dec 7th, it was time for me to hit up the "An Event Apart" conference, and hit it I did. It was intense - not a multi-track CHI-like affair with 45-min nuggets of knowledge, but more of a tutorial onslaught. AEA was very much practice-oriented and focused, and I liked that. Glad I went.

Susan and I had a little bit of time to explore San Fransisco on our own, and the highlight for me was the Legion of Honor museum. Maybe I didn't expect a classical collection in the vicinity of the Golden Gate, or maybe it was the nicely-selected exhibits... or maybe it was the fact that we got in for free with our Bank of America cards... either way, it stood out during our museum blitz.

Jonas was nice enough to drive us to Napa, where we enjoyed a two-hour wine tasting with the owner of Hendry winery. Afterwards, we spent the remainder of the trip in South Bay, thanks to the hospitality of Dave and Jen. How they find time for anything with Dylan and the twins, I don't know. Hakeem made an appearance at the 11th hour and came through for us with a drive to the airport. Good times.

Fast-forward to the end of December, to the non-denominational holiday celebration at the Drozdetski home base. As usual, we've had our dinner on the 24th, sat around for a minute, and decided it was time to open presents. I made off handsomely, but then followed up after Xmas with an investment into a PS3. Yes, "investment" into our Blu-Ray/Netflix watching experience - the games are a nice bonus.

post-thanksgiving mayhem

I managed to get myself sick over Thanksgiving, which didn't help as we tried to host Daisuke, meet with Schrock, Dave, and Sunny, and drive down to Rhode Island to see Pisit and Casey. On T-day itself, Susan prepared a feast at her parents' house, with me pitching in for manual labor tasks. Susan used a special bag to cook the turkey in, which I had doubts about - but it totally worked out, and the turkey was fantastic!

Oreo was spending the holidays away from home, as Susan's aunt got another dog and wanted Oreo to get to know her. Then, on Monday, I was in for a surprise when Susan revealed that the new doggie, Luna, will spend the week with us. Again, for the record, I'm *not* a dog person, but Luna is adorable! Plus, she follows Oreo around as if they're tied together. Very cute, especially when they cuddle together:

Finally, yesterday was Susan's birthday. We went to an Ethiopian restaurant in Somerville for a romantic dinner - made even more romantic by the fact that we happened to be the only people dining... unless you count a crowd of townies at a bar one door over. In any case, we went full-on authentic, and ate with our hands aided only by pieces of injera bread. The best part was the sweet honey wine... very nice.

two days in nyc

So over the weekend, we got a chance to scoot down to New York. Oreo took the copilot seat on the armrest on the drive down:

Once we got to NYC, we had exactly 0.5 seconds to spend with each one of our friends, but it was still good to see Chris, Sunny, Eugene, Karim, and Roman. We've had a definite blast at the lawyer-organized party that had an agenda split up into 45-min blocks, and got a chance to take Oreo to the dog park for the first time. The little guy was so excited he slept like a rock for most of the way home.

On the way out, we did make one stop at a place that Susan somehow found in Flushing. It was a canteen inside a Hindu temple that served "real" Indian food. We didn't know what exactly was on our plates, but soon found out what the flavor extremes taste like. The place itself was interesting - kind of a family-run, family-oriented joint with simple picnic tables and plastic chairs. Take a look at how many dishes we scored for about $20:

wud

So, I survived another World Usability Day. It was my turn to pick up the slack, after skipping last year while my coworkers bore the brunt of bored kids at the Museum of Science. This year, things were drastically different 'cause we've had to change venues - ending up at South Station, a pretty busy stop on the Red line / commuter rail.

What preceded the event were a dozen or so hectic meetings where we tried to figure out how in the heck we could tie usability to this year's theme - sustainability. If you think about it, if you set out to create something perfectly usable, you may end up wasting more materials/energy/money than you would otherwise. It's all about finding that sweet spot between designing something that works and not destroying the planet in the process.

In any case, we actually ended up with a few fairly coherent activities/posters. Folks from Farm Design had examples of sustainably-built yet usable medical implements. Somebody discovered that Boston has a place called the "Institute for Human Centered Design" that produces nifty items for everyday use. We even recruited a local bike shop to demo their foldable bikes.

The star of the show was your truly (of course!). I stuck about a million ideas on my poster, but the gist was that a) companies that make products that are designed to fail / become obsolete / you can't repair yourself should be avoided (I'm looking at you, Apple!); b) DIY'ers that either fix things or repurpose their components are cool; and c) think before you buy. I even had a hands-on activity - I took apart an unusable and very much broken vacuum cleaner, and invited passersby to come up with novel uses for the parts. You can see the plastic bits under the poster:

Surprisingly, people that did stop by were very interested in the message. It may have helped that they had nothing to do while they waited for their train, but hey, we'll take 'em in any shape or form.

All in all, I thought things went much better than they have in some of the previous years. As a bonus, all the participants got to imbibe at will at the reception held inside MIT's Stata Center. And let me tell you - that's one weird building all right... talk about usability...

nothing grows... except hilarity

Since early spring, Susan and I have been carefully tending our garden. We bought the seeds, planted them, and watered the soil (almost) daily.

OK, maybe we forgot to water for a week. Or two.

And maybe the plot that we chose only gets sunshine for five minutes a day.

Still, we were disappointed with the harvest that can be only described as disastrous. The tomato plant yielded approximately two tomatoes. Not two pounds or bushels - two tomatoes, period.

Carrots didn't do much better. The one that did grow is, umm, a little too awkward to serve to guests:

people of walmart

Definitely the funniest site I've seen in a while: People of Walmart. Why didn't I think of bringing a camera to the store before?

Update: John Michael has pointed me at another treasure, "People of Public Transit". Excellent compilation!

slappin' paws

Oreo shows off his listening skills:

royal visit #2

So now the second October visitor - Daisuke (accompanied by Cecilia) - has come and gone. Daisk got lucky, though, since his visit coincided with a Yelp event at the Microsoft office in Cambridge. Not a shabby place, I must admit, esp. when it is filled with people handing out free food/coupons/baby bottles of vodka. Unfortunately, Daisuke didn't make it to Burlington in order to meet Oreo - oh well, maybe next time!

don juan

Jonny made an appearance in Burlington, seeing that he's had an interview with Tufts Medical School. He said it went well, so there is real hope that Jon will make it back to Boston!

Susan made us a very nice breakfast before Jon had to leave for the airport, and it was warm enough to eat outside on the deck. Awww. Maybe the food will contribute in luring Juan away from Florida!

again, google...

Minding my own business, I went into Google maps to find directions - and was stunned to see the property lines drawn in. Holy sh#t! I can see a very detailed representation of all the plots in the neighborhood, including our very own patch of dirt. The neighbors across the street have a strange driveway configuration, and sure enough, it's on there. Wow.

we're so predictable...

I stumbled upon Google's Domestic Trends data visualization, and found some of the patterns very curious. All that Google doe is track the number of search queries across many categories - such as "Air Travel" and "Unemployment". Take a look at "Computers & Electronics": every Xmas, the searches spike in exactly the same fashion. I bet the searches on "batteries" spike even higher after Dec. 25th...

about time...

A year later, an EU commission finally determined that Georgia started the war in South Ossetia. Something tells me that the news networks will hesitate to admit that they totally f'ed up the reporting of that conflict...

st. barack

Just read that Obama is scrapping plans to install the missile shield in Eastern Europe. That was one of Bush's dumbest ideas, and he's had quite a few of those.

So is it time to canonize Barack yet?

decordova

After slaving away on deck duty for a few hours, Susan and I decided to reward ourselves with a trip to the DeCordova outdoor sculpture park. The stars lined up perfectly, as the admission was free for Bank of America members.

"But wait, Stan," you might say, "your Bank of America account was closed a while ago!" Yes. Yes it was. But I still held on to my Hello Kitty card, heh heh!

The weather was perfect, and we really enjoyed walking around the forested reserve and discovering cool installations, like this one:

For some reason, I've been craving a Zingerman's sandwich the whole day, so we tried to find the closest substitute in downtown Concord. Main Street's Market came really close with its salmon BLT, so I left happy - right back to more construction work.

no somerville today

Ohhh man, we almost made it to Senator Kerry's town hall meeting in Somerville, but just as we were about to take off Oreo landed awkwardly after jumping off the front stairs and started whimpering. He seems OK now (good, 'cause he ain't got no insurance!)

Luckily, it looks like the town hall meeting went well, and that Senator Kennedy's dream wasn't smeared days after his passing. Still, what a debacle this healthcare debate has been so far...

handshake

Finally, my laborious labor has produced something I can show outside of work. For the past few months, I’ve been working on a project that’s looking into using social networking to connect folks at MITRE to the people we work with on the outside – sponsors, research partners, vendors, etc. Sure, we have some tools now, but they’re either email-based or just too heavy-duty due to security regulations. We needed something more persistent but at the same time more open, and a social network may just fit the bill. Why do I say “may”? Well, that’s the whole point – we’re prototyping an approach, and if it doesn’t meet our needs, at least we’ll at least know why.

So anyhoo, after searching far and wide, the team established that we needed our own environment (sorry Ning/Facebook/LinkedIn, you ain’t getting our data!) We picked Elgg, an open-source platform that so far has been working reasonably well for us. The biggest problem I’ve faced on the user experience side, however, is that Elgg is endlessly expandable with plugins written by the open-source community – and those plugins are endlessly inconsistent. Just getting something that could pass for a reasonable navigation scheme took a few Stan-years... and I’m still not done.

Since this is a research project, we’ve had an equivalent of 1 - 1.5 full-time developers working on it, which meant I had to get my hands dirty with PHP - and actually, that felt strangely liberating. Normally, I’m working with locked-down COTS products, where even the smallest change takes. With this Elgg-based thing, everything is up for grabs.

Our baby, christened “Handshake”, is out on https://handshake.mitre.org. Check it out, although there’s only so much “checking out” you can do without being invited by a MITRE employee. If you’re interested, shoot me an email, and I’ll pull you in.

kelly's centennial

In the middle of a day, I received a distress call from Susan – her car blew a tire on a highway not far from my work. I got to her pretty quickly, and put the spare on. Then, on the way back, my dear Prelude Kelly reached quite a milestone:

I wasn’t sure if the car was gonna blow up or turn into a pumpkin, but luckily neither has happened.

my cusk and I

OK, so maybe waking up at hella-early in the morning was worth it after all. Sunny and I met up in Gloucester, and boarded a Yankee Capts fishing boat. The website (pretty much our only source of information for anything deep-sea fishing related) told us to show up two hours in advance of departure, but we could've walked in ten minutes before 7AM - the boat wasn't too crowded. So, right at seven, off we went - past the picturesque harbor, and into the Atlantic - for a good hour and a half. Then, the boat dropped anchor, and we got to fishin'.

Now, this type of fishing wasn't what we expected. Instead of casting, we dropped bait on a hook attached to a heavy sinker all the way down to the ocean floor, 250ft or so below the water surface. One thing that we quickly found was that it meant lots of reeling. Lots. Just dropping the lure took almost a minute in some places.

Sunny was the first to deliver, with a fish that was just short of the minimum length that you needed in order to keep it. Then, we hooked a couple of sharks (yup...) - not as scary as they sound, as they were about 20 inches long. Those we couldn't keep either. Finally, mid-way through the day, I caught a cusk fish:

Apparently, these guys are infamous for being poor swimmers, so it barely fought as I brought it to the surface. Eh, all that mattered was that it was long enough!

A little later, Sunny distinguished himself by reeling in a nice-looking haddock:

Thus, operation Fish was completed, and we had something to show for it. Good times!

plans for the weekend

Up at 4:30AM on a Saturday morning to go deep-sea fishing, after staying up to play paintball last night. Somewhere out there, work begins on a monument to my manliness.

the whole 10 yards

This is a first for me as a homeowner - and for my family as a whole. I just got my very own 10 yd dumpster!

What's the big deal, you say? Finally, I have a chance to get rid of all the construction debris that have been clogging the basement/garage/shed. This is just about half of the stuff that's been sitting in the basement alone:

First the yard sale, now this... we're finally getting organized!

P.S. For the record - yes, I know that disposing of stuff is not the most environmentally-friendly thing you can do. In my defense, everything I'm throwing out has been carefully sorted for anything recyclable/salvageable.

long live the autococker...

After eight faithful years of service, my Autococker is no more. At the last paintball outing, the cocking rod snapped - leaving me with a very sentimental paperweight. Alas, it's time to move on - it'll be hard to expect the same accuracy from any of the new electronic markers, but I was clearly outgunned in the rate-of-fire department.

So, after a few days of online research rendered useless by a 10-minute conversation with Jason at Paintball Wizard, I am now a proud owner of a Dangerous Power G3 marker. You gotta admit, it's a bit sexy:

We'll see if it shoots as well as it looks, though.

yard sale: lessons learned

We pulled it off - we've had our first very own yard sale! It was something that we kept on delaying for a while: either the weather wasn't right, or we were busy doing something else. In the meantime, useless junk kept on accumulating everywhere, most noticeably in the garage.

I was so excited about this purging process that I woke up an hour early - this is on a Saturday, too. Even before I had breakfast, I started pulling boxes of mismatched plates that we'll never use, old PS2 games, cables, books - and arranging them on a couple of tables at the end of the driveway. I even converted an old door slab into a makeshift display space and started piling things up on the stairs. Susan joined in to help out, rescuing some kitchen utensils in the process:

Right before 9AM, I went out to hang the signs that I carefully scribbled with a huge Sharpie the night before. Guided by a traffic map that I sketched out, I tried to make sure that I channelled pretty much all the cars passing by the downtown into our little dead-end street. Apparently, the scheme worked - a steady stream of bargain-hunters kept us busy for most of the morning.

People do vary. Some where very nice and stopped by to chat even if they weren't buying anything. Some haggled down to the last cent (c'mon! who does that!) And then there were some who just drove by, made a U-turn at the end of the street, and went back up the hill. Can't please them all!

So, what are the lessons learned?
- a wheelbarrow is mighty useful for carrying items back and forth from the garage
- little post-it stickies work well as price labels
- def. need lots of change ($1 bills)
- dropping down the prices at the end of day just to get rid of stuff does the trick - we should've done it earlier!

So, all in all, the garage can breathe easier, we're $86 richer, and hopefully some people will use our stuff instead of having to buy new things. Everybody wins. Especially the dude who got the yellow seats from my del Sol for $15. May he find a way to ride them into awesomeness.

the dish

There are those that claim to find fault with the married life. But "those" are not taking the positives into the account. Take, for example, the feast that Susan cooked up for me on Friday. For starters, we had French green beans and baked sweet potatoes with cinnamon. Next came the roasted chicken seasoned with garlic and herbes de provence, with a side of spring pasta with zucchini and carrots. Finally, as if I wasn't stuffed, Susan unveiled the dessert: fruit medley with white chocolate. Owie. I'm still recovering.