Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Thursday, 24 January 2002

# 6 PM

Now I know why my alarm clock was blinking twelves at me the other day: all afternoon, the power to the whole apartment would cut out for five seconds periodically. There's nothing obviously wrong with the fuse box, I wonder if these are area-wide brownouts. Fortunately I have a UPS so the computer didn't crash.

I've pretty much concluded to take the user interface course and not the compiler course. I'll learn more.

This weekend's assigned reading for the UI course is from a book titled Usability Engineering. I'm not sure if it's the one by Jakob Nielsen (we were given copies of the chapters assigned). It has some funny quotes:

Validity is a question of whether the usability test in fact measures something of relevance to usability of real products in real use outside the laboratory.

...[U]sability test subjects are not normally bodily harmed, even by irate developers resenting the users' mistreatment of their beloved software...

Now to do some dishes and then help Sumana move furniture.

# 12:10 AM

About to run off to the NTL meeting.

Did finally manage to get halfway decent airfare to Minnesota.