Tokarski

A stream of Hillel Cooperman’s Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) 2005 presentation (”Get users to fall in love with your software - 2005″) is now available online for a brief time. If you’re as passionate about software user experiences as I am, you have to watch this (it’s about 1.25 hours long and well worth it). Hillel, a user experience guru at Microsoft, is an incredibly talented guy and inspiring speaker.After reading one of Paul Thurrott’s blog posts about the 2003 PDC version of Hillel’s presentation (see the Aero rocks Aero rocks Aero rocks… section), I unsuccessfully scoured every resource available to me for a copy of the presentation, screen shots, etc… I heard it was fantastic and wanted to get my hands on it.

I was quite pleased when I ran across a link for the 2005 version of the presentation on Hillel’s prrrl blog. Great stuff.

[Via Hillel Cooperman's prrrl]

Update: prrrl.com was replaced by jacksonfish.com sometime in late 2006 after Cooperman left Microsoft to start his own business.

Comments(0)

End of 2005 F1 season: October 16, 2005
Start of 2006 F1 season: March 12, 2006

Comments(0)

“…it’s a beautiful day…don’t let it slip away…”I love the Fall. Shorts and a sweatshirt. Sunroof open and heater on. The leaves swirling behind me on my favorite drive (believe me, they’re there in the picture above, you just have to squint to see them).

I used to speed through days without noticing the change of seasons - now I notice the subtle changes each day. The journeys definitely matter more than the destination.

Comments(0)

In addition to being a sucker for all things Apple, I’m also a sucker for all things Ideo.

Since I enjoyed The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley, I was excited to hear about his new book, “The Ten Faces of Innovation: Ideo’s Strategies for Beating the Devil’s Advocate & Driving Creativity and Innovation Throughout Your Organization.”

Normally, I’d get this through Amazon, but in my recent crusade to simplify and streamline, I’ve been getting a lot of my books through the local library (why not benefit from the tax dollars I so gladly pay?) Since this is a new release (released last week), I figured I’d have to wait a while to see it show up in my local library branch. Then, I noticed the ‘Material Request‘ link on my library’s Web site. In addition to ordering the book, it placed a ‘hold’ for me as well.

Comments(0)

Like any of the zillions of personal blogs out there, mine is mostly an exercise in self-indulgence…I enjoy getting my hands dirty from time to time to try out new tech things and to see how they work, and it provides me with a means to ‘commit to virtual extended memory’ some things I want to retain about the ‘who, what, where, and when’ that are interesting to me.And, if it yields a forum to share at least a little bit about what’s going on in my life with a small group of friends/family/acquaintances, all the better. I’ve joked before about my ‘audience’ being the one or two folks who visit out of boredom or by accident (”…I was searching for another Tokarski…”). Now, based on the wonderful wares created by the FeedBurner folks, I have means to validate my small readership guesstimate ;-> Back in mid-August when I ‘burned my feed’ (after the urging of my FeedBurner-pal Traci), I didn’t think I’d ever get above the magic number ‘2′ (e.g., me and Traci - since she, of course, would have to subscribe to my feed…seeing as she recommended it).

I log into my FeedBurner dashboard from time to time to check in and was surprised by the stats (refer to post pic). Wow, I actually hit a max of 6 folks who requested my feed in a given 24 hour period. That’s not to say that anyone actually ‘reads’ my posts…..but, I was pretty surprised.

Especially, since I only have 2 friends.

Comments(0)

The 2005 Formula 1 season only ended last week with the final race in China on October 16th. Yet, I’m already starting to wonder what I’m going to do on those Sunday mornings when there’s no F1 racing going on (I guess I could extend my Sunday morning drives…).Sadly, the season is 20 long weeks away. So, instead of enduring my quick blurbs about ‘F1: Round X of Y’, you’ll now have to endure a weekly countown to the start of the 2006 season on March 12th.

One little brightspot: in a recent issue of Autoweek, I stumbled upon a blurb about a new ‘Grand Prix Masters‘ series starting up - with an inagural race in South Africa @ Kylami, the weekend of November 11 to 13th, 2005. I pray that SpeedTV televises it. There are a lot of great names from F1 past associated with the series - some notables include: Prost, Fittipaldi, Jones, Patrese, Arnoux, Johansson, Mansell, and others.

(If you’re wondering what the heck the post image represents, it’s my first attempt at trying to visually represent the season countdown….races are on Sundays…the numbers represent the dates of all Sundays between then end of the 2005 season, October 16th and the start of the 2005 season, March 12th….there are 20 weeks between today, the 23rd, and the start of the season….if you have any suggestions for improving it, please pop me a message to tom at tokarski.com….thx)

Comments(0)

The October 24, 2005 issue of Time magazine has a good article on “How Apple Does It” (’it’ referring to Apple’s streak of innovation).

In response to the question “Where does it all come from?”, Jobs relates the “Parable of the Concept Car”:

“You know how you see a show car, and it’s really cool, and then four years later you see the production car and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory!”

“What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, ‘Nah, we can’t do that. That’s impossible.’ And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, ‘We can’t built that!’ And it gets a lot worse.”

hmmm….where have I run across that before?….

“But Jobs doesn’t just care about winning. He’s willing to lose. He has done it often enough. He’s just not willing to be lame, and that may, increasingly, be the winning approach.”

Comments(0)

Part of what I enjoy about getting new music is it’s truly an immersive, multimedia experience for me - I love reading through the liner notes and examining the CD case artwork, all while listening to the CD for the first time (…boy, I really miss the days of album cover art and liner notes…). That’s one of the reasons I still buy CDs, even though I am a frequent iTMS music purchaser and use my iPod/iMac exclusively for listening to music.Yesterday, I picked up a couple of CDs at the local Best Buy and went through my usual routine. As I was looking over one of the CD cases, I noticed a logo / badge in one corner on the back (pictured above). I had just plunked down some $$ to legally buy some music, yet the record label (or whoever was responsible for putting that damned badge on the case) felt the need to remind me that ‘unauthorized copying is punishable under federal law.’

Additional, dramatic changes to the music industry can’t happen quickly enough…

Comments(0)

The Chinese GP marked the end of the season and formalized Renault’s constructors championship.Race Result: Alonso, Räikkönen, R. Schumacher

Driver’s Championship Result (top three): Alsonso - 133, Räikkönen - 112, M. Schumacher - 62

Constructor’s Championship Result (top three): Renault - 191, McLaren-Mercedes - 182, Ferrari - 100

It’s time for me to go into withdrawal, as F1 is on hiatus until the opening round of the 2006 season, expected to begin in Bahrain on March 12.

Comments(0)

I love James Bond and have incredibly fond memories of growing up and eagerly waiting for the next installment in the series. My all-time favorite Bond was Sean Connery - followed by the short stint of George Lazenby.It’s official - Daniel Craig is 007.

I have nothing against Daniel Craig - but he doesn’t match my mental picture of what a Bond should look like - maybe I just haven’t seen enough of his movies (I didn’t quite warm to his character in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider).

Here’s to hoping he does a wonderful and unique interpretation of the role.

Comments(0)