In a telling sign that Major League Soccer has a little more business acumen than the WUSA is this article in USA Today.

The USSF staff and MLS' central office and teams are providing virtually all of the tournament's organizational and business-side structure.

The league's investors also took considerable risks when they built soccer-specific stadiums in Columbus, Ohio, and Carson, Calif., and when they assembled a production and marketing entity that paid a reported \$40 million for the U.S. English-language TV rights to the 2002 and 2006 men's World Cups, as well as this Women's World Cup.

Now they stand to reap a reward in the form of TV ad sales, corporate sponsorship deals and stadium fees.

Nielsen has a better than usual alertbox today trying to dispel the Misconceptions about Usability. One of his points really resonated with me regarding the tensions that can exist between creativity and usability.

Design is basically problem solving under constraints: you must design a system that can actually be built, that's within budget, and that works in the real world. Usability adds one more constraint: the system must be relatively easy for people to use. This constraint exists whether or not you include formal usability methods in your design process.

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Knowing real-world facts increases creativity because it offers designers ideas about design improvement and inspires them to focus their energy on real problems.

Its hard to say that adding a constraint is going to increase creativity. However, when a designer is thinking about creativity they're usually talking about coming up with a site design from scratch and resist the way that usability guidelines force them to work in accepted ways such as boxy-columnar layouts and avoiding mystery meat navigation. I think what he should have really said is that usability, like any other constraint, forces designers to focus their creativity to improve, mold, and refine accepted website design conventions for a particular deployment. Of course, this takes the creative joy out of the process and routinizes it.

I've been meaning to write a review of the movie SWAT since I saw it last weekend. Overall it was a good summer action movie without any noticeable slow parts. The cast was good, although not full of too many known actors. Colin Ferrel did an excellent job as the SWAT officer who lives and breates what he works. Samuel Jackson was his usual cool and funny, ass-kicking self.

My favorite part of the movie had to be the scene where my Latino brothers from East L.A and the brothers from Compton come together - with enough firepower to equip the standing army of the Netherlands, I might add - to assualt the SWAT trucks carrying the movie's villain to a federal prison. The moral of that segment must be that there can be racial harmony when it comes to liberating a French drug kingpin from the clutches of the US Government.