Here are some of the best. (A few are classics, like Kevin Mitnick’s; others are new to me.)

Also, you might have a look at this great card — ready to assemble into a working Blue Box! If you don’t know what a Blue Box is, yet, then your adventure has just begun.

When I see a truly great business card, I always feel the urge to redesign my own. Hah. The shoemaker’s children go barefoot; the graphic designer never gets their own card printed. I’m always planning great cards… Good thing I got out of design, or I’d never have gotten some of my own.

“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.” (Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon)

You don’t need to hear me rant on again about uncontrolled Google Ads.

Yesterday, I moved the homepage of the Haredi Women Professionals (aka Supermom) Network to a new hosting site that plants automatic Google ads along one side of the page. In the ten minutes between my setting up the page and paying for a premium service entitling me to remove the Google Ads, the homepage was advertising links to pornography (how obvious, given the word “Women” in the title, right?).

Here’s another example (from a search results page). Not a mis-match of interests, this time, as much as poorly-chosen ad copy:

Need I point out that Orthodox Jewish Women are not for sale?! :.D

…for example, if you’re working with text originally written by a non-native speaker of the language.

I wanted to change the setting on a very simple (kosher) Samsung flip phone, so that instead of answering calls automatically when I open the phone, it will only answer when I press the “call” button to accept the call (this gives me a chance to see Caller ID first).

I knew the setting was available somewhere. Well, I looked and I looked. I hunted through every possible menu (there aren’t many on this phone).

In desperation, I got help from an Israeli colleague, who found the setting in just a couple of minutes. It wasn’t obvious. The function can be found in the “Extra Settings” in the “Settings” menu — fair enough. But the function itself is called “Active Folder”.

As a native English-speaker, I understood “Active Folder” to mean “a group of files or functionalities that are activated”, and therefore didn’t select that function even when I saw it during my original hunt.

My English-as-a-second-language colleague understood “Active Folder” correctly: “the function triggered by folding the phone is active”.

Watching store/restaurant employees use infrared touch-screen point-of-sale (POS) terminals. The old technology isn’t always very responsive, often has low-resolution input, and runs slowly. Thus the following observed accommodation behaviors:

• Using a credit card instead of a finger
• Cutting fingernails to different lengths
• Pressing harder (irrelevant to an IR technology!)
• Pressing longer
• Pressing more often
• On the software end, designing extra-large icons, to reduce false positive inputs

Sorry, no picture of this one.

My spies report from the men’s room in the Hong Kong airport (HKK) that the sign over the urinal reads: “Electronic urinal. No touch needed.”

I’ve talked about each of these stores before. A recent visit to London gave me the opportunity to visit both within a couple of hours, which led me to think about how the experiences in them compare.

Nokia Flagship Store: Dark. Threatening. Exciting. Intense. Deep.

Apple Flagship Store: Light. Friendly. Discovery. Validating. Transparent.

Entering the Nokia store is like entering a video game: It’s not clear where you’re going, you need to explore and discover the levels of play. There’s a tension and an anticipation, an expectation that something thrilling is about to be revealed. Handsets are displayed in closed Lucite boxes or on pedestals, adding to the sense of mystique, but also to the distance. The dark palette and oddly high proportions of the ceiling (think Gothic awe) create a feeling of dominance and control that promises treasures if you explore. Reinforcing that, the ultra-high-end Vertu products are hidden at the far back of the space. On the negative side, there is too much empty space. Now what? Is there enough product here? Am I looking at the “right” things?

Entering the Apple store is like entering a great candy store: No surprises, here are the products, here are the prices. Bright, light, clear. Despite the open appearance, the store is rather fully packed. The glass stairs lead to the second level with the promise of more great things to find. Even if you never climb the stairs, you are left with the invitation, and with the sense that there is even more to delight you. There’s a validation and confirmation of your decisions;  you are never left wondering if you are in the right place. You can see everything on display clearly from any point in the store.

I’m not saying that one store is “better designed” than the other. They have very different atmospheres, which is interesting.

It’s good to be back to the blog…

I was just watching a camp video; the background music is of the “modern hasidic” style. The main melody line is nice but bland; the bridges between stanzas are the theme music from Beverly Hills Cop — a very popular Eddie Murphy movie when I was a teenager, notable for being one of the first of the wildly popular comedy movies that was rated R. It’s fairly safe to assume that the arranger of this more recent music has no idea where the theme comes from; it’s been copied, re-copied and re-recorded since the day it came out. Still, the association is funny.

OK, so I wasn’t going to post anything today. I certainly don’t have time to write (I must get some sleep), but couldn’t resist sharing this YouTube link. Enjoy!

Of course, that those of us who use candy-bar form phones already have random dial functionality…

[via Fortune’s Apple 2.0 blog]

I haven’t been on an airplane in eight weeks. It’s been a wonderful chance to stick to a more normal schedule — less catching-up-before-I-leave and digging-out-from-what-piled-up.

Sticking around has meant more time to bake with my little ones, play games with the middle ones, and hang out with the big ones. It’s been really good.

Tonight I’m off to Japan, and hoping for a really good trip. Posting to the blog will probably be light for the next week, although I’ve already got a backlog of items and ideas… well, that much more to look forward to, I guess.