Cool! This usability tool for the Mac captures a a user’s interactions with the computer and uses the built in iSight camera to capture their facial expressions and gestures.
I need to give this a shot at some point.
Author Archives: admin
AIDS/Lifecycle 8 Web Page
October 1, 2008 – 00:58
My new AIDS/Lifeycle 8 web page is now up (and ready to accept donations)! I haven’t put anything on there yet… but here’s the URL.
Thanks for the video Perry and some ALC memories
September 30, 2008 – 23:59
A friend of mine who I haven’t seen since college (you don’t want to know how long ago that was) sent a nice surprise. He taped the closing ceremonies for AIDS/Lifecycle 7, compiled the highlights and sent it to me! AWESOME! Thanks Perry. It brought back a lot of memories!
While there are many highlights in my life like graduating from college, meeting my wife, getting married and having children, this event is a little different. I’ve never done anything to challenge myself at this level. Now that several months have gone since the ride, I’ve had time to think what I walked away with.
First of all, I’ve never challenged myself in this way. This ride took its toll not just physically, but mentally and emotionally.
Riding great distances on a daily basis is an incredible feat, particularly when I’ve never done anything like this. This ride was the first time I ever rode beyond 70-miles, and to do it on consecutive days… even I was surprised.
Mentally, the ride is what you make of it… there’s a good chunk of solitary time, where it’s me, my bike and the road. There were many friendly people along the way, both on bikes, the support crews, as well as well wishers along the way… everyone supported each other, and made light of the great distances we were all traveling together. I had a lot of time to think about… well… everything.
Emotionally, there were some incredible personal milestones… there were moments along the way when emotions were so incredibly strong that tears would go streaming down for no particular reason. Maybe the concept of seeing familiar things I’ve seen maybe hundreds of times and knowing their relative distance from home. Then there’s the times I just wanted to quit from mental exhaustion. Ironically, physical exhaustion never got me. It was all the tricks my mind played on me, telling me that I can’t go on. Then it reminded me of everyone who thought I was crazy for doing this ride, who didn’t believe that I could make it to Los Angeles. I cried at those too because I started believing them.
Thing single most powerful personal event during the ride was day 6 – 90 miles from Lompoc to Ventura, when I almost quit several times in the last 25 miles from Ventura. I was exhausted with only 1 rest stop remaining. Had I stopped, I might have quit and taken the bus into camp. Thinking back on it, while it might seem like a small decision, it was one that made me think about why I did the ride. More importantly, if I quit, everyone who told me that I couldn’t make it would have been right. There was no way I was going to let any of them gloat… I realized that I had to prove to myself that I could complete this leg of the ride.
I made the conscious decision to skip remaining stops because getting off my biked spelled certain defeat. Needless to say, I started getting emotional — my mind was telling me to stop and it started tricking my body into thinking that I needed to stop too. It’s a good thing I didn’t listen to my mind — once I merged onto 101 from Highway 1 along the Ventura Freeway, I resided on the fact I was going to complete this leg and got my rhythm going and made it into Ventura… and at the end, I was still able dismount without falling off my bike 
In Ventura, my parents, my son and my friend Al (we were the only two who ended up riding of a much larger group) were waiting. From a distance, I could see that they recognized me and I could see my mom starting to cry. My dad, who’s normally not an emotional person was also getting a little emotional. Any doubts they had about me completing the ride were gone. More importantly, I broke mental barriers to complete what I thought was going to be impossible.
The next day was an easy ride into Los Angeles.
Oh yeah… if you don’t already know… if one time isn’t enough… I’m officially registered for AIDS/Lifecycle 8!
Kodak Theatre HD Player
September 18, 2008 – 23:19
Kodak Theatre
I saw this in an e-mail blast and thought … wow… who’s going to pay $300 for an over designed media reader. Sure it will retrieve photos from a networked PC and play networked music… but so does AppleTV… for less!
Kodak didn’t think this thing through…. products that cost far less have failed. Even at a lower pricepoint, it really doesn’t provide any sort of additional value other than making a HD television an oversized digital photo frame.
Kodak has an incredible amount of value in its brand, but their products are simply sub-par when compared to companies like Sony, Canon and Nikon. They need to concentrate on making better cameras, not overpriced gadgets.
Kodak could provide more value by:
- It had a large harddrive, say 1 terabyte for transferring photos and video from your digital camera / media
- Cheaper
- Provide better value — tie to the Kodak Gallery service as a value add (and an upsell for that matter). I’m thinking a better implementation of .Mac… err…. sorry… MobileMe. Sychronized backups with an online service with an option to purchase prints through a single interface. With no storage limits for their premier service and their terms of service, talk about auto backup galore!
- Connect to other photo services, allowing file uploading to Flickr, Photbucket, etc….
- Provide a social networking option to Kodak Gallery to retrieve photos from friends and family (it’s kind of there now, but is nowhere near social)
Just some thoughts….
The World of Tomorrow/Today – Disneyland and User Experience
August 17, 2008 – 09:42
Walt Disney was such an incredible visionary, and someone who understood the importance of customer experience in traditional commerce. The more I examine successful models of business, whether online or traditional storefronts, this is becoming a standard expectation of consumers. While some people may dismiss rich interface applications (RIA’s) as unnecessary to usability, consumer tastes are changing. These experience help differentiate one business from another, but more importantly how that business is positioned within a customer’s mind. Think about the following:
- Disneyland vs Great America
- Target vs Walmart
- Smart&Final vs Costco
- Circuit City vs Best Buy vs Fry’s Electronics
- Apple vs Dell/HP/Microsoft
While Smart & Final vs Costco seems a bit odd, S&F is positioning itself as the alternative to Costco… it’s a lot like Budget Rent-a-car comparing themselves to Hertz. It’s an extremely long, steep hill to get people to think about these companies as equal or better than the dominating company. However, in terms of experience, each one of these companies elicits certain positive and negative mental experiences… it’s those experiences that customer’s walk away with and those customers have the potential of influencing the experience of those who have never visited these businesses.
I think this is what separates companies like Apple and Disney from the rest of the pack. Sony’s pretty good, particularly after they launched their Sony Style stores — they are able to control the experience of how their products are displayed and sold. Apple hit it on the head decades ago with their emphasis on user experience and industrial design.
The latest trend I’ve been seeing is branding campaigns from Dell and HP. For me, Dell will always be Dell, but I’ve been impressed with HP’s “The computer is personal again” branding campaign, and their introduction of lifestyle notoriety like Shaun White, Gwen Stafani and Jake Burton. Their latest campaign for the HP TouchSmart PC is particularly impressive — where HP tries to evoke the magic of Disney’s Fantasia by equating the touch screen experience to magic (and it is a pretty cool experience). The question for me is whether or not HP will be able to deliver the magic.
On a lighter side, when I saw this, I thought about how unintentionally, Walt Disney might have predicted the world of tomorrow’s transportation — gridlock. While still tons of fun, he was even able to simulate what it would feel like having to wait to get to the end of your destination
Turning off the annoying system beep in VMWare running Linux
July 28, 2008 – 12:00
Searching high and low, I tried everything to stop by system from producing an annoying system beep from Linux running in VMWare Player.
It was simple:
sudo modprobe -r pcspkr
For a more permanent solution, add blacklist pcspkr to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.
Working on a new portfolio site…
June 26, 2008 – 02:20
I’m in the process of revamping the non-blog portion of this site (which technically doesn’t currently exist after moving from thecell.com). The new version will incorporate some pretty nifty things, including a handful of jQuery based interactivity.
Now that I’ve got a template that I’m relatively happy with (still need to do some treatments to some DIVs), I’m converting some new content pages.
Here’s a sneak… http://www.victorsolanoy.com/webdesign
San Jose Skyline Photo on CreaTV – San Jose Community Channel
June 25, 2008 – 14:14
I just gave permission for the use of one of my photos for a video spot on CreaTV… In the past, the photo was also used by CNN… kinda cool, eh.
Photos from AIDS/Lifecycle 7
June 17, 2008 – 09:18
I’m slowly putting the photos up on Flickr. I’m not editing the photos very much. I’m mostly weeding out mis-shots.
Travis Wise on Flickr followed the ride and got excellent shots. If you go through the photos, you’ll find me talking to Angela on the phone. His photo collection can be found at Travis’ ALC7 Photo Collection.
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