Pleasure and Pain

Measuring the impact of new technology on human experience

Pleasure and Pain: photos by Whitney G. Hess

University of Phoenix needs an education

July 2nd, 2008 · No comments yet

Here’s my rant for the day.

I was looking up a definition on Dictionary.com when I saw this skyscraper from The University of Phoenix.
The list of degrees they offer scrolls down (from top to bottom) instead of up (bottom to top). Hit play to see what I mean.
Why is this bad? Well, the degrees [...]

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Plurk You

June 20th, 2008 · 3 comments so far

I’ve been wanting to write about Plurk for a while. Everyone seemed to be so enamored with it when it first launched, but maybe that was because Twitter was experiencing serious downtime and people were pissed off — not because it was anything actually worth being excited about.
The first time I logged on, I had [...]

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Bluefly don’t bother me

June 13th, 2008 · 1 comment so far

It’s been hot in NYC lately. Very hot. So it’s time to buy some more dresses. But being the busy woman that I am, I don’t have a ton of time to go shopping. I decided to check out a few websites to see if anything caught my eye. I’ve never shopped at Bluefly.com, but [...]

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Why I Don’t Have an iPhone (but might someday)

June 10th, 2008 · 26 comments so far

As you probably know, Apple released iPhone 2.0 yesterday. Watch Steve Jobs’ WWDC Keynote Address if you haven’t already seen it.
I watched it live on MacRumors, and when it was over I Twittered this:

That comment solicited quite a reaction from my Twitterverse. Two examples:

As a designer and gadget geek, I’m constantly asked why I don’t [...]

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Group Video Chat: A Usability Evaluation

May 23rd, 2008 · 2 comments so far

Back in January when I started this whole “getting to know the community” thing, I met a couple guys named @matto and @snook, a.k.a. Matthew Oliphant and Jonathan Snook respectively. Matthew had been following me based on David Armano’s recommendation, and I had followed him back because, well, I basically didn’t know anybody on Twitter. [...]

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