A little bird named Kathy just told me about Born Magazine's You and We experiment. Register and add your thoughts to the collective.

Just read Mike Parsons' evolt.org article Optimising Return On Investment with Intranets and enjoyed the commentary. I managed a similar ROI investigation about a year or so ago and the main issue we had was defining what ROI formula to use. While there's no question that a well structured, intelligently designed intranet will increase the productivity of end users when compared to it's opposite, developing a model that accurately reflects this time savings as ROI is a difficult task.

Ever wanted to design your own money? Catscape is running a contest revolving around designing a new currency for the never-to-be-discovered (fake) country of Zambonia. Go ahead - give it your best Stuart Devlin.

If you design or develop web sites for a living, Iconico has a set of tools available that will make your web building life much much simpler. Web Tools and Screen Calipers have been especially useful to me of late.

Well, it's been one year since my first post to this blog, which means co][nz.org is one year old today. A number of things have happened over the last year (to say the least), some details of which have been spoken of here and some not. More of the same in the coming year, and hopefully another redesign. Thanks to all for tuning in.

In unofficial honor of the said birthday event, I switched dynamic DNS providers. For the past year, I'd been using Deerfield's DNS2GO software and service. It worked fine, up until about six weeks ago when I first noticed that Deerfield was suffering a number of service outages, disconnects, etc. At any rate, rather than live through the pain any longer, I switched to ZoneEdit, using DirectUpdate to communicate my dynamic IP address when it changes. So far so good.

Danger is getting ready to release the Hiptop communicator, an all-in-one mobile device that connects to GSM and GPRS wireless networks. Rumor has it that the basic service plan will include unlimited data connections as well as a few hundred voice minutes for around US$40 a month. The Hiptop itself is only US$199. Expect more of these devices to hit the market in late 2002 early 2003.

The following excerpts from a recent Digital Web interview with Adaptive Path together serve as excellent summaries of my work life struggles.

"Everyone thinks they can design. I've never met a CEO who doesn't have opinions about what navigation items should go where, and what color the links should be. I'm not entirely sure why this is, but I think people confuse design solutions with their preferences for how things look. Or they just assume everyone else is like them. Regardless, it gets in the way of good design when you start assuming these things. There is nothing I like less than hearing someone say, "Well, I think users will..." It's a good sign that things are going off track."

"The most fundamental mistake people make regarding IA is assuming that their users think about the subject matter in the same way that they do. In other words, most designers are really only designing for themselves. The view of your site from inside the organization will always differ from the view from outside. Sometimes that difference will be dramatic. You've got to set aside your preconceptions to see the site the way your users do."

Design Within Reach (DWR) is hosting their first e-card contest. Only lively, fun and ability-ridden submissions need apply. The grand prize winner receives a $2000(US) cash prize and their work becomes the 'official' 2002 DWR holiday card. Second and third places will receive US $500(US) and US $300(US), respectively. All entries must be submitted by September 30, 2002. On your mark, get set, go.

This past week's A List Apart brings us 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web. A must read for anyone who writes for the web.

How quickly a week can go by... I just got back from an extended weekend in Manhattan's Upper West side. We set up camp at the Hudson Hotel on 58th and 9th (swankalicious!) and spent a good portion of the weekend wandering around the Upper West side, Soho, and Greenwich Village shopping a bit here, cafe'ing a bit there.

On Friday, we started of the evening with a fine Italian meal at Baldoria on 49th and 8th. While there's no doubting that there is better Italian in the city, the ambience at Baldoria was timely and the food delicious. We caught the musical Urinetown immediately after dinner. We were all very pleasantly surprised at how well done and entertaining it was. Don't let the sketchy plotline turn you away - it's dark comedy mixed with satire at it's best.

Saturday night led us to Son Cubano in the Meatpacking District/West Village for cuban tapas. While known for making the best Mojito in the city, the live Cuban music and tasty tapas did not disappoint.

I could go on and on, but I'll save it for when we go back in the winter. Let me know what you think if you try (or have tried) any of the points of interest above.

I spent a bit of time yesterday toying around with the Amazon web services API. It's written in ASP and makes use of the MSXML2.DOMDocument.4.0 and ServerXMLHTTP.4.0 objects. I ran into a snag initially, due to an issue with a document type declaration embedded in the return stream. This rogue declaration was causing the MSXML parser to error out, complaining of an invalid DTD. Removing it from the feed prior to transforming it turned the trick.

Web services from the likes of Amazon and Google are just the beginning of what's about to unfold in this. In a year from now, a variety of web services will be provided by a majority of internet retailer, banking and information service providers as a means to reduce costs, expand business models, enhance brand and reach mobile device audiences. I say bring it on!

Barry Bonds. 600. Priceless.

I saw Beth Orton perform at The Vic in Chicago last night. She played an hour and forty-five minute set that consisted of four encores (granted the first of which lasted three songs). I caught her set on the opening leg of her current tour back in June at The Metro, and thought that she put on a better show then. Now, it could've had a lot to do with the venue - The Vic has much poorer sound due to its loftiness - but I felt she lacked the energy and soul that she had down earlier in the tour. No matter; it was a fun show and boy can that girl sing.

MTV UK has put together an intriguing day in the life video (RealVideo player required) of a typical London-based IT worker bee using a slew of modelled infographics set to a popular UK dance track. Glad to see that MTV is up to something other than corrupting Generation Y and ramming Britney Spears down our throats. Props to xBlog for the link.

Molly's article lit a fire under me... As a result, I just finished upgrading all of co][nz.org from XHTML Transitional to XHTML Strict. The effort wasn't nearly as tedious as I had anticipated it to be. Many of the issues that came up during the conversion revolved around misuse of 'noscript' tags and missing block level elements within 'form' tags.

You may have noticed that I reformatted a few things while I was upgrading - posts are now preceded by their associated titles and are grouped more visibly by date. I still have a short list of tweaks that I plan on making in the not too distant future, so stay tuned. As always, bug reports and comments are appreciated.