Even as a child I resonated with George Carlin’s comedy, specifically about the English language. His comedy introduced me to the power of language, whether it was about the seven dirty words:

euphemism:

or just talking about stuff:

Carlin was a master of rhetoric, its place in and its effect on our culture, and the humor in how it corrupts. His voice will be missed, at least by me.

I finally made the permanent switch from a PC to a Mac — specifically, a sleek and juiced up MacBook Pro — after years of waffling over the convenience of compatibility (my previous 9-to-5 didn’t supply a laptop and required usage of Windows-only software) and the coolness of Apple’s experience.

Having drinks with a Mac-compatible friend one evening, I informed him of my imminent switch, and he warned me that Apple’s user experience doesn’t carry over to customer support. Perhaps suffering from the “That can’t happen to me!” syndrome, I wasn’t deterred and ordered up a shiny new laptop. What followed was a series of communication breakdowns, buck-passing, and ineptitude of a magnitude far greater than any I’ve ever witnessed with any product company.

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With all of the issues I’ve had on this blog — a horrendous hosting provider, a failed experiment with unproven blog software, family craziness, and a case of walking pneumonia, to list but a few — perhaps the reason I’ve been silent here as much as I have was because I have embarked on a career change. I’m happy to announce that just about four weeks ago, I joined the Experience Design team at Molecular.

A career move is not made without significant introspection. It was a pleasure to spend three years working with the bright folks at Miller Systems — many of whom I call friends — but over the six months before the move, I realized that my career interests were moving in a different direction, and after meeting several members of the Molecular team at various events I realized that they were the perfect fit for a number of reasons:

• I cherish the thought of collaborating with a group of folks who are like minded in their pursuit of designing total experiences that inspire.
• Molecular’s focus and industry leadership in emerging interactions — discovering patterns and themes in everyday use of technology, how those patterns evolve over time, parallels my personal and professional interests.
• To know that those i work with know that experience design intersects and intertwingles with art, sociology, psychology, literary studies, cinematography, and cultural anthropology as much as it does technology.

As a result, the future focus of this blog will be on the general themes found in this post. Blogging will be more frequent, often more topical, and occasionally (hopefully) more thought provoking than it has in the past.

I’ve moved hosting providers from the atrocious Dreamhost to the more website-friendly HostDiscovery.

Thanks to Dave for the video find.

Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke died today. He was 90 years old.

Clarke’s 3 Laws of Prediction:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

He’ll be missed, Dave.

This weekend I finished migrating this blog over to WordPress, thus ending a six-month experiment with Typo, the WordPress-like blog tool built on top of the web application framework Ruby on Rails. I originally went to Typo for two reasons: To evaluate RoR performance on my ISP (The much-maligned Dreamhost) and to keep up with the numerous blog platforms available floating about in the ether. In the end, I gained a better understanding of some determining success factors for open source software projects.

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After dealing with various crises at the 9-to-5, bronchitis, a cheap hotel in Albany, NY, a coolant leak in my car, Skaneateles, NY in a snowstorm, and more bronchitis, I’ve officially caught up with the rest of my life and finally feel like I can blog again.

Lots has happened since my last post here. Facebook launched, and then relaunched (and then re-relaunched) Beacon. Google launched Open Social on which LinkedIn launched their own platform.

I mention these things because they dovetail nicely into what has been occupying so much of my time. Specifically, I’ve been spent in the last few months immersed in either designing total experiences or being hindered by applications that have been organically grown without much thought to their experience at all.

It’s been a very tiresome, but very educational experience.

I’ll be spending much of my time here detailing some of the lessons I’ve been learning, and (hopefully) they will coincide with what others in my discipline have been experiencing.

I’m here at PodCamp Boston 2. The Unconference on social media. The unconference format, with content provided by the participants, has been a fantastic and informative experience so far (even when the speaker doesn’t show up for a session, which is the case right now. PodCamp’s co-founder, Chris Brogan is running an ad-hoc session on the world of Podcasting.

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I’ve been a fan of the folks over at Common Craft for a while now. Just in time for Halloween, they’ve released their guide to Zombies in Plain English. This instructional video is especially handy for those of you who haven’t read Max Brook’s Zombie Survival Guide

Boy wonder Mark Zuckerberg and company announced today that Microsoft infused their little social platform with $240 million in cash for a 1.6 percent share. This puts Facebook’s value at $15 billion, which makes MySpace’s purchase price fall somewhere between pocket change and one car payment, relatively speaking.

And so ends the flurry of blog posts and newsbites regarding the tug-of-war between Microsoft and Google. Microsoft will serve international banner ads on the Facebook site, and Facebook can continue their plans to expand their targeted ad network.

The other obvious win for Microsoft is that it gains footing in what has become the most successful open web-based operating platform while still in its infancy, a move which will (hopefully) provide some meaningful competition to Google’s efforts on the web-OS front.

This can only be good for the rest of us. I would expect to see some cohesive form of social network/web OS come out of Google soon, integrating what has become several interconnected but disparate service applications. A little competition never hurt anyone.