Someone Read this Blog

Someone commented on my post-RefreshPhilly post the other day. Which was weird because I never really expect anyone to read this blog. It's more of a personal space. But then if I didn't invite it, I'd have made the blog private.

Anyway, it makes me nervous about writing anything disparaging. It prompted me to re-read my post, nervous about what I said.  But I have no reason to be nervous (my most harsh comment was that the talks weren't "earth-shattering"). Really, I just have to remember that, even when writing to myself, I'm incredibly forgiving of my subjects.

1.5 miles on June 17

So today, in about 13 minutes, I ran this much:

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It's about 1.5 miles, according to Google. I think I was trying to outdo my before. But it turns out I didn't do much better. I mean, I wasn't as beat as before, but I think that may be because I had more of a goal. Anyway, it's not bad. I feel like I'd like to be able to do 2 miles in 15 minutes or less.

HappyCog @ RefreshPhilly

I went to a RefreshPhilly talk by HappyCog this evening.  They talked about their process in developing the new visitphilly.com website.  They presented four stages of development: information architecture, back-end coding, front-end coding, and design.  Things were not necessarily done in that order, but that was the presentation order.

• Information Architecture
  
  This is classification of information within context. It's clumping and separating. It's apples and oranges, but to a botanist or a chef. The information architectural design is going to determine the structure of your menus and links (and probably other stuff).
  
  Start with a detailed breakdown of the domain (context) you're working within, from a users point of view. Classify them according to importance and according to how well they can be achieved through software, and then clump them into separable categories (experiential goals -- things the user wants to do with the software).
  
  The presenter recommended a book: Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior by Indi Young.  Might be worth checking out. I should also get around to reading those other books like The Design of Everyday Things.
  
• Back-end Coding
  
  This, in the case of HappyCog and the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation (GPTMC), was construction of the system that the site maintainers will interact with.  It was choosing and setting up a CMS.  It was also deciding how to transfer all the old data into the new system.
  
• Front-end Coding
  
  This was basically taking the design and coding it.  She gave some good best-practices advice, like making landing pages for all top-level menu links (for folks without javascript), and making :hover = :focus and onMouseOver = onFocus for those people browsing with their keyboards (I do that!).  Also, I like their "megamenus".
  
• Design
  
  I would sum-up design as a word in one of the slides: reinterpreting. It was taking a new [conceptual] image of the city and putting it into a visual statement.  They came up with some emotive themes that they wanted Philadelphia tourism to embody (contemporary, fashionable, and a couple others I don't remember), and evaluated each of their design possibilities against those themes.

Anyways, nothing earth-shattering, but I certainly learned some things, and had other things that I may have already known on some level made salient.

1.2 Miles Today

So this is the route I ran today:

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Apparently it took me about 10 minutes. Hm. Well, I'm not training for a marathon or anything, but I'd like to be in good soccer shape. That's not good soccer shape yet, I think.

What will I do without my Lala

I have to say, I am quite disappointed to be losing Lala.  I think it has turned out to be my favorite music site ever.  I mean, Pandora's cool (and it was cooler before I had to listen to ads), but sometimes you want to listen to what you specifically want to listen to.  And Lala let you do that for $0.10 (or like $1 for albums).  It was so easy to buy music at those prices.  No complicated "is it really worth that?" questions.  If you liked an album, you bought it, no hesitation.  Then, you could listen to it to your heart's content until you decided that you needed it everywhere, and you made the plunge and bought the whole album.  And you could still listen to it online.  And if you never needed it everywhere, you never bought it for offline.  No problem.

Now I'm faced with a delima.  Lala's closing.  My online songs will go away.  Do I buy them?  That's quite a bit to drop at once (particularly without a steady income).  Apple will likely open up a similar service (well, one would hope), and I'd be able to use my Lala credits there, but I've never liked Apple software.  Apple makes bloatware.  Even if it were exactly like Lala in every respect, it'd take me some time to get over the Apple brand.

Oh well, I suppose I'll just wait and see.

I wonder if Apple's service will use Flash :).  If it used HTML 5 audio, that'd be awesome.  In spite of my less-than-stellar feelings about Apple and "HTML5", Flash is terrible on 64-bit Linux.

Adinkra Desk

Here's a shot of the desk that Jennifer and I finished about a week ago. So far it has been working pretty well from a productivity standpoint. I drilled a hole in the middle so that we didn't have computer cords coming off of every side. I'm quite proud of this piece. The next one I'm working on is for Ambata. I had my father write some Mdw Ntr on the side and I carved it out. I hope it turns out well (and doesn't take much more time). I'll post a pic of that soon, before I send it to MA.

Update: OK, I sent it to MA a while ago, but here's some pictures anyway.

There it is, in the wild.  My father did the Mdw Ntr on the side.  It's a phonetic translation of "Chemistry".  I hope it's holding up well for him.  I have to get up there and visit at some point, cause I don't think he'd tell me if it were falling apart.

Obama's speech in Cairo, June 04 2009

I'd like to address briefly one thing from Obama's speech in Cairo (you can find all but the very beginning here). In part 2 he says:
"Violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That's not how moral authority is claimed; that's how it is surrendered."

A NY Times article addresses this:

"Many ... would not agree with Mr. Obama’s categorical comments about the futility of violence, noting that American revolutionaries had used violence in their struggle for independence against Britain." Violence happens to be an integral part in many moral struggles that we laud in retrospect. Yes, even in the U.S. civil rights struggle. Also, in the part 1, we find Obama justifying the U.S. troop presence in other countries. "Necessary", he calls it. I can't really blame him for not at least acknowledging this apparent hypocrisy, as the fact of it is antithetical to the rest of his point. But he's too intelligent to not recognize it.