I love to rant over how bad HOAs are. There are so many case studies in my life where otherwise happy friendly people become tyrants when given a bit of power. From the band leader that threatened my wedding would be a failure to the people that run the Home Owners Associations. It takes a certain type of fellow to run an HOA. My buck’s county HOA is much better then the one in Manalanapan....

The google blog recently put up a remarkably content-free post on their product blog about how they use iterative design and usability studies to develop enhancements to their core search offering. Official Google Blog: Behind the scenes of the Search Options panel. We do similar testing for our search product (http://search.comcast.net) and we actually run 8-12 live tests at any given time. The real users using the product in the wild give us fantastic insight that is combined with the more traditional studies in order to guide us....

Cute tag-cloud generator off my feed [](http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/875557/Aaron%27s_Blog ““Wordle: Aaron’s Blog”)

Over in CIM we are working on a major CMS overhaul based on Alfresco. Alfresco gives me the solid foundation of what I need in terms of content APIs, scalability and workflow. Unfortunately the UI leaves something to be desired. I’ve decided to focus my teams efforts on the Editorial interface of the CMS and really want to get it right. CMS projects in general are prone to dissatisfaction and most people using ‘enterprise’ CMSs don’t really like them....

Taking of Pelham 123 on Fancast! I went looking for the trailer of the original Pelham 123 and was plesantly surprised to find the full lenght movie on Fancast! This was one of my favorite movies as a kid and well worth watching. There are some comments out there about how this is a well done film in terms of pacing, so I hope that they model that in the remake....