thoughtcrumbs : january 2000

Lunchtime logic on the last day of CHI

CHI has been exhilarating, and I have oodles of posts to upload. The ones with HCI merit will appear over the next week, when I've had a few days to process my thoughts (and, well, fly home). For those of you who asked for my slides, they'll go up then, too. But a teaser: After three days of intense usability, accessibility, visualization, and robotics, this is the kind of elegant conversation some of us had over lunch:

The other day, Google returned AdWords that were tailored to my location.
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Goggle knows my IP address.
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SkyNet has won.
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We humans had a good run, a few million years.
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At least we had TiVo.
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Yeah, the dinosaurs didn't have that.
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Try giving them a remote!
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But, we should consider accesibility issues for everyone.
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Including dinosaurs.
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How about a one-button mouth remote?
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For dinosaurs?
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Or, more currently, for robots.
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No -- dino robots.
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From outer space.
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Yeah, the one-button mouth remote for dino robots from outer space. Time to apply for the patent.

Vegan restaurants in Vienna

If you´re in Vienna this week for CHI and looking for a good vegetarian-safe restaurant (and, like me, are intimidated by all of those caps and consonants on many German menus), try the BIO BAR near Stephansdom. I had a fantastic stuffed cabbage and potato dish last night (the photo belies how good it tasted) and the owners were effusive and more than willing to translate the house specials for us.

Update: Even better (though pocketbook-ly posh) is Wrenkh. I had a tomato risotto with wild mushrooms and arugula. Larger pics will be in my photo gallery in a few days.
 

Seussentennial Nalgene bottle from Powell's

Powell's is giving away a limited-edition Nalgene bottle with cute Dr. Seuss graphics with the purchase of three Seuss books. You've been wanting to have your own copy of The Sneetches, haven't you?

Mozilla Firefox

A few random notes on Mozilla Firefox:

• I love that new tabs are opened behind the current tab. The design acknowledges that people opening additional tabs have a reason for maintaining the current page, and allows them to move to the new tab after finishing the original one. Earlier versions of Mozilla, where new tabs automatically had the focus, forced me to Ctrl-Shift-Tab a lot.
  
  
• The multipurpose search widget next to the address bar ("Mycroft," the dino-librarian) is nice, and adding new engines is a breeze. But I can't find a keyboard shortcut to jump there. Anybody know one? I use F6 or Ctrl-L to highlight the address bar all the time, so something similar for the search tool would be great. Especially if there were also a way to toggle between the different engines with the keyboard, too, so I don't end up Googling dictionary terms or Amazoning javascript error messages.
  
  Update: Thanks to Asa for pointing out that Ctrl+k (Windows) will focus the search field, and Noah for finding Ctrl+up and Ctrl+down to toggle between engines. Firefox Help also has a good keyboard shortcuts page.

Score!

My elation at getting to be one of the beta testers of Google's email service was dampened slightly when I found out that gmail usernames have to be at least six characters, eliminating my chance to be "moira." Bummer. However, do send me a message: my gmail address is my first and last names concatenated. Decode that one, sniveling spam spiders!

Over an hour of grammatical pedantry

For those of you (like me) who have forsworn a business based solely on its misuse of the holy apostrophe ("LADIES NIGHT! FREE DRINK'S!"), and who have a tendency to drool over a novel directly proportional to its deployment of parenthetics, semicolons, and elipses, you'll love Bob Edwards' audio interview with Lynne Truss. She's written the surprisingly best-selling book, "Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation." She and Bob discuss, among other topics, panda munitions, the ominious "Giant Kid," and even whether the book's subtitle lacks a hyphen.

Even better is NPR's collection of related stories (at the bottom of the page), which includes:

• Middle school "grammar pirates" whose word-choice paradigm is Bob Costa
• The dumbing down of NY Times bestsellers and the journal Science
• The problem with the double "is"