Reason being: I have a very clear memory from my college varsity volleyball days of my teammate Erin Ford move from the middle to a perfect right-side swing attack, hit past slow blockers for the kill down the line, then keep falling to the floor with a torn-up knee. In the middle of a perfectly executed fake-out attack, away from any other players or obstacles, Erin tore one of the major ligaments in her knee.

It has bothered me since. As we sat together on the bench, two* injured middle hitters watching the season go on without us, I kept replaying Erin’s attack in my head, looking for the tweak to her knee while she was in the air. It never made sense. So you can imagine my cheer to find Madam Fathom’s piece on cognitive activity and ACL tears. Women disproportionately suffer through ACL tears, and ACL tears are often due to unanticipated events rather than collisions or contact.

I remember Erin Ford was a fraction of a second behind the right-side attack, but made up for it with a line shot for a point. Being late on the attack could mean she didn’t expect KDA would set that attack out of the options available (it’s not a common attack), or just about anything else…say the 6 players hollering on the other side of the net, a yelling crowd and a fast-moving ball to jump and hit in a irregular sneak-attack play. There’s an endless list of possible causes of an “off guard” moment to push the body over its limits.

The twist added by Madam Fathom—or at least the way to get my attention and admiration—is that she cites an unusual source for academic-types: David Foster Wallace’s essay “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart”, from the excellent book Consider the Lobster. DFW’s essay covers his bewilderment about why a brilliant athlete like Tracy Austin could write an awful memoir, one that describes none of the intense, instinctual cognitive immersion athletes develop for their chosen sports, nor even strategy observations during the game. To DFW, Ms. Austin’s memior might as well not have been about tennis, at least not playing it at an exceptional level. He argues that exceptional athletes might have a unique, pre-cognitive focus, that overrules what could be damaging second-guessing and doubt.

Ms. Fathom’s analysis of DFW’s point is worth a read, specifically. But her main conclusion is that “if the rest of us were under such circumstances [as intensive athletics], we would founder and crumple and fail precisely because we think too much”.

So there ya go, Erin Ford, 8 years after the fact. Cognition experts to DFW to you.

* I’d sprained both ankles (not simultaneously) just a few weeks before

Out of the 350+ folks in attendance, an hands-up poll showed job “titles” were split 45–45 between web designers and web developers, with the other 10% made up of copywriters, marketing, PMs, etc. I don’t recall if the speakers polled types of employment—freelance, small company, large company, etc.—but really I wish they had. In fact, I wish demographics of web-related conference attendees were always available, and something we could study and refer to as a community.

All the AEA presentations were top-rate, but Jeffrey Zeldman’s “Selling Design” presentation, in particular, helped me focus my thoughts on a fragment of the audience that has been under-addressed in articles, conferences and blog posts. Mr. Zeldman’s presentation was about making the case for design thinking and UX, primarily using the vocabulary of freelancing (with extrapolation, a company-bound UX worker could think of bosses as clients). Likewise, other presentations at AEA Seattle also swung back and forth between UX attitudes and techniques for multi-discipline freelancers and corporate UX professionals.

But here’s the thing: Collecting UX tips and tricks to take back to freelance or defined corporate work is wonderful. But what about people trying to carve a UX role out of resistant or ignorant companies?

What’s not addressed is people working in crap jobs. Places where users are paid only lip service, if anything. Places where design is mostly high-fidelity visual mockups. Places where UXD is fragmented (if anything) across PMs, devs, managers, founders, executives and designers.

The good fight, in those situations, is to try to develop an awareness of UXD. The good fight is to start practicing UX tools and techniques individually, and show their effectiveness to team members. The good fight is to get buy-in from those currently owning fragments of UX, and solidify support and awareness into one position in the company, which then advocates users to upper-management in a happy, peaceful, enlightened process.

Yeah, right. What could go wrong there?

My own experience is that if that fight sours, it can do more damage to a team, company and UX professional than good. Resistance can range from passivity and disregard, to active politics and hostility. The prevailing advice, from that mostly targeted at freelancers, is to drop a “bad client”. Quitting is always an option. But then how do people get their feet in the door as a UX professionals? Leaving a job is no easy thing, even if you’re that clear-minded about it.

The situation is exceptionally difficult to fix, which is why it has been swept under the rug by educators, I think.

…

I have to say I don’t have any easy, clear thoughts about such complex problems. But I’m certain I’ll post more on this, as I work it out. I primarily wanted to articulate the thought.

I’ve tried del.icio.us, bluedot and other social bookmarking services in the past. The only one that really fit my needs was del.icio.us, and even then, I use it is a research-ready collection of articles on user-centered design. Del.icio.us is just too clinical for my personal bookmarking, but it does work well for sharing research. Maybe my organizational methods are on a different wavelength than most people (likely), but if it doesn’t fit in my Firefox bookmarks, I really don’t need it weighing on my mind as something to which I need to attend.

I’ve updated it a bit today, with things that I could recall being worth sharing. Yes, it’s mostly XKCD.com comics. They’re funny.

While they’re not definitive articles about unique topics, I’m pleased with them. I got a chance to see the author’s side of the Digital Web editing process, and see my esteemed colleagues Carolyn and Kerri at work with my somewhat scattered book review. I learned a lot about flow, editing and the timbre of Digital Web’s voice in articles. All great lessons. And I now have my first published writing up on Dig-Web. Hopefully the pieces in various shades of “draft” will now go more smoothly.

Thanks, fellow staffers!

Go check out Lost Cog.

I’d like to note a few things about its development. More than a few intelligent, awesome people spoke with me about the underlying themes and questions. Without their help and encouragement, I would have kept my inner turmoil about the tech industry—well—inner. And there are far too many smart people keeping their observations about problems in the industry internal, to the detriment of us all, I believe. The tech industry is too new and raw to keep its maturity evolution strictly a top-down process. It employs some smart people, yet it undervalues or even ignores their analysis.

My interest in management theory comes out of personal discomfort with what I’ve experienced so far, in my career. I’m happy to admit my expectations were high, though. I was raised by one of the best managers in Seattle: my dad, Tim Fehr, who worked for Boeing his entire career. Tim Fehr (hereafter, Dad) started as an engineer within Boeing, eventually working up to being a senior VP, tasked with training many of Boeing’s top-brass in his management style. Dad underplays it, but my childhood was professionally managed by the best of the best. My analysis of management is strongly informed by a childhood absorbing Boeing’s management theory from my dad, and his take on management in a competitive, geeky industry not unlike the tech industry. So now I find myself reading management-theory books for fun, as an echo of management strategies played out on the kitchen table of my childhood, with salt and pepper shakers representing stakeholders, and the napkin holder representing the Board.

On the geek side, Lost Cog represents the beginning of my summer project of learning new skills: Ruby on Rails, domaining and improving my design and writing abilities. Lost Cog’s visual design tries hard to follow both grid-based design and a strong, mathematic attention to vertical rhythm, both hot topics in web design. It also runs on Garrett Murray’s writing-focused, RoR CMS SimpleLog, which gives me a working app for tinkering with RoR. Simplelog is a great project all the way around, and a good learning foundation for subsequent projects. (I’m a good ways into my first real Rails app, currently.)

With Lost Cog, I have a focused place to write about my ongoing argument about my career and industry, hopefully with an editorial overtone, rather than personal. I’ll cross-post summaries of big topics on Lost Cog here, of course, but I hope to keep Syncretic Conundra devoted to my own technical and design topics. More than a few posts are in “draft” status.

In the meantime, my work on those side-projects spawned my first “free theme” contribution to a CMS system! Woo! Wait, let me back up a bit…. Blue Flavor recently added Garrett Murray to their roster. I got a chance to meet Garrett at SXSW, and learn a bit about his own awesome side-project, a Rails-based blogging CMS called Simplelog. Being a Seattle geek, and friends of the Blue Flavor guys, it was, in effect, a challenge to start using Simplelog. So that I might rock Simplelog on my side-projects (and someday soon this blog, too), I had to learn a bunch of things I’d promised myself to learn—terminal access via a Mac, server installs via DreamHost, MySQL and a bit of Ruby on Rails. A secondary goal is to use my side-projects on Simplelog as a springboard for learning more Rails, too.

After a bit of an uphill battle to get Simplelog up and running in a few places, the obvious next-step was to customize the UI and layout. UI design brought in a secondary goal of mine—doing a bit of design work, and building a CSS base that used em-based grids, em-based scaling, vertical rhythm and some of the latest/greatest CSS practices. The task was really rewarding, because I’ve struggled with vertical rhythm and grid design in the past, trying to add it onto and existing project, rather than starting with a grid as the base. Much better to start, rather than add.

Without further ado, I give you “Stripes”! It’s linked within Simplelog’s wiki, so hopefully some folks might adopt it as their design, or as a solid basis for CSS-based sites that want to use a vertical-rhythym/baseline grid system, too. In the meantime, you can see it in effect on the pre-launch of one of my side-projects, too: The Society of the Tap & Pint.

Download Stripes over here.

Technorati tag stopcyberbullying

Related to that, two days ago I posted a short “news” item on Digital Web with some of my thoughts on recent instances of the Internet’s “underbelly” rising up to shock the web-standards/blogger community. It took me a good long while to research and write, but I felt compelled to try to find some conclusions from the disparate events. Primarily, I wanted to look at the momentum added by the crappy events to the growing need to shape web-standard design/development into a solidly defined craft. During my research, I had the good fortune to chat with Kerri Hicks—an extremely talented fellow staff member at Digital Web—about the state of the industry. Kerri has a rich background and a very smart perspective about our industry, and its current state of waffling between what’s almost cults-of-personality and a real, defined industry.

The way I see it, we’re at a crossroads. Define it as a true discipline, like its sister industries, or risk leaving behind those of us who do web-standards web design/development in a corporate environment. To my perspective, the industry is led by the freelance/consultancy mentality—that’s the path to the comfort, good work and glory of web-standards. But considering the impact of the sub-group on the acceptance and business momentum for web-standards and progressive web ideas, the ignoring that segment seems dumb. But we do it, to some extent, in conference panel topics, blog posts, even articles in our community publications like Digital Web. How do we better address people on the fringes of web-standards at our conferences, events and in our day-to-day geek interactions?

I’m sure I’ll post more on this as the week and conversation continues.

Since this site is my own toybox, I use these pages to tinker with new CSS effects until I think they’re ready to go into my professional UX work. One effect I have in development is borders on page elements and links, and how they work throughout different interactive states. Browser support for advanced border effects isn’t stellar, but it does graceful degrade down to IE6 and alt stylesheets can cover beyond that in business settings. Based on the accessibility/usability notion that one shouldn’t rely on color alone to convey interactivity, I added border density changes and background-color changes to emphasize each interactive state distinctly.

One of the style goals of “broadsheet” is to mimic old wild-west typeface flourishes, best summed up in Larabee’s typeface “Vanilla Whale”. Top and bottom borders comes pretty close, in my mind. Eventually, I’d love to either get CSS to create the signature diagonal linking words like “&”, but I might also just sIFR select pieces in Larabee’s typeface itself, because I love his work. Lastly on the aesthetic side, I have a “low class” design idea brewing, in response to B-movies and Christopher Fahey’s “class” panel at SXSW. Think of “broadsheet” as the first salvo.

Another goal for “broadsheet” was to pack my navigation elements full of links to things I want referenced/linked/crawled. I didn’t want it to distract too much from the major pieces, so I tried to use size to indicate main components and supplemental information or sub-categories. I tried to visually mark links that open external sites, but also collect them into meaningful groups. The end result is really a “sentence” style, with B-movie, tabloid wording, to boot. Final steps: I need to complete work on my “digital self” page, which is supposed to be an “about me” page, but I’m having trouble writing anything satisfactory, so for now it’s all external links.

Coincidentally around the same time as I started my little project, Jeffrey Zeldman posted about the redesign of Happy Cog, which uses “sentence” navigation. And another friend, Garrett Murray, recently redesigned his blog Maniacal Rage with a similar “sentence”-based style and a killer hover effect. Garrett, in turn, credits Megnut for his design, which also uses ellipses and begins to wrap back to my “broadsheet” derivative.

One happy, segmented circle of people experimenting with navigation.

In the middle of March of last year (2006), suddenly the blogs of most professional web designers, web developers and geeks were awash in breathless reviews of SXSW Interactive (hereafter SXSWi), enthusiasm and a “see ya next year” summer camp vibe. I didn’t really see the connection or over-aching theme, so I chalked it up to general geekiness and self-reference among blogs I read, and went on my merry feed-reading away.

This year, I had the great good fortune, due to my role as Prod Mgr with Digital Web Magazine, to attend the pre-meetup to SXSWi, Web Directions North (hereafter WDN; everybody loves acronyms—you do, don’t lie). WDN was absolutely fantastic, and truly a top-notch event in its own right. Two days of fabulous event organization, high-quality panels, meeting talented web geeks and lots of Wii, beer, food and fun. Add in two more days of geekery on the slopes of Whistler/Blackcomb—with Microsoft generously covering the bar tab in a real, hearty, beer-fueled embrace of the web-standards community—and I really can’t think of a more enjoyable career-related thing I’ve ever done. Or, even, if you count it among my vacations.

After WDN, my Dig-Web boss, Nick Finck, started pestering me about “Southby”, as it is called by some indeterminate number of geeks too lazy to say the whole name. After a sprint session to find out if my day job would cover any of it, I ended up taking vacation days to attend. (I hope it’s not a trend, but I’ll still do it every year if need be.) Blue Flavor kindly loaned bed space, and I moseyed into Austin, TX, with a set of quasi-ironic authentic cowboy boots…and absolutely NO idea of what would come.

I’m not going to review individual panels and events, since the are so thoroughly covered by just about every other blog I read. But I would like to comment on the character and quality of geeks at SXSWi. I’ve never met such a warm, engaging, outgoing group, and I’m thrilled to call them my peers. Every individual I met was sincere, eager to geek-out about any kind of topic, and genuinely stoked to be at SXSWi. I met more people than I could list (or spell), including most of the talented geeks who write the books, blogs and articles that get my through my day job. I tried my best to express my thanks as the festivities closed, but undoubtedly I missed a few hundred. To all—you goddamn rock, “see ya next year”.

The reason I wanted to comment comes from an observation, then a discussion I had with the ardent Jeremy Keith. I’m still taken aback by the number of people I met who blow apart the mold that geeks are introverted and flawed, socially. Most people I met were so strong of character, personality and elan* it was genuinely surprising. Which leaves me to wonder why. What is it about the public-facing side of the Web that attracts such a diverse group of people, with such similar senses of humor, geekery, passions and personality quirks? Sure, creative types are often strong on opinion, and even front-end programming has a strong creative element. And geeks are compelled by an internal need to join any nearby geekery, which is where SXSWi gets its heart.

But I wonder if we are shaped in personality by the inanity of the browser-wars? Slogging through W3C specs? Internalizing the cascading nature of CSS? Tabled designs, and the latter purging of? I don’t think blogs are the commonality—those also seem to me to be symptomatic of a similar strain in personalities, rather than the spark. I’m sure I’ll continue to think more on the matter, as the year continues. But, the net effect is SXSWi was such a massive confidence booster to me, as a person, as a geek and as a career woman, that I will always be grateful. I’d be remiss if I didn’t call out awe-inspiring conversations with Nick Finck, Andy Budd, Dan Rubin, Dave Shea, Derek Featherstone and Bokardo, aka Joshua Porter. All those gentlemen took moments out of their socializing to have frank discussions with me about the nature of this industry, and I’m proud take their advice to heart.

So, until next year, I will see you all online, and continually lament I don’t get to see you all in person nearly as often as I like. Which would be daily. really.

* arch-nemesis, look it up.

“‘Young Digerati are the nation’s tech-savvy singles and couples living in fashionable neighborhoods on the urban fringe. Affluent, highly educated and ethnically mixed, Young Digerati communities are typically filled with trendy apartments and condos, fitness clubs and clothing boutiques, casual restaurants and all types of bars-from juice to coffee to microbrew.’

The lifestyle and media behaviors they are more likely than the general population to engage in, according to Claritas, are: shopping at Banana Republic, Amazon.com and Bloomingdale’s, going snowboarding and scuba diving, visiting spas, spending more than $3000 on foreign travel in the past year, watching IFC, Showtime and HBO, and driving an Audi A4. Sound familiar? There are even more statistics that can be gathered about the lifestyles of this segment, as shown here.”

It’s an S4, thank you very much.

Now, I think removing Monster profiles was probably a good thing—that job board has been spammed and mobbed into a C- or D-grade resource for anyone who works with a computer. “Cook Looking For Something Different in Computers”, indeed. But the anecdote repetition got me thinking about the ethics involved in these company’s tactics,hubristic as they are. Persecuting employees for perceived job searching activity is unethical. On company time, I can’t fault HR for the completely deluded notion that employes devote every minute of their time at work to the company’s bottom line. Ideally, that should be a hallmark of the professionalism and respect employees bring to a good, self-respecting job. But confronting employees about their out-of-work activities on career-related websites due to assumptions about job searching is wrong—wholly and with very, very few shades of grey.

As awareness of digital identities increases, employers are learning that the internet is a great way to research candidates for the stains bleached out of résumés. Awareness is only growing; the media love a good tech feature about college-fresh job candidates dropped from consideration due to the archive of their college bong-huffing, hazing, sub-human, foul-mouthed behavior on MySpace. As an infrequent hiring manager, I can see the appeal. But modern HR teams have yet to really describe (to me, at least) how googling a candidate’s past differs from asking questions that bring out potentially discriminatory information. You can’t ask a candidate, “what are your late-night hobbies”, but you can google it. Someone want to clarify where the line is?

Employees, on the other hand, are just as quick as HR teams to realize the trouble spot of questionable digital wake. As a result, we get an ever-increasing collection of websites and services catering to digital “self” management, like Naymz, ClaimID, Jobster and others. But beyond denying the fact you are a real flesh-and-blood-and-stupidity human being, employees quickly learn that managing their digital self also helps position themselves in their field. Search results concerning “’Tiff Fehr’ [vilified drug of choice]” might be of interest to future employers, but the results for “’Tiff Fehr’ web developer” is equally helpful to me. Most job boards these days not only address job opportunities, but also hit up identity management and networking. Any employee worth their salt sees the importance of the latter two. Passive, exploratory job searching is just another research angle. It’s in your careerist interest to keep tabs on shifting job roles, pay scales, team composition and education backgrounds.

To me, this is where it gets muddy—it’s okay for HR to do or hire out “compensation analyses” and “hierarchy level implementations” that affect your skills, position and pay, but it’s not okay for you to keep tabs on tools that help your career research (or at least get caught near them). I’m studying Ajax and DOM scripting because it showed up on peer resumes, education backgrounds, and, most importantly, job descriptions for companies and projects in which I want to be involved. No HR person made that benevolent recommendation to me, and none have ever expressed that level of interest in what I do, even if they hired me.

Passive job searching via RSS—or, hell, actively at the sites themselves—is now so intertwined with being aware of your industry and career that it’s laughable to think it can be quashed with questionably ethical company policy. Any company that does so should be regarded with skepticism, if not a bit of contempt for purely reactive policies. Which encourages job searching. And, in the immortal words of Tevin Campbell (á la Prince), we go ’round and ’round and ’round.

“Can you tell me where we goin’ to?
Can you tell me what it is
We really wanna find?
Is the truth really there?
Or is it right under our hair?
For all we know it’s been there all the time.

I say, nothin’ comes from dreamers but dreams.
I say, sittin at night all in our bowl (TF - ?!)
While everyone else is down the street.
Nothin’ comes from talkers but sound (oh yeah).
We can talk all we want to
But the world still goes around and round.

Round and Round.(Ooh hoo)
We go round and round and round
And what we’re lookin’ for still isn’t found.”

Goddamnit all to hell, now that’s stuck in my head.

I still have my tabby, but it’s days of use are numbered. I bought a slick matte black MacBook.  I looked at new tabbys, but just couldn’t find the same feature fluidity and pricing I wanted.  At at the heart of it, I need something better than 512MB RAM and 1024×800 that won’t get in my way with a bunch of Vista.  While I will love my tabby’s mouse equivalents to my dying day, the trackpads on Macs isn’t as awful as I feared.  In fact, I’m actually becoming mildly efficient at it.  As for my poor tabby, I think I might use it to try out some Linux experiments, or turn it into a glorified GPS navigation system, since it perfectly matches the paint of my darlin’ S4.  …Maybe a hacky touchscreen remote control for our growing entertainment system, or a remote cat monitoring system so I can persecute our WRECs (WRetched Excuse for Cats) from work.  I just don’t know yet.

To sum up, I’m making a new resolution to give up my delusions of being an ink blogger, and be a better blogger in general.  I give it…2 weeks before I manage to rationalize my way out of it.

* I’m stuck in an alliterative loop right now, due to the fact Jake asked me to read Tom Robbins‘ “Wild Ducks Flying Backward”.  Robbins, to my mind, is florid.  He’s amusing, but as a conceit rather than in substance.  My general impression is that I’m wading through a gassy swamp of alliteration and assonance, with infrequent will-o-the-wisp moments of brilliance which were anticlimacticized (to coin a word) by friends before I even got to them.   But primarily it is lots of mossy, decaying cleverness and word games, with a whiff of sulfur.  Good book, Jake—don’t take my meaning the wrong way.  But he reminds me of Dickens.  Certainly no Twain or Gogol.

My favorite indie music blog is DoCopenhagen (as in, “the people running this blog want these bands we like to play Copenhagen, Denmark, please”).  They came to my attention last year with a stellar list of the Top 50 music videos for 2005.  Well, the 2006 edition is out, and YouTube-friendly.  Check it out.  Some awesome videos.

DoCopenhagen’s Top 50 Music Videos of 2006

My favorite from the year is Field Music.  Maybe I’ve spent too much of the year whiteboarding.

Two common suggestions to increase voting turn-out at largely meaningless mid-term voting:

• Make it mandatory
• Make it a federal holiday

Neither are likely, let’s be honest. They make too much sense.

My new favorite idea to improve voting turn-out comes from the Freakonomics blog:  Abolish polling and all the navel-gazing, run-up bullshit that makes voting an underwhelming civil grudge. Make it a mystery again—popular convergence, not mass manuipulation. I’d sure like to feel less like a mindless drone, voting right along with my demographic, socio-economic and homophylic group. I did get a kick out of voting against my theoretical self-interest in our Washington State propositions offering up prudish interpretations of the estate tax and lap dances. Note to Seattle’s *two* strip-clubs:  lap dances okay within a 4-foot radius!

Then again, if polling, punditry and patronization were abolished, what would “The Daily Show” & Colbert mock?

Mock, mock, mock. “Don’t knock my smock or I’ll clean your clock.“