Monday, May 16, 2005

Stupid Stuff Update

[...]

Through 's latest entry I ended up on Rosie O'Donell's old blog. It is an amazing car crash of honesty, form, and fame. It is too easy to call it stupid or maudlin, I am unable to do that about people expressing their own emotions, because my emotions are most often stupid and maudlin too and I don't want to hear it when they are. Yet I know, I know, that right now I am simply rubbernecking. Her current blog is the same with a celebrity twist: it is flickr-enhanced and comments enabled. Comments from Rosie fans and foes. 500 per entry. She has a special moderator for them. Somehow I feel partly responsible just because she is publishing phonecam-pics and I work for a mobile phone manufacturer and took phonecam-pics early on and put them in my blog and in a tiny tiny way may have helped popularize it.

Recently we got a new person in the building who hits the elipticals just when I go to the gym too, and she has no problem switching the TVs on to what she wants to watch. I only change the channel s when nobody else is around, and I'll set them to inoffensive CNBC -- well, Kudlow is becoming a bit too much of a no-taxes supply-side cheerleader for my tastes -- but it beats the FNN I often find them on, the station that makes me crank up my shuffle loud when people are watching it. I would impose my taste if I were using the aerobic machines where the TVs are, but I am not, I am in the weights area where the sound just spills over, so I don't feel like I have a right to decide what the people right in front of the TVs have to watch. She is in that area and has no problem setting it to what she wants to watch -- in fact, she asks me to because I can reach the TVs better than her -- and what she wants to watch is Oprah. I'd never switch that on, I would think all the men using the gym would kill me. But she does, and all the men end up watching that show, transfixed like deer in the headlights most of the time. Oprah is spending an awful lot of time on fighting fat and pedophilia these days. I gotta wonder what she would tell a fat pedophile "Love yourself enough to make that change and get thin! Then go off to an uninhabited island and die!"

Sunday, May 08, 2005

Recruiter Woes

Company 1, a very expensive joint venture for a new mobile operator, which will basically re-sell network time on Verizon or Sprint, but wants new handsets for a totally new experience. Compare to Virgin Mobile.

recruiter in email: I don't think you are a fit, but perhaps you know someone who is, check out these two jobs. Job 1: Please have 5 to 10 years of experience designing UIs for handsets, and be innovative and wonderful and visual because we want to make a whole new way to have people use phones so they will buy from us. Job 2: Interaction designer to support Job 1, keeping tabs on information design and requirements.

Callback.

recruiter on phone: welll, we really want the 5 to 10 years.
me: Good luck hiring in Finland or Denmark, because that is where that level of experience is. However, I would also like to apply, at least for Job 2.
recruiter, dismissive: but wouldn't you agree that in their position you would want that level of experience?
me, sensing only one way to punch through this: well, if you want new ways of thinking you may want UI people who are not hampered by past constraints and understand that however fast the devices change, humans don't

recruiter later in email: well, I sent forward your resume, but really, do you know the star UI designers?

Yeah dude, I am so giving you the names inside Nokia. Sure, I wanna get fired for a guy who can't even pretend that I am good enough just to butter me up. Look, I know I was a lightweight for Job 1, but you could have pretended I could do Job 2, which I can.

- * - * - * -

Company 2: Researchy Now Very Big Company (but everything they release is Beta). Oh fuck it, it is Google, ok? Frigging "Research? Product? Who knows, ship it!" Google.

me: send resume to job advert for mobile-UI designer

--- 4 weeks of silence ---

recruiter & me: email for phone date

--- 1 week later ---

phone date

recruiter: blah blah what do you do
me: explain, where strengths are, experience with UI design, recent experience with mobile UI design in research context. Some things I do are currently confidential.
recruiter: evasive maneuvers, "but we do have a job opening for a mobile UI designer, perhaps you know someone for it?"
me: I'd love to apply myself, send it to me
recruiter in email: sends original advert for mobile-UI designer
me in email: "I'd love to apply and show you how I can fit that position"
recruiter in email: "I spoke w/ the staffing lead for UI and it seems that a portfolio of some
sort is required. I'm sure this request immediately makes you want to take
your name out of the hat. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks!".

I. Don't. Think. So.

Until I get a "Please don't call us, we'll call you", I'll plug at this. I am not going down that easy. It may just have one or two cases, but the fact that this email happened Friday evening gives me a chance to put something together for Monday morning. And by the way, recruiter-dude, you aree about to be perceived as damage, and I will start routing around you.

- * - * - * -

My job life is just schizophrenic right now. On the one hand my boss loves, loves, loves me becayse I work on these research projects with demos grounded in reality that show results and possibilities inside the company. I take strange areas and make them work on the device. On the othe other hand, I can't seem to convince anybody outside the company I have the brain to make something that works on the mobile device, because I haven't been making dinky mobile websites for the last 5 years or had Nokia ship any of my explorations in the two years I have been on it, for technologies that are barely ready to be used by anyone.

I obviously will need to make some of these at night to show off if I want to go to the next step of these gigs. I am annoyed at that prospect, though. More coding, yay.

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Oh.

And like every time, I look at the UI description, I look at the sketches I made, I look at the interaction I imagined, I look at the system I sold to partners and managers, I look at the programming API and available tools, I look at what I know can fit on a device, and once again, yet again, when there is nothing more to read and nothing more to sketch,  I ask myself, just once again...

...how the hell are you gonna make this one happen this time?


Better get to work.