First, lets take a look at last years predictions: ✅All hell does NOT break loose - Whew! ❌Twitter continues to die - 🤮 (Source) ✅Warriors make the playoffs and lose in the quarter finals - Semi-finals actually! Stock Market (almost perfect predictions!) ✅Nasdaq 20k ➡️ 23k. (Actual 23.5k) ✅Dow Jones 44k ➡️ 49k. (Actual 49k) ❌Bitcoin 104k ➡️140k (actual 88k)

Buying gifts always seems difficult. I know I am not easy to get something for. I've been thinking about it and thought of some uncommon but good gift ideas. A cheap Ukulele You can get an acceptable one for under $50. It's much easier to play than you might expect. You don't need to finger pick. You don't need to read music.

We recently went to see Josh Johnson, one of the hosts of The Daily Show, perform his standup act. Unfortunately, I was deeply disappointed with the experience. It was a perfect storm of problems, some of which were not his fault. The Environment The show was at the Fox Oakland theater, seating over 2,800 people. It's a stunning and impressive venue with a long, rich history.

I was thinking about the applications that companies put on your work laptop. Most serve a business function like Zoom for video conferencing or a VPN. However, I had an unpleasant thought about how AI could be used for employee surveillance. There have been services that monitor how your mouse is moving during the day. Clever people figured out little jigglers to keep it in motion.

To me this is obvious, but somehow everyone gets this wrong. Everyone is way too verbose. Slides presentation Use speaker notes. Don’t put every word on the slide. Don’t make long bullets. Don’t over explain. If you are worried about a leave behind, make a separate document for that. For your presentation, less than 10 words max per slide.

There is a job role I have been experimenting with for the last couple of years called UX Producer. In my humble opinion, it has been a terrific success and has helped in countless ways. I thought it would be helpful to share the concept and how it works. Mission of UX Producers UX Producers should develop processes and programs that would…

Warning: This is pretty much an old person rant. I recently upgraded my Alexa devices to Alexa+. I am considering throwing all of them away and replacing them with some equivalent. What's the problem? There are many, but the one that makes me the most aggrieved is that I want it to be more concise. Every time I ask a simple question, I get the answer in a verbose sentence along with a long follow-up question.

It's an American holiday, Thanksgiving, but I believe there is a tradition which would benefit everyone. Simply, you just say what you are thankful for. I feel in todays world, what we are upset about drowns out any positive thoughts. Here are a few things I am thankful for this year. Good music I'm thankful for the creativity of millions of musicians over the years who have created auditory art for me to enjoy.

I recently attended the Crowdstrike annual event in Europe. This year it was in Barcelona. I had never been to the city before (or any other part of Spain. I was truly impressed with the city and rank it in the top cities I could imagine living. Some of the highlights below. Lots of pictures! The People Barcelona is a young city.

I started taking photos and videos of my life and family about 25 years ago. I have them as a screensaver on this computer. It brings me happiness to look back on those photos after many years. I have over 180gigs worth of media compiled. Timeline of storage Originally, I just had the photos on a drive on my local computer.

Artificial intelligence is moving fast. The way people interact with it will evolve as the functionality improves. These are my predictions of where the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is going, Pre- ChatGPT It used to be called ML or machine learning. I worked at a startup a few years back that used a very advanced system to monitor trillions of signals from huge things like aircraft carriers or steel mills.

One of the biggest problems in AI is training. Where can you get source material for the AI to train that doesn’t break copyright laws? Google certainly has a ton of data, but I think there could a way to change the game. The hardware You need a pin that can be worn by the user. It would mainly be an audio recorder but could also be a video at some point.

Over the past few years my knees have been progressively getting worse. This has nothing to do with product design, but I use my blog sometimes to just journal what has been going on in my life. Symptoms Walking down stairs in the morning hurts. Playing tennis required progressively heavy knee braces or within a set or two my knees would buckle and fail.

Honestly, I have loved my 2020 Tesla Model 3. It has been a wonderful car and way ahead of its time. If not for the buffoonery, cruelty, greed, and stupidity of their CEO (Elon Musk), I would have purchased more Tesla cars. Additionally, I would not have been in a hurry to get a new car if not for the same irrational behavior of the Trump administration in stopping the electric car federal rebates.

This is just like 2000 and 2007. Runaway company valuations Unrealistic expectations of values going up forever Unsubstantiated pay packages for employees Deeply flawed underlying economic realities Inflation Sound familiar? It preceded the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble and it’s happening now. The hype cycle The Gartner Hype Cycle This is the way bubbles are formed and evolved. The timing is sometimes variable and not everything eventually reaches productivity.

Many designers are anxiously wondering, “will I be replaced with AI?” To jump to the conclusion, I think many designers are at risk and the job of interaction designer will change dramatically in the next 2-7 years. However, as an optimist, I think it may have a happy ending. Bubble? Sure, we are in a bubble similar to the dot.com bubble of the late 90’s or the housing bubble in the mid-2000s.

We have had a large liquid oak tree in front of our house. It grew and grew for decades. Eventually it started to break the sidewalk and encroach on the foundation of the house. Very sadly, the city decided that our glorious tree would have to go. Tree before and after The tree provided excellent shade to the house and dropped a billion little spiky balls on to the yard.

As a beta junkie, I felt compelled to install the latest OS for my iPad and new iPhone. This is a few days in. First impressions are important. Here are quick first week thoughts. Liquid Glass Obviously, this is the most noticeable change. I feel mixed about it. It is very different depending on what you put in the background. If you have a bright background, the icons look extremely harsh.

Fewer and fewer people host their own website using a hosting service. Designers use Framer or Webflow or EditorX or even trying the new Figma sites. Corporate websites are usually hosted in the corporate cloud like AWS or Azure or Google Cloud. Content creators have moved on from blogging to either short form text like Bluesky or Twitter (I refuse to say X), or video content like Youtube or TikTok.

Two shows I really enjoyed in the last few years are Andor (a Star Wars saga) and The Penguin (a Batman spinoff). The reason for both is how they completely delivered an unexpected product. Andor In he case of Andor, it is a Star Wars movie that chronicles the time leading up to the first released movie, Star Wars: A New Hope Episode IV…

Who is this post for? This is a true chronicle of an experiment for my youngest son to skip college and directly enter the workforce. If you know a young person who is considering skipping college, this may be helpful to see what someone else did. Fair warning: It's long. I tried to be as concise as I could. My education experience was pretty awful.

Sometimes a large portion of the world believes something is true, despite the fact that it is not true. Here is one that is especially annoying to me. Myth: Companies use AI to auto-reject your job application based on your resume I have used multiple different recruiting tools over the years. Lever, Greenhouse, Bamboo and others. Not a single one I have used even had this feature available.

Our bodies need constant oxygen. Even a minute without it can do serious damage. Our organs, our brains, our plants, our pets, our stoves…everything needs oxygen. It is the single most important thing in our lives. We need metaphorical oxygen too. I am going to skip all of the ways kids need intellectual oxygen growing up and how our education system deprives them of it.

I’m at Figma’s annual conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Their annual event has really grown since the first one I attended almost a decade ago. Rough estimate is about 10,000 attendees, but I did not count them all. The announcements they released were fine and expected, but not really what I was interested in. The obvious one was to compete with Webflow and Framer on designer portfolios and other website projects.

I have been using Google Android phones since 2009. I was always a Windows person and never an Apple fanatic. So when Apple had the iPhone, I steered towards the cheaper alternative. I upgraded every 2 years like clockwork. A few years ago, I was traveling internationally more often and decided to give Google Fi a try. I was mostly disappointed and realized I would go back to Verizon when the time came.