Yesterday afternoon from 2-3:30pm, we had our annual all-staff assembly at the nearby Grand Hyatt hotel. About 1,000 people from our company headquarters gathered to get fresh perspectives from our leadership. Some of the other 1,000 people dialed in from field offices. In addition to our president and CEO on stage, various directors stood up from the audience under spotlight and video piped to two giant screens to give updates on major initiatives. There were also several video pieces of members and other leaders speaking.

I've met so many of the staff in the year since last assembly, that I was able to make a lot of eye contact and wave as I walked through the room--a good feeling. The program concluded on time and people gathered outside the ballroom for ice cream.

- mike lee - washington, dc

The last two days at work saw a flurry of Post-IT-powered discussion to further refine and put a human face on our four draft scenarios for the future of the web. With the expert facilitation by our super smart team from the Global Business Network on Tuesday, we ended the day with four emblematic characters that would each live in one of the year 2011 futures. Today we filtered our organizations hopes and desires through the future scenarios and brainstormed new ideas to support our vision and mission. It was not a moment too soon finishing our draft stores as our exectives want to mention them at our shareholder's meeting next week, and next Friday, I'm showing them to students at the MIT Media Lab.

- mike lee - washington, dc

I've finally got Katamari Damacy running on a used PS2 as s4xton did a long back. Now I see what the excitement was all about. This is a great game indeed.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

Saturday: 1) we stopped into Barbarian Comics in downtown Wheaton. The store is a lot neater and well organized than I remember from my last visit three years ago. I chatted with the owner, Carl Bridgers (2), who says they are in their 38th year of operation and he's been there since the beginning and through three storefronts all along the same street. I remember Carl from when I visited the store back in high school. In the age of Amazon, Carl still doesn't have a web site, and manually pulls comic book subscriptions for customers who come in regularly to pick them up. 4) Cianna didn't sleep well during the daytime--this photo shows one of her few naps. Thus there were several screaming meltdowns from tiredness. 5) Amy's Potterotica came in the mail from Amazon 6) Amy didn't want to see War of the Worlds because of how the story twists poke at moms' deep-seated fears, so I hit the 7:50pm show. The camera point of view was almost completely confined to a 10-foot bubble around Cruise and the little girl which intensified the threat of the alien extermination force. I left the theater drained, in a good way. Today: 7) I visited the Penn Camera Store near on Rockville Pike near our house. The showroom is larger, but they don't rent professional gear like the downtown DC location near my office. 8) I bought a pair of basic Nikon binoculars to keep on our kitchen window sill to spy on birds as they come to the bird bath (9). Tonight, I'm once again compacting empty boxes into the recycle bin (10) from our move and new things bought. We've made good progress unpacking, with maybe 40% of the boxes done, but the remaining are the toughest because they are full of books. Our house is starting to feel like home.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

One of our current favorite stops in the new neighborhood is the Ledo Pizza franchise. The Baltimore location near our old house closed a while ago, so it has only been in the last month that we've been able to get our fixes of the rectangular pizzas featuring flaky crust and thick hand-cut pepperoni. Ledo Pizza restaurants are located in the eastern states from PA to FL. The original restaurant is still operating in nearby College Park. I remember seeing, and being in, the long lines in front of that location. I noticed today that this year is the restaurant's 50th anniversary. Congratulations!

- mike lee - wheaton, md

I took my boss Mark, and co-worker Dave, to the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) at the University of Maryland today for a tour. The lab's founding director, Dr. Ben Shneiderman, gave us a quick tour and had some of his researchers demonstrate a couple projects before taking us to lunch. Ben was engaging as always. First, we saw François Guimbretière's,

prototype mouse for older adults (2, 3), which consisted of an interesting new shell built around the guts of a small USB mouse. The sculpted form was generated from a CAD file on a Z Corp 3D

Printer. Another researcher was working with the National Institute on Aging to study older people's decisionmaking behaviors when confronted with a color-coded and labeled grid of choices to click in a web interface. Test participant's gaze on an LCD computer monitor is tracked by VisionTrak

Software taking eye movement data from the infrared sensors on a Polhemus ISCAN video based eye and target tracker. Naturally, I volunteered to try out the eye tracker (5). They had me fix my gaze at points across a calibration pattern, but some kind of triangulation error happened and we had to leave for lunch anyway. The head rig was lightweight, but somewhat cumbersome, and I had to quip, "this thing needs a couple drink holders!" Playing with the eye tracking hardware made me more excited to see the upcoming results of two eyetracking studies on our web site I commissioned from a west coast firm.

When I got back to the office, I went right into some meetings with one of my managers on production issues, but my assistant Pam handed me the hard copy of a report (7) on converged media newsrooms of the future published by IFRA, the international association for newspaper and media technology. The illustrated document showcases their prototype newsroom called Newsplex at the University

of South Carolina. Good reading for sometime this weekend.

- mike lee - washington, dc

Where yesterday's all-staff meeting was of the division we're in that does all of the profit-making activity to partially fund the social mission of our non-profit organization, today's all-staff was for sister groups involved in communications. Under the umbrella of Integrated Communications, and headed by our Chief Communications Officer, the groups include web operations (my 46 co-workers and me), TV, radio, publications (magazines, books, and news bulletins), public relations, advertising, branding, creative services, internal communications, and more. These meetings consist of almost 200 people! We were in the Paris Ballroom on the 4th floor of the Hotel Monaco to hear news and encouragement from the big boss lady and to work in roundtables on collaborative exercises designed to generate new ideas. Believe it or not, there's ONE MORE all-staff meeting next week for the entire organization of over 2000 people.

- mike lee - washington, dc

1) Leaving in the morning, I get dropped off at the subway station, child gets dropped off at my mom's, wife returns home to enjoy her last day of vacation 2) Reading a positive scenario for the future history of the internet until 2011 3) Morning all-staff meeting in the company's main auditorium. We are up to 160 people now in our division, and with roundtable-style seating, it's a packed room. Senior management is doing a panel discussion on strategy. 4) I moved back up to the 7th floor from 5 today because Sandy so generously gave up her office to double up with someone else so I could be with our team again. Our division is doubling people up wherever possible because we're hiring like crazy, but won't be in our new office space until early next year. 5) My view of E Street. Best thing is I get GPRS reception to my Sidekick again. 6) Today, I grabbed a cab home from the Wheaton subway station. There are always several parked by the station entrance. 7) On Comcast's fourth visit, and after wife's call to a county government agency, we got high definition cable installed. 8) Now there's a Motorola Digital Converter offering 780 channels of content. My brain is full now. Goodnight.

- mike lee

Clearing out miscellaneous photos from this week: 1) The library near our new house has a decent section of books in chinese where I found an HTML 4 book. I wonder what my mom would think of it. 2) I was first into our CEO's private conference room at 7:45am one morning this week for a meeting with a potential web site content partner. It always bugs me that there's not an LCD flat panel on the wall showing our web site along with the magazine and bulletin covers. 3) Another shipment from the TED2006 bookclub arrived containing Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter and Neil Gershenfeld's FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication. 4) Our architect came up with a last-minute breakthrough for a much better layout for our web team's new meeting room and usability testing lab. 5) While waiting to meet our director of broadcast at the restaurant of the Hotel Monaco, I saw that the Washington Post featured a phonecam photo on the front page for the first time. Keith Jenkins, a former HN moblogger, and now the paper's photo editor, posts a better image on his Flickr photostream. 6) Here's the Firefly phone all configured and loaded with extra minutes taking some extra juice. 7) Watching Kill Bill Volume 1 on Sony PSP UMD tonight.

- mike lee - wheaton, md