Events

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen takes a look at Kindle 2 usability in his column today: [T]he device is best for reading long linear material, such as novels and some non-fiction. Kindle's best user interface feature is turning the page; the reading experience you design should require no other interactions. Writing linear books simply requires a skill that all good authors already possess: the ability to keep readers immersed in the plot. Kindle also works well for the long, narrative articles common in...

Not to libel ostriches, or suggest mass killings of the birds, I think McDonald's and other fast-food restaurants prefer customers who stick their heads in the sand. This may result from McDonald's execs sticking their own heads—never mind. Apparently the laws in New York, Philadelphia, and California requiring calorie and nutrition information be on fast-food restaurant menus are causing customers to buy salads instead of triple-bacon-lardburgers-with-extra-goo, so McDonald's wants a Federal law...

I had a conversation with Joe over at Urban Outsitters this morning when I picked Parker up. It seems he's had run-ins with Yelp as well. He mentioned a ratings service that, he thinks, actually works: Angie's List. The difference? Angie's List members have a reputational risk of their own when posting. The members may be anonymous to the vendors they're rating, but they're authenticated, and can be held accountable for their content. Also, the List, being member-financed rather than...

Having already admitted to frequent flying, and looking at an enormous amount more in 2009 and 2010, I've started thinking about getting a Kindle. So, I'm blegging for opinions. I'm almost entirely sold because you can email PDF files and Word documents to a Kindle, to go along with the up to 1,500 books it can store in its 290-gram innards. Given the volume of reading I'll have in the week before each Fuqua residency, and given that much of it will be electronic anyway, it's starting to make more...

I fly frequently, more often as a "revpax" (revenue passenger) than as pilot. And I've mentioned before, given the two full-service options in Chicago (American and United), I long ago chose American as my preferred carrier. I have, in fact, been a member of their frequent-flyer program since 1988. American is one of the two lynchpins of the oneworld alliance (typography and letter casing theirs), the other being British Airways. Only, they seem to hate each other's customers. Exhibit: neither's...

Is nothing sacred? Not when your company implodes: Willis Group Holdings, a London-based insurance broker, announced Thursday that it will consolidate its area offices to Sears Tower and as part of the deal, gets to put its own name on the 36-year-old skyscraper. Willis will move nearly 500 associates into Willis Tower, at 233 S. Wacker, initially occupying more than 140,000 square feet on multiple floors. The company said the move to the new space, at $14.50 per square foot, will result in significant...

Bristol Palin and whosit have split. Didn't see that one coming. (Probably because I wasn't looking.)

Romi Tharakan at Henley & Partners AG, the Swiss firm who produced the visa-free travel list I mentioned before, sent me their master list of visa-free travel as of 24 July 2008. I was right: the lists for the U.S. and Canada are not completely orthogonal. Americans (but not Canadians) can travel visa-free to Côte d'Ivoire and Equatorial Guinea; Canadians don't need a visa to visit Bolivia (but Americans do). Mystery solved.

After posing my question about why Canadians need a visa to go to one more country than Americans do, several commenters on the original Gulliver post chimed in about a squabble Canada had with the Czech Republic at the end of the last decade. It seems, however, that the commenters, and quite possibly the report Gulliver quoted, were out of date. According to the Canadian Embassy in Prague, the countries ironed out their differences in 2004: The Government of the Czech Republic has decided to lift its...

At 7pm CT last night, it was 16°C; now, twelve hours later, it's -8°C, a 24°C drop. Can anyone say "cold front?" It's not the biggest twelve-hour drop in Chicago history, but it does wake you up in the morning.