Archives for March 2007

Nicole and I are heading out on a road trip to Northern California. We are heading up to visit a friend of hers. I can't wait. Work has been so busy this last week and a half with the launch of 2 new sites and another one launching at the end of the week while I'm gone. Right now we have very little planned while we are up there and that's how we want it. Our days will consist of relaxing, reading, and just enjoying the scenery. We'll be right next to a lake, so we'll have great scenery.

On the way back, we are staying a day/night in San Francisco. We've both been there before. She's never been to Fisherman's Wharf though and I've never ridden a cable car so that's what we would like to accomplish while we are in San Francisco.

It's going to be a great relaxing trip.

I found a great article today about design, Five Principles to Design By. The author outlines 5 keypoints you should always consider when designing: Technology Serves Humans, Design is not Art, The Experience Belongs to the User, Great Design is Invisible, and Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication.

The first bullet point, Technology Serves Humans, can be applied to the design of anything. Here's a great thought:

Too often people blame themselves for the shortcomings of technology. When their computer crashes, they say “I must have done something dumb”. If a web site is poorly designed, they say “I must be stupid. I can’t find it”. They might even turn to a book for Dummies to get it right.

This is horrible! People should never feel like a failure when using technology...

This is so true. They say 90% of all computer problems are user errors when actually the error occurred because of the way the software or hardware was designed. Granted, you can't predict everything thing a user will do with your software and no software is truly ever bug free, but you can't really blame the user for the error either.

I guess I've angered someone in the upper management here at work. I say this because it seems I've been given the unholy task of having to skin a myspace profile page for a client. What did I do to deserve this?

Myspace has some of the worst HTML/CSS on the internet. There is no structure to the HTML at all. I equate myspace pages as the modern day Geocities. Those were the ugliest sites back in the early days of the internet with their blinking scrolling text and stupid little animations that would follow your mouse cursor around the screen. Ah the joy of reading dark gray text on a black background while animated snow falls down on the page and some midi/mp3 starts to play as soon the page loads.

Hopefully it won't be as bad as I think it's going to be. Time to do some research on how to add styles to the profile. Here is a link to the profile I created to test with, Lorem Ipsum, Jr.

Edit: I'm off this task. It was originally supposed to go to another team member, but the Project Manager tried to give it me. When I asked my Director about it, he said to push back and tell the Project Manager to assign it to the team member that was originally supposed to handle the task. Phew!

There's a local news station here in San Diego that has billboards around town claiming to be the first local news station to broadcast in High-Definition (HD). Does anyone really care if the watch news in HD? Being able to make out a news anchor's individual pores doesn't make the news program any better. I guess the weather graphics will look better. So now those "scattered clouds" icons will look really crisp and detailed, and the footage of the car accident will show every piece of the car strewn across the freeway.

I'm glad that TV is moving forward with technology, but I'm tired of HD being made into a selling point. Movies and sports are perfect for HD for their action and widescreen formats. The news on the other hand, it's just 2 people sitting at a desk talking.