Abigail drew this on the way home from swimming lessons. It's Finn! What time is it? It's aaaaaaaaaadventure time!
June 27, 2011
June 27, 2011 By 2 Comments
How to have a great conference experience.
June 20, 2011 By 3 Comments
Nothing like a pen and a pad of paper to organize your thoughts
I just got back from “An Event Apart” in Atlanta. This is the second AEA that I’ve attended, the first being in New Orleans several years ago. If you’ve never attended An Event Apart, it’s a truly inspirational conference. Creatively merging design, development, and mixing them all in a tall glass of web standards, it’s really the one other conference, besides Adobe Max, that I feel is a legitimate, “must-attend” learning experience. It’s not for the feint of heart however, it’s a lot of information over a small amount of time. You’re exposed to an eclectic mix of speakers and topics ranging from high level design discussions to low level, technically challenging sessions like the nuts and bolts of CSS, or technical executions of cutting edge HTML5 solutions. It’s not like MAX, where you’re moving from venue to venue over the course of a couple of days, interspersed with keynotes and scoping the sponsor pavilions. You’re essentially in the same place for two straight days (three if, like us, you attended the additional “A Day Apart” session on devoted solely to “Content Strategy”).
Spending two days in the same room can sometimes try even the most patient observer, but the topics breeze by and the challenge instead becomes, “how do I make sure I’m taking this all in?”. Luckily, the brilliant guys and gals at AEA make the presentation slides available to attendees, and armed with an iPad, I quickly discovered the best way to keep up. Each day, before that day’s sessions, I would download all the presentations to my iPad and set it up at my spot, allowing me to keep up with the talking points on a provided pad of paper. Yep, good ol’ pen and paper worked better than anything I could come up with, and leaving my laptop up in the hotel room enabled me to really concentrate on what was being presented.
In fact, this worked so well I think I’m just gonna plan on attending future conferences armed with a moleskine and a pencil.
QR Codes in the wild in Atlanta and Buckhead, GA.
June 13, 2011 By 1 Comment
In town this week for “An Event Apart” I started noticing QR codes as soon as I got off the plane Sunday morning. A lot of the airport duratrans had them and I was particularly drawn to the destination ads, with the ad for the Gulf Coast being the best example of a mobile landing page so far. Another interesting thing was how many of the codes were going to URL shorteners. I saw a lot of bit.ly urls and custom bit.ly urls for the landing pages. Only one that I remember went to a non-mobile page (Very Bad!) and another went directly to a video. I see a lot of articles mentioning taking users to videos as landing destinations, but I disagree wholeheartedly. You have to remember that not everyone has an unlimited data plan and I think just sending people straight to a video without allowing the user to choose to go to a video is not only rude, but bad practice. If I were paying for my data plan by the byte, I’d be irritated if you forced a meg or two on me without asking first. I think the workable option is to take users to a nice landing page with some copy, and perhaps a screen shot of the video that links to the video on a robust delivery platform like YouTube.
The best example so far though was GNC nutrition in the Lenox Mall. First off, they had a huge QR code in the window. We’re talking four feet across at least. I couldn’t miss it, and when I snapped it, I turned to walk away expecting some kind of landing page, but was pleasantly surprised that I was told to turn around and go back into the store to get a free coconut water. I could choose between three or four flavors. So naturally I turned right around, headed into the store and got my free coconut water (I chose peach, by the way)! Excellent little offer that got me into the store when I was actually walking the other way.
So here you go, a little gallery of my first day in Atlanta sort of casually walking around on a Sunday.
Some goals and some lessons.
June 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Okay look, I’ll admit it. I ate like an army when I was in Seattle. Fish, french fries, artisan cheeses, delicious local gastronomy. The restaurant at the Sheraton was “The Daily Grill”, a personal weakness of mine. They make the best meatloaf and chicken pot pie… and yes, one night I got in late and ordered a Daily Grill Hamburger delivered to the room after 10 o’clock. Not to mention I was like, two blocks from KuKuRuZa gourmet popcorn, and I got an almost crack-like addiction to dark chocolate caramel popcorn, as well as enjoying a delicious bag of swedish fish from the Candy Store at Pike Place Market.
And I don’t regret a single bit of it.
I did realize, however, that I can’t take that type of diet lightly, and I certainly can’t sustain the combination of not riding/exercising (I was in pretty brutal shape from my accident days before) and eating like a roman soldier on leave. So I knew when I got home I was going to have to buckle down and get back to the discipline needed to get my weight back down to a manageable level. Doc says I need to be about 165-170, but we agreed that 170-175 was probably a more reasonable weight for me, and when I got home I was way off that… by um, about 25 pounds. I actually came back from Seattle the heaviest I’ve been in over two years. I was just north of 200 (201).
About the same time I came home from my trip, I read a blog post somewhere about the secret to achieving your goals, and one of the tips was to “be specific”. Don’t say, “I’ve got to lose weight”, say, “I’ve got to lose X pounds by Y”. Make it realistic and specific. So, knowing I was going to Atlanta tomorrow for the “Event Apart” conference, and feeling very strongly that I didn’t want to go to Atlanta in bad shape, I used it as an opportunity to try and be as specific as I could. I went back and looked at my weight history (yes, I keep a weight history at FatSecret.com, as well as a diary of everything I’ve eaten over the last two years) and told myself, “okay, you’ve got about three weeks before you leave for Atlanta. You need to lose 20 pounds and be at least 180 before you go”. This would give me only about 5-7 pounds I’d need to lose when I get back before I’d be back down to my healthy weight. A lofty goal, but looking at my weight loss history, and knowing how much I’d ride and the discipline I’d need, it seemed a good goal to set.
Weighing myself this morning, and I’m 177.4 pounds. Not bad. Exceeded my goal by about 2 pounds.
So what were the lessons? Fairly straightforward, actually.
- Weigh yourself. Often. I read this a lot, and it’s true. If you’re attuned to your weight, and you weigh yourself as often as possible – I started weighing myself every morning – you’re more apt to be aware of what you’re doing throughout the day. It’s just a psychological tool, but it’s a pretty powerful one. I noticed that when I don’t weigh myself frequently, I simply don’t make the connection between my diet, my exercise, and my weight.
- Keep a Food Diary. This one’s huge. I don’t really care what “diet” you’re on, whether it has a “name” or not, I don’t really care how much you exercise. I only know one thing. It’s a simple matter of calories in vs. calories out. It’s no more complicated than that. Your body requires a certain number of calories to power it for 24 hours. If you consume more than that, your body converts and stores it. If you increase your physical activity and burn more calories than you take in… the opposite is true. I happen to burn a LOT of calories, and if I keep a dietary diary, if I keep track of everything I eat throughout the day, I just naturally consume fewer calories. This is very closely tied to portion control, but you’ll find that when you have to actually write down everything you eat, and the quantity, you just sort of naturally practice much tighter portion control. Also, I bet you’ll surprise yourself by how large your portions are. Serving sizes really ARE serving sizes. They’re not just there as a “recommendation” or a “suggestion”. I really do only eat 4 oz of chicken when I eat chicken breast, and yes, I actually weigh it… or at least I did… until I learned what 4 oz. of chicken looked like and can now eyeball a single serving of chicken with remarkable accuracy.
- Don’t eat at night. Seriously. Don’t do it. I eat about every 3 hours. I eat roughly 300 to 400 calories at each meal. I eat at around 8, 11, 1, 4, 6, and 8:30-ish. I consume about 2000 calories or more a day, and that last snack at 8:30 is it. No more. I don’t snack at 10. I definitely don’t eat anything before I go to bed, and if I eat at 8:30, I won’t go to bed for at least 2-3 hours after that last meal. This has been huge. I always eat breakfast, and trust me, if you don’t eat anything after 8:30, you will too.
- Exercise. All of the above is well and good, but if you’re not increasing your metabolism with exercise, then you’re only doing half the work. I’m not talking about walking around the park, or taking a leisurely bike ride around the neighborhood. You need to get your heart pumping. Do whatever suits you… but do it.
So I did those sort of basic things. That was my discipline. I kept my eye on my weight, I kept a food diary, I wasn’t snacking late at night, and of course… bike, bike, bike. Made myself a nice, somewhat challenging, but realistic goal, and kept to it. Sure enough, it worked.
Now… my next goal is, “don’t gain any of the weight back while I’m in Atlanta…”
Fingers crossed for this one, I love soul food.
What do you call them? I know you know what I’m talking about…
June 7, 2011 By 3 Comments
You’re flipping. Then you see it, and you stop dead in your tracks. You can’t flip anymore, and you have to watch the rest of it… every time you come across it.
For me, it’s always “Goodfellas”, “Casino”, “Open Range”, or to a lesser extent, 80′s movies like, “Pretty in Pink”, “Sixteen Candles”, or “Saint Elmo’s Fire”.
Don’t judge me.
Is there a name for these movies? “Flip Stoppers” seems a bit contrived… but oddly appropriate.
What are yours? And what do you call them?
Ten minutes of Hype.
June 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment
So I downloaded Hype from the Apple App store last week. I only just got around to playing with it this weekend and I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts. If you’re running Safari or Chrome, take a minute to check out the home page. I made the little slideshow there in about ten minutes Sunday night playing around with it. I didn’t browse any of the video tutorials, not because I was trying to avoid them, but because when I opened the program for the first time, I wasn’t really trying to do anything with it. I just wanted to see what the interface was like, how it worked, what the palettes looked like, etc. However, it was only a minute or two into it before I said, “hmmm… lemme go about looking for how to set the stage size…” then, “hey, that was easy enough… now let’s import an image or two…”. I had already read a review that mentioned setting up a slideshow was as simple as transitioning between “scenes”, so I began by looking for a way to import images into different scenes, which turned out to be pretty easy. By then I was about 3 or 4 minutes into it and had all my images imported, all my scenes created and named. All that was left was to start playing around with transitions and trying to figure out how to move between scenes to get the effect I was looking for, which was just a simple cross dissolve between images. This actually took the most amount of time, only because I didn’t quite know how things were set up. However, once I got the hang of the Identity Inspector after a few minutes of tinkering, all I needed to do was “Export as HTML5″, choosing the “folder” option (remind me to play with the “Dropbox” option because that sounded intriguing!) and it packaged everything up nicely, providing me with a couple of <DIV> tags that I copied and pasted. Upload the folder containing the javascript (more about that later), and you’re done.
All in all a pretty fun little experience. I didn’t play with the capture/record feature, but reading about others experience with it makes me wanna fire it up. I definitely think it’s a cool tool with a LOT of potential, and an especially polished “version 1.02″. I suspect it’s exactly what Adobe’s going to release as “Project Edge” though, so it won’t be long before some heavyweight competition moves into that same visual design/development territory. Just between you and me, my money’s on Adobe. Speaking of… I did notice that there’s a nifty little “Dreamweaver Preview” button in Hype. Combined with Dreamweaver’s live view, it makes for a nice little round trip workflow. Props to the Hype guys and gals for that little nugget.
The downside? The animations are javascript. No CSS animations, and it doesn’t even use canvas elements. Just wraps it in <DIV> tags. I know weird, right? A quick browser compatibility test confirmed my fears. It works great in Chrome and Safari… but, well… if you’re not using those browsers, you’ll see what I mean. Or, rather, you WON’T see.
So it’s like I said. It’s a great start. Fun little program for a nice opportunity to do some visual design without writing code. I’ll play with it more and maybe dump some examples here. I’m not exactly sure I’d use it for production work just yet… well, maybe for something quick and dirty…
And again, let’s not forget that Project Edge is coming…
The best part about being a dad.
June 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment
I dunno. Some moments you just treasure more than others, you know? Sometimes during the course of the day, things happen that make you just pause and realize how great it is to just be, “that guy”.
Last night my daughter came into the room because she had a bad dream. All she wanted to do was climb into bed.
I didn’t have to lift a finger, I didn’t have to buy a Barbie, I didn’t have to cut chicken tenders, I didn’t have to kill a bug, or open a jar, or do anything except just be a dad.
So she got into bed, got herself situated under the covers and I fell back asleep with my arm over her.
Best. Night. Ever.
June 2, 2011
June 2, 2011 By 1 Comment
(Click The Photo To View A Much Larger Version)
Standing at "the top of the hill", overlooking my old stomping grounds. I shot three images and stitched them together using Adobe Photoshop's Panorama Tool. From my May, 2011 trip to the island.
