A spontaneous trip to NYC was in the works this weekend, spearheaded by Fincher (and Mr. Fincher!), with appearances by Brad and Tilda and y.t. of course.

Pix follow, of course:

A mural by some guy.

You don't see these in DC!

Of course, the most spectacular views were to be found on the roofdeck of 230 fifth, which sadly, didn't play to the strengths of my camera. Suffice it to say that unlike the narrator of the linked piece, we managed to:

• get in the club within minutes
• get some beverages within no time
• obtain a table equally easily
• roll upstairs to the fabulous rooftop with no effort
• steal a "reserved" table without breaking a sweat
• get every drink on the roof comp'd

Yes, there were palm trees mixed with evergreens; besides this oddity the place was great.

From the sushi dinner beforehand (a place I wish I had taken some pix of; including a great ice sculpture!), to the halal lamb in the late morning hours, a fun foody time all around.

The absence of text hit home when I read about the increasing numbers of "usability experts" being hired by major corporations these days in The Inferior Paper during product design.

The goal, of course, is laudable: having devices work as they intended makes everything work smoother. Yet boiling everything down to IKEA instructions inevitably allows people to gloss over complex concepts.

Ideally, there'd be a healthy mix of pictures + words to allow people to learn concepts. The inevitable result, however, of textless learning is that people train themselves in a manner which prohibits new growth.

If I have a new phone, and someone shows me the cool features on the phone, I'll assume that there are no additional features. If, however, I'm forced to wade through a manual to learn of the original features, I might be exposed to a greater variety of concepts and ideas. There simply isn't a way, with pictures, to explain complex concepts as concisely as with text.

Taking things a step further, the inclusion of text in most instructions allows people to grasp how something works, rather than merely that it works. This is important, because as my own experience with IT people has shown, curious and incurious IT people tend to be divided by a neat line: the idea that tweaking something will "break" something else. Users who have learned a concept as a series of steps, absent any meta-level idea of what is going on, often assume incorrectly that deviation from the series will result in a problem. A more text-driven approach, by focusing on concepts rather than operational learning, lets people experiment more, which fosters even more learning.

My worry is that, ten years down the road, product design has become advanced enough that the curious are discouraged from poking around. Even now, most products with advanced features, like computers, are dumbed down to ease the greatest common denominator. In a rush to simplify then, devices which can do so much more are walled off (much like the original Mac's refusal to provide a command line interface) in the interest of reducing problems.

Will the youth of tomorrow be allowed to experiment? Hopefully. Will they learn merely graphically? Hopefully not.

Originally, I thought the problem was that there's a direct correlation between ease of use and understanding. Easy to use products (like microwaves, toasters, etc) didn't require much knowledge to operate, so they didn't force any lower level understanding of how things worked.

But the converse then would be true: and difficult to use devices (programming a vcr, or a scientific calculator, or yes, a computer) would help people understand how they worked better. My own personal experience with many people working in IT showed the error of that logic.

Upon further reflection I realized that the people who were IT-oriented and yet somewhat dim were the perfect lens to view the issue. Why would someone, who had worked for so long, with a product so complex, still be fundamentally ignorant about how things worked?

Almost all the IT people I've met who aren't very savvy display a similar trait: they're fine as long as the subject area they see is a familiar one. But if things stray too far afield, they develop an almost cargo-cultish mentality towards technology, where things "simply aren't done" because they didn't work in the past. Complex concepts are boiled down to smaller items, so a particular task (say, creating a user) becomes a series of simple choices "click here, move there, click there" completely devoid of context. This lack of context, almost invariably, coincides with a black-box nature of the process involved. Things "simply happen" rather than be caused by users.

The thread, between the lack of knowledge and the task being performed, is the interface itself. A slick, intuitive GUI, lets people do their jobs much faster. Yet it also allows people to be lazy and elide over what is taking place when they perform certain operations.

What's missing? Simple: text.

So I'm sitting here, at work, performing some mind-numbing-but-necessary patching of servers. Ugh.

I think over the past few years I've started to realize that most people simply aren't very text-driven. There was a brief moment I think, in the mid nineties, when the web started to explode, that most people simply said that "young people understand the internet and computers" and left it at that. The implication was simple: those people born before 1975 simply never could grasp what the rest of us could intuitively about computers, having never grown up with them.

The curve fell rapidly, and soon everyone had a web page, or went into chat rooms, or got their news from an online newspaper. The number of people who responded to a job query by saying they "did computer stuff" soared.

Yet that curve trailed off. It wasn't the dot-com burst. It wasn't the explosion of blogs. No matter what the reason, the outcome was the same: people who are just leaving high school these days, fully a decade my junior, aren't more savvy than I am (or was) with computers and the internet.

It's puzzling.

I always assumed that my sister would be better with computers than I was. Not because of any desire of hers to out-geek me, but merely because she grew up alongside so many of them. And yes, she does spend hours chatting with her friends online in a way I never did. But if her computer (a mac) breaks, she doesn't fix it. And even simple network issues aren't her cup of tea. So clearly, merely being around computers a great deal doesn't magically transfer into knowledge. I don't know a great deal about cars simply because I drive them all the time, either.

But the cars-to-computers analogy elides over something different: yes, it's true that as computers broke less, people needed to fix them less. At the same time, when cars exploded onto the scene, there wasn't a huge repository of information that anyone with a decent set of eyes and hands could view to look up information. There were books about cars, sure, but the detail available on the web today is unprecedented. With a single wikipedia search I can gain at least a passing knowledge of fields I'd never imagined.

So why is there the gap?

Fourth of July pix should be uploaded this evening. Then posted tomorrow.

Someone last night complained that they weren't aware of the names on the site.

Have at it.

Keep in mind these are very, very old. So the descriptions may no longer be quite apt...

We visited Cooperstown at one point, having lunch at this location:

It had an impressive view of the Otsego Lake (nee Glimmerglass) which you can see here:

or here:

Enough said.

The first picture of many:

It's the major's inn...