Category: glamorous

My Glamorous Life

  • The End

    The End

    ON THIS DAY in 1971, Pamela Courson found Doors frontman Jim Morrison dead in the bathtub of their Paris apartment. The cause of death was heart failure. No autopsy was performed. Morrison was 27. A…

  • Underdubbed

    Underdubbed

    When my brother Pete and I were kids, and our parents were out of town, we ditched school for a week and cut an “album” by recording backing tracks to my dad’s reel-to-reel, then live…

  • She’s the Boss.

    She’s the Boss.

    She is not here to eat. She is here to ensure my compliance.

  • My UX Superpower: Nothing Works!

    My UX Superpower: Nothing Works!

    Maybe I’m special. Or unlucky. But things that supposedly work intuitively for most users tend to fail spectacularly for me.  After stints in academia, journalism, advertising, and music, I poured myself into web design in…

  • Pete’s Presence

    Pete’s Presence

    It was a spring that felt more like winter last week in New York; suddenly it feels like summer. After my air-conditioned bedroom, the living room and kitchen was like a walk-in oven. A weirdly…

  • Too Many Notes

    Too Many Notes

    Lately, in work conversations, I find myself fighting a lifelong tendency to provide way more context than is absolutely required. If you ask me to okay your work, for example, I may respond with an…

  • My brother, the rhythmic conceptualist

    My brother, the rhythmic conceptualist

    Remembrance of beats passed.

  • American healthcare

    American healthcare

    Cooling my heels at the drugstore.

  • Cold Storage

    Cold Storage

    Good UX is what companies do when they have to. A company that has your stuff locked away doesn’t have to.

  • My Glamorous Life: Entertaining Uncle George

    My Glamorous Life: Entertaining Uncle George

    Fam and I are visiting my 96-year-old Uncle George tonight. We love him. His complicated and somewhat meandering stories have been music to my daughter’s ears since she fell asleep in a cab at age…

  • My Glamorous Life: Bots, Books, and Betrayal

    My Glamorous Life: Bots, Books, and Betrayal

    My father was an engineer who designed robots. When I first learned what he did, I imagined the Robot from “Lost in Space,” and asked him to make me one. When I turned 13, I realized…

  • Staying relevant

    Staying relevant

    “And in their place came acceptance.” Staying relevant in your profession as you age and technology changes.

  • The eye of God

    The eye of God

    My doctor sends me to Brooklyn for an abdominal aortic aneurysm screening. As instructed, I fast for six hours beforehand. I don’t even brush my teeth, for fear of swallowing toothpaste and screwing up the…

  • My Glamorous Life: broken by design.

    My Glamorous Life: broken by design.

    I encounter broken systems like this almost every week. And probably, so do you.

  • A morning’s tale

    A morning’s tale

    Instead of screaming, I turned on the faucet.