Susie and I are up late again, messing around and working on facing computers like the serious geeks we are. The past two nights have been fun, though the days have been a lot of hard-core Web development work.
Tuesday of our trip, we took a taxi to downtown Lima. We were dropped off in the central square, by the cathedral. To its right, the presidential palace squats behind a metal fence and a large courtyard.
So, I’m still talking about Peru. One of the event’s venues was a club called the Jazz Zone. I was going to order a snack at the Jazz Zone one night late, but Amy vehemently objected. The previous night, she said, she’d seen hideous things happening in the kitchen. What do you mean? I asked, turning away from the musicians to concentrate.
“I’m not bitter about what happened to me as a child, and my mother was instrumental in keeping me from being so. ... She taught me to be grateful for my life regardless of what that entailed, and that’s directly related to the image of Christ on the cross and the example of sacrifice that he gave us. What she taught me is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not no pain—it’s that the pain is actually a gift. What’s the option? God doesn’t really give you another choice.”
After over a decade of user testing, it is clear that the way we search the web is similar to the way we would search our home for valuables as it was burning to the ground. Frantically.
“We must shift the focus of companies back to the customer and away from shareholder value ... The shift necessitates a fundamental change in our prevailing theory of the firm… The current theory holds that the singular goal of the corporation should be shareholder value maximization. Instead, companies should place customers at the center of the firm and focus on delighting them, while earning an acceptable return for shareholders.”
You can scroll right easily by holding down the SHIFT key and using your scroll wheel. (Firefox users trying this will end up jumping to old Web pages until a) Firefox releases a fix, b) they change their settings like so.)