Norman is great for theory but if you actually need to, like, build real software there's a lot of stuff that's more practical. I like Krug's Don't Make Me Think, 37Signals' Defensive Design for the Web, LukeW's form design book and the Oreilly Designing Interfaces book. Make sure to read Apple's UI guidelines for MacOS and iOS even if you're not developing for those platforms. They're free and have a good intro-level explanation of a lot of basic software usability concepts.

Norman, Nielsen and Cooper are fun reads but offer little in the way of actual solutions (because those books mostly exist to promote their consultancies).

IAAUID (I am a UI Designer)

Read this:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2011-April/032988.html
and then have a good laugh about this whole line of thought. Canonical is an effort to make a more usable default Linux desktop but they have one major problem (and many minor ones): Mark Shuttleworth is a terrible UI designer and either all the designers he employs are terrible as well, nobody at canonical is willing to stand up to him or he's not willing to take feedback from the designers he employs. Making a cargo cult hybrid of OS X and Windows 7 isn't going to do anyone any good.

Even the article doesn't get it, it assumes that Apple is successful because they "dumbed down UNIX".

They could always lift the xenophobic near-total ban on foreigners working in their country but that would be preposterous!

Wasn't the entire point of the CrunchPad to show how Michael Arrington was smarter than the entire consumer electronics industry and to highlight how he's a brilliant, super connected Silicon Valley darling? The FusionGarage guys seem to have a pretty good point in that Arringon apparently never delivered on his promised to hook them up with VC and supplier contacts.

Techcrunch is the Drudge Report of tech blogs and Arrington is a douche who seems to piss off every person he encounters.