A couple of notable items came my way via newsfeed this morning:

1. Web 2.0: Take a run on over to script.aculo.us to see how ajax can change your presentation. (link via BD4D who cautions: "just because you can use them doesn't mean you should") In other words, make useablilty your primary concern, if it helps your audience use your site - go for it.


2. Web 1.0: For those of you who may not have already read it, Jeffrey Veen has released the pdf proof of his now 5 year old book The Art and Science of Web Design as a free download.

Cool - it's like Christmas came early ;)

Tuesday night at the movies...well being sick and all, D rented a couple of movies to watch this evening and here is the rundown on them.

First was Hostage, starring Bruce Willis. He plays a small town cop who was previously a hostage negotiator with the LAPD who ends up leaving that position after a failed negotiation which ends badly - crazy and hostages dead, including a young boy who had placed his trust in him. He finds himself embroiled in another hostage situation that he gladly hands off to a larger police dept. until he is forced to reassert command of the situation by another party who holds his own family hostage. Lots of action ensues. Creepy thug was played to perfection by Ben Foster; and Kevin Pollack was the epitome of "dad".
★★★☆☆
3 stars out of five

Next we watched Cursed. Now I really liked this werewolf movie (but I've yet to see the Ginger Snaps movie/s - I hear they're awesome). In Cursed, I think what I liked best was the treatment of the movie - kind of Buffy'esque in presentation. I liked the symmetry of cool people who are "monsters" to the uncool people who become real monsters and exact revenge. Great stuff. And I guess it is really a story about revenge and how the need for revenge can make monsters of us all. The effects were fun if gory, but the movie leaves you at the end with no icky aftertaste.
★★★★☆
4 stars out of 5

I promised myself I would try to get to the beach at least once a week this summer. Some summers we haven't gone at all and before you know it the summer's over. When I was young (way back when :) ) and school let out for summer break, it seemed that summer stretched out before us forever. Day after day of hanging around, stretched out on lawn chairs reading comics and drinking colas. We had more summer than we knew what to do with and by mid-August we were bored. Fast forward to now and if I don't schedule it in, I'll miss summer like I do most years. So it's off to the beach every week and force myself to slow down enough to enjoy the season.

Week One - Beach One:
New River Beach

This is a lovely sandy beach about 30 minutes drive from my home. It's an ocean beach so we have to check the tide tables before heading out to make sure there'll be enough beach to sit on when we get there. The sand is soft and fine, not like some of the others around here, but the water is bone-numbing cold. People swim here - I have no idea how they manage not to get hypothermia. Aliya went for a swim - but not me. I got my feet wet up to the ankles and then the cold was too brutal so I gave up and went back to lay down on the hot sand. Nothing better to bake the cold out of you. Yes, of course I have a cold. A nasty drippy head cold but I wasn't going to waste 27 degrees of hot sunny weather at home inside. We had about 4 hours of beach until the tide came up and by then it was time to head home anyway. Nothing like the ocean to mellow a person out. We'll have to try and get back here again.

I struggled a bit with what to call this entry and decided to go with transitions. I didn;t want to call it absent friends or something equally maudlin because it is about an absence in our lives but not for bad or dire reasons. Today we held a retirement party for the previous director of the webteam, John Webster. Retirement is an absence and a transition. As John exits from his position at UNB, he transitions to a new and welcome phase of his life (I've heard mutterings of "lucky guy" more than once). But it's a difficult event for the rest of the team because the "webteam" is pretty much no more. Now we transition from our past to our new life being integrated within the I.T. department. As we make this transition, the I.T group also transitions as the organizational structure is reshuffled and reformulated to produce what will be a more rationalized, dynamic department at the end of the day. Life is change, change is hard but change can also be good. We certainly will miss John terribly because he was, quite simply, a great boss - in fact one of those bosses who are superlative. He was more than fair in his role as director of the webteam; he inspired us to strive for excellence. We will miss our group conversations about what's going on in the tech world, the latest movies and about life in general. We will miss working with him but we wish him the best of enjoyment and happy times in his retirement.

And now, it's time to look ahead to new beginnings.

D and I rented and watched The Woodsman the other night. It's about a child molester who is released from prison after serving 12 years. He settles in some town USA and tries to rebuild his life while struggling with shame and disgust he feels for his past. He is desperate to be "normal" and not have those "feelings" anymore and is terrified he will never be normal.

This movie was so well done it was excruciatingly painful to watch. The subject matter so abhorrent and yet you can almost feel pity for the main character. And of course you can feel empathy for those who can't accept him back into society. Kevin Bacon's acting was masterful in this film.

★★★★★
(5/5 stars)

Just a bit more on accommodating accessibility needs in your website. Here is an interesting article on creating an alternate stylesheet for low vision from Gez Lemon - Juicy Studio (Thanks to John Oxton for pointing it out.)
Looks like an intersting idea, we already create stylesheets for different media (screen/print), why not add another to accommodate for viewer with low vision that don't have access to or just don't use screen readers and instead can get by with zooming the text size?

There seems to be a bit of buzz these days about accessibility: Andy Budd discusses legislating accessibility in
Accessibility and the Law; Malarky ponders the role of government in
Accessibility and a Society of Control. So I thought I'd chime in. I tend to agree with Joe Clark when he comments that "accessibility only happens in large quantity if you make people do it." It seems though that when we're creating the mental models of our users, we often tend to forget the accessiblity requirement. Where I work, that was also the case early on but the issue became front and centre as we have a faculty member and a few students who have accessibility requirements. To answer our needs we developed UNB's LUCI - a tool to work initially as a temporary measure to make our websites more accessibile, more readable to screen readers - but in fact we may just continue to use it as our overall accessibility solution. UNB's LUCI is more than text only, the interface allows the user to adjust their viewing preferences (larger text, greater contrast, increased line height). We released it as open source so feel free to try it and by all means use it if it can be of help to you.

The fairs here seem to bracket summer vacation. There's one very near the beginning of summer vacation and one just before school starts in September. The one at the end of June is new - I think it's only been around for the past few years. I much prefer it to the one in late August which is overpriced and has few rides and games. It used to be the big event, the harvest fair, with the livestock and agriculture shows, rides, games and fun, but has dwindled over the years until it is a weak shadow itself.

The community fair is more centrally located and has free entry to the grounds. I lucked out with free parking too (bonus). The only thing you really need to shell out for is the ride coupons. (well and the food if you dare). I now insist on bringing a friend along for Aliya so they can enjoy the rides together - I'm at the age where the whirlies bring on the hurlies, but I still like the thrill rides. I didn't get a chance to try the Freak Out but Aliya and her friends rode it twice and proclaimed it "awesome". This year instead I prowled the grounds and took tons of photos. I've always liked the color and frenzy of fairs and there are many opportunities for interesting shots. I really like the decorative details you find on some of the rides.

And no trip to the fair is complete without the commemorative tattoo (oh - airbrushed of course ;) ).

What is a well-designed website?
This is a question I have been mulling over for a while now and some ideas have begun to coalesce. When you use the word design there is usually an automatic connection to the look and feel of a thing and this hold true especially for the term web design. "Web design" usually equates to: production of graphical elements, layout/placement of graphics plus textual elements, colour choice, typeface choice. To this end, Joshua David McClurg-Genevese has written an excellent article in Digital Web magazine of the principles of design. This is definitely a must-read primer for those who wish to get a basic overview of the visual design process.

But I believe that the design of a website goes beyond the visual medium deeper into the realm of the user experience. I'm mindful of the praise heaped on the design of Apple products - they're minimalistic and elegant; and on the Mac OS X platform. The refrain you hear over and over again on the Mac OS X operating system is "it gets out of your way and lets you do your job". If you've worked with OS X you know what they mean.

So web design then, encompasses both the visual and the visceral. Going back to the question of the well-designed website, I believe that good design should not distract you from the job at hand, whatever that job might be. In relation to the web, good design should not distract the user from their goal: getting the content.

The user experience is more than the visual experience. It's also the deeper experience which is derived from the implicit website, the structure, which should allow the user not to have to think about how to conduct their tasks. These are Information Architecture principles encompassed by the elements of user experience design. (See also: Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug) A popular best example of this being the interface to the Google search engine. No thinking needed here, just type what you're looking for and hit search.
I believe, therefore, that good design should be invisible to the user. A well-designed website should evoke a feeling of comfort to the user because the user will be able to perform their tasks easily and quickly, with no hesitation, no anxiety, no frustration in a pleasant user environment. The user environment being the environment within which the tasks are done. It is pleasant when it does not intrude into the user's focus by, for example, a distracting colour scheme, or jarring use of typography, or badly placed elements, or unexpected behaviour, unfamiliar jargon, or unintuitive structure.

I spent some time at a conference over the past few days discussing with my collegues Scott Olszowiec and Mehmet Doğan the need for more than a technology conference in the Atlantic Provinces. Together, we agreed that the lack of a forum east of Montreal and north of Boston for brainshare between web professionals is somewhat frustrating. To this end, we will be working together to try and get something organized for next summer. We'd like it to be a forum to explore trends, techniques, solutions in web work today and discuss the possibilities for the future. I'd also like to see a track that blends the technology with the real life application in academia, maybe in the form of case studies - how is the web being used in the classroom today. How would you like it to be used in the future. Kind of a think outside the box track. Maybe a track would be too big, it might be better suited to a panel discussion.

Day 3 events wound up at noon today with a slideshow presentation of photos. The conference photographer had been extremely diligent in taking candids of conference participants at the various events over the entire conference. Apparently there was grumbling from some fellow sitting behind us that I must've taken my own photos and had the photographer include them. I'm not exactly sure how I ended up in so many photos, heh, right place right(?) time I guess. Anyway, while the slideshow was running giveaway prizes were drawn and handed out to everyone - yay, everyone! Unfortunately for those who left the conference early you had to be there to claim your prize. The highlight prize was (IMHO) the 40Gb iPod followed closely by the IBM leather jacket. Congrats to "Kenny" for winning the iPod - I know you're glad we stayed!!

This was such a great conference, congrats to the organizers for making it so memorable. I'm sure next year's hosts will find it a tough act to follow.

Day two of the conference was a full day of speakers and sessions, all of which were held at the magnificent KC Irving Environmental Science Centre. The high point of the day was sitting with Scott and Mehmet and brainstorming the nascence of our web designers/developers conference. I really hope we can make this happen because there's nothing north of Boston, east of Montreal where like-minded web professionals can gather to discuss, learn and brainshare both on the Web today and on the Web of the future.

The evening festivities included a banquet followed by a kitchen party at the Axe. (the student lounge).
The kitchen party was a blast! The music was great, toe tapping stuff and the beer was plentiful. A great way to wind up the day.

Of course, after the kitchen party ended, a few of us went looking for more party and decided to go down to the Anvil.

The Anvil was a place that we had found the night before; a place that had been recommended to us when we arrived a shade after last call at Paddy's. Following the directions we were given, we arrived at a place that was clearly Not a Main Street kind of place - just a little rough 'round the edges. I wonder if they call it the Anvil because you must leave your hesitation behind at the street corner and "forge" on ahead if you want to visit the bar.

(Un?)fortunately, there's not a lot open in Wolfville at 1:30 am - in fact only the Tim Horton's was open so coffee it was and then back home to bed to get a much needed 3 hours of sleep.

It took about 4 hours to drive from Saint John to Wolfville, NS and the drive was fairly pleasant - no rain. One of our first stops was for lunch at Paddy's Irish Pub.

The afternoon sessions were roundtable, birds of a feather sessions and I attended the Web Content Management Systems. Lots of interest in the Atlantic universities of coming up with a solution/strategy for content management. Many are either using Contribute already or are evaluating it for rollout. After the session a few of us were commenting on the importance of usability / user experience and have decided to try to set up a usability conference in our region, hopefully for early 2006. This will be awesome.

The afternoon keynote was given by Steve Giles, Canadian Olympic Bronze medallist (canoe) in Athens. His talk was on performance, goal setting, and motivation. Good speech, good points.

In the evening we all went to Dooley's for pool and beer. Unfortunately, people are allowed to smoke indoors in public places here after nine pm. Ugh! But the evening was a lot of fun.

Now - off to breakfast and more sessions!

The thing I hate most about travel is packing. I do anything to avoid it (which explains why I end up doing laundry at 11:00 pm the night before I'm on the road). Avoidance has it's uses though, I got through a bunch of bill paying, accounts balancing, got in my long run this afternoon and did a bunch of laundry. It usually ends up that I almost always leave packing to the night before leaving and then try to organize what to bring and hope I don't forget something essential. Which just adds a bit of stress. Never mind the fact that you can always (usually) buy stuff you've forgotten. There must be a happy medium between the people who pack days in advance and the last minute packers like me -- I've yet to find it.

Just got back from seeing Mr. & Mrs. Smith and I have to say I enjoyed this movie. Directed by Doug Liman (Bourne Supremacy) there was a bit of camera shake and I'm not sure if this "mockumentary" style was really needed, but it was minimal and thus bearable for this movie. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie just sizzled on screen. Their fight scene was awesome and their dialogue snappy.

So the story is of a married couple, bored in their dull, routine of a marriage who suddenly find things spiced up to the max. So as they hunt each other and the adrenaline starts pumping, they suddenly find themselves turned on to each other. Hmmm... nothing like a little stalking and trying to kill each other to liven things up a bit. Or maybe it's the catharsis of letting all the truths come out. No true relationship can be built on lies and as the truth comes out they get to really know each other.

It was a good 3 stars out of 5. Heck, even if you don't like the action there's always the eye candy.
★★★☆☆

via Design Principles

Oh this is good stuff that Eric has uncovered and brought to light over at meyerweb. CSS is so cool and the amount of stuff I've yet to learn about it seems a little daunting.
The way is long but the end is bright young grasshopper.

Man, what a crazy week! I almost can't believe it's actually Friday. It's been so nuts that I'm really regretful that I didn't get to the club this week to train but I was feeling pretty crappy this week. I did get a run in last night though which makes me feel a little better about missing training this week. In fact, I'd like to increase my running but I'm not sure if I should run more times a week or run longer. At first I was thinking that I should try to run at least 3 times a week, but now I'm thinking why not run longer but twice a week? That might be a more do-able goal for me at the moment if I'm also trying to maintain two nights a week training at the fencing club. And it's endurance I'm trying to work on so perhaps longer runs might help.

No, I'm not fanatic about exercise but I think it's one thing that's keeping me somewhat sane. For me, there's nothing like the feeling of running and letting go of the day; I visualize the crud that's stressing me out just peeling off and falling away behind me - and that just feels liberating. With fencing, I enjoy the training. I like demanding lessons, ones where you sweating as much from concentrating as from physical exertion. Hey - and I like when I win the bouts, well come on - who doesn't?

So it's Friday and now I'll have to plan for next week. And next week I'm at a conference in Nova Scotia for 3 days - I doubt I'll be getting any running in there, and it'll mean no fencing either since it kind of spans my training days. Hmmmm...and hmmm again. So, maybe I'll try to get in a longer run tomorrow, and one on Thusday next week and that might have to do.

Over at 456 Berea Street, Roger Johannsen points to a must read article at Juicy Studio titled Div Mania.

"More and more web documents are appearing that consist of nothing more than a collection of div elements. In most cases, better use of CSS selectors could be used to avoid overusing the div element."

It makes sense though, moving from tables-based to CSS layouts one brings with them the same mindset of putting stuff together. Divs are overused because the way they're used makes sense initially. Now reading the article, it makes much more sense to do things right ;)

Books, books and more books. I come from a family of readers and it seemed, growing up, that books were jammed into most available spaces in our home. I started reading at a very early age and books became like my favorite friends. Of course the early years went from Seuss to Miss Pickerel to Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew. And then my early teens were spent with Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. LeGuin, Asimov, Clarke and others of that genre. A brief foray into the horror novels and then one day I picked up the Lord of the Rings and a whole new world opened up for me. The world of action, adventure, heroes, good vs evil. It also seemed that there was much variety in this area at the time. From novels spun from mythologies (my favorites being the Celtic myths) to action/adventure novels, dragon novels, relationship novels, but lately the pickings have grown increasingly slim, the bookstore shelves being slowly crowded out by the Forgotton Realms and AD&D series.

So after a long friendship with fantasy novels, it seems like the well has run dry and not much truly original work is being done in this genre. So one of my 43 things goals was to expand the range of genres that I'm reading. Happily, I've rediscovered Science Fiction, and I am now trying out some bestseller/action/adventure type novels like Brimstone by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child , DaVinci Code by Dan Brown, and others.

Also happily, while perusing books at the bookstore (they had a buy 3 get the 4th free sale) I checked out the young teens books hoping I could find something interesting for Aliya and there amongst the young angsty books and the O.C. novelizations I came across The Outsiders by S.E. HInton. Man, this was one of my favorite books at her age so I picked it up for her. She loves it. I think I'll borrow it from her when she's done and read it again.

Latest Books read:

• Brimstone, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child
• Pandemic, Daniel Kalla
• Decipher, Stel Pavlou
• The Family Trade, Charles Stross

• Still Life with Crows, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child
• Sethra Lavode, Steven Brust

• American Gods, Neil Gaiman

Finally, phase one of the update is over. The blog is now running fully as a MT3 blog and a lot of the broken parts/functionality of the old one should be fixed. I can actually do meaningful sorts by date and category - whoo hoo. Ok, so I didn't fully have a clue about what I was doing when I first put up the old site, I'm learnin'... I'm learnin'. I've also added a link to my Flickr site, and more good stuff on my linkroll (apologies if I inadvertantly dropped anybody).

My plans for the next phase of the design is to include a style switcher and the first of at least 4 seasonal styles. Ok, don't hold your breath. It's a work in progress but here's a sneak peek:

You know that spring's well into her season and summer's very close when the road crews are out digging up the roads. So much road work is going on in the city that driving is more waiting than going. Pretty much every year the city does maintenance work to the deck of the Harbour Bridge. This year is no exception. Which brings 4 lanes of traffic down to 2. Not normally a problem as people can take the Reversing Falls bridge - except this year there is water main replacement going on on Main Street west and there are huge detours. The only way I can get back and forth from work is to take a bridge and both routes are clogged. *sigh* The evening commute today was paticularly hellish - but it's not so much the waiting in line, but those &^@#^$&Y drivers who feel entitled to sail up the right hand lane (which ends in right turn only lane just before the bridge) past kilometers of backed up traffic and butt their way into line at the top of the hill just before the bridge. I'm trying to be "oh, so what" about it but can't get thoughts of spike belts or, perhaps a roof mounted twin 50-cal to spit hot lead at them as they slip on by. These people drive me nuts! Where's my personal aircar???? This is the 2000's - we were all supposed to be flying by now and not endlessly waiting.
- end of rant -