7-12 inches of snow in a major city. You expect certain things, but our new city home continues to find ways to surprise us … here are some things that made us smile:

1. Don’t have enough snow plows? So what. NYC handles large snow storms by attaching huge plows to their trash trucks. Makes sense to use what you have. Brilliant.
2. Cancel schools? Well … it is a pretty big snow storm, so ok. But this was the first time in 5 years. Wow.
3. Mayor says some other surprising things in his press release … if you go out, ask your neighbors if they need anything; if you’re in 5th grade, math tests are rescheduled until Wednesday; and then summarized key points in Spanish for those who are more comfortable with the Spanish language.
4. City parks feel differently about snow days … come out and play! Each borough names one park with sledding and free hot cocoa!

Hillsborough, North Carolina. Trees. Land. Deers.

From the location of the Reyes Ranch you can truly get lost in the outdoors. From her window, mother Reyes watches the deer drink from the birdbath and the squirrels and blackbirds compete for leftover hushpuppies and shrimp (I didn’t know birds ate Shrimp, see, I’m learning all the time).

And the best part about being alone out in the woods is that we’re really not alone. In fact, after church on Sunday we gathered around the dining table and had coffee with my parents and Conrad’s parents together. It was a fun time seeing everyone together — there was much laughing and story telling, and I could from see everyone’s faces I wasn’t alone in the joy.

But we were alone in the woods of Hillsborough. And my parents were alone in the warmth of Florida.

So thank you Skype and Logitech Quickcam for bringing the family together for a Sunday social. We hope family togetherness is something we can more easily accomplish now that we’re all spread up and down the eastern seaboard.

See you online and around the supper table!
– The Reyi

I think she’s telling the truth about being unable to post from behind China’s Great firewall … but I have the slightest doubt that this is her sneaky way of getting me to finally post to the blog.
– C

First impressions of China as perceived in the Beijing airport.

We descended to the Beijing airport on a cloud (probably a smog cloud). Made me happy to think the pilots have a horizon orientation tool, because there was no way my eyes could tell which way was up. The window seat was pointless as we didn’t see ground until we were nearly upon it… so I’ll have to see the sights of Bejing another time, because apparently I am not going to see them from the window of a plane.

If what lines the arrival halls of the airport is to give visitors a first impression of what the Chinese value, then in order of importance, it would be: Olympics (advertisements of the 2008 special olympics still addorn the lobby); next comes History (massive, intricate iron artifacts decorate the terminal – from bells, to urns to a rotating dragon-flanked sphere built in 117 to prove the earth is round and rotates. Why do we talk about Galileo again?); and finally technology: I had help purchasing and activating a new sim-card for my mobile phone before even reaching border control.

But all these impressions were dwarfed, truly, by the scale of … well, everything. I’ve had to explore by bus to find Terminal 3 and transfer to my domestic flight to Shanghai. This terminal is massive. It’s at least 3 stories high and stretches … at least a half-mile long but probably longer. Typical for an airport I suppose. But where it differs is in the interior: the whole structure is one open space. Which means a view in any direction feels like you’ve walked into a room with a mirror on either wall, where the reflection mirrors a seemingly endless hallway within a hallway within a hallway, continuing forever until the smallest hallway dimishes to a dot — but if you peer even more closely, you see yet another iteration. So that’s the Beijing airport — and that’s just the architecture.

Anyone who’s been to a china town will probably comment about how rude its locals are – just cutting in front of you, abandoning the concept of lines, not even looking you in the eye. Only, they aren’t being rude, they are being Chinese. In fact, When we expect otherwise, it is we who are rudely projecting our cultural rules onto them. The scale of the population is apparent here in the airport — large tour groups continually parade through the check-in and security gates. And yes, Dad, they are following flags. I keep wondering what will happen if the woman bearing the yellow standard crosses path with a man carrying one similiar — will their tours fall into a state of chaos not knowing which to follow? I imagine them landing 4 hours later at the wrong destination and realizing they had someone followed the wrong yellow flag onto the plane.

As to the lines, I relearned that cultural phenomenon on a trip to the ladies room. Normally a long queue, this seemed a bit more chaotic, with people bipassing those waiting and tring different door handles. Once realizing the doors were locked, they would stand guard outside, pouncing on the vacated porcelain as soon as its previous occupant relinquished the stall. “But there’s a line,” I thought. And then I realized I was the only one standing in it. Everyone else was stalking a stall. There are just so many, many people in China that culturally they have have had to learn to push to the front — for food, for jobs, for attention. Those who don’t push, stay forever in the back, and you can imagine the results. It’s not rude, it’s survival. But when you know a culture’s rules, you can play by them. So when the stall next to me opened, though in my mind I was 4th in line, I was next in the potty. Good thing too

Alas, here I sit with time to spare, lots of restaurants, and not the slightest desire to eat or drink a thing. A food review will definitely be forthcoming … maybe tomorrow after a good night’s rest and a tour of my new surroundings.

We woke this morning to the mercury hovering around 23 in its frosy, glass tube. “Let’s go for a hike,” we thought. Duh. What else do you think when it’s 23 degrees and snowy outside?

And so we dug out and layered up with long johns, fleece, buff, coats and boots, and took Gil out for a ride in the chilly Westchester air.

Thanks to Bevin for the great suggestion of the Cranberry Lake Preserve. We stopped in at their Nature Center where the ranger made a few notes to our hike plan, and then we were off.

Though the weather was windy, we were well-prepared and actually grew toasty warm once we got moving. The three mile hike was a snowy wonderland. About 6″ of snow and ice blanketed the trail, giving us a beautiful winter wonderland to explore. Though the trail was well-blazed with orange, purple, blue and red — we found the rabbit and deer-print blazes even more noticable. Yet despite the plentiful snowy prints, the only wildlife we spotted were two hungry woodpeckers knocking for snacks.

Two and a half hours later, we picked up Gil and found a Little Spot in Westchester to replenish our calories with onion rings, hot dogs and a hamburger “wedge.” (Note: for all you non-New Yorkers, what we called a “grinder” in MA and a “Sub” in NC, they call a “Wedge” in Westchester — who knew.)

Saturday’s going well – Conrad has a little undisclosed location for tonight – this weekend just keeps getting better and better

… because I’m going!

And no, Kevin. I’m not going to Asia for another 4 months … just a short 7 day trip this time!

… oh, and the quality of this little clip isn’t too great, but as the first video blog update, and the first Flip cam experiment, I think you should give me some room for error here.

Earlier this week, I attended a lecture with the NYC chapter of the Usability Professional Association called  The NYTimes and the Online News Experience . The lecture was outstanding, so I’m sharing my notes perchance others find the content worthwhile.

Ok, let’s start with first impressions. The venue was enviously gorgeous. A glassy, techy homage to success and money money money. I brought a few colleagues with me and we couldn’t be sure if we were more impressed by the video cameras at the security check-in, the moving monitor screen art representing the famed Bloomberg terminals, the fish-tanks-as-columns in the atrium, the free-coffee and free-snacks stations (that’s “stations” plural) or the amazing two-story hall that led through it all, up a glitzy open stairway, to the open bar and hors d’œuvre buffet at the auditorium’s entrance.

But I digress … we should move past the meat of the mini-burgers to the meat of the event.

The lecture opened with some words from Bloomberg’s CTO — I tried to dig up his name for you as well, but apparently my Google foo isn’t fully charged today. I did think one of his points worth noting: he said at Bloomberg, they “now push out terabytes of data, every day.” And he empathized with the audience asking them to imagine the “usability challenges of to how display and work with all this information in a useful and intuitive way.” — hence the invention of the two-screen Bloomberg terminal and the massive amount of text and information they can put at the fingertips and eyeballs of people across the financial industry … in milli-seconds. IBM has a similar history of necessity-driven innovative design.

Andrew’s presentation was not really about usability though. It was about using multimedia to tell and present graphic and interactive narratives — a thing he called “visual journalism.” Like any good journalist, he broke his story into 3 big chunks: the Who, the Why and the How.

The Who
The New York Times (NYT) organizes their reporting teams into 2 primary desks: features and news — but between that now sits the multimedia crew, composed into 6 main groups (which he presented in a venn diagram of overlapping skills and complimentary components): Interactive news; Graphics; Design; Multimedia; Photography and Video. Together these teams collaborate on a few pieces a year that turn data and news reporting into a whole new sensory-rich experience.

He described the transformation at the NYT – the need to move 1400 paper journalists to new medium. We can understand that moving a big ship is no easy task. To work through and help this, they identified a smaller group and empowered them — within that group they further gave license to a few rock stars to really lead the pack. And slowly, the NYT ship is beginning to turn.

The What and Why

His goal was simply stated: Use new media to tell a story in a way that empowers the voices of the many.
He illustrated this point though a few compelling pieces: voice and data used to tell the story of pardoned and compensated convicts; his team created an immersive experience with video and graphic blueprints to give a virual tour of a new exhibit at the Met museum.

There were a few types of stories he called out specifically:

1. Non-linear interactives – What if someone reads a story and wants to explore further. We tend to tell stories in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom way. But this isn’t the experience of the Web – someone can dive deeper, learn more on a sub-topic, and then return to the story to continue reading, only to dive deeper again. In the current model, we lose people to Google to Wikipedia or to other articles. But what if we plan a story that isn’t linear. He also encouraged us to think about involving media in the story – rather than, “see the video on the right” or “listen to the podcast over there” … he said, “We tell stories because they are stories, not because they are media types.”
2. Data-driven story telling – NYT has a beautiful understanding of using data to tell a story — and by providing the data in a raw but understandable way, they empower the readers to interpret the data. Examples here included Election-day results (pulling from real election databases and creating accurate country-by-county maps that would evolve as time and votes elapsed); box-office revenues; and a face of a a solider that was composed of other pictures – each with data behind a clickable thumbnail.
3. News-driven / breaking news – Here the multimedia evolved over time. Templates were his team’s secret weapon. And being ok with publishing news as it unfolded, not needing to wait for perfection and finality, but having a solid foundation from which they could continue to hang new information off of and develop. He used examples of the recent plane crash in the Hudson River and a shooting incident where facts were unfolding rapidly.
4. User engagement – An area for the NYT where much experimentation is still on-going and admitting they hadn’t yet dived fully into this part of the pool. But where the readers are the story tellers – adding their own content to compose the story. Example was the Inauguration day. Where people were encouraged to upload their own photos from the event – a plan that quickly evolved to a scope much larger than the DC audience and became a global audience with photo stories pouring in from unexpected places and delivering a story virtually impossible for the  NYT to tell otherwise.

The How
The mulitmedia desk is not involved in every story. There is a cost of production and a cost of time involved, so naturally like any big company, there were process and rules of engagement. He listed a few: when there’s news value, power of the medium lends or user experience lends a new aspect of the story.

He relied on 3 things to execute: A strong team with the knowledge and skills to execute, A collaborative environment across their whole organization to create, and Templates. No department wants to reuse — everyone wants something unique. But templates allow them to get news out quickly, in a way that works. He said he always tries to create templates and reusable elements — otherwise they don’t do the piece.

On templates, he said it important to think about:
- XML
- Design pattern libraries with style-sheets for Flash elements
- Editorial scale to allow series or ribbons over time (see #3 above)
- Search engine optimization – in the case of the NYT, they keep as much information as possible out of flash – including headlines, descriptive text, etc.

… And to the gentleman I met in the coat-check line, I hope your getting good use out of that mouse-pad giveaway … I’m still scratching my brain over the infuriatingly complicated Bloomberg Rubik’s cube.

More information
InteractiveNarratives.org
Netvibes.com/InteractiveNarratives
Twitter: drewvigal

Our zesty-for-life friend did a 180. She hung up her rave dancing shoes, put away the directions for the quick trip to Hotlanta and moved to Minnesota where she shacked up with her dear man-friend, Doug. On a recent visit to the big apple, she was relaying a popular Midwest table fare called a “hot dish,” and her new family’s ultimate favorite: the Tater Tot Hot Dish.

I couldn’t figure it out. First off, I kept calling it, incorrectly a “tater tot hot pot.” Secondly, I just couldn’t understand Doug’s criticism of my friend “doing it wrong” by getting “fancy” with all kinds of other “exotic” ingredients, … like garlic salt! (???) Third … tater tot topping?!!

So on her next visit to NYC, she came with a house-warming gift. My very own hot pot dish cookbook. Look out! That same day I traveled to Fairway (our fancy grocery store) where my friend steered the grocery cart right past the oh-so-tempting fresh produce section towards the frozen goods.  “Honey, you won’t be needing any of that fresh veg for this dish” she informed me. We landed first at the organic frozen food section. “Nope, you don’t need or-ganic, you need ore-ida.”  And off we went. Frozen peas – check. Frozen green beens (french cut, not to be fancy, but because they lay better in the pan .. like, duh!) – check. And of course, tater tots (extra crispy, or original, my choice).

Later that night, as I top sauteed ground beef with cream of mushroom soup, my head is playing back every new-years-resolution, healthy-eating article I ever read; my father is salivating; my mother is shaking her head in quiet dismay … all that she taught about nutrition, I should know better.

The concoction is layered and bubbling in the oven. I won’t lie, it was fun and it looks scrumptious. How funny that I find myself, Boston-bred, Miami-educated, Europe-cultured and New York City-living .. getting in touch with the roots of my Ohio forefathers.

How will it taste? Stay tuned! My first tater tot hot pot is bubbling in the oven.

Christmas decorations: packed & away – check. Blog: updated with some memories – check. It seems like only the sales and a few lingering street decorations mark the festivities so recently passed.

Yet despite the dour news of Wall Street, Conrad and I look about our streets with uplifted hearts, still on an emotional high from the year passed and ready to face the year ahead.

As Conrad and I look back upon Christmas 08, we don’t first think of our flight delays, wrapping paper or shopping lines. We think of our Christmas tree. And we think of how we posted it, for free, 7 days before Christmas, on Craig’s List. And how we were touched and surprised – not by the 5 responses that came into our email in about 10 minutes, but the story one woman told that touched our hearts and filled us with a real spirit of Christmas. This year, Jennifer (that was her name) found herself unemployed and in a new apartment in the Bronx with her 9 year old son. Unfortunately, the tree was simply one of the luxuries that had to go. “My son kind of understands, but I know he would love a tree in our new apartment,” she wrote. “I hope to be able to have a tree this year, but if not I will make the best of it.” I called her right away. We talked on the phone and her exuberance was palpable. After confirming babysitting duties with a neighbor, Jennifer was able to make a dash from the Bronx to Harlem, load up our now naked Christmas tree on her car, and return with her husband to their apartment where there son would awake, surprised, to a Christmas tree. She may not realize it, but the tree wasn’t free. Jennifer paid us in kindness, in hope, and in faith. She filled our hearts with her hopes for a better tomorrow and a reminder that we are all an active part of the communities we live in.

When she got home with her tree, she sent us an e-mail:  “In These Times I Trust In God And I Know It Will Always Be O.K.” I sure hope so, and we firmly commit to do our part to try.

Our best wishes to everyone for a happy, healthy and mindful 2009.

Ah retirement … the good life.  You may have heard it before, but really, it’s true. We checked.

This Christmas Conrad and I spent two luxuryous weeks in South Florida. You know the weather map they show on the news every morning? We live where it’s blue in the winter … maybe even white. But my parents? They picked that little triangle at the tip of Florida that’s always orange .. maybe even red. Even better, though we had a few work days to put in at the beginning of the trip, the rest of the vacation was what we call in the biz “lids down” – which made it a real retirement experience.

What do retired people do? Exactly what you think. Only it’s not silly, it’s awesome. Hmmm I wonder if Seinfeld’s Florida episodes were an intentional deception method by the government to encourage us to work longer? Because truly, I’m ready. I’ll retire today if I must. Bring it on.

The agenda is worth sharing, just to rub it in… Sundays are Flea Market mornings. So dad, Conrad and I bunded into dad’s new, purple (or what he calls “maroon” and the dealer calls “red”) SUV and got in line with the migrant orange pickers who sell some really good stuff. Everything from collectible glass ware, to fishing poles, to fresh tomatoes, orchids and tomales. The smells and tastes are as fun to take in as the sights. From there it’s a Sunday breakfast on the porch which if we’re lucky features mom’s homemade corn pancakes. That’s right, kids. Corn. If you haven’t had it, you’re missing out.

Dad is also reusing his captain’s license with the national park service now. Which means we get to swarm the national park service boat to Boca Chita and party tropical style. Speaking of partying tropical style, our time also included a trip north to the beaches of South Beach, happy hour raw bar at Monty’s and New Year’s Eve at Morada Bay dancing the night away under a starry sky bordered by palm trees above and sandy beaches below.

Oh, and I shouldn’t forget that Monday’s are bingo night. But don’t underestimate blue-haired bingo. We are NOT talking about 5-in-a-row. Our “youth group” (median age = 31, mind you) wandered in ready to punch our 5 dots (including free space). Conrad was surprised to learn that you couldn’t have any number in any column (no, Conrad, there is no B35), Andy thought you had to get 5 in a row to win. Yikes, we were behind the times. But we were rescued by the wiser members of our table and shown the light of bingo configurations like the Picture Album and the Double Postage stamp).

There was also shuffleboard and hot tub, canoeing in the everglades, fresh strawberry shakes from the farm and Conrad’s fresh and famous guacamole … but alas, I’m no longer retired and there just isn’t time in the day to give full details of the trip. Suffice it to say, if you were there, you hopefully remember highlights of your own … and if you weren’t there, well, we missed you!

Thanks to Momma & Poppa O, the consummate Camp Leaders of Camp Osmon South.

On Monday, Conrad and I successfully recreated the “When Harry Met Sally” and bought, according to my specifications, the “tallest, skinnist, cheapest tree” the guy on the street could sell us, and carried it home.

Conrad wore a ratty coat and gloves to parade through the city, I dressed in my usual white coat and leather gloves. Hmm, why didn’t he TELL me he wore old clothes on purpose as trees have SAP. Argh.

But anyway, traipse across the park towards home, laden with tree and huge grins, we did.

Our tree is now nestled in his new tree stand and festooned with the fattest, tackiest lights Conrad could find, lights he procured last year when he surprise-decorated our apartment; strings of popcorn garland; the few Christmas ornaments we’ve collected on our travels; and holiday cards from friends and family.

On my walk to work this morning, I passed by 8 burley looking fireman standing outside their station. They were in a hot debate and money was on the line.  “5 dollars per man. How many ornaments do we have?” Yep. They were decorating the firehouse with what looked like antique painted wooden cut-outs – santa and his reindeer, holiday balls, and holly. Fierce.

Christmas is definitely in the air!