Developing Usable Experiences

“Ventromedial frontal cortices”

January 13th, 2008 10:23 pm —  152 views

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Like most days, I got up pretty early and sat in front of my computer wondering what I could do to make a difference in the world. Maybe it wasn’t so direct a thought, but it’s in the general area.

I took a big step today and decided to get rid of a few hundred books that I’ve been holding onto for no good reason. I’ll never read them again. Those that I “might” read I kept. Things like reference books, text books, books on learning, books on martial arts…like “The Secret of Invisibility – Ninja Training”1.

Later this week I’ll be donating 13 boxes of books to a local library where they’ll be sold to raise money. There has to be about 250 books altogether. There are a fair number of collections by specific authors that I hope somebody will enjoy as much as I did2. It was time to move on. I’ve read them all and won’t read them again. Might as well give someone else the chance.

In my organizing frenzy I disposed of 7 (yes seven) old computers (computer cases to be accurate). I gutted them of course, taking anything that I might be able to reuse later (though not that likely). Somebody might need a 4 GB hard drive someday.

Most of the afternoon was spent reading for classes this week. I’ll be presenting on one of three articles this week for my psychology class. I’m presenting with another student so it shouldn’t be that bad, but the material is…well…hard to describe. I read through the other two articles3 and found them interesting but fairly hard to understand. The title of this post was pulled from one of the articles as an illustration of how ridiculous they are. OK, that might be a bit harsh. They aren’t ridiculous, just very hard to understand.

W. has been asleep for a few hours now and I wish I were too. I’ve been sitting here thinking about the two classes I have this semester and how they relate and though I see that they relate, the depth of material is such that I’m having to blink a lot to get my bearings. This is crazy shix. It is madly applicable to my job…though management is SO not ready to embrace any of these principles or practices. But if you ask me, the future depends on understanding who is using our software, how they’re using it, and why they use it the way they do. There are no “users”, there are individuals using our software.

Image: I had a few pictures selected for this post but decided to use this close-up of a paper I’ve been reading. The paper seems to be suggesting that we don’t really know how to explain what we know. We know it but don’t know how we know it. I’m not sure this means anything, but the paper was published so it must.

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  1. I’m not sure that is the actual title. I’m too lazy to go look it up, but there is one on learning how to blend into the environment from a person that claims to be a Ninja. [↩]
  2. No point in keeping all those books by Stephen King, Peter Straub, Dean Koontz, Ann Rice, Robert McGammon, Issac Asimov (though that was a tough decision), Clive Cussler…I could go on and on. [↩]
  3. The subject this week is ‘consciousness’. Like that can be covered in one lecture. [↩]

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Comments

2 Responses to ““Ventromedial frontal cortices””

  1. Melanie on January 14th, 2008 9:19 pm

    Thanks for reading!

    I can never give away books, at least not books I read for pleasure. I sold back nearly every text the bookstore would take in college and law school, though I still have a couple books for some of my advanced Psych seminars. Books are kind of sacred to me – they’d toss them across the room into a big bin at buyback, and I’d cringe.

    Your studies sound interesting; I’m always interested in the different ways psychology can be put to use.

  2. Dawn on January 15th, 2008 9:59 am

    last year in the psych class she didn’t have us write reflection papers each week. So most didn’t read the articles unless they were presenting. Discussion was tough, needless to say. She said the year before she had a QUIZ every week to make sure we read, and people objected, so she dropped the quiz. Sounds like now she’s resorted to reflection papers to up the discussion content of the class. That’s fair I guess, though a lot of work.

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