Reading a good book about Interface design, published, interestingly enough, by Sun and Prentice Hall: Designing Visual Interfaces. Up to about page 65 so far; they go through the mid 90’s incarnations of Windows, NeXTStep and MacOS, and use examples like the old batch process window from DeBabelizer (you know the one I mean) and the original General Controls Panel for System 6.0.3. I find it very funny that almost every example they use of NeXTStep is treated with praise. Here’s a quote they include which caught my eye:
What is simple should be treated simply, what is difficult should be reduced to the simplest terms.
Josef Müller-Brockmann
The Graphic Designer and his Design Problems
I got most of the stuff on the Road Warrior (2nd partition removable drive) backed up onto the NT UAM volume last night; there’s something like 3.5 gigs of MP3’s that need to be burned to CD pretty quickly. (!!!) Tonight I need to get all the residual stuff off of Massachusetts (first partition removable drive) and backed up; Then I have to set up High Mass (internal drive) with all the settings and applications. That should be most of the evening right there. Then, flatten and wait out Andy to see if he wants it back. If Sean is with him, I’m sorta screwed. (Sean bought the drive and installed it for me.)
Cheap SCSI drives are about $70 at Other World Computing, but I’d also like to look into a FireWire enclosure for my USB drive- that thing is slow as dirt, but it works.
- Back up Massachusetts –> NT drive
- Back up LifeBuoy –> NT drive
- Empty Lifebuoy and copy Massachusetts
- Copy ALL settings for Massachusetts and document
- Set up High Mass and rename
- Wipe Mass and Road Warrior.
- Replace RAM in Jen’s laptop.
From what the man tells me, my Globe posters should have been shipped by now, but my check hasn’t cleared yet.
Much is being said about the Dot-Com survivor set. All the examples given are the ‘poor, shocked ex-employees’ in San Francisco, who miss their free Frappuccinos and roof parties and foosball tables in the break room. My girlfriend is a dot-com ‘survivor’; I know a few other folks who are too. She is worried because she doesn’t have a job right now, but she’s not bitching about the fact that she misses free sodas in the cafeteria, or First Fridays, or the ‘dot-com’ atmosphere.