is a blog about design, technology and culture written by Khoi Vinh, and has been more or less continuously published since December 2000 in New York City. Khoi is currently Principal Designer at Adobe. Previously, Khoi was co-founder and CEO of Mixel (acquired in 2013), Design Director of The New York Times Online, and co-founder of the design studio Behavior, LLC. He is the author of “How They Got There: Interviews with Digital Designers About Their Careers”and “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design,” and was named one of Fast Company’s “fifty most influential designers in America.” Khoi lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
About nineteen months ago, I set up my first wireless router at home, and I remember at the time that there were only one or two other publicly broadcasted SSIDs in the general vicinity of my apartment. Today, there are at least eight or so wireless networks within range of my laptop, suggesting that broadband, in my building or in my immediately neighboring buildings anyway, has reached a significant level of pervasiveness.
One unwelcome consequence of this is that my home broadband access has gotten noticeably slower over the past six months, almost to the point of frustration. It takes two or three seconds of blank responsiveness from my browser before a page will suddenly load, a clear sign of saturated bandwidth. I was hoping that, by upgrading to an 802.11g router as I did earlier this week, I would see some performance gain — not a realistic presumption, I know, because most of the speed increase in wireless-g hardware benefits intra-network activity. Still, I hoped, but as is to be expected, no favorable results.
I never paid much attention to warnings that the performance of cable broadband pipes, by virtue of the fact that they are community shared, inevitably degrade with increased patronage. Naturally, I assign more credence to that claim now, but I think it’s also attributable to a predictable tendency to outgrow bandwidth, regardless of how much speed you have. Given 5 Mbps downstream (I’ve been at that speed for roughly five years now), before too long I’ll need 8 Mbps. And if you give me eight, I’m sure I’ll find a way to max it out before the current (and last!) Bush presidency comes to a merciful end. You can never have too much bandwidth, so to speak. It’s a natural human behavior — or, at least, a natural consumer behavior.
This morning I spent some time fooling around with JotSpot, a hosted wiki-engine that allows anybody to create a new wiki and share it with authorized collaborators instantly. It’s a pretty cool piece of work with a lot of smart user information architecture behind it. The JotSpot team has put some laudable effort into making this tool a solid user experience — no installation or server configuration is necessary, and I got a pilot wiki up and running in under ten minutes. But there’s not much new to be found in terms of design, unfortunately; in spite of its competence, the application doesn’t look or feel particularly slick. In fact, JotSpot got me thinking that the rendering of wikis, by and large, has been quite lacking to date.
Okay, I’m getting a little concerned about iPod theft on New York City’s subways, which are up 24 percent over the same period last year, according to recent police reports. It’s been a long time since I really thought that anything I carried about my person was in danger of being stolen — or would make me a candidate for a mugging — in New York, but something about the ubiquity and attractiveness of iPods make that scenario seem not quite so far fetched now. I could just stop using my iPod on subways, but a less counter-intuitive and more agreeable solution would be to replace those telltale white earbuds with something a little more discreet. As a side benefit, it will prevent me from appearing, as a commenter suggested in a previous post I wrote about iPods in New York, to be a “tool of Apple.”
About nineteen months ago, I set up my 
This morning I spent some time fooling around with 
Okay, I’m getting a little concerned about