Weezer - Pink Triangle

When I'm stable long enough
I start to look around for love
See a sweet in floral print
My mind begins the arrangements

And so beings one of the greatest Weezer songs ever, splashing ideas of mental frailty, emotional turmoil, and senseless obsession that leads us to make all the wrong conclusions in love. Yes, this song says it all.

Crimes and Misdemeanors - by Woody Allen

Crimes and Misdemeanors is a movie about the conflict of morality and reason. "A man can reason himself into anything" and thus, what is the use of morality? On the other hand, so much of our joy in life comes from morality...I.E. fidelity is better than adultery and so forth.

The movie complicated this question by bringing to light people's own instinctual drives in solving problems and seeking security as being less satisfying than moral high ground, but doesn't directly give us an idea of which one is correct.

In the end the movie provides good media and thoughts to be discussed at a later time.

Townes Van Zandt

Townes van Zandt is a singer songwriting the country/folk genre. With a mellow swaying voice, picked guitar, and lyrics that really mean something... he might surprise you as the country singer you can listen to.

Listen to him sing Pancho and Lefty:


And check out his official site:
http://www.townesvanzandt.com/

The Song Of Wandering Aengus - William Butler Yeats

The Song Of Wandering Aengus - William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

------------

In the poem Yeats seems to be playing with two themes: Undying affection for a lost love, and nostalgia for the romance of youth. The character in the book sets out in expectation, casting out and hoping for a catch. This can symbolize both a quest for romance and a general quest for achievement. The fish that turns into the woman resembles unexpected fortune that is like all good fortune, destined to fade eventually. Yeats seems to console us believing that the loves and good times in our life are never lost if we can remember enough to walk through them, and treasure how the beautiful moments in our life resemble them, thus plucking the silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.

My Little Airport

My Little Airport is an indie pop duo out of Hong Kong consisting of composer Ah P and vocalist Nicole singing beautifully cute songs in a mix of Chinese and English, with occasional French. Their songs focus on forbidden romance, erotic overtones, and snapshots of everyday glory like: going to the zoo, getting homework done, or reading French poems. My Little Airport provides validation to being a nerd; their music says that it is possible to be an intellectual who studies hard and has sensuality, sexuality, and fashion sense.

Nicole of My Little Airport:


Watch Ah P and Nicole perform: The Ok Thing To Do On Sunday Afternoon is to Toddle in the Zoo (all in Chinese)


For more, check out their beautiful webpage:
http://www.mylittleairport.com/

Or get their latest from Amazon: Stay As Sweet As You Are

The Teahouse Fire by Ellis Avery

When I was nine, in the city now called Kyoto, I changed my fate. I walked into the shrine through the red arch and struck the bell. I bowed twice. I clapped twice. I whispered to the foreign goddess and bowed again. And then I heard the shouts and the fire. What I asked for? Any life but this one.

And thus begins the story of Aurelia Caillard a French-American girl who loses her mother before her time and is ferried to Japan with her abusive Missionary Uncle later managing to escape to a Great Japanese Tea-House where she learns Japanese Tea Ceremony,temae, the meaning of family, loyalty, elegance, love, forgiveness, death, and life.

Social Ranking and Acceptance

“Now,” the older woman said in Japanese, crouching to fix me with her small eyes, “your father?”

“None,” I said, as far as I knew.
The woman blanched a little, and persisted. “Your mother?”
Now I flinched. I didn’t want to say it. “None,” I repeated. The two women glanced at each other. I felt queerly translucent. Saying the thing for the first time made it more real, but saying it in this language abstracted it from me, as if the moment were happening to someone else.

Language forms part of our identity. When Aurelia (later the Japanese name Urako) is found she has to confess to being an orphan, saying it in what little Japanese she knows divorces her old identity from her, makes her feel foreign to who she was. At the same time it establishes how foreign Aurelia is in her new environment of Japan, this is an important point as one of the main themes of the book is that Aurelia is never truly accepted in the culture, even after years learning to think, live, and breathe in Japanese.

The task of running Tea Houses in Pre-Western Japan was granted to families of the highest cast, Samurai, and only the wealthy and powerful could come to enjoy being served tea. Thus throughout the novel there is an element of worth in terms of social status. Take for example Jiro, a man from a lower cast who married Yukako, and became successor of the Tea House, only to fall when he found he didn't have the social graces or caliber of elegance to manage running all the poetic details of Tea House. His wife, the true Samurai, takes over.

Trying to jump social status leaves a kind of inflation that shows your true worth, and leaves you empty, out of your element. The lesson is one should accept who and where they are and grow slowly to manifest their own world into greatness. No matter what role that world plays, it is important.

Poetry, Discipline, and Elegance
...as she followed Yukako’s maxims: “Make heavy things look light; make light things look heavy.”

Yukako put out the fire in the floorboard pit, and I sat with her quietly. When she found me in this room, she was the age I am now, I marveled. The host’s door to the mizuya was open, as was the outside door beyond ---the push-up sky-light, too, the small windows and the little crawl-through door ---so that the bleached-bone gold of the house was lit on all sides by green air and pink petals. The very house seemed to be breathing light. Above the lovely dark board with its whitegrained streak, a calligraphed scroll hung in the alcove, edged in sky-blue silk. Beneath it, in place of flowers, lay a small pair of flower-cutting scissors, their butterfly handles gleaming. “Why?” I asked, pointing. “Why?” Yukako teased. “What flower is most beautiful of all?” It was a matter of catechism, not opinion. “Sakura,” I answered. “Sakura only bloom a few days a year,” she said. “And now they’re everywhere. To cut a branch of cherry blossoms and bring it into the teahouse is too much, don’t you think?” She nodded toward the alcove. “This is just enough, the shears alone.” Walking back through the moss-and-slate garden, the fresh spring air blowing petals my way, I felt joy, joy, at how I saw the outside world more intensely for having seen the world Yukako made inside. No wonder Jiro resented not getting to choose and name the tea bowls himself; every aspect of speaking through tea gave pleasure.

The book echoes again and again the extreme importance of elegance and aesthetic, the idea that learned traditions so enrich life as to be coveted. What it calls into question is what it means to be civilized. What are the movements, rules, and aesthetics, learned and practiced by (most) all of us that make our world a more pleasant place to live? The Tea House takes the idea of culture to the most extreme level. Take for example the situation where Yukako is obliged to hang pictures of the Emperor in every tea room:

“Of course we’ll accept it: it would be rude not to. But how ridiculous. It makes me wonder if he ever understood the Way of Tea at all. A photo for every tearoom? How inelegant!”
She use the same word Sei Shonagon had nine hundred years before, describing a hayseed of her own acquaintance. As Tsuko nodded and soothed, more gracefully than I’d ever been able to, I wondered if the Heian court lady had ever written of being upstaged in the eyes of her Empress by some young modern thing. Perhaps it was on a page Shonagon had brushed and burned, a list of inelegant feelings.


No inelegance can be tolerated, it is important though to distinguish this from perfectionism, since Tea culture actually understands the inability to achieve perfection, indeed designs the concept in to the art:

In the tea world there is a phrase, ichigo ichi. One moment, one meeting. Every moment is what it is. Even though tea people watch each other constantly for slips in form, and gossip shamelessly about one another’s technique, in the end, in the deepest sense, there are no mistakes. This is what the Mountain meant to teach in giving his students the precious antique with the crack, the flaw, certain to break with use.

Indeed is not the height of elegance and culture having the ability to accept a lack of perfection? Humility, therefore, is an essential part of elegance.

Love and Elegance

Where among this culture is there room for the awkwardness of love and romance? To make her task even more difficult Avery makes Aurelia a lesbian, in a world where most marriages are arranged. Still part of this is OK, since no one really shows their feelings for anyone directly, and more poetic writings and gifts create the greatest points of expression, consider when Aurelia recieves a gift from her lover Inko:

Unspooling a puff of white tissue, I found a water-lily-shaped wafer of pressed sugar. I had not been forgotten; my eyes stung from gratitude.

Eyes stung from gratitude. That is just great writing, you can understand the power of the gesture way more than the perpetual (sometimes half-empty) "I love yous" thrown about in society today.

The Embodiment of Elegance and Beauty

If there was one character that embodied the grace and beauty of temae and Tea Culture it was Yukako, older sister and master to Aurelia. Consider Aurelia's thoughts when Yukako dies:

As I purified each utensil under that kiri dome, I felt her (Yukako) beside me, prodding me here and there with her fan: like so. Like so. I felt her as I had when I was small, folder her fingers around mine…My body had known hers this intimately, I thought.

This passage describes how Aurelia learned temae from Yukako, and how the exchange of teaching and culture could brought them together, even behind the formal rigidity of the world, or was it the feeling of accomplishment to follow precise rules that created the opening for affection?

Yukako was dead, I learned, reading at home that night. She died some twelve years before, in 1916. My very first response, as with almost every interaction I had with Japanese people, was embarrassment: how rude of me to think she’d never die! How selfish! My second response was surprise: how could she have succumbed to anything so petty, so ordinary, as death?

Yukakos suffering, Kenji said, had been intense but brief, and she had gone about dying with the same attentiveness and vigor with which she’s lived.

These two passages summarize the perfection of tea-culture, of being something more bigger than life, yet unable to escape it. Like the coming Westernization of Japan in the late 1800s destroyed the elegance of tea culture, so even Yukako had to submit to mortality, and when she does so, she does not make the inelegant move to escape her fate, but cooperates with it in honor and beauty.

If Yukako had given me one single-edged gift, it was this: how to love this soft air, this wash of light-flooded leaves, this sun hitting red brick, this one day in all the world.

What is the amazing thing about the human condition is that we have a million different ways with which to perceive the outside world, and yet how often do we stop to appreciate it? What is the beauty of each passing moment? What is the benefit of cultivating the beauty, grace, intelligence, artfulness, to appreciate it?

Ellis Avery and Japan
Avery herself studied Japanese Tea Ceremony in N.Y. City (where she lives) and Kyoto, for 5 years. A large element of this book is Aurelia's trouble being integrated into Japanese culture. Reading this book it is important to keep in mind that it is a story depicting Japanese culture as seen from the outside. I do not mean to bash Avery on this, any book trying to describe a culture would be difficult, but it seems like an important fact to note with a book so rich in describing the culture of Japan as it transitioned to Westernization in the late 1800s.

Get The Teahouse Firefrom Amazon.

Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug

Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug is a website usability book that is so important, vital, and good that I outlined the major points chapter by chapter.

Ch 1. Don’t Make Me Think
1. Don’t make me think, do as much work for the user as possible
2. Get rid of half the words, then get rid of half of those
3. Make everything as self-evident and self-explanatory as possible
4. Make it OBVIOUS that something is clickable
5. Making things easy builds confidence in yourwebsite
6. Eliminate question marks or anything which makes you think

Ch2. How we really use the web

1. People don’t read, they skim
2. People don’t make optimal choices, they satisfice and go back if needed. “guessing is fun”
3. People don’t figure out how things work, they muddle through.
4. People use things differently than how they were intended. Like typing a www address into a search box.
5. If something works for people, they will rarely try to find a better way, so build a website that makes the user feel smart.

Ch 3. Billboard Design 101

1. Make sure people see and understand as much of the website as possible
2. Create a clear visual hierarchy
3. Take advantage of established conventions (learn from what is already working)
4. Again, Make it OBVIOUS what is CLICKABLE
5. Minimize noise.
6. Make content nested together in a useful manner. (check out the front page of a newspaper to understand nesting)

Ch 4. Animal, vegetable, or mineral? (Why users like mindless choices)

Krug’s Second Law of Usability: It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice.

1. While it is good to keep track of the number of clicks to get to a certain goal, what might matter more is that the path to the goal is mindless
2. As a rule of thumb: 3 mindless clicks equals 1 that requires thought
3. Making things as mindless as possible will make your site easy to use and help its chances at becoming popular

Ch 5. Omit needless words – The art of not writing for the web
Krug’s Third Law of Usability: Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.
1. The web is full of words no one is going to read, eliminate them because it reduces noise, makes the words that matter, matter more, and it helps the reader get a general idea of the page without scrolling.
2. Get rid of happy talk – this is usually intro stuff that serves no purpose, but it is also anything you read and your mind starts going “blah blah blah”
3. Eliminate instructions as much as possible, no one reads them, if you must have them, make them as short and clear as possible.

Ch6. Street signs and Breadcrumbs (Designing Navigation)

1. People won’t use your Web site if they can’t find their way around it.
2. Like shopping in a retail store, you go to a website looking for something, and expect a certain hierarchy with clearly marked signs.
3. People leave your website when they are certain you don’t have what they are looking for, or when they get too frustrated from looking.
4. When browsing website there is no sense of scale (how many pages) where in the hierarchy we are, so it is good to give as many clues to this as possible.
5. This explains the importance of book marks, and websites having good home pages
6. 30-40% of web clicks are on the back button
7. Navigation is about getting from one place to another, and figuring out where you are
8. Navigation tells us where we are, and helps us get to where we want to go, and it also never loses us, once it does that, we are in serious trouble
9. In a website you are always asking, “Do these guys know what they are doing?”

Good techniques for good navigation:

1. Have the same navigation menu on every page (except maybe the home page, or some special function page like a form)
2. Keep the site logo and id on every page (site id is usually at the top left, by convention) – have the id also be a link back to the home page, to let people be able to know where they are, whenever they want
3. Give people a way to search your site
4. Most navigation help breaks down after the first or second level, but it is important to have clear navigation at as many levels as possible
5. Every page needs a name, and it needs to be in a prominent place, and the name needs to match user expectations to build trust
6. “You are here” indicators help too
7. “Breadcrumbs” give people an idea of where they are, and the path they have taken, but they should not be used as a substitute for real navigation.

On using tabs (TABS ARE GOOD):
1. They are self-evident, hard to miss, slick, and suggest a physical space
2. Color code them, this adds to their pop and appeal
3. Don’t over do it, or you will have load time issues on all those images
4. Have a tab highlighted for every page, never leave a tab un-highlighted.

Ch 7. The first step in recovery is admitting that the Home Page is beyond your control

1. With a home page, there is ALWAYS ONE MORE THING
2. The homepage has to establish site identity and mission, has to give a site hierarchy, and give a search capability

The homepage should also have...
1. Teases – things to entice the reader
2. Timely content – tell people what’s new
3. Deals – how are you giving them new value?
4. Short-cuts – stuff that is a long way a way, but important, popular, and pertinent
5. Registration (if that is even an option)
6. Show the person what they are looking for
7. Show them other cool stuff they might not be looking for but are interested in
8. Show where to start
9. Establish credibility and trust
10. It has to be amenable to the pressures of promoting the site, work politics, and showing all aspects of the company

Usual pit-falls of home pages it needs to make clear the big picture of the site “what it is all about” and easily answer these four questions
1. What is this?
2. What can I do here?
3. What do they have here?
4. Why should I be here--- and not somewhere else?

Excuses to avoid for not spelling out the point
1. It’s obvious
2. Once people get it, it is not needed
3. Anyone who really needs the site will know
4. Advertising will take care of that
5. We can just add a “first time visitor” link, right?

Tools to get the point across are
1. The tagline, it should be personable, lively, and explain the site
2. The welcome blurb
3. Use as much space as necessary, but don’t use more than necessary
4. Don’t use your mission statement as the blurb
5. Test your home page, send it to people, and then ask them what the main point of the site is

The homepage needs to answer “Where do I start?”
1. Where do I start to search?
2. Where do I start to browse?
3. Where do I start to see the best of the site?

Pull downs and other site descriptions are bad because they are twitchy, and you have to exert effort to see them

Killing the home page goose:
1. Putting a banner ad on the homepage when it is not necessary
2. Promoting everything
3. Letting deals drive the design of the homepage
4. Being greedy


Ch.8 “The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends” Why most web design team arguments about usability are a waste of time, and how to avoid them

1. It is impossible to know what will work because it can’t be proven, so any discussion on what is best, is ultimately flawed
2. This is because there is a myth of they average user, when in fact, everyone is unique.

Ch9. Usability testing on 10 cents a day – keeping testing simple so you do enough of it

1. You will wonder why you didn’t do usability testing sooner
2. Focus group – many people see many ideas and discuss to discover what they most want
3. Usability testing – you are seeing if the site can be used and understood

Testing rules of thumb:
1. Testing one user is 100% better than testing none
2. Testing one user early is better than testing 50 at the end
3. Importance of recruiting the right people is overrated.
4. The point is not to prove or disprove, but to get information
5. Testing is iterative, you have to do it more than once
6. Nothing beats a live audience if you can get it
7. Do more than one round since the first layer problems can block testers from seeing the second layer problems

Answer these two questions with usability testing:
1. Do they “get it”?
2. Can they perform any necessary key tasks?

Ch 10. Usability testing: The movie – How to do your own testing

If you conduct your own test, do the following:
1. Tell your user to think out loud, and listen to what they say
2. Tell you user what to do
3. Be understanding, empathetic, and encouraging to your user, thank them!
4. Try observe their thought process
5. Don’t give them any hints on what to do!!!
6. Probe, probe, probe, they are there, ask as many questions as you can (i.e. what do you like best? What appeals to you? Etc….)
7. Less experienced users are probably better since they are less likely to know how to cope with bad design.


Expect the following from a test session:
1. Find out if they “get it”
2. Can they find their way around?
3. Head slappers – the obvious problems you consistently overlooked
4. Shocks – the “how could they not understand that” shock
5. Inspiration – you will get some new cool ideas
6. Passion – see your baby “website” come to life and make a difference
7. Don’t jump to conclusions – step back observe as much as you can, conclude later…
8. You are seeing people on their best behavior, they are likely to act differently on their own….
9. Give more credence to actions, than what the users say
10. Make notes immediately after each session

Ch 11. On not throwing the baby out with the dishes – interpreting test results

After the testing decide what should be fixed, and then, how to fix it.
1. Always try tweaking first
2. Work on specifics, what exactly “didn’t work?” or “get the point across?”
3. Re-test, after tweaking
4. Scrap and start over if you have to, even go back to basic assumptions…

Avoid:
1. Fixing problems that most users managed to recover from
2. Adding things in, thinking that additions solve the problem…
3. Resist adding in those suggestions for “new features”
4. Do easy stuff first: The head slappers, etc…
5. Remember that even small changes can have a big impact!

Get Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition from Amazon

or check out the website: http://www.stevekrug.com/index.html

Also, check out the website I am building that applies these principles, and let me know what you think.