Professional
In summary, I'm a web designer-developer-usability person-"make it pretty" person-interaction designer-user interface designer. Got it?
My CSS kung fu is pretty good. I'm the only person in my department who had the patience to understand semantic markup, XHTML, and how to style web pages soley using CSS. Want to see an example my work? View source on my blog, or this page. If you want to see the real rock star stuff, you'll have to ask me.
Officially, my title is applications developer, and I have been known to produce database applications for the web using PHP and MySQL.
My department needed someone to design the user interface for a large-scale, mission-critical web application– a content management system to drive our web site– and since I'd always been the person the other developers went to to "make it pretty", my manager gave me the job.
Nowadays, I might claim to be a User Interface Designer, or an Interaction Designer, although it's fair to say that I'm still learning just how to do both of those things. My job entails user research, sketching out interfaces on paper (my favorite part!), creating paper prototypes as necessary, and walking our users through them prior to development. I create semantically marked up XHTML prototypes from the sketches, then work with our developers to ensure they are implemented in a way that will be usable.
When that doesn't keep me busy enough, I also write the XSLT stylesheets that allow the system to generate web pages, and manage the home page and top level of our corporate intranet.
Hobbies
Hobbies? Yeah, I've got my fingers in a few pies...
Volkswagens
My first Volkwagen love is a 2000 Beetle named Spacepod. Spacepod
is a diesel and runs on biodiesel (diesel fuel made from vegetable oil). If you live in
my area, you may have seen him around. He's hard to miss; he sports chrome decals on either
side explaining what biodiesel is, and a chrome luggage rack on the back. At close to 150k
miles, Spacepod is now enjoying the retirement he so richly deserves, and mainly lazes about
the driveway.
Most days I drive Creampod, a 2004 Beetle convertible. Although I'm not a fan of the hot, moist weather in NC, I decided to try to embrace it with an open-air car. Plus, she's terribly cute.
Lurking in a neighbor's garage about a block away from my house is 9Westy, a 1982 VW Vanagon
camper with a factory diesel engine. The diesel Westy is a rare beast; they were only sold in
the US in 1982. The engine is the woefully underpowered Rabbit diesel engine that might approach
50hp if there's a stiff tailwind. The Westy, although petite for a camper, still weighs in at about 2 1/2
tons. Not surprisingly, the top speed of this brick-on-wheels is about 60mph, and I avoid taking
her on interstates as much as possible. I'm currently working on sanding off all her paint, primer,
bondo, and even the galvanizing layer under the primer– right down to bright steel. I
plan to coat her in a clear, high-glossy epoxy that will bond with bare metal, then turn her
into an art car. The sanding is a slow process that I am documenting in
this flickr photo set.
Over the years since Spacepod and I first came together, I've been involved with a few different New Beetle events. I was one of the folks who helped get the Roswell2k car show off the ground, and the Internet Wayback Machine shows how the Roswell2k web site looked (sans images, sadly) back in June of 2000, the year that I did the site.
I went to the Roswell show every year for the first five years, and I did a web site documenting the experience, All Pods Go To Roswell. By far the coolest, most gee-whiz part of the site was the live web cam that I ran in the car while driving to New Mexico, and on site at the car show and other events. Back in 1999 I had folks tell me it couldn't be done, but all it took was one cellphone, two iBooks running OS 9, an alien garden gnome, and a little ingenuity.
A few years back I got involved in an East Coast New Beetle show called NBeast, and I'm still involved.
WXDU
Back in May of 1991, I was bored. A long time fan of WXYC in Chapel Hill, and a former dj at WQFS in Greensboro, it was only natural that I'd eventually wind up at WXDU, Duke University's college radio station. WXDU takes all comers, regardless of whether you've ever been a Duke student, which makes for a healthy mixture of community members and students. I've had some affiliation with the station for umpteen years now.
Over the years, aside from being a DJ, I've done various jobs at the station, including production work and work for the computing staff. Sometime around 1997 I designed my first web site, the WXDU site that is, for better or worse, still around.
Of course, in the world of the internet, keeping a perfectly good web site around indefinitely just Isn't Done. Well, that and new technologies and ideas about what a web site can do come along, and after nearly ten years a site starts to feel a little dated. I've done a static XHTML/CSS prototype of a possible new web site, and the computing staff is currently investigating open source CMS options. That is, we'd like to implement something that folks who don't know HTML can maintain.
Careful observers of the WXDU web site may notice that there is some live content on the home page– the currently playing song. Following that link takes one to the public face of a system that I set up for the station. We call it The Playlister. I took the code from an open source project called the Theis Playlist Manager, and modified it to work for us. This involved making GET and POST variables explicit; removing all formatting code from the embedded HTML and creating CSS stylesheets for formatting, as well as doing a few tweaks here and there to suit our needs.
Much to my surprise, DJ's love it, and after the initial hiccups, adoption has been broad and fairly smooth.
For a while in the '90's, I also was part of a three-person live audio collage show called Triskadecaphobia. The show was all improvisational and I assume that it was fairly painful to listen to for the average person. It was one of the most fun and engergizing experiences I've ever had. Favorite conceptual shows included the "all vacuum cleaner show", where all source sound was generated by a passel of vacuum cleaners we lugged up to the studio. I am also quite fond of the "Ouija Board Show", which we did twice. One of our number wrote out a "map" matching destinations on the Ouija board to actions we could take in the studio. A small team of volunteers manned the Ouija board in a quiet location in the station, and would communicate the commands of Ouija to us in the studio via walkee-talkees.
Tapes of every show exist, and I'm in possesion of 1/3 of them, but frankly, my desire to listen to them is pretty limited.
BPAL
How to explain BPAL?
It stands for Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, an operation in Los Angeles that produces perfume oils. The oils are all natural essential oils, fairly cheap to come by, and the woman behind BPAL, Beth, has a twisted genius for both compelling marketing copy and bottling scents that it shouldn't be possible to bottle. You know the scent of fresh, moist potting soil? She bottled it. How about sugar cookies, or gingerbread? Peppermint candy canes? Cherry pipe tobacco? A burning fire? The smell of Fall? Can you tell the difference between a fresh rose and a dried one? She's bottled them both. Imagine the scent of a cantelope that has just been cut open. It's almost like magic. And it's highly addictive.
I never want to be that stinky perfume lady. I made my co-workers tell me if they could smell me, when I first started wearing the stuff.
In the morning, it's a treat, like a delicious breakfast that has no calories. It's fun to read Beth's descriptions of the scents, and to track the limited editions. She keeps her fans on tenterhooks constantly, waiting for the next exciting batch.
One never knows how a scent will react with your body chemistry. I learned the hard way that roses, on me, usually wind up smelling pungently of Ivory soap. A good friend has found that anything with cinnamon winds up smelling like a bad fake-cinnamon air freshener on her– whereas on me, cinnamon is quite pleasant. The endless adventure of trying BPAL scents has been good blog fodder.
Television
There's nothing I like better than a really gripping serial. That's why I like blogs, and that's why I like TV. I prefer for my TV to be fiction, extremely well-written, and usually with a reasonable budget.
Oustanding favorites include "Twin Peaks" and of course "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". Just lately I've been devouring British spy series like "Danger Man", "The Saint", "The Prisoner", and a favorite new discovery, "Sandbaggers".
I've also been known to lose entire weekends to the likes of "Sex and The City", "Angel", "MI-5", "Dead Like Me", "The L Word", "Queer As Folk", and, embarrassingly, "Monarch of the Glen". "Battlestar Galactica", the new one, fits in there somewhere although it has gone downhill recently. I used to use "Star Trek The Next Generation" as a means of explaining things to my co-workers, since it's a shared language.
On Sunday mornings I often eat my waffles with a side of "Pee-Wee's Playhouse" or "The Addams Family".
