Charles Parra

Twitter Updates for 2007-12-18

admin — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 02:59:59 +0000

Back at the apt after a long day at work. Looking forward to playing with my blog or playing around with Hulu. Just got my Hulu beta acc … #
Catching up with email and wishing that someone will soon reinvent the email client. There has to be a better way to self-organize an inbox. #

Favorite insight from Designing Interactions

admin — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 02:36:29 +0000

Core design skills as described in “Designing Interactions” by Bill Moggridge:

• To synthesize a solution from all of the relevant constraints, understanding everything that
will make a difference to the result.
• To frame, or reframe, the problem and objective.
• To create and envision alternatives.
• To select from those alternatives, knowing intuitively how to choose the best approach.
• To visualize and prototype the intended solution.

I remember these as Filter -> Restate -> Sketch

What a mess

admin — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 02:12:00 +0000

Looks like I’ve gone overboard with all of the plugins clogging up the side panels. I have to get around to cleaning up the site design to improve the signal to noise ratio. The goal is still to wire in as many connections to the web sites that I touch on a regular basis so as to have this blog act as an aggregation node.

I think I get Twitter now

admin — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 03:59:47 +0000

But I’m still not twittering.

I wanted to look into another way to capture and record what I’m doing throughout the day in order to get some more insight into the Twitter phenomenon. Call me lazy, but I would rather not have to bother with posting twitter messages all day long.

So I decided to focus in on something that occupies a major portion of my day, which is listening to music. So I rigged up my blog thru Last FM, and now I have a historical record of the music I’ve been listening to. And since we are in the holiday season, and my birthday is coming up in February, I thought it would be fun to include my Amazon wishlist on the blog using the Widgizit widget. Seems like some more twittering.

The same path of exploration led me to a Word Press widget that allows me to showcase Amazon items. So now I have a list of the books I am currently reading twittering away on my blog.

Just a small start. Now I need to figure out how to export my Delicious Library to Amazon’s Your Media Library in order to expose a list of all the books I own. Small beginnings…

Hello world!

admin — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 21:00:40 +0000

Today’s as good a day as any other to get this started. I’ve managed to resist creating a weblog up to now. My reasons for not blogging are many, and I’ll probably write about some of those reasons in a future post, but for now I wanted to kick this off with a declaration of some self-imposed ground rules. Note that the ground rules apply to me not you. If you happen across this blog, and find a thread that catches your interest, then feel free to join in and contribute to the conversation. The only request I have for visitors to this site is that they adhere to the code of conduct that I am adopting from Wikipedia. Some starter ground rules

Don’t directly discuss anything you are currently working on. - I’ve been a technology consultant, and am currently the director of product management for an internet media company. I have to respect the confidentiality that my employer and clients expect of me.
This is a blog and not a personal journal. - I write to share thoughts about things that relate to my professional life. I have personal interests that are related to music and culture. To the extent that those interests are aligned with my professional interests, I’ll write about them.
Look to engage an audience of individuals who share your interests, but not necessarily your opinions. - I seek to elicit an alternative perspective rather than amplify my own.

And so it begins