• This is the first week in quite a while that I fulfilled all of my at-work weekly objectives. Sometimes lowering your sights slightly can pay off. Yet I also feel I accomplished more than recent weeks. It's probably a combination of smaller, more accomplishable (therefore likely better-defined) objectives and actual progress on a thing that's been lingering for a while. We'll see if this is a trick or a technique.
• Having to explain my thoughts about product research/design/development to folks I work with, and having them ask me to operationalize parts of it they don't fully understand, has led me to explaining some of the concepts from new angles. This is challenging my thinking and helping me to firm it up.
• I had a lovely chat with a person who is contemplating moving from designer to design manager. I find this sort of thing rewarding because I like helping, and I like meeting people, and because it reminds me of what I've learned, what I think, and to listen first. It's tempting to opine, but only valuable lightly and if that opinion is actually relevant to the person's situation or question.

Be it version three or an MVP, the experience we deliver should

• be valuable to specific users
• be usable by those users
• conform to or enhance the user's understanding of the subject area
• be pleasant to use
• be visually polished
• deliver value in results and conveniences
• minimize toil
• be complete in its delivery of the uses we offer
• be complete in its states, messages, and errors
• make good use of familiar controls and interaction paradigms
• make success obvious
• be obvious in expected actions and right action
• be self-explanatory, relying on recognition rather than training and recall
• be well-labeled
• be instrumented so we can witness users' successes and difficulties

…even if the scope is small, even if it's a little slice of functionality from a bigger, longer-term plan, even if it is a fragment of the excellent future we envision. Even the basics should be built completely, with thoughtfulness and pride.

• I installed a bluteotth kit behind the factory car stereo in the 2006 Matrix and
  • it worked on the first try,
  • it sounds great,
  • pairing was easy and the connection seems reliable, and
  • in doing so I accidentally fixed the clock.
  • I also found a decent way to plug the hole in the dash left by the old aux in jack.
• There's a personnel issue at work, but it has a bright side and is totally surmountable. It is very likely that the parties involved will grow as a result. That's not an easy way to get growth, but I'll take it, this time.
• I hit a new one-rep deadlift max on Wednesday. 365lbs is a far cry from the max of my youth or even of a decade ago, but I can see my way to exceeding those with time. Forward!

• It's downright refreshing to work for a company that doesn't reflexively look to "try harder" as the answer to its problems. It's nice to hear the CEO say that he doesn't think our problem is not stretching enough. (His assertion is that it's alignment we don't have enough of, and that's generally true also.)
• Our first design critique (of the "expected, not volunteered" style that I favor) went great. I expect it will continue to go great.
• My wife and I have hatched a plan to get our remaining stuff out of storage that does not involve a supreme concentrated effort. Much like how I'd prefer companies make progress on major initiatives, we have a plan to do a little each weekend. This will help us move items, repack the ones that need repacking, and weed out things we no longer want to keep a bit at a time and get out of the storage unit by March. We've already transformed four boxes of books into two boxes to keep and two for the Friends of the Eugene Public Library's annual book sale. The lesson for everyone: you can get a lot done by
  • getting started
  • taking small bites
  • regularly
  • in priority order.

This was meant to be a week in Santa Barbara for work and a little play. A climate-change-strengthened "atmospheric river" made it a week of travel difficulties, muddy torrents, and missed connections. Even so…

• One-on-one meetings in person, with folks I've only recently met and met only online, went fine. Well, even.
• Though we were only able to accomplish about half of our agenda, that half was a good half.
• Santa Barbara has good food.
• It was interesting to watch, over the course of a few days, our ideas about alternative travel emerge rise and fall in sensibility as conditions changed: roads closed, buses halted, trains canceled, airports shut…ultimately the tie between "take the train" and "rent a car" was decided by Amtrak taking longer to dry the flooded train tracks than CalTrans took to scrape the mud off of the 101. But…
• …renting a car allowed us to give a ride to two team members, adding a positive to early disaster.