Earlier Rants and Raves

rants, raves, and other random thoughts...

HomeEarlier Rants and Raves

a website by Francis Li

Latest Rant: January 3, 2000
In one fell swoop, the people of the world put their conflicts aside for a brief moment to celebrate the coming of the new year. Thanks to early awareness, hard work, and a lot of money, the transition occurred without any major problems, giving us the chance to sit back and have a little chuckle at the folks in the boonies with their hoards of supplies.

The arrival of the new year also means it's time to give the website a refresh. Updates have been sparse, mainly because it's simply too difficult to do! It doesn't matter that I have a degree in computer science, I shouldn't have to juggle three or more programs and write my own code simply to put up this website. We've come a long way, regardless, but to truly benefit from the increasing population of Internet users, it must be as easy to contribute as it is to browse.

Case in point: eBay. It's a mesmerizing experience to browse through this garage sale of the world and reflect upon recent artifacts of our civilization. The reason why eBay is successful, and why Yahoo!, Amazon.com, and MSN aren't (in auctions), is because eBay has acquired the critical mass of contributors necessary to make it possible. When you browse eBay, you're browsing part of a collective consciousness and taking advantage of the sharing of others.

I spent an hour simply to list some items I wanted to sell on the site. Keep in mind, this is after I had already created all the descriptions and taken all the photographs. After doing all of this, I was exhausted. It almost isn't worth the trouble to contribute. My sister, who has been selling some of her unique jewelry on the site, agrees. We're both highly computer literate- how does the rest of the population handle it?

It's times like this that I'm reminded why I'm researching human-computer interaction. We need to progress beyond the current state of the art to a period in which technology supports and conforms to the user, not the other way around. Given that I'm listing this website on my resume and on my business cards, I'll be putting up more on my research interests. To get things started, I've put a link to the Group for User Interface Research at U.C. Berkeley. Check it out for a starting point. I'll have more coming soon- as soon as I finish trudging through and grappling with the software.

Latest Rant: 10-09-1999
Today marks the introduction of the third iteration of my website. I've removed links to the content from previous years, and I will be selectively restoring them as I do some housekeeping and editing. Of course, all of the content is still on the server to prevent broken links from search engines.

I've simplified the site design even further. I've dropped the header image in exchange for a simple text table. And, I no longer constrain the width of the text to fit a 640 x 480 resolution monitor.

On the right, notice a new link to Peggy Li Creations. Among so many other things, my sister is now selling her unique handmade jewelry on the Internet via secure credit card transactions. Keep an eye on Sarah Michelle Gellar's neck in TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" to see the latest PLC!