Author: tiphane

musique et poésie (1)

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I’m starting this series today because I heard some learners of French were sharing poetry, and I keep a playlist of songs from mostly 50 years ago that I listened to back then, when I was young! 1- Les Feuilles Mortes This is a well-known song and poem by Jacques Prévert that you’ll hear translated as Autumn Leaves, however the translation leaves a whole lot of it out. So get the one sung by Yves Montand (French actor whom I remember from movies like César et Rosalie and Z). I don’t know if this link will work for Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/song/les-feuilles-mortes/1444874656 It was also sung by Juliette Greco, Edith Piaf, and many others. It’s a song about remembering happy days spent together on the sea shore (“et la mer efface sur le sable, les pas des amants désunis”), the fallen leaves an image for thoughts, feelings and remembrances that have since died out and that the cool wind from the north blows away. Or something like that… 2- Je t’aime, moi non plus This one …

More Bags!

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Lately I’ve been making grocery-size bags with the bottom made of a layer of a rigid mesh sewed inside the canvas, which you can’t see because of the lining. I just finished this one (I think I will keep it for myself!) But if you want one I offer these two at the Shawl-Anderson Dance Center online auction!

Do Me a Favor and State Your Pronouns

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In the space of the first two weeks of the Trump regime, they have managed to eliminate DEI not only across government agencies, but also on corporations. Any mention of the existence of trans and non-binary people have been removed from official documents, and everyone was surprised to see LGBTQI+ suddenly was truncated to LGB (hint: some wealthy donors are gay). We ceased to exist. I’m not too worried… They’re wrecking so much that they are going to provoke much bigger crises. I’m actually relieved that they’re erasing us, it won’t be on the minds of tourists improvising as gender police. It was thanks to DEI trainings that I started using They/Them or She/Her pronouns (this regime also put an end to all DEI efforts and even blame DEI for causing plane collisions – it’s code for saying they only want white men everywhere, preferably the ones without a fully developed frontal lobe, but I digress). I don’t say “She/Her” alone, because in reality I am afraid of a backlash. I concede that I make …

The Elevator in my building

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The elevator in my building is relatively simple to operate… But judging from the occasional bell ring I can hear from my apartment, people get confused with the bottom row of the panel. The buttons for the five floors are close enough to their legend and distant enough from each other to make it a clear choice. There’s even Braille although I would have to check with a blind person to know if it’s working for them. Fortunately they thought of putting a star next to the number 1. Too often I see, especially in buildings with a basement, an assortment of letters the user has to guess… Sometimes there’s LL or B for the basement, and G for Ground Floor which could just be 1, because this one user (me) keeps thinking it’s for Garage while LL suggests Lobby… The problem with the bottom row is that it contains both a frequently used pair of buttons to request door opening and closing, as well as two buttons that trigger the alarm. It isn’t clear …

DYI User-Centered Design and Usability

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Too late in my working life to have any effect on my work, I took a class from Richard I Anderson, a survey of user-centered design and usability research, which at the time were relatively new. Designers were relying on their own instincts or copying from others who dominated the market, and more often than not Computer Science curriculum never included the possibility that we were making our users’ lives more difficult by imposing our views on them of how they should interact with our creations. To make matters worse, our employers insulated departments from each other, and conflicts would arise about “who owns the user.” Was it the industrial designer, hired by Marketeers to entice consumers to buy the product, or the Engineer who applied their techniques to the best of their knowledge? I was neither of them, relying mostly on intuition (not really great either), and never being able to impose my views (I came to specialize in fixing other people’s software because I could take it home and rewrite it with clarity, …

Memories of a Waltz

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A fine dancer, she remembered thinking, leading her but not directing like so many awkward men did. She knew where the music would take them next, and there she went. Their feet glided in unison, and never seemed to suffer from an inadvertent push or pull by the other…