When I was about 14 years old, my aunt took me tubing down a river in northern Florida. At the beginning of the river you could look down, down into the spring the water came up from, a deep tunnel into the earth. I remember people scuba diving into the spring, but I don’t know now if they were really there at the time, or have been inserted by my imagination because I thought it would be so cool to dive down into that tunnel to explore. Tubing down the river seemed so unexciting in comparison, but I did almost get bitten by a rattlesnake that was on a branch over-hanging the river, so the trip turned out to be pretty exciting after all.  Read →

While software and hardware have made great strides, some things still remain in the realm of specialized software. One way to look at this is, what can you still not do on the web? I can think of a few things: 3D, sound synthesis, video editing. I have hopes for all of these, but 3D in particular looks to be on the edge of a real breakthrough, and not necessarily from where I expected it.  Read →

[This is an essay I wrote in 2002, found in an old journal] What do you get when you cross a clock and a computer: a computer. An airplane and computer: computer. A VCR and computer: computer. [This argument I believe was my summary of something Donald Norman said in The Design of Everyday Things.]  Read →