(cross-posted at my blog)

So as previously noted, I am unemployed, going on three weeks now. In an effort to keep myself busy, I’ve painted two entire rooms, as well as attempting to assume all cleaning duties around the house (an endeavor the Special Lady Friend has informed me that, in no uncertain terms, I am terrible at.)

Also, I stopped shaving immediately after losing my job, the better to show solidarity with my millions of brothers in the Great Hirsute Unemployed Brotherhood:

These days, the hirsute pursuit has evolved into a full-blown, full-grown trend. According to the marketing research company The NPD Group, sales of electric shavers and men’s facial trimmers have dipped 12 percent just in the last year while beard-related activities are, well, bristling.

Beard Team USA, a division of the World Beard and Moustache Championships, boasts 36 chapters in the U.S. alone, many in urban hotspots such as Los Angeles, Dallas, St. Louis and New York. There are beard contests and beard blogs, mustache movies and facial hair fundraisers.

(snip)

Why the sudden growth spurt? The blustery weather — and brutal job market — are certainly part of it. But Paul Roof, assistant professor of sociology at Charleston Southern University in South Carolina, says there are other issues at play.

“For some it’s a trend, but for others it’s a way of life and simply self-expression,” he says. “At the heart of the revival, I think, is the ‘reclaiming of masculinity.’ Beards are a direct backlash against metrosexuality and the feminization of modern man. But beards are also the only accessory route that men have — the only way men can change their looks.”

You hear us, Mr. President? We’re hairy, we’re angry, and our ranks grew by 598,000 last month. It’s like Fight Club, only instead of beating the shit out of people and blowing stuff up, we’re blowing away your societal preconceptions with our rockin’ facial hair. Our beards demand to be heard! Our beards demand satisfaction!

Now, speaking for myself, after two weeks of unrestrained growth, my appearance began to scare young children, so I trimmed the beard back to a very stylish “Evil Genius” appearance:

(Above: Kneel before Zod!)

Nevertheless, I still maintain ultimate respect for those of my Facial Hair Brothers who choose to rock the full on Caveman look.

No doubt you, the new mustache or beard owner, have many questions concerning the awesome power your facial hair holds. Luckily, through the magic of the Interweb Tubes, I’ve discovered a series of training videos to help you find your way. You’re welcome.

It’s…not that interesting. I’m having to fight off a certain low-level dread that I ought to be doing something. But I am going to try and do the opposite; relax and move forward slowly. It’s not easy, and I think I’d be less worried if I didn’t have a girlfriend. Don’t get me wrong; she’s awesome and I don’t want her to go, I just understand that if I make the ‘wrong’ choice that impacts her too. That’s an unusual feeling for me; I have gone to great lengths to try and make sure that I don’t have a negative impact on the people around me, but sometimes it’s just unavoidable. 

I did catch most of the Superbowl yesterday. Good stuff, for two teams I really could’ve cared less about. The Cardinals’ defense stepped up to play an excellent game, and the outcome wasn’t really assured until inside the last two minutes. The Boss played a set worth seeing, and I got a genuine laugh from the careerbuilder.com commercial. All in all, the Superbowl was a football game worth watching, and I can’t always say that. 

I’m going to play some Final Fantasy 7 I think, and then do laundry, housework, and get my head on a little straighter. I’d rather come at these interesting times with a calm heart than a panicked one, and since panic is where I’m leaning, I’m just going to try and give that a day or two to pass.

I like new year resolutions — at the very least, the make me stop and think about what I can do better. Here’s what I resolve to in the ‘09:

1. Make it to the gym twice a week
2. Read at least two books a month
3. Make some type of food completely from scratch once a month (like bread, sausage, or soup)
4. Join a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program
5. Save 10% of my paycheck every month

And you?

I don’t know about the rest of you, but it’s been a less than stellar year. It hasn’t sucked but it also hasn’t had a whole lot of goodness to it either. The music I’ve heard has been solid but not awesome, and I’ve spent more time in my back catalogue than with current releases. The movies I’ve seen have been merely OK excepting Wall-E. Even the Dark Knight, which was good just blew it at the end.

Books have been a decidely different endevor; World on Fire, The Coldest Winter, The Shock Doctrine-or at least as much of it as I could read before becoming so depressed that I thought a worldpurge might be a good thing (hint-when you pray for Chuthlu, something isn’t right), and the Commanding Heights all taught me a whole lot about how the world economy works. Or doesn’t, as of late.

Which brings me to the job. Which I am mired in in some decidedly unpleasant ways. I seem to be unwelcome and untrustworthy here. I offer to assist on things, but no one takes me up on it, and projects that come up have me shut out, so there’s no way for me to get in there and learn, progress or succeed. I seem to have risen to a level of mediocrity-a level that was requested of me. There’s a lesson here about leadership; if you don’t ask the people around you to do something interesting, to own the work they do, they won’t. Or perhaps that’s just my problem. And I do have problems here; I’m not a very good advocate for myself, and I resist doing projects where I don’t understand why I’m doing them, or don’t have clear (or any) direction. I get that I am partly responsible for what’s going on, but it’s not all me, and now I’m isolated and sad. This is not to detract from the communication or leadership issues here, which are serious and problematic, but I feel like I ought to shoulder some responsibility for my situation.

Which all sounds like gradeschool bullshit, I know, but it’s not. It’s Gen-X bullshit, thank you very much; I’m in a dead-end job and I don’t know what I want to do with my life. Of course, I’m picking a great time to crisis about it, too. Every job I look at I feel grievously unqualified for, like there’s a cattle brand of FAIL waiting for me.

Sigh.

My writing has stalled too. I’d like to get my website built, and I go about halfway and then get irate and decide Left 4 Dead is a better use of my time. (Which it frequently is, because it’s awesome.)

Which leads me to one of the high points of the year; videogames. Mass Effect, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Metal Gear Solid 4, Dead Space and Fallout 3 have all been either really good or flat out excellent. Special awards go to Little Big Planet though, because it really is one of those games that has no shortage of Wow to it. Play it if you get the chance.

Added bonuses include my girlfriend, and her acquisition of a new job which is a tremendous relief for her. Getting to witness history through Obama’s election is pretty humbling. Making some pretty good beer and getting to write about it has been fun too. OK, blog about it, but it counts, right? Sorta?

I only have one New Year’s Resolution, and that’s to make the next year better than the last one, and I’m not sure I did such a good job of that this year.

Ahoy, mates!

So, do tell:

Where’s the best place to live in Seattle? Which are the best schools (public or private (for the children under 18))? Is it really so very rainy or is that just an urban legend?

I have reason to believe this may be in my (relatively) distant future:

http://depts.washington.edu/bioe/programs/phd/phd.html

As of today, it’s exactly one year to the day since the Special Lady Friend and I arrived in Maine, fresh off our 4,300 mile odyssey, moving back from Seattle. (Although, if you want to be pedantic about it, this is a leap year, so technically yesterday was exactly 365 days. Luckily, I am not pedantic.)

It’s been an eventful year. Since setting up shop back on the East Siiiide, I’ve

• Gotten married
• Changed careers
• Reached the statistical halfway point of my expected lifespan
• Cheered for not one, but two championships by professional franchises from my general geographic area, which of course covers me in vicarious, unearned glory
• Been bitterly disappointed by a third. (Yes, I realize I’m ridiculously spoiled. It’s not as if anyone from, say, Seattle would have any pity for me at all)
• Posted treasonous, objectively pro-Elitislamohomoliberofascist insults of Dear Leader on no fewer than 19 occasions (ok, so maybe that’s not a big change)

After being away from my home state for the better part of a decade, I can say it’s changed quite a bit. I used to curse the place for being too conservative and claustrophobic, but an interesting thing happened while I was gone: Mainers have loosened up quite a bit. There’s state-run health insurance for the poor, every 8th grader gets a laptop, the Green Party has official standing, marijuana laws are fairly lax, and George W. Bush is staggeringly unpopular, even in Kennebunkport.

In fact, given its large size, low population density, large swathes of pristine wilderness, and odd mix of rednecks and hippies, Maine less resembles its urbanized, overpopulated Northeast neighbors than a large, Western state.

Except, of course, that here, the sun rises out of the ocean, instead of setting in it. As it should be.

(Shamelessly cross-posted nyah)

Ever since my XO laptop arrived, I’ve been tinkering with it, looking for ways to make it behave more like a traditional laptop. While the hardware on this technological marvel is neat as hell, the childlike operating system quickly grew tiresome. I looked into ways to load Ubuntu onto it, but the complexity of the process, XO’s lack of a cd drive, and small amount of storage space on the internal solid-state drive made that proposition a dicey one.

However, there is a less intensive way to make your XO grow up, one that doesn’t involve wiping out the operating system or trying to boot a second one from the flash drive: namely, you can install a new graphical interface right next to the one that already exists. The Xfce desktop, being very small and lightweight, is perfect for a machine like the XO, and detailed install instructions are already readily available on the web. I followed these, and had the new desktop up and running and most of my desired software installed in about an hour and a half. Yeah, most of the config has to be done from a command line, but you can cut and paste lines in from the website, and it only needs to be done once.

When I finished, I had a tiny little laptop that could pull in a wireless signal from anywhere, browse the web in Firefox, run Open Office, and play media from an SD card or USB drive. (Although I’m still looking for a media player that will play mp3’s, since Fedora, the underlying Linux operating system, apparently doesn’t include mp3 codecs on any of its media software.) All in all, I was pretty pleased with myself…

But then I heard a certain Snarky Penguin crowing about his brand new Asus Eee, a tiny, commercially available laptop similar in design to the XO… but with a much bigger internal drive.

So now I have Eee Eeenvy.

UCD Steps: by Rosenfeld Media

Same company. New position.

As of Monday I’ll be in a new position at my company. That’s the news. You can stop reading now, and go visit Digg if discussions of web design processes bore you.

Since graduating from the ISchool I’ve been working as a site manager, which in some other organizations might be called a technical project manager, and in others a producer. Basically, I’ve been responsible for the day-to-day upkeep of a number of different web properties–working with IAs, developers, writers, taxonomists, and designers to keep the sites fresh and our customers happy. I’ve enjoyed the work, but its a lot of what I’ve been doing for years, both professionally and as a hobby. Plus, it doesn’t require any particular expertise, other than a vague understanding of how the web works and a knack for staying organized when the firehose is turned on. So, I was getting kind of bored and felt my degree was a bit wasted.

So, as of Monday, my new title will be “User Experience Architect.” Those geeks and librarians in the house might know my new job better as “information architecture,” and indeed, that’s much of what I’ll be doing. However, at my company (a large web marketing consultancy) we don’t separate the processes of gathering user data and insights from the nitty-gritty of wireframing and sitemapping; rather, the two are part of a large user-centered design approach, and user research flows right into the design portion.

Here’s what my company says about it:

“Information Architects” or “User Experience Architects” provide user research, information architecture, interface and interaction design, and usability testing. They conduct primary research, often in the form of interviews (in-the-field, in-person, and via telephone), to understand the goals, attitudes, and behaviors of users of the web sites and applications. This understanding is expressed through personas, scenarios, mental models, and task flows. These deliverables are shared with clients and project team members and are used to inform strategy, prioritization, messaging framework, taxonomy, information architecture, and design (including visual design).

IAs/UXAs create site maps, user flows, and wireframes to define logical grouping of content and features, navigation systems, labeling, elements per page/screen (and their layout), and interaction behavior. IAs/UXAs evaluate the usability of the designs via heuristic evaluation (using the Forrester Scorecard), paper prototyping, and clickable/interactive studies in the field or in the office. This work is collaborative with Editorial, Taxonomy, SEO and Visual Design.

For those who still have no idea what I’m talking about, think of my new job this way:

Before, I was the foreman on a construction job: I’d take the designs, and work with my team to build them. Now, though, I’m becoming the architect who designs the building.

Pretty cool, huh? This should allow me to take on new challenges, have a greater impact on projects, give me some subject matter authority, and take me to a new income bracket — all very good things.

NETFLIX gave me some odd recommendations today.

Obviously because I enjoyed Brian Regan: Standing Up & Jackass: The Movie I will therefore thoroughly enjoy Ultimate Fighting Championship 69: Shootout & Ultimate Fighting Championship 49: Unfinished Business.

I don’t pay attention to the recommendations as I don’t have a problem finding titles to stuff in my queue, I just happened to look in there today.  Anybody else get strange recommendations off of  NETFLIX?

Two days ago, while I was at work, the Special Lady Friend snapped and decided she needed to have a cat, immediately. So she headed off to the animal shelter and picked up this little bruiser:

It’s a female of indeterminate breed, eight months old, six pounds. She’s been living at the shelter for six months. While the younger kittens cost anywhere up to $100, this one was free, leading us to conclude that we probably saved her from death row.

Problem is, we don’t have a name for her yet. I prefer “Lump,” since she’s spent most of her first two days at our house hiding under furniture or staring out the windows. The SLF thinks “Lump” is a horrible name for a cat, but what the hell does she know?