Couple Grammes of Soma

I have had so much Project Management these past few weeks. Meetings, meetings, and more meetings. I start to forget that I actually can be quite productive and build things if I’m not constantly preparing for meetings and trying to piece in development work in half hour increments.

1 day = 25 pages

At the beginning of the day the site was at best 15% complete. At the end it’s more like 90%.

You know for being as new to ExpressionEngine as I am, and even though I would change the way I did a lot of stuff in my templates, I built some good stuff into those. Today I found myself styling headers exactly the way I wanted them styled, with out styling them, just taging them from memory with the header tag I thought applied. And amazingly enough my mind 4 months ago agreed because they showed up styled exactly how they should be. Isn’t that an extra little perk.

MyEasySchedule and OTSBmusic.com are on for the evening.

I just signed up for both FOWA and BarCampMiami.

I plan on doing a presentation at BarCampMiami on either using OpenSource tools like GIMP/Inkscape to keep cost down, maybe just a tutorial type presentation on the two, or how to use KCacheGrind to with Django, PHP, and RoR. Or maybe something else. I’ll keep thinking about it. Anyhow after BarCampOrlando was so much fun I regretted that I didn’t do a presentation. So no I will not regret.

I also made this little badge from the logo, got the idea from the FOWA socialize page. Anyhow, use it if you want.

BarCampMiami Wiki
FOWA Website

Yesterday the 1st BarCampOrlando was held. It went extremely well.

I am honestly very impressed that they were able to have as many talks, just about non-stop from 1 PM - 8:30 PM. My biggest regret is not doing a demo.

Talks I enjoyed

• Introduction to Facebook
• Introduction to Agile
• Cow orking

I’m a bit frustrated I was stuck trying to get the live Flickr feed to work and missed Elliot’s talk.

I recently joined the Ubuntu Florida LoCo team and it was cool to meet a few people from the team there. Also the install fest was cool, not a ton of participants but those who did try it out booted up fine. Especially impressive is that it booted up on a Macbook Pro.

So I’m in the middle of building these templates that five sites will use, and I’m starting from scratch, or was. A few months back in a couple days I built this same sight, well 4 pages of this same sight and did that from scratch. I have to admit though I hacked up a storm to get that out so quick and it only worked in IE 7. For my purposes it was great work done faster than could be expected. But for production, I think not.

So I decided today that YUI Base, Reset, and Grids are going to be included in the templates.

One concern about using the grids is that the grids are mostly fixed width, well for my purposes that’s fantastic since I’m creating this site off of it’s current tables based design. The move to CSS is a HUGE step in the right direction. I’ll keep working on a layout that works fluidly for another phase.

I know I’m going, looking forward to my 1st conference of this type. Especially I think I will enjoy the DIY attitude of it. What’s going to be talked about? I’ve heard so far in discussion that Ruby, .Net, PHP, Ubuntu (and Linux in general), Launchpad, MySQL, and a host of other topics are all possible. Oh and it’s FREE! But you better watch the website since registration starts soon.

When is this thing? On Sunday, September 23rd, from 1 PM to 10 PM at Taste in the College Park area of Olrando FL.

What is it all about? Watch the video to learn more, also check out the BarCampOrlando website for more info.

I installed activeCollab today. I like it. The future seems bright with an API and timetracking on the way in the next version. Looks like they’ll even support importing Basecamp data.

So I’ve set a goal for the summer. While I cannot participate in the Google Summer of Code, I have decided to make every effort to design and submit a CSS Zen Garden style sheet. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but for me it’s quite the undertaking. Any ideas for a theme?

First I must:

• Finish Thomasmooremusic.net
• Finish Prudencewhittlesey.com

I also want to start making some icon sets. I have yet to find the tool of choice.

It seems I’ve got a great opportunity to start learning RSS and XML as well as bzr and PHP. By learning I mean actually make stuff that uses it. Tonight I fixed a broken section of code 1st try. Oh yeah.

Work has been a touch slow over the past few days. Today, that changed.

I’m am the creative and technical lead on a resource site that will support both internal and external members of the team for a large account. I’m very excited about it. It’s going to rock. (The site that is.)

At a debrief meeting today some new ideas were tossed around. One in particular that rung very true was the need to have a social network element added to the current intranet. The goal is to reduce barriers between different parts of the organization that stem from them being in a different part of the world. What seems to happen currently is people don’t connect as freely with each other if they are not in the same part of the world. The more people feel like they know each other, the more inclined they are to collaborate. Thus, better global implementation takes place as internal unity is strengthened. Cool idea, not my baby, yet.

Next, I was in a smaller meeting to do some catch up and planning on where things were with the Global website and what tasks we could tackle during the three week build out leading up to beta testing. Lots of things. I mentioned the workspace/information resource project already. Also I was assigned to research podcasting and wiki’s. A W E S O M E. I love this job. That’s what I was most excited about. I also got some other to-do’s with writing the style guide and outlining who needs to buy in on what before we proceed. Which we noted is kinda the backwards way to do it. Design the site and then figure out the style guide. But hey, they started before I got here.

So to the wiki drawing board. Elliot tells me about Socialtext. Again, awesome find. I also start getting these emails about the SNS (Social Networking Site) solution ELGG that has been suggested by someone who knows.

That was a post I started over a week ago. Obviously I got a little bit busy at work. heh.

I finally got around to getting two plugins to work properly. I long time ago I had a nice Ajax plugin installed that would glide comments out right under the post without taking the user away from the home page. I really like it. Check it out on this post.

If you notice my sidebar there is a new section on it called Stats. The bar graph displayed shows the number of posts for the last 30 weeks and the number of comments. The posts are indicated by the height of the bar and the comments are indicated by the opacity of the bar. The light red colored bar on the right is the current week.

Inline Ajax Plugin
SparkStats Plugin

So first I have to explain the title of this post. I did research today to find out how to use UTF-8 special character codes. Curious if they worked on the fly in WordPress I just made one up. Conveniently it worked and provided the second word/character for my title. BAM!

“I threw up on your bed.”

Writing a style guide is quite a task. I noticed a few references today mentioning that people leading that task for larger ‘papes tend to retire after finishing the guide. Or retire so they can finish it. Hopefully this wont be quite so involved and long strung. (Heh, long strung, I like that.) I was reading ALA’s guide and was mondo impressed when they mentioned that it’s important not to dumb down stuff too much on there since web professionals read the site. However, not to go over board. For example they mentioned that just because a CSS programmer knows all 317 CSS workarounds doesn’t necessarily mean they have heard of Edward Tufte. I was so glad I knew who Tufte was. Because I certainly don’t know 317 CSS anythings.

I’m starting to get a slight understanding of typography issues associated with the web. Typography is such a massive topic it seemed to me at first glance, certainly worth sinking my teeth into, but only it in little pieces at first. I’m amazed at how quickly some of it is making sense. I don’t like the construct of those last sentences. Another time.

I got one of these mini optical mice for my lappy. It’s tiny.

One gripe I have about using this leg top putter is that the little touch pad is forever experiencing an ID10t error because I bump it with my thumbs. I’m hoping as I get used to typing on it I’ll lighten up on the accidental touch pad cursor moves. Nothing kills a train of thought quite like jumping three sentences and randomly inserting characters. I enjoy the portability however.

I still use ‘though’ far to much in just about anything I write. I’ve done better this round but it was conscious.

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.

Work

I got a job this past Friday. My first week was pretty nice. We are working on a global web site project and there are some very solid deadlines for a beta version they want to show at the company meeting in two weeks. That’s a run on sentence. It’s fun jumping into something like that though. Lots to do. Lots to catch up on. Got pretty familiar with browsing shutterstock.com for photos to use in the flash banner.

Our next big project after the global site launch is to implement a CMS for this big contract they just got. They’d like to have different contributors be able to post things that follow the same styling and keep it all organized and still be simple enough for people to post to without being an expert at the interface. I’ve been doing a little bit of research about that and I’m really looking forward to the challenge of picking the best solution and then customizing it to match the brand of the company and the feel of the project.

I may also be getting a copy of the Adobe Creative suite. But that is still up in the air.

I did get this pretty sweet lappy though.

It’s hard to believe it was just a few months ago I went looking for work and now I’ve got a job. Full-time. Here I am. I appreciate the value of my aptitude for technical things now that it’s gonna be paying my bills. Previously I saw it as a rather irritatingly expensive hobby to maintain.

We had champagne at work for the second time in a week. Not bad. I could get used to this.

Not Work

I went to Barnes & Noble after work today. I hate that store. Honestly I do not enjoy it. Although they do have a Starbucks inside, since going to CR I really don’t have a particular fondness for any brand of coffee. Thus I am left to only consider the actual store. And I hate it. Not only could I not find books on typography there, I couldn’t even find a section of books on art. Now I know there was a section that might of been close to what I was looking for but a woman was sitting there and I think she spoke to me when I walked by and so I didn’t want to go back. I just don’t like the way the store feels. Enough.

I did see some books on usability though. I was a little bit disappointed on the fact that they were from ‘02 though. Looked like they had some pretty decent ideas and process for analyzing usability though. Thufte or Tufte, however it is spelled, he’s got cool info in his book. I was just getting a bit of the value of spark lines. I still think I’m missing quite a bit of their value, since I’ve never been trying to convey data like that. Interesting phrase he used though was “activated negative space,” that one is definitely going in the vocab for common use. I should get some time to read those books.

Some deaf people have a cool attitude I think. But I have a pretty limited exposure to them so my impressions are very shallow.

I’m hard to convince.

I need a little pick me up so I don’t stumble down tonight considering staying alive hitchhiking on the disco drive

When I was a swear word the hours were shot-gunned
the hours will get you
the hours will get you