Category: geeking

January 29, 2010

iPad thoughts

for me: i think if grabbing magazines were like grabbing songs off of iTunes, i'd be pretty into that. one of the things i hate about magazines now is that i'm left with this physical artifact laying around my house that i do. not. want. and have to dispose of.

for others: i've been pondering whether my mom would enjoy an iPad. right now she uses a windows desktop. she's definitely into communicating online with friends and family so maybe doing that from the screen porch would be more fun than being up in a little room in the house? OTOH, maybe she doesn't want the internet to intrude into the living areas. i can see her feeling that way.

if it were five years ago i'd be trying to think of a way to run a mobile web cam off the thing. but not so much these days.

Posted by spacegrrl at 04:49 PM | Comments (0)

Category: geeking

January 08, 2009

Ada Lovelace Day

Pledge to blog about a woman in technology on March 24th.

"Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women's contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised."

Posted by spacegrrl at 02:30 PM | Comments (0)

Category: geeking

October 15, 2008

Upgrade!

it was time. really time. it seemed like i'd been waiting for apple to update their macbook line all year. the dead computers were piling up around my house and the sole working computer had a history of hard drive problems. oh, it was time.

i went to the durham store; they'd sold out during the time since i'd called. i went home and called the raleigh store. "we've got plenty!" the dude said. i hoped that was true.

i trekked out to raleigh. the store is exasperating. there's no clear cash register. everyone in a blue, turquoise or orange shirt seemed to find me invisible. i stood near someone who was buying a powerbook in the hopes that his sales dood would help me next. that didn't happen.

i finally realized that part of the genius bar is a cash register. huh? okay. the orange shirt at the register told me he'd get me someone to help.

finally, turquoise shirt arrived. i know exactly what i want, i said. i rattled it off, the exact specs.

"now let's find out what you're going to be doing with this computer to make sure you're getting the right one." helpful to most people; oh so frustrating to me. "no, no, no, no! we don't need to do this. just SELL ME THE COMPUTER." yes, i actually said that to the poor guy.

"okay. is this your first apple product?"

"not. even. remotely."

"okay, so you already know about our genius bar and everything?"

"YES."

he was okay though, or at least i thought he was when he came back with a couple of boxes. we had a nice little conversation. he tried to get me to crack it open in the store so he could show me stuff, but i wanted out of there.

i called J from the parking lot. he's a little jealous.

IMG_1406

oh, and i got a terabyte time capsule, too. my track record on backups is dismal so perhaps this will improve things.

Posted by spacegrrl at 11:37 PM | Comments (2)

Category: geeking

October 08, 2008

another ending

not nearly as traumatic, but it gave me a start. the first web site i ever did, wxdu.org, has finally been replaced.

i neglected to take screenshots of the old site before it was replaced, but i trust that the internet wayback machine will store it for all time.

it gave me rather a start to read the mail, "the new web site is live!".

Posted by spacegrrl at 09:49 PM | Comments (0)

Category: geeking

August 27, 2008

geek alert

there's a job open in my department-- what we call webmaster-- the unix geeks who run the web servers.

alert all geeks. it's very rare that a webmaster job comes open. if you know a unix sysadmin type who is looking for a job and wants to work on the web, have them search for Systems Programmer on the job listings of my company... if you don't know what company i work for, post a comment and i'll mail you back.

Posted by spacegrrl at 08:27 AM | Comments (0)

Category: geeking

July 27, 2008

Mac Cube G4 for sale

SOLD

Mac Cube G4 500mhz PowerPC
40GB / 1GB

Mac Cube G4

cd-rom drive does not work.

hard drive has mechanical problems. disk warrior repaired it to the extent possible and it will boot now, but cannot really be used and needs to be replaced.

comes with matching keyboard, single-button optical mouse, spherical Hardon Karmann clear lucite speakers, and 15" LCD monitor.

$200 OBO

NOTE: Metal Devil Duckie NOT included.

Posted by spacegrrl at 12:51 PM | Comments (1)

Category: geeking

April 27, 2008

Vintage shortwave radio - TAKEN

I'm giving away this shortwave radio has been taken:


P1010061.JPG

The last time I tried it (10 years ago), it powered up but only made a clicking sound. The person who gave it to me told me that it probably needed to have a vacuum tube replaced.

The cord is in excellent condition. That's about all I know about it.

Posted by spacegrrl at 04:17 PM | Comments (1)

Category: geeking

April 25, 2008

1013 w. main

while most people in durham are interested in the food, beer selection and atmosphere the new occupant of 1013 w. main will offer, i have to provide the nerd's critique of their web site.

1013westmain.com

the site looked suspiciously amateurish, and i couldn't resist sneaking a peek at the html behind the web site. even better (or worse?) than i hoped, it's a tour de force of poor coding featuring links to 14 different style sheets, plus tables for layout and font tags!

Posted by spacegrrl at 07:29 PM | Comments (3)

Category: geeking

April 13, 2008

my demographic & other observations

Posted by spacegrrl at 11:03 PM | Comments (0)

Category: geeking

March 13, 2008

iPhone debate

Pros:

Cons:

Posted by spacegrrl at 07:12 PM | Comments (0)

Category: geeking

January 15, 2008

and one less thing...

well, if you don't pantingly refresh the liveblog of the macworld keynote speech, but actually care about what apple is up to, you may not know (and yet may be interested in knowing) that i only got half of what i wanted: they did announce a new, verrrry thin laptop called the "macbook air" that only communicates wirelessly-- that includes software installs, there's no optical drive. but they did not announce an iMac-like dock for it.

however, the dock seems so logical given what the air cannot do that i'm hoping they'll announce that later in the year. but who knows?

my resolve to wait it out and not get an iphone yet has been ground down a little by the update today-- the maps stuff sounds cool-- and by the completely unassuming and fuss-free way that friend BB looked up movie listings the other night while we were at dinner. it was like, M and i were talking about movies, and a moment later he was listing out what was showing near by.

the "time capsule" announced today is appealing, too. i don't know what a terabyte of storage normally goes for these days, but does it usually come with a wireless hub, too? neat.

Posted by spacegrrl at 06:59 PM | Comments (0)

Category: geeking

September 05, 2007

and there was much gnashing of teeth

i've already heard from one person who bought one of the first iphones and is bummed that they've already dropped the price by $200.

i wasn't able to muster a lot of sympathy.

Posted by spacegrrl at 06:41 PM | Comments (2)

Category: geeking

July 10, 2007

tell me about losing your entire music library

well, i thought i'd backed everything up. what i didn't remember was that i didn't back up the actual music files-- just the xml files.

so i did as the "genius" said, and erased the hard drive, re-installed the OS.

i do have my mail, photos, documents, favorites, other important things. but not the music.

so the music i lost falls into several categories.

it's that last one that gets me, i'm just not going to think about it too hard.

my now-dead 200gb backup drive has the last known backup of my music files, which dates back a couple of years. if that drive had been working when i'd done the backup before going on vacation, i would have backed up the music files and i'd be golden. the computers, they hates me!

:|:

in other news, i'm kind of worried about moses, not for anything really obvious, it just seems like he's sleeping too much. he had a lot of stress recently-- staying with the dog for an extended period, then traveling to Va last weekend-- i'm hoping he'll just sleep it off for a week and then be himself again.

:|:

after staying in clutter-free, daily-cleaned hotel rooms, i'm exasperated with my house. i want less clutter, i want to own less stuff, i want a place for everything, i want the house to feel finished. i know "finished" is usually unrealistic with an older house, but i want some feeling of completion. well, what i really want is to feel like i could put it on the market.

at least it looks like my laptop is back to being fully functional (if a little light in the music library), so i can hopefully wait to replace it more at a time of my own choosing.

Posted by spacegrrl at 08:54 PM | Comments (2)

Category: geeking

July 05, 2007

...and the genius says...

that i should take my ailing laptop home, erase and format the drive, and re-install the OS (in this case, i'll be upgrading to 10.4 at long last). it could be on the verge of hard drive failure in which case that either won't solve my problems or won't solve them for long.

in the meantime, the icebook is actually working a lot better than i thought it would, and it occurs to me that i should erase and format its drive, too (although maybe i already have, i can't remember).

there's a hardware tech at work who has expressed interest in my 17" powerbook (the ailing one), so if it does need a new hard drive i will probably contact him and see if he wants to buy it and put a drive in it himself, and i will get a new laptop. it looks like i can get the same screen resolution in a 15" macbook pro, and i wouldn't mind having a faster computer, bigger hard drive, and smaller form factor. so if it goes that way i won't be too upset.

i also got to play with the iphone while i was in the store. there was a little cluster of people around them but i was still able to walk right up and pick one up and try it out. it's as sweet as the advertising promises, and i hope my current cell phone lasts until the price drops and a few of the cons are resolved (mainly, for me, that includes not being able to use it to connect a laptop to the internet, and being forced to get a 2 year contract with a particular carrier).

thanks to folks who have mailed me via gmail. i really like gmail. i really, really wish i could use it at work without violating a policy. that would solve some problems for me. oh well.

Posted by spacegrrl at 06:57 PM | Comments (0)

Category: geeking

June 15, 2007

the computerez, they hates me

decide to consider upgrading to MT 3.3
realize i need to back up current MT database
can't remember password
get distracted; decide to reboot computer before getting in too deep into something
get a disk error when trying to save a file
quietly freak out
reboot, apply security patch
decide to back up computer
try to get external hard drive to mount, it won't
causes computer to crash, reboot
install drivers, reboot
install updated drivers, reboot
still won't mount; run disk utility
external backup drive is corrupted and cannot be repaired
decide to try backing up by email zipped archives of things to underutilized gmail account
zip things
try to email three zips; mail crashes
try to email one zip; mail crashes
decide to back up to DVD
currently making more zips for the backup

now, wait. what was i trying to do? get comments working on the new allpods site? oh right. yeah. uh.

right.

Posted by spacegrrl at 06:36 PM | Comments (0)

Category: geeking

June 14, 2007

way behind the times

i haven't upgraded any software, even my OS, in so long that it's biting me in the ass now that i'm trying to get the new allpods site set up.

comments don't work -> looked like it was one problem -> fixing that problem involved re-ftp-ing a file in my MT install -> that version of MT no longer available -> help no longer available for my ftp client -> finally found the option to upload as binary -> problem fixed but comments are not -> hey, maybe it's mt-blacklist -> mt-blacklist no longer exists and the entire support forum has been taken down -> fiddle with mt-blacklist plugin without guidance -> comments still don't work.

sarah suggested upgrading my MT install which is so the last thing i want to have to do a week out from roswell! but having comments on the blog is really important to me, and i may have to.

post roswell, i am upgrading. everything. hell, i might even get a new computer.

Posted by spacegrrl at 11:08 PM | Comments (1)

Category: geeking

January 09, 2007

a bright little iphone

due to a punishing work schedule today-- punishing to someone who feels like she's developing whooping cough, anyway-- i remained only dimly aware that apple was announcing the iphone today. so many thanks to steph for a nice thorough blog entry on the iphone that i caught in my usual blog rounds this evening after work.

i haven't been this excited about a piece of geek bling in many years. maybe not since the first ipods and ibooks. or the cube. the iphone looks like a very sweet and sexy piece of technology. the hardest part will be waiting... the six months until it first comes out, the month or three until all the initial flaws are sorted, and then however long until i can work up the desire to spend that kind of cash on a tiny little sliver of plastic and metal.

but... you know me. i'm going to get one.

Posted by spacegrrl at 09:41 PM | Comments (1)

Category: geeking

December 14, 2006

the work, the work

at work we're readying a new version of the corporate intranet home page, the first new version to be deployed in seven years. it's more than just a page; it's a web application that's crazier and more complex than most people realize.

so we've been busting our asses pretty heavily for a couple of weeks now, after a couple of months of planning and initial work.

so i'm basically... fried.

anyway. the new page goes out over the weekend and on monday, we'll be bracing for the criticism.

in the meantime, i suspect i'll be pretty boring.

Posted by spacegrrl at 07:28 PM | Comments (0)

Category: geeking

February 17, 2006

booyah

i so totally wailed on the design of a new intranet home page at work today.

i so totally did not call the chair place to find out about shipping and stuff. because i was so totally enthralled with my work.

totally.

Posted by spacegrrl at 07:05 PM | Comments (0)

Category: geeking

November 16, 2005

"Why do you read Boing Boing?"

boingboing reports that most of its readers read it because it sucks.

god, it's so true. i thought i was the only one tortured by my continued, unexplained desire to read boingboing.

i read a comment thread on someone's LJ last night about taking cocaine. one person said that she decided that cocaine's main effect was to cause her to want to take more cocaine.

i feel the same way about bb most of the time.

Posted by spacegrrl at 04:18 PM | Comments (0)

Category: geeking

November 01, 2005

i am geekier now than i was this morning.

it has been a while since i stopped actively persuing an increased state of geekiness. in fact, i've been sloughing off the geekiness slowly, as i shed extra computers and allow certain skills to atrophy. today at work i threw out some useless stuff from my bookshelf, like a java tutorial, and a .net manual. i think it's safe to say that i'll never become a java coder, although at one time i considered it. there was really never any chance that i'd take up .net, though. i'm almost embarassed to have that thing around.

but at the very end of the day, i found myself newly in possession of a sourceforge account, and reason to use it. we've decided that the playlister software we're using at wxdu needs to be its own sourceforge project, because i've changed it so extensively from the original project. now that it's in active use almost all day, every day, we need the version control and bug tracking that sourceforge offers.

i'm glad of a reason to keep my php and mySQL skills fresh, and it's nice to do something for the station that has been so badly needed for so long. but i was hoping to fly under the geek radar as much as possible with this thing. sourceforge seems very... public.

Posted by spacegrrl at 11:19 PM | Comments (0)

Category: geeking

October 12, 2005

talking to people

"so did you talk to the woman wearing your shoes?" - sarah

the simple answer is no.

for some people, one of the primary reasons to go to a conference is to network. not the kind of "icky" networking that marketing and sales people seem to do (which might be better called "schmoozing"), but the kind of networking that geeks do, which involves a beautiful aristotlean exchange of ideas in a sunlit forum with everyone wearing togas and olive leaf headbands...

...or, more likely, it involves buying beers for the guy who wrote perl, and having a beautiful exchange of ideas in a dark bar.

i don't like that i work in solitude and have little to no contact with other ui design / interaction design / visual design / usability professionals at work. but when i get to a conference filled with my peers, even though it's a prime chance to connect with people who actually might understand what it is that i do, i rarely meet anyone. i have the skills and i could do it, but i really, really don't want to.

why is that? part of it is that it takes energy and a certain kind of focus to start conversations with strangers, even when i have an easy opening. the conferences take a lot of energy anyway; in a good one, i'm learning, heavily, for a full day. this is a completely different kind of energy from what i need to be highly social. to swap back and forth would be extremely taxing.

at this type of conference, i am In Class. being In Class means certain things for me: that i am anxious about looking like a moron in front of my peers; that i am intimidated by the people around me, who seem to have far more expertise in design and usability than i do; that i am intimidated by the instructors, who i don't see as resources there to serve me, but as authority figures whose displeasure i don't wish to incur.

now, i realize that that last statement is a little preposterous, but it is the attitude that i took all the way through grade school and on into my unsuccessful career in college, and it probably had a lot to do with the fact that i failed out of school. i know now that it's ridiculous, but i haven't yet succeeded in shaking that feeling when i am sitting down and there's an expert at the front of the room lecturing and manipulating a giant overhead projector. i don't raise my hand, i don't ask questions, i don't come in late and i don't go see the instructor after class. i fly below the radar as much as possible.

now, today i could have gone to the class on css and xhtml instead of the class on advanced usability testing techniques, and i would have felt like a big expert the whole time, because i am an expert on css and xhtml. but what would be the point in that? i was startled to find that experts in usability testing were in the usability testing class. at first i felt intimidated by the people who were making comments that demonstrated their experience in the field-- but realized that it was ridiculous to be intimidated by people who have the luxury of specializing when i simply do not. still, i was glad they were there-- i took notes on what many of them said.

it is true that i do feel anxious about the possibility of looking stupid. the people who have worked with me for many years (or perhaps i should say, the person who has worked with me for many years) have seen ample evidence of the confidence problems i have had and continue to have. this is at least partly due to my background; i don't have a degree, have learned everything on the job, and have had to prove my worth and competence to people who hold CS degrees-- often advanced ones-- from one of the top technical schools in the region.

i read once that women in professional careers are often plagued by the feeling that they will be "found out"-- that the people around them will suddenly realize that they are not competent, and have been somehow fooling everyone into believing otherwise. i have this problem, less so now than i have had in the past, but it's partly grounded in fact-- when it comes to running a formal usability test, i am clueless. i have never done an heuristic evaluation. i have never written a formal usability test report, because the person i am reporting to is usually me! i design it, i test it, and i fix it. this is not a valid way to ensure usability, and that's extremely apparent to me now that i have finished today's seminar.

that feeling of being a sham comes to the front when i attend a conference of this sort, because i am surrounded by people who are experts, have been to design school or hold degrees in HCI (human-computer interaction).

i realize that my skills are unique in my department and that they are grateful to have me. but suppose there comes a day when i need to move on? will i be able to? then it will matter to someone besides me that i don't have the chops.

well, i have strayed from my original point-- not talking to people. but maybe it's clear now why i don't-- there's just too much happening in my head. welcome to my head.

Posted by spacegrrl at 06:04 PM | Comments (3)

Category: geeking

September 26, 2005

SuperGeekyIdea

i was reading some patterns web sites today, trying to find some kind of standard for indicating that a new window will open when an action is performed in a web page.

the confluence of that with an IM conversation resulted in this idea: a pattern language of geeks.

silly geek patterns i devised on the spot:

SuperLazyGeek (that's me)
IndustriousGeek
HeadInTheCloudsGeek - the kind of geek who is all theory, no implementation.
BBsWereGreatGeek - the kind of geek that hung around on BBS back in the day and hasn't gotten over the fact that they are gone. A subset of RetroGeek.
RetroGeek - Geek that values old-school technology highly. Likely to be heating their residence with old Alpha boxes. A MacQuarium is not out of the question.

i could go on. i know there are at least a few geeks reading this, what are the Geek Patterns you can see?

Posted by spacegrrl at 01:52 PM | Comments (7)

Category: geeking

August 29, 2005

My job description

I'm the person who tells the developers that we don't need to display timestamps that include not only seconds, but tenths of a second.

Posted by spacegrrl at 02:58 PM | Comments (2)

Category: geeking

August 23, 2005

Welcome, people of the world.

Only the coolest thing ever.

Via Steph.

Posted by spacegrrl at 02:57 PM | Comments (1)

Category: geeking

July 31, 2005

Too clever by half

So I guess I can't get through a summer without driving somewhere and pointing a webcam at a funny looking car while i'm doing it.

I was telling Joe about how Sarah and I were thinking we'd try and run web cams during our caravan up to Louisville on Thursday. He suggested that, rather than using a computer-to-computer wireless network to have a live cam in each car with only one cell connection, I should see if I can share my connection with an Airport base station connected to my laptop via Ethernet. The base station would have much better range than a computer to computer connection.

And it turns out I can. In fact, it works beautifully. If Sarah gets out of range, her computer should automatically re-connect when it's back in range. Or so we hope.

So Joe gets the "too clever by half" award this week for giving me that idea.

For those attempting to follow along at home, this is how it works:

dualcar.gif

And for your enjoyment, as long as we're talking about creative geeks hard at work: The Kegtenna.

Posted by spacegrrl at 09:45 AM | Comments (2)

Category: geeking

July 09, 2005

this and that.

weather. glorious.

powerbook back in hand-- already! they installed the same OS as i had before on the new hard drive, so i've dodged the issue of paying for an upgrade, happily. hey, that's $100 i can spend on my vacation instead.

i'm starting to ponder what i'd like to do with the rest of my vacation time. the first half is pretty well planned out; the second half is rather open-ended. i feel a little more relaxed about finances than i did when i was first planning it. the savings and debt repayment are going really well. maybe... i could find my way to NYC? via plane or train from chicago or indy? that might be a little nuts... but just think, two fluevog stores in one week :)

the powerbook and cube are on the fast connection, the little amber light next to 100 is lit up on the router. the data is transferred and now i'm re-loading apps.

but... well, i like using the cube. i like having desk space, a chair, an open window and sunlight pouring in in the mornings. i've straightened up the no-man's-land of the back bedroom a bit while working back here, and maybe my nose is dead, but i can't smell the litterbox at all.

i'm rather attached to this space. i find myself reluctant to transfer my email back over to the powerbook.

ok, i'm going to hide the rest of this under the MORE link, cause it's about BPAL and only a few of you are interested in that.

MORE...

Posted by spacegrrl at 10:03 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

July 01, 2005

target disk mode roxx

was able to boot the powerbook to firewire target disk mode and got mail, documents, and most of my music off of it before the hard drive got stuck. i'll let it cool down overnight and see if i can get more in the morning.

anyone know where my itunes playlists might live?

things i'm real glad fer:

there is one thing i could probably use a hand with. my recording of FDDF tonight failed. i tried to copy down the ogg stream and couldn't get it to download (update july 2: got it!); even if i can, chances are not good that i can get it converted to a format that iTunes likes (this is still true). is there anyone with a way to convert ogg to mp3 who would be willing to try and pull down the show and make me an mp3 of it? it was from 6-8pm tonight.

anyway, i've got Mail kinda configured so i can feel like i'm reading it somewhat normally, and i'm getting "moved in" to my temporary digs on the cube. all of this makes me want to do something about the hard drives on the ibooks. would be nice to have a laptop right now!

Posted by spacegrrl at 10:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

DO YOUR BACKUPS!

came home today to a hard drive failure on my powerbook. i'll try and recover data myself over the weekend but who knows?? my elaborate BPAL spreadsheet-- and the mailing addresses of everyone who wanted to participate in the postcard exchange-- may be lost.

anyway. back up those computers, people! don't put it off! and if you don't have a place to back up to, google for a way to use a gmail account as a backup drive. it's slick.

quote on hard drive replacement isn't too bad-- $316.

Posted by spacegrrl at 05:13 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

June 02, 2005

Actual Headline from Actual Magazine in breakroom today


Whole Earth Review No. 44, Jan, 1985

All panaceas become poison

COMPUTERS

AS

POISON

Also: Whole Earth Software Catalog Update

Posted by spacegrrl at 12:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

May 26, 2005

it's sooooo 1982

like my van!

i so totally want to see, possibly own, the bbs docu.

when i watched the triumph of the nerds, cringely's documentary about the history of personal computing, i think my hair literally stood on end and i had goosebumps when i saw footage of the first windowing gui and the first mouse. i don't know why, but i think historic computers are just really, really cool.

if i ran a movie theater... i'd do an early-80's geekfest featuring 'triumph of the nerds', 'bbs', and of course the geek movie against which all other geek movies are measured-- war games. and then we could throw in a screening of 'tron' just for kicks.

Posted by spacegrrl at 09:16 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

May 04, 2005

odd sources of satisfaction

images_found.gif

it's a tiny thing, but for some reason, every time i see this bar, i feel great satisfaction at how it looks. it may be my favorite part of the UI i'm working on.

Posted by spacegrrl at 04:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

April 18, 2005

CSS Reboot

wouldn't it be cool if i could get a new xdu site ready in time for the may 1st css reboot?

yeah, it would be, but it ain't gonna happen-- dammit.

Posted by spacegrrl at 04:53 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

February 26, 2005

the continuing coolness of airtunes

so this weekend i'm spending a lot of quality time with my laptop, working on my Big Radio Station Project.

at some point i may tire of my house and move operations to Our Favorite Coffee Shop. but at the moment, i'm liking the living room scene.

one of the reasons the living room scene is so hotttt right now is because i basically have a remote control for my stereo. and that remote control is sitting right in my lap.

i can play any playlist or song in iTunes. i can adjust volume and equalizer settings without moving my ass. i can play any pre-recorded radio show i've got on the Cube. i can change my mind or skip songs or whatever, all without interrupting my work flow.

it's pretty cool.

:|:

the other great thing about the Living Room Scene is that it's very nearby to the Kitchen Scene. And the Kitchen Scene just produced an extremely tasty strawberry smoothie. Yummmmmmm.

ingredients:
* huge, whole frozen strawberries (from costco-- wow)
* plain, full-fat yogurt
* whole milk
* half a scoop of vanilla soy shake mix
* a capful of sugar-free vanilla syrup

mmmmmmmmm.

Posted by spacegrrl at 01:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

February 23, 2005

links of interest, from d.

triangle bloggers
blog together

Posted by spacegrrl at 11:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

January 25, 2005

pencil sketches!

because you're just dying to see my work. you know you are.

the first round.
now on round two.

Posted by spacegrrl at 07:37 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

December 07, 2004

advancing

so the other day i was working with one of the developers on our big project here at work, and i realized that she has this amazing innate talent for walking through an interaction flow and visualizing the whole thing in sequence without having to see it in front of her. she can just imagine it.

now this is something that i really cannot do and it's kind of a problem since i'm supposed to be the interaction designer on this project. in reality, i am acting as visual designer and usability specialist, and allowing the developers to suggest interaction design to me, then mocking up their suggestions in semantic XHTML, making it look all sleek and professional, and eliminating any obvious usability gotchas. but they're really the ones visualizing the thing from scratch.

so i was talking with the project lead about this today (who reassured me that i'd made a big and important contribution to the project regardless of this) and he suggested that i seek some education in this matter. in fact he suggested i look into a SIG-CHI conference, which is the big heavy academic CHI (computer-human interaction) stuff, and i'd always regarded it as too technical for me. however, he may be right, and this is the direction i need to go.

also, i have been aware for a while of jesse james garrett's visual vocabulary for IA's which is a symbol language that an interaction designer can use in Visio(?) to lay out the flow of an application or web site. i told our project lead about it, but said that we'd been moving too fast for me to handle the learning curve involved in using this thing. however, things are going to relax a bit next week and he encouraged me to get a copy of the software and to give it a shot.

Posted by spacegrrl at 02:02 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

October 27, 2004

archeologist

when i was in 5th grade, when people asked me what i wanted to be when i grew up, i would say "archeologist".

it wasn't that i actually wanted to lay about in the sand and dig things up. it was that i enjoyed being able to say (and understand) a word that was much too long and complicated for such a little kid. i liked impressing people with my vocabulary. show-off!

much to my surprise, i have in fact become an archeologist to some degree.

researching the UI for a tool my department is writing is a lot like archeology. there's a lot of buried information that i have to locate, tease to the surface, and collate in a way that will be meaningful. is there already an unspoken editorial policy? do templates already exist in some form? will i ever solve the eternal mystery of why so few rules are ever enforced on the web site? dig, dig, dig. i'm amazed at what i uncover.

ok/cancel wins the geek cute award again this week-- i am so getting one of these likert scale shirts!

Posted by spacegrrl at 11:31 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

October 12, 2004

ok/cancel has all the geek cute this week

as alicia says, dies of adorableness!

(i'm referring to the cartoon. and if you even remotely understand it, and are also a single guy, please get in touch immediately.)

Posted by spacegrrl at 11:56 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

October 03, 2004

ibook for sale

it's time i sold my 14" g3 iBook. the hard drive is dead, so I will sell it for the going price on ebay, minus the price quoted to me from Ten Plus systems to have the hard drive replaced.

I'm still doing the price research and am waiting on the quote from Ten Plus, but if you think you might be interested, or know someone who is, please contact me.

I believe this is a 700mhz G3, with cd-rw/dvd drive, 30gb hard drive, airport card, dual usb ports, sound out (and i will throw in my iMic if you want sound input), and firewire.

aside from the mostly dead hard drive, the part of the a/c adapter that plugs into the ibook was damaged slightly, but it still works fine. the outer case has a little wear (light scratches) and i think one or two of the little rubber feet are missing. it has been well loved!

i have all the original packaging, documentation, and discs.

Posted by spacegrrl at 08:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

September 16, 2004

you better believe it, baby.

i am blogging this

Posted by spacegrrl at 11:30 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

August 26, 2004

trying to remember my gmail account name

i have a gmail account. of this i am fairly certain.

no where in my saved mail is there a record of the account name i chose.

i have tried the forgotten password link on the following:

[redacted]

i have-- apparently-- sent password change messages out to a variety of people who are not me.

i am somewhat at a loss.

if only gmail allowed me to look up my account by my other email address!

Posted by spacegrrl at 03:55 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

August 24, 2004

segway sighting

forgot about this! friday night in chapel hill as a bunch of us were walking to the wine bar, we were passed by a fellow going the opposite direction, dragging a stick with wheels on it. I said, "Is that a Segway?" He confirmed that it was, and said he'd worn the battery down so it wasn't rideable at the moment-- hence the dragging. my first time seeing one in person.

Posted by spacegrrl at 04:54 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

Resources for an up-and-coming IA

I was talking to a friend recently about her career path. When I started to describe the field of Information Architecture-- a combination of visual design, web development, usability, and information design-- she started nodding her head vigorously. So I told her I'd compile a list of my favorite IA resources. I thought it would be useful to post them here, as well.

books: note, I have not read most of these, but have good reason to believe they are all of value. and fully intend to read them someday...

blogs:

reference material I like:

Posted by spacegrrl at 11:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

August 19, 2004

web colors i like

i've been collecting some colors that i like to use at work in web pages. most of these colors are not part of the web safe palette (which no one cares about anymore, anyway). In general, they are much more subtle than the colors on the palette, which is why i like them. I find that when I'm designing a particularly dense or complex UI, I need a lot of subtle shades for grouping and prioritizing the information on the page.

anyway, it occured to me that keeping them on little sticky notes in my office is a good way to ensure that I won't have them when I really need them. So I had better record them here.

[ see the colors ]

blue-grays, from lightest to darkest:

khakis, from lightest to darkest:

nabbed from 1976design.com:

rebeccah's khaki (also found on amazon.com):

non-bright yellows, from lightest to darkest:

Posted by spacegrrl at 01:26 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

detail. oriented.

for those of you who, like me, appreciate attention to fine detail and good, innovative blog design, i present 1976design.com.

i'd seen this before but stumbled across it again today. of particular note is how he's handled the comments... the "inspired" stuff took me a minute to get, but now that i do, i kind of like it. lj-style indented conversations are probably more intuitive, though...

(of course, i feel the need to note that my blog is completely slapdash and has like no attention to detail whatsoever. i recognize this, and choose to live with it in favor of putting my time into other things... )

Posted by spacegrrl at 10:08 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

July 23, 2004

kickin' it old school

i didn't hear back from the apple store today, so i decided to take the time to get the mail client on my tangerine ibook updated with my email from the last several days-- the stuff that's still on the mail server.

it was something like 1600 messages, almost all of which were spam. it took a couple of hours to download and sort it all, but now i can use email in a semi-normal environment, and that's totally worth it. email is, i have to admit, a big comfort thing for me. i can and will go for long periods without it when the situation warrants-- usually while travelling-- and it's not too distressing, but when i'm home, it's such a deeply engrained habit to be constantly checking mail that i feel very wrong and kind of upset without it.

anyway, i must state again just how awesome my little tangerine ibook is. i'm so glad i never got rid of it. a co-worker offered today to buy it from me, and she's not the only person who has expressed an interest. but i think i will hang on to this sturdy, adorable little machine for a good while longer. in fact, i'm thinking squishy will find a home inside 9 Westy. a good, sturdy, compact, and good-looking computer will be appropriate inside my sturdy, compact (and hopefully one day good-looking) van.

i think i will take this opportunity now to introduce you to each of my macs. i'm not saying that macs are a substitute for children, but they all cost me money, bring me great joy and consternation, and i have named them all (well-- almost all). so in a really sad, hollow sort of way, it's similar :)

first, i do have two very old macs that have not been named (that i can recall). One is a Mac Plus with no internal hard drive, but a 20mb external hard drive that's about the size of a small cat, and sounds like a jet engine. This was the first computer I ever bought. I bought it used and was pretty much completely ripped off. I also have a Mac SE with the original canvas carrying bag. It was free. Not a ripoff.

next oldest is my tangerine iBook, squishy. this was the first iBook model ever made. it was difficult to get at the time that i got it-- TenPlus systems in Raleigh had a customer refuse delivery on it so they sold it to me. I loved this thing more than I can tell you. I used to make people hug it when they were feeling upset, because it really does make you feel better. It's rounded and rubberized, and as christa can attest, virtually indestructible. one of the best form factors for laptops ever invented. owning a laptop revolutionized my computing life.

i replaced squishy with a white 14" iBook (an "icebook") called icemaiden. this machine enabled me to switch to firewire web cams, which made a huge difference in picture quality and size. it also allowed me to switch to OSX, which was reputed not to be compatible with the tangerine iBooks. icemaiden now has a completely dead hard drive, probably due to exposure to large magnets. i bought this new. one day dave and i walked into the apple store and asked the guys to bring us one powerbook and one ibook. the store was pretty new and they were pretty excited to be selling two laptops at once.

late last year, someone at work was selling a cube, and i decided to go for it. cubes are kind of special. actually, they're very special. i bought it as much as a collector's item as because it's a nice, compact desktop that runs OSX and that i can hang a printer and scanner off of. it's very buck rogers in the 25th century-- all lucite and glowing blue lights. right now it has a dead cd-rom drive. it's named foxy box.

this year i decided that i really, really, really wanted a lot more screen real estate. i have done some good design work on small screens, but it's painful. literally. the more i have to move windows around using the trackpad, the more my pre-carpal-tunnel symptoms flare up. so i bought a refurbished 17" powerbook and named it spacecase. that's the computer currently in the shop. my sore wrists never really flared up during the roswell development cycle this year and i have to say that i just love that computer to death. it rocks my world.

i have also had, and sold: a dual g4 tower; a powercomputing powertower pro (a "clone"-- one of the very few macs that were not made by apple); and a pismo-- the first firewire laptop apple ever made. the pismo and the tower were for doing video editing... the power tower was the first really beefy, modern computer i ever bought, and i designed my first web site on it-- the still existing wxdu site.

anyone who made it this far definitely gets a cookie :)

Posted by spacegrrl at 11:26 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

July 22, 2004

i want to date the genius bar

well, i put the challenge to my fellow mac geeks at work... and got back the idea that finally released the stuck DVD from my powerbook's drive-- reset the PRAM. ran some other tests and diagnostics... didn't get anywhere.

drove straight to the apple store after work and was able to get my hands on a genius right away. i liked this guy-- the first thing he did was read the kernel panic log, and saw that my AirPort card was being mentioned. i was actually kinda surprised that the other guy, last night, never looked at the log.

i wound up leaving the powerbook at the store... it's under warranty so basically it's up to them to troubleshoot and fix it. i guess. i hope :)

at some point during the day, i realized that my old tangerine ibook is, right now, the least broken of all my computers-- all it needs is a new power adapter. so i walked out of the store with a power adapter, and here i am happily typing away on good ol' squishy. i am reminded again of what a great computer this is-- i spent many happy and productive hours developing web sites and doing all kinds of stuff with it. it may be considered dated technology these days (it's not even running OSX), but today i'm very happy to be using it.

oh, and yes, i want to date the genius bar. you know how certain girls would be reputed to date, say, the entire football team or the entire chess club? (ok, maybe not the chess club...) well, lemme tell ya... a guy with good customer service skills who can also out-geek me and fix my powerbook is damned sexy. plus, they're all kind of cute.

Posted by spacegrrl at 07:11 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

July 07, 2004

fire my fox baby!

I just couldn't be more excited about the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar

If you're a web developer, you owe it to yourself to download Firefox, and this toolbar. It takes a lot of the hassle out of designing with CSS, if you don't tend to use a WYSIWYG HTML editor. Just mouse over a region to see what classes or id's are controlling the formatting of that region; click the Edit CSS button to... you guessed it, edit the stylesheet, right in a separate pane in your web browser. See the changes instantly. Not sure if it supports FTP as a method of saving said changes...

It also does a whole huge passel of other useful stuff, like size your browser window to 800×600 with the click of a button, outline all the table cells on a page, or block level elements, and it'll rock your baby to sleep and wash your car, too.

Oh, just go read the page and download it already!

Posted by spacegrrl at 03:46 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

July 05, 2004

the computers, they hate me

first, my ibook died.

then the cd-rom drive on the cube died, leaving it stuck at a many years old operating system.

now the powerbook is dead. i believe it's under warranty, but apple is closed today. also, i never did back it all up to that big firewire drive i bought. just didn't think about it after i got home, i was all preoccupied with other stuff.

the geeky details can be found under "MORE".

MORE...

Posted by spacegrrl at 02:01 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

June 05, 2004

google makes me a guru!!

so, i decided to upgrade my mac cube to the latest OS.

one of the many unique things about the cube is, there's no mechanical way to force it to eject a cd-rom. there are quite a few software methods of ejecting, including a particularly hairy one that i just used successfully.

i decided to erase the hard drive completely during the upgrade. the previous owner had left some software behind that i didn't care for and couldn't uninstall. the iTunes install had also become corrupted. i wanted a clean slate.

the install program hung during erasure of the disk (i believe).

i was able to erase the disk with the disk utility-- but then the OSX upgrade cd that i was currently booted off of wouldn't install an OS... because it's an upgrade cd.

i typed, "eject disc from cube" into google. the first result had my answer.

boot into open firmware and type "eject cd".

booting into open firmware is pretty exciting. it's like booting a UNIX system that has no GUI installed. lots and lots of scary text scrolls down the screen, and finally a little command prompt shows up:

>

well, it worked. and handily, OF supplied the command for shutting down ("shut-down", imagine that!). i shut down and booted off of my original OSX install disc, which seems to be happily installing away right now.

Posted by spacegrrl at 06:13 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

May 21, 2004

actual work and stuff

( unlike christa, i don't care if my work stuff is boring... cause you can always skip or skim. )

we got new pc's at work last night, which will be a good thing, but caused much frustration, irritation, and all caps venting to jason over IM this morning.

as you can imagine, being a web designer/developer, my web browser is pretty much the most important application in my computing environment. i'm pickier than the average person about it.

i happily d/l firefox and then realized why i'd continued to run it's predecessor, firebird, long after firefox came out. on my PC, for some reason, firefox lacked a back button and scroll bars. i could find no recourse for this within the UI and quickly resigned myself to using another browser. firebird is no longer available for download (that i can find), so i went with the next least worse thing, mozilla.

well, mozilla is kind of icky, and slow. and it didn't have the super awesome bookmarks setup which i'd crafted for firebird/firefox. and i couldn't find the freaking bookmarks file for firebird anywhere. geah!

so i resigned myself to also attempting to recreate those bookmarks manually in mozilla. gross! i was so exasperated that i had to listen to the funnest thing i could think of on my ipod (which happened to be "the sun and the rain" by madness) to feel better.

then i finally did what i should have done all along and vented to dave about it. he came down and showed me how to trash my bad firefox profile, force it to create a good one (with back button and scrollbars), then transfer my bookmarks file into the new profile.

viola! magickal! then, dissatisfied with the blobby, candy-colored buttons that come default on firefox, i d/l an extremely understated and beautiful theme in pearl gray. i've never been so happy with a d/l theme on anything before.

i was planning to squash an annoying bug in one of my apps today, but have been unexpectedly inundated with user requests. which i don't mind. i like helping people if i can. i like small tasks that i can complete and feel a sense of satisfaction with.

looks like i'll finally be getting a photoshop upgrade in the bargain as well-- the version on my old PC was so old that it's not available for download anymore, either. I was at 5.5; the current version, called "Photoshop CS", is version 8. my manager approved the cost of the upgrade and hopefully the IT folks will hook me up with a download license right soon.

we finally got google as the engine for our intranet search engine and this week we've been busy deploying it. it's fun to see the emails come in from people who are just tickled to have a search engine that actually works, for a change. makes me feel like we are actually doing good things with the intranet after a long period of stagnation.

now it is up to me to drive certain other things forward-- a redesign of our look and feel, a revamp of the information design on the top level, and the template we provide for departments to use seriously needs all kinds of work. i don't feel like i'm doing a very good job with that-- i'm working alone and that's very difficult. i get stuck.

Posted by spacegrrl at 04:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

April 17, 2004

ipod!

so, ipodmods.com officially rocks.

they've resurrected my dead ipod for considerably less than it would have cost to replace it, and the turnaround time was amazingly quick.

my diagnosis was correct-- dead hard drive. they replaced it. the ipod updated fine and is playing away happily over my stereo right now. all the seams are tight and the connectors and trackpad and everything seems just right. no scratches on the case that i didn't put there :)

unfortunately, i had no idea that my ipod was nearly full. i thought i only had 5 or 6gb on it; turns out i have over 9gb, and it's a 10gb drive. i should have asked them if they could put a 20gb or larger drive in there for me! oh well. i'll work with it.

Posted by spacegrrl at 02:59 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

March 11, 2004

an unexpected metaphor

i started out with the Very Large Array, and somehow it would up sounding dirty... IM convo with a friend:

[me]: the Very Large Powerbook is calling to me... i miss it!
[me]: it's saying, "lisa... i am very large... obscenely so... come make funky fresh designs on me all night long..."

Posted by spacegrrl at 04:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

March 09, 2004

sacrifice body for computer

not the first time i've done that, and it probably won't be the last. i spent all the time today that i'd normally spend finding or making and eating decent meals for myself driving around trying to obtain something that fedex was holding hostage.

but i did succeed, and it's here-- an obscenely large powerbook. i decided, finally, that doing design on a small screen is for the birds. of course, there's work to be done before i can really use it. but i'm hopeful that it'll make as big a difference in my day to day computing life as getting my first laptop did. well, that's probably too much to ask :) but a big difference, anyway.

still, i just see it as a tool. my first ibook was more than that to me and i find now that i can't let it go. the current ibook and the powerbook will be easier to sell when the time comes.

Posted by spacegrrl at 11:14 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

February 20, 2004

the advantage of liking strange people

there's a woman in my office who is a little odd. a little bit of an outsider. well, in a geek office she'd be a little bit of an outsider; my department is equal parts geek and marketing, so that makes her even more of an outsider.

but you know, i do love the ousiders.

i think most people avoid striking up friendly conversations with her. i've almost never seen her talking to anyone about anything but work-- except me. i know she eats lunch alone with a book every day (except one day when she sat with me and dave).

i was kind of scared of her at first, too. not because she's intimidating, but because she really is kinda strange. at times she seems to be brilliant, and at others almost autistic in her inability to communicate or understand spoken instructions-- being in a meeting, or a training class with her can be an extraordinarily exasperating experience.

one day, and i can't remember how it came about, she found out that i had a halloween decoration that i was procrastinating hanging, because i realized i'd need help. it was getting quite close to halloween. she said, "I'll help you. Let's do it right now, don't procrastinate anymore."

and so we did. and i think she said something very smart about procrastination, something that impressed me at the time. i realized then that i kind of liked her.

recently, i've begun working with her in small ways. there's a group of project managers, and there's a group of applications developers. my new manager is using me as a sort of "translator" between these people; someone who can take the project manager's complaints about a UI, design a solution, come up with the markup to implement it, and pass something usable along to the programmer to plug into the application code.

she's a programmer. i'm starting to get the feeling that the project managers have a hell of a time communicating with her. i'm not sure that i'm doing any better, but i'm hoping that having already established a small acquaintanceship with her will turn into a surprise advantage in this situation.

Posted by spacegrrl at 04:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

February 18, 2004

space girl lisa linn

i finally set up web log reports to run last night. i was delighted to find that reports automagically ran for every month i still had logs for, so i was able to get a nice picture of what's been going on since november.

anyway, checking out the search strings people use to find my sites has long been a happy pastime. i used to find quite strange ones leading people to my allpods site, though sadly that no longer seems to be the case.

it made me happy though to see that one person entered:

"space girl lisa linn"

and reached me that way. because really, who else could that be but me? there may be a burgeoning porn star named lisa linn who is getting all the linkage these days (i'd like to think i'll outlast her though), but there's really only one space girl lisa linn.

if you're curious, you can peruse the loggy goodness here.

Posted by spacegrrl at 09:03 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

February 16, 2004

dialup

sometime this afternoon, my DSL line went flakey and slow, so bad that it's essentially unusable. after a lot of troubleshooting and a long phonecall to earthlink, the determination is there's something wrong with my local line, something verizon will have to fix. and it'll be a day or two before they get to it.

so then i proceeded to tear the house apart looking for the data cable for my cellphone. my cell connection is so good and so easy to use that i don't mind it at all. but i can't find the damn cable anywhere.

and then, finally, i remembered our old standby... dialup. i get free dialup time with my DSL account; might as well use it! took a little creativity (and a call to the earthlink modem in Roswell, NM) to get a local number, but now i'm connected, and i'm amazed at how not-bad it actually is.

of course, i'm still completely screwed if i get paged and have to go online to fix something for work. i haven't had a working dialup connection to sas in years.

let's just hope that doesn't happen...

Posted by spacegrrl at 09:37 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

February 02, 2004

calling comic book geeks!

i think i may attempt to adopt a graphic novel/comic book style for the allpods site this year. this is a bit silly because i have never been a huge comic book reader :) but i think the style would be very suitable for the tone i want to set this year, the look i want to achieve, and because it's an unfolding narrative.

i know that some of you are comic book readers, however! if any of you would be willing to supply me with some examples-- ie, loan me some comics and/or graphic novels-- i'd be totally grateful.

Posted by spacegrrl at 01:29 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

January 30, 2004

i am a designer.

today i, along with many other geeky people in the area, went to a seminar given by edward tufte. his field is the presentation of information.

i've always shied away from calling myself a designer. to me it has long meant, mainly, "artist and decorator". one who makes things look attractive, who develops a harmonious color scheme and picks just the right font to communicate an appropriate style.

but in fact, designer means finding design solutions to challenging presentation problems. (one hopes they're challenging, anyway.) and i've been doing that for a very long time. i have a knack for it. no formal training outside of seminars and conferences; most of what i know was learned on the job, in a couple of college art classes, or grasped intuitively.

there's a paper form that was used a great deal in my work when i first started working at sas. i was in the IT division; it was our request tracking form. the first iteration of this form was done on a mainframe, or possibly on a typewriter. shortly after i arrived, we got a mac in our lab, and i taught myself pagemaker. i'm not sure how it came about, but i wound up re-designing the form in pagemaker. my re-designed version became the standard that was used for many years, until the whole process went on-line.

i ran across a copy of that form recently. i'm still proud of it. the level of information crammed onto a letter-sized page is quite astounding. i could do it over better now-- i have access to much better fonts now, for one thing-- but even without making excuses like, "it was my first try", i'm still pleased with it.

during the tufte seminar, i started thinking about a couple of the projects i'm currently working on, and how to apply what i was learning. i thought a lot about one of his main points-- that high density (or "resolution" as he calls it) of information is desireable. when i've had my designer hat on in the past, i've always thought of this information density as a problem-- undesireable. but in fact, he's right-- if the information is all necessary, then the problem isn't that there's too much information, but that you simply have a challenging design problem in presenting it.

and i realized that, a lot of times, at work, it's up to me to come up with that solution. i do sometimes work with someone down the hall whose official title is "designer", but only on the really big projects. there's so much day-to-day stuff-- user interfaces for all the applications our group develops, mainly-- that comes only to me, not an official designer, and i "make it pretty" (as my co-workers have always called it).

i think i've long underrated my value to the group, but we've recently merged with a much larger group, and now i have the opportunity to work on UI's that will appear on the company's external web (until now, i've worked exclusively on the intranet). and what has become clear is that no one-- not one single person in my department-- can do what i do. other people have pieces of the puzzle-- programming skills, a knowlege of CSS, or the ability to cook up the way the UI should look, using a tool like powerpoint (oddly). but i seem to be the only one who can design the UI, put it in its correct context, ensure all the menus on the page are correctly weighted, that the links are properly labelled, that the style of the UI fits the style of the site it's being inserted into, create the CSS to accomplish this, ensure the XHTML is semantic, and, if i'm the programmer on the project, do the database design and write the back-end code for the application.

i've focused so much on those last two things over the years, and how i'm not as accomplished in that area as others are, that i've ignored the value of all the rest of it. now that i'm working with external web people, the importance of my design skills is thrown into sharp relief. and the nice thing is-- it's what i love doing.

anyway, if you're a web designer, you really have to check out tufte's stuff. he's the leader in his field. he's got three books, and aside from the seminar, they're probably the best way to get to know his work. the web site unfortunately doesn't serve as an introduction-- it's more a sales tool for the things you can buy from him.

i plan to recommend that every person in my department, as well as the folks who produce our internal company news, be sent to a tufte seminar at the next obvious opportunity. they sent a huge boatload of people to jared spool's seminar in RTP last summer, so i don't think its out of the realm of possibility.

Posted by spacegrrl at 06:26 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

January 29, 2004

gorgeous

it's sad, but i rarely come across sites any longer that i love the design of so much that i want to check out their source/stylesheet.

however, today i came across a site that struck me; appropriately, it's the site of the Web Standards Project.

i love the layout, which has just enough and not too much whitespace between its elements; i love the headers (that's text, not graphics-- Trebuchet with an uppercase transform); i love the subtle colors and the little boxes of info about each post at the top right.

oh, i suppose the content is worth exploring as well, but that's not what i'm here to write about :)

Posted by spacegrrl at 04:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

January 06, 2004

pink!

pink pink pink pink pinkpinkpink!

ipodmini.jpg

Posted by spacegrrl at 02:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

December 31, 2003

printfest

yesterday i finally got frustrated with my inability to print at home, and bought a printer.

i have to say, printer technology has come a very long way since i last bought a printer in the mid-90's.

i got a photo-quality printer with separate tanks for each color that makes virtually no noise and spits out a page of text in about the amount of time it takes for me to turn my head from the computer screen to the printer.

how much was this astounding machine? $150.

it's starting to make me really love my cube, not just as a nifty museum piece, but as a highly functional desktop. it's zippy, the LCD monitor is bright and crisp, and hey, it prints! plus, the speakers sound pretty nice, and i can listen to xdu online whilst printing.

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Category: geeking

December 24, 2003

pretty flower mood

i think moodstats is going to be my new favorite web thing.

unfortunately, i think have to ante up the $15 to see my moods translated into a field of flowers, but it might just be worth it.

Posted by spacegrrl at 04:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

December 22, 2003

tufted

jason's trying to get a group of ten for the tufte thing

edward tufte is coming to durham

jason's hoping that even if we get a group discount for people at disparate companies, we can still get the companies to pay.

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Category: geeking

December 14, 2003

if filmmakers were web designers...

this cracked me the hell up.

the business of using every bit of space on a page is one that web designers encounter all the time. i think people often view web pages as newspapers, especially the pages i tend to do, and that's why the slightest open space on a page "looks wrong", or is an affront because i'm wasting their precious screen real estate.

it's understandable, but frustrating, because web pages aren't newspapers.

Posted by spacegrrl at 11:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

December 10, 2003

wi-fi in durham

from christa: Durham Visitors Stay Connected with Wi-Fi -- Visitor Information Center Among the First in the State to Offer Wireless Access

blue coffee is wireless it seems-- i wonder if that's the downtown location, the 9th street location, or both? seems like 9th street is the more likely location. we should have a mac play night there sometime.

Posted by spacegrrl at 12:41 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

November 18, 2003

tinyurl o' mine

my tinyurl: http://tinyurl.com/lisa - i'm rather pleased with it. (this is what the tinyurl people happen to have in their database already for "lisa").

in other geeking news, christa came over last night to burn a cd and demo charo's small-but-powerful speakers for me. (i don't really have room for my large but fabulous sounding speakers anymore, and i'm trying to find small ones that can compare.)

anyway, she saw iChat for the first time and said, "It's so cute !" i guess i've been immersed in OSX long enough that the cuteness doesn't come as a surprise to me anymore. but it is kinda cute.

the speakers, btw, sounded great, but still didn't compare with my big speakers. i'm going to go to the bose store and check those out, and i may also go back to the store where i got my speakers and basically say, look, i have a 10 year old pair of vandersteen b's-- is there a small speaker that i'm going to be happy with?

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Category: geeking

November 13, 2003

web design practices

some useful research on de facto web standards, and just how de facto they really are: web design practices .

Posted by spacegrrl at 04:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

November 11, 2003

the efficiency of patterns

ever since i discovered christopher alexander's a pattern language (via brian eno), i've had a mild fascination with the idea of patterns.

patterns seem to exist at the edges of modern-day computer science, like a sort of cult that we tolerate but don't quite trust. there's only one person in my department who has any real expertise in programming patterns, despite the fact that there are plenty of people doing object-oriented coding.

once you stray from programming into the world of information architecture, patterns are a little more accepted, and probably a little more useful and common-sensical. i've been catching up on my IA reading lately, and ran across Patterns for Personal Web Sites.

what this amounts to is a fairly efficient and organized account of the standards that i've intuitively grasped over the last six years of web site creation. if you're wishing i could help you with your web site, and i'm not available, go read this and (provided you can figure out how to apply it) you'll have basically gotten the same benefit that you would have had i been around to help.

of course, if i am available, i'd probably be delighted to help you fix your site. especially if it really, really needs it. in fact, the people who do the slayage site should email me now. oh my god.

Posted by spacegrrl at 04:24 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Category: geeking

November 09, 2003

the power of mt

i don't talk about geek stuff very often, but this has me excited. thanks to this article, i think i'm pretty close to getting the old north durham web site set up so that it's all driven by moveable type. this will mean that the non-tech folks who provide all the content will be able to update the site via the very friendly moveable type interface, from a web browser, without help from me.

Posted by spacegrrl at 09:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)