I’ve been taking it for granted all this time, and it just occurred to me that the subtitling is actually beneficial to the hearing impaired population. Many online videos don’t come with captions or subtitles, and YouTube’s automatic captioning feature isn’t great. So there is a lot of information and media that we miss out online.

(Note: both links below are probably Not Safe For Work, depending on how conservative your workplace is.)

If the person who made these GIFs and added the subtitles hadn’t done that, I never would have discovered how hilarious this video is.

So to you GIF creators out there, thank you for subtitling them.

Today from my desk I looked out the window and watched cherry blossom petals blowing around in the wind like pink snow.  It occurred to me that there must be a Japanese word that describes the phenomenon of falling pink petals.  After some research I discovered not one, but two Japanese expressions for this.

One is hanafubuki (花吹雪,) which literally means flower (花) snow storm (吹雪).  What a beautiful word for something so ethereal.

The second term is mono no aware (物の哀れ) which means “the pathos of things” or or “a sensitivity to ephemera.”  It is an awareness of the transience of all things, which prompts one to appreciate their beauty and feel a gentle sadness at their passing.  Since cherry blossoms bloom suddenly, are only around for a few days to a week, and fall off the trees very quickly, they are a very good metaphor for the concept of mono no aware.

I forwarded the email to Roger Ebert.  He touched on the no-subtitle issue in the last two paragraphs of his review here:

Note: “Touch the Sound” is not subtitled, and its words are therefore unavailable to the hearing-impaired. Riedelsheimer is said to oppose subtitles because they would affect his visual compositions. Presumably he is as entitled to the same control over his art that his subjects exercise, but such directors as Ozu, Bergman, Scorsese and Welles have lived with subtitles, and I imagine he could have, too.

The music in the film might in any case be out of reach to most in a hearing-impaired audience, so perhaps the DVD will be a better way for them to access it. Volume can be manipulated, the actual speakers can be touched with hands and feet or sat upon, the bass can be boosted, and the experience might approximate what Glennie herself perceives. Almost all DVDs are subtitled even in the language of their making; if the DVD of “Touch the Sound” lacks subtitles, then Riedelsheimer will have some explaining to do.

Thanks for that, Roger.  Godspeed.

Infinite scroll is a topic of consternation among UX designers.  We either love it or hate it.  Me?  I am somewhere down the middle.  I can see places where infinite scroll works and where it doesn’t (tumblr, I am looking at you.)  When designing the user experience of large-scale search results, it’s challenging to find a way to streamline the experience so the user can find what they want quickly and efficiently.

In UX, some functions used to improve search results are:

• Narrowing down results by category, type, color, brand name
• Allowing the user to customize pagination options by choosing “# of products per page” or “view all”
• Adding autocomplete typing in the search bar

Infinite scroll became an option to give an user the ability to scroll through numerous results without having to deal with the extra clicks and loading that pagination causes.  So what are the downsides of infinite scroll?

• Pages can’t be bookmarked – in infinite scroll, you can’t find your place again
• No data is added to the browser history
• It bogs down memory
• There is no indication of the total number of results

If an user is looking for a very specific item such as “Canon SD1400is camera” or “IBM logo,” then naturally the search results should be immediate and the user will likely pick an item from the first search result page.  But if the user is just browsing until they find something that jumps out at them, then infinite scroll may be a time-efficient way to present large-scale search results.  I’d like to present a few examples of where I would like to see infinite scroll.

• Searching for “duvet” on Etsy produces 3,947 results at 99 pages.  If an user is browsing for a duvet, but doesn’t have a clear idea of a color or style, sorting through these results in pagination mode will be very time consuming.
• The keywords “Macbook Air 13” on ebay produces 11,300 results.  Even after narrowing down the results by price, shipping costs, and seller ranking, the results are still in the thousands.
• “St. Patrick’s Day” results in 2,703 illustrations on iStockPhoto.  Set at 200 results per page, that comes to 14 pages of slow-loading thumbnails.

Infinite scroll has functionality in some cases of large-scale search results, and should be offered as a view option – users should have the power to choose between pagination and infinite scroll.

Genealogy can also be challenging.  Records get lost or destroyed, leaving a lot of questions unanswered.  Roadblocks crop up.  Some relatives aren’t interested in talking to you.  This sort of endeavor does require a lot of patience, and being able to let go and accept that as much as you would like to, there are just some things you will never know.

I’ve done some extensive research work on both sides of my family tree, aided by cousins also interested in genealogy.  We’ve pooled together our resources and knowledge to preserve our family history for future generations.  We’ve discovered relatives around the globe, uncovered history, and solved mysteries.  It’s been an enthralling adventure.

The mystery-solving part of genealogy is quite fun.  An opportunity came up recently that gave me the chance to do a little sleuthing, and the process was educational for all involved.  A cousin of mine traveled to our ancestral home in Ireland (which is still inhabited by the descendants of the oldest son to this day) and received the photograph you see in this post.  He was told that the gentleman in this photograph was my great-great-great-great grandfather, a certain Thomas Shadwell.  Not the poet laureate, though we have been trying to prove a connection to him.  What a great find this photograph was – it’s so rare to find photographs dating this far back!

We really had no obvious reason to doubt that the man in the above photograph was anyone other than Thomas Shadwell.  However, one day I had the family tree right in front of me, and I happened to look at Thomas Shadwell’s entry.  He was born in 1742 and died in 1839.  There was something jumping out at me about those numbers, but I couldn’t figure out what.  Then I remembered that the first photograph of a person was made in 1839 by Louis Daguerre.  In 1839, Thomas Shadwell was 97 years old, and the gentleman in the above photograph looks to be in his forties.

After my discovery, I started using that particular data point to cross-reference photographs for accuracy.  We still have no idea who this gentleman actually is, and we may never know.  There is no name on the photo, and the older generations passed on without leaving any documentation.  It’s up to us to unearth the hidden stories and leave them for future generations to discover.

Technology has made family history research much more accessible; a large bulk can be done from your home computer.  So there’s no need to spend hours in a dark archive room poring over dusty records for the most part, as such a large percentage of records are now digitized (and more are being put online daily.)  Between sites like ancestry.com and family DNA services such as 23andme.com, there’s a plethora of buried treasure waiting to be discovered.

The provodnitsa on the Trans-Siberian came up with a creative way of asking me whether I wanted chicken or fish.

When I studied photography in college and did my year abroad in an arts-focused program in Italy, we were constantly encouraged to take inspiration from different art forms, the environment around us, and our personal experiences.  In addition to reading art publications and visiting museums, I also took classes in other genres of art such as sculpture, printmaking, and painting.  Field trips were an important part of the Italian study abroad program I was in; we went to Carrara to see the marble being cut out of the mountains, to Deruta to see the clay being dug out of the river and turned into pottery, and to Fabriano to watch paper being made.  The art history professor took us on long guided tours in Florence and Rome, explaining the history of the buildings and walking us through the museums and churches, going in detail about all the artwork we saw.  He even pointed out landmarks used in Fellini and Antonioni films.  I found that this exposure helped to broaden my techniques and keep my creativity flowing, and this made me a better photographer.  This important lesson I learned has carried over into my career as an user experience designer.

“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” – Abraham Maslow

I take a lot of UX experience from many places.  One such source is travel.  The thing about travel is that I end up using a lot of skills that carry over into UX design, and I get exposed to different ways of doing things.  UX design is about improving things, and seeing how other people do a task that I never thought about doing in a different way makes me pause and think, “Hey, that’s much more efficient than the way we do it.”

Travel requires research, preparation, and resourcefulness – all qualities that a good UX designer needs to have.  Putting myself in a foreign country in unfamiliar situations pushes me out of my envelope, and helps sharpen my problem-solving skills.  Knowing more potential scenarios and the possible outcomes helps when designing a new product.  Travel is a fitting environment in which to learn how to deal with unfamiliarity.

When I travel, I learn new ways of doing things.  How information is conveyed and presented, and the different flow of things in other cultures opens my mind to more user experience possibilities.  Seeing how basic everyday actions are used differently opens my eyes to more practical approaches that are not obvious to me in my home country.  Watching how other cultures use technology, and observing their user experiences gives me fresh ideas.  For example, the Shinkansen bullet train in Japan is the ultimate user experience.  It’s immaculately designed down to every last detail, from the alignment of the seats to the electronic sliding doors on the toilets.

Being on the road gives me the opportunity to vigorously field-test my technology.  In that environment, I get a much more intimate understanding of what works, what doesn’t, and how I could design things to work better.  On my recent Trans-Siberian adventure, I took notes and drew wireframes with ideas of how I could make the Google products I was using work more efficiently.  Of course, riding a Russian train inching its way through snowy Siberian taiga was a pretty damn inspiring venue!

Traveling has also honed my communication skills.  Meeting people from vastly different walks of life teaches one to be more diplomatic and mindful.  I’ve learned that there is a huge cultural difference in body language and gestures.  Trying to communicate by miming movements, such as pantomiming writing something down when you’re trying to ask for a pen and paper, may work in your home country, but won’t always translate well in another country.  What’s clear to us is not always as clear to others, and this is something user experience designers need to remember.

When trying to communicate with people who don’t speak your language very well, it’s best to keep your explanations as simple as possible; overly complicated language usually leads to misunderstandings and unproductive outcomes.  Being able to make products intuitive with clearly communicated instructions is a hallmark of a good UX designer.  I’ve gleaned a lot from my experiences working abroad with multilingual teams who spoke English as a second language.

Foreign travel is transcendental and gives me confidence.  I return home from each trip re-energized and brimming with ideas.

On the Trans-Siberian Railway, somewhere between Ulan Ude and Khabarovsk.

Today I read this blog post by Jodi of Legal Nomads where she commented that traveling gives her a feeling of connectedness – “that we are all connected in one way or another, and we are all more alike than we think.”  She also discussed the “overview effect,” a cognitive shift in awareness that many astronauts and cosmonauts report experiencing after seeing the Earth from space. This prompted a day-long introspection as I’ve just recently come off the road after adding another bullet point to a long list of life-changing experiences I’ve had via global travel.

You see, I’ve been a traveler for most of my adult life.  I’ve done multiple backpacking trips in Europe since I was a teenager, and I’ve lived/studied/worked abroad in various countries for a combined timeframe of three years.  I just finished spending a year and half living and working in France. After I left France in October of this year, I traveled across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, then I caught a ferry to Japan from Vladivostok and traveled up and down the islands of Honshu and Hokkaido for a bit before finally flying home to San Francisco.

For me, the seed was planted early when I started reading my father’s National Geographic magazines as a child.  I’d sit in his study on rainy days and go through the yellow magazines, marveling at the faraway places and the people in them, and wanting to see them in person.  When I travel, I experience a profound shift in my awareness when places, objects, and people that I have read about suddenly become tangible right in front of me.  The way the world just opens up in front of me, how the pages of a magazine suddenly come alive, all the scents and tactile experiences factored in this new equation – these sensations have never diminished in over twenty years of traveling.  They are the dopamine that I chase.  I still have the same childlike wonder when I arrive somewhere new.  There is an inexplicable sense of connectedness I feel with the world and its inhabitants due to traveling.

When I start out on a trip, I have a mental picture or idea of what it’s going to be like.  Once I get there and the reality is swirling around me, it’s overwhelming and so much more than I could have imagined.  There was the time I was at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam,  and all of a sudden, the swinging cupboard that concealed the staircase to the secret attic was right in front of me.  Instinctively, I reached my hand out to touch it, to make sure it wasn’t a figment of my imagination.  As my hand connected with the wood, it was as if I had suddenly made this palpable connection with the book I’d read years before, the layers of history in this building, and the people who were here before.  In Marrakech, I was most surprised and enchanted with the scent of orange blossoms that hung in the air and darted in and out of the velvety nights, following me like some djinn.

And then there are the people I’ve met.  I am deaf, which already limits my options in the number of people I can effectively communicate with in my home country, so you can imagine what the odds are in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language and the body language and gestures are so different that trying to communicate via pantomiming isn’t always successful.  And yet somehow, in spite of these obstacles, I’ve had tremendously profound interactions with people around the world.  Traveling on a train through Croatia years ago, I shared a compartment with a Croatian family who spoke no English, yet they insisted on sharing their fruit and sandwiches with me and we looked at the same things out the window of the train, then looked at each other and smiled, knowing what the other was thinking without saying any words.  At a ryokan I stayed at in Japan, the nakai who brought my dinner to my room shared a bottle of sake with me while I showed her my pictures of Russia on my mobile phone, and we laughed and enjoyed each other’s company without communicating a single word.

Traveling pushes me out of my envelope, opens my mind, and fills my heart.  Each trip changes me and I’m never the same person again. I’ve reached a state of consciousness that I wouldn’t have attained any other way.  And as exquisite as it has been, I know I’ve only scratched the surface.  I’ve come nowhere close to the “overview effect,” or to savikalpa samadhi, a state of spiritual consciousness that astronaut Edgar Mitchell used to describe his experience in seeing the Earth from space.  He said:

[“Savikalpa samadhi] means that you see things as you see them with your eyes, but you experience them emotionally and viscerally, as with ecstasy, and a sense of total unity and oneness.”

Traveling keeps me alive, and keeps me connected to this Earth.

August is a hard time to be in France. The French take their annual vacations (congés annuels) towards the end of July and during the month of August. As a result, a lot of businesses shut down for weeks or for the whole month. My favorite produce market is currently on congés until August 30th. There is a law in France that the bakeries have to sync their congés with each other, so one bakery remains open in an area when the others are closed.

I live in the Alps, 4 hours away from the Mediterranean. Seafood options here are rather limited. There are two seafood markets in town; one is on a medieval street that has been used for food shops since the medieval ages, in fact the space that seafood market is in has always been a seafood market since the 15th century. They’re only open Tuesdays through Saturdays, and only in the mornings at the moment. Everything they have is fresh, but their selection is small and they’re expensive, so I don’t shop there often.

The seafood market I like best is actually a stand in the open-air Friday and Saturday market, so they’re only here twice a week from 8 AM to noon. They have a really wide selection of seafood from the Mediterranean, the North Sea, and the Atlantic coast of Northwestern Africa. Everything is super-fresh, and they offer wonderful homemade seafood terrines, marinated anchovies, seafood salads, stuffed squid, pre-baked scallops, seafood spreads, and other delicacies. They also display large vats of homemade paella, seafood stews, and tuna balls cooked in tomato sauce with capers and white beans. I love this market, and I look forward to visiting them once a week on Saturday mornings. They’re family-owned, always remember me, and are extremely patient with my poor French pronunciation. They give great recommendations when I ask “Comment puis-je cuisiner?” (How do I cook?)

They were on congés from July 21 to August 17. Each Saturday for the past few weeks when I did my market shopping, I would look forlornly at their empty, closed stall:

Thursday I started to get excited as I knew the seafood market would be coming back on Saturday, and started thinking about what delicious things I’d like to make this weekend. It’s been unbearably hot here, this weekend has been 96 -98˚F (35-36˚C) so after some pondering, I decided I wanted to make ceviche. I’ve never made it before, and it seemed easy enough, and I could find all the ingredients here with one substitution.

Most recipes I read had suggested red snapper, but that “any firm white-fleshed fish will do.” Red snapper isn’t native to European waters; it’s found in the Gulf of Mexico and along the eastern Atlantic coast of the USA. It isn’t something you find here easily, in fact, I couldn’t find a proper French translation for it. Didn’t find it on this list. I decided on halibut (flétan), and also bought tomatoes, avocado, lemon, lime, red onion, piment fort (the only available fresh chili pepper here apart from Scotch bonnets at the African market, and that’s way too high on the Scoville scale for me) and cilantro.

This was really easy to make and came out well. I didn’t really follow one recipe – I read several different recipes and kind of improvised, taking inspiration from different influences. Here’s how I did it.

I cut the halibut in quarter-inch cubes and put them in a bowl with one small red onion, finely diced and 1 clove garlic, finely chopped, and added the juice of two lemons and two limes to this. This went in the refrigerator for 4 hours. That’s how long it took until the fish was no longer translucent.

I drained the fish and onions in a colander, then added to the bowl a handful of chopped fresh cilantro, 1 fresh tomato chopped, 1/2 of a long piment fort finely diced (always wear gloves when handling chiles, kids!), about 1 tsp of salt and 1/2 tsp of sugar, and about a tablespoon of olive oil. I put the drained fish and onions back in the bowl, and added one diced avocado, and gently mixed it up.

The result: FLAVOR COUNTRY. Amazing. Wonderful tartness, spiciness, and freshness. Great textures. I’m all full of ideas right now. I want to make something with mango next time. I want to experiment with scallop ceviche with thinly sliced fennel (thanks for the inspiration, Derek!) I imagine grapefruit and shrimp would be a great combination. Ooooh, I want to make langostino ceviche! Aaaah! The possibilities!