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A lot of people who know me know my concern with the passage of time, and my dismay at how quickly weeks and months can slip by if you're not disciplined about paying attention to them. One thing I've been doing since around Memorial Day 2000 is writing down each day's events in my "mundane journal". I like the idea that each day leaves a little footprint. Admittedly it's been kind of a "write only" activity...I've never gone back to read them en masse, though they have been useful for reference every now and then.

But lately I've been wondering "where did 2002 and 2003 go?" Sometimes it seemed like they went by in a blurred rush...it might be due to the relative longevity of my current job (2 years, another half year and it ties my personal record.)

At any rate, yesterday I finally figured out how to leverage my daily recording discipline in a readable form...I'm going back and summarizing every month in a pseudo-bulletitem form, a metajournal of sorts. The result is a lot more browsable...I focus on anecdotes and events where I say "oh yeah...I remember that" and overall I think it's going to be a great way of reclaiming that "lost time".

Also, it's amazing to go back and see events as signs and portents. With Mo of course, but also the path of my career, and even the lives of my friends. I recommend private journal keeping as a discipline for everyone.

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Design Advice of the Moment
Design Eye for the Usability Guy...five designers ("the Design Fab Five") offer advice to Jakob Nielsen's famous useit.com.

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Photo of the Moment

--I must've walked by this bit of plantlife alley off of Derby Street in Salem hundreds of times without seeing it. Weird how easy it is to be blind to this stuff...I used to think NYC was unique in how you could walk down the same stretch of upper Broadway and see new stuff each time, but then I realized it's just a concentrated form of what happens everywhere.