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Would you rather be an amateur, a professional or a guru? I love this chart.
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Interesting to see that even the City is getting better from a diversity point of view.
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This is cool — a mashup of two of the modern geek’s favourite things: moleskin notebooks and notebook harddrives.
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“The cost of the remedial work looks likely to approach if not exceed the cost of the original development. A perfect illustration of why you build accessibility in from the very start.”
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“Aunty Maiduguri, 45, reportedly married four women at a ceremony in the city of Kano. The multiple marriage was witnessed by 2,000 guests and was followed by two days of feasting.”
Much as I don’t personally agree with polygamy, you have to admire her chutzpah! -
If you live in the UK (or have the right to sign these petitions as an expat), please sign this petition. Without monitoring, it’s easy to dismiss the views of the LGB community — help us have a voice.
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“Sure I can overpower it NOW, but it feels like a few short steps from here to the robot war.”
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“To get them to actually understand what user centred design is about - you need personas.”
Great perspective from Leisa about the value of personas. I have to agree that the value lies more in requirements definition and aiding understanding than in design. -
Interesting — I wonder how many RSI sufferers like myself would fail to authenticate though. I’m pretty sure my typing patterns and speed vacillate a lot when my hands are hurting.
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Wicked, another Freakonomics book! Stephen Dubner is talking at a conference I’m attending next month, hopefully we’ll get some new anecdotes
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Presentations and podcasts from the recent Refresh Edinburgh event are now up.
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“You are what you pay attention to.”
Great productivity advice from Brian.
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I wonder how many Flickr photos will turn up now with the tag “chessonarollercoaster”.
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This is verging on scary… the things students will do for stress relief.
The “N.O.E” mission in San Andreas was really kicking my ass, until Elly suggested a great strategy: rather than trying to go overland, where you have to avoid all the trees, buildings, hills, etc whilst staying “under the radar”, just go the indirect route and fly over the sea. Much easier to stay at a lower altitude and nothing to crash into!
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“I’ve talked at length about the benefits of embracing the chaos, but I haven’t talked a great deal about how. […] There is a total shift in perspective that needs to occur. Here are some ways you can start to re-condition yourself”
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Sounds like Nat organised another STORMING Oxford Geek Night. Reckon it’s just a matter of time before someone realises she makes an amazing events organiser and offers her a conference job. She even got the BBC covering the event!!
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Collection of speakers, slides and write-ups from the most recent Oxford Geek Night. Wish I could have been there.
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Wonders how long it’ll be for total abuse to come to the fore.
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Our puppy has bitten her foot too much and now has to wear a lampshade. And an expression of permanent, unhappy mistrust at our betrayal.
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“Anyone wanting to use the service [..] can send plain text, rich text, html or Word documents by e-mail. Within a few minutes they receive their document either as an MP3 audio file or as electronic Braille.” Cool idea.
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John’s typography slides from the latest Oxford Geek Night.
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For comparison
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“The All-India Services Performance Appraisal Rules 2007 contains a three-page health section asking women for a “detailed menstrual history” as well as other personal information, such as when they last took maternity leave.”
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This is really quite scary…
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Totally nicking this from Mr Coates, but would appreciate it if folks could follow the link and pick the 5-6 words that you think describe me best. Might be interesting
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“If a website fulfils no purpose then it is essentially just sculpture. And if your website doesn’t have some positive aesthetic qualities, perhaps, as in architecture, we should say that it is not Web Design.”
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“Nothing surprises the ground crew at CDG more than the arrival of the daily, scheduled flight from Kennedy. Every single thing about that airport is broken and it’s the worst place in the world to change planes.” Hafta agree. CDG is AWFUL.
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New wiki from Christian Heilmann, hoping to capture the various arguments for web standards and to help folks package them into appropriate business cases for different audiences.
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This site is a little strange, but an interesting and creative idea.
Although unfortunately Elly and I didn’t make it to Highland Fling (which by all accounts was a great conference), we did drive up to Edinburgh to attend Friday’s Refresh Edinburgh event, organised by John Sutherland and Matt Riggott.
The line-up was very interesting - ranging from “show and tell” type of presentations for new web apps through to more training/”lessons learnt” talks.
Alex & James Turnbull were first up talking about their Google Sightseeing site and the lessons they’ve learnt from starting it up as well as creating the related book. I was impressed with these guys, not only for what they’ve accomplished, but also for how honest they were and how freely they shared their experiences.
I was next up, feeling a little out of place since I had no product to display, just some thoughts on why project management can be useful to geeks too. At least some folks seemed to like it though, so hopefully it was useful
Tony Farndon then did a mini-talk, introducing us all to Flock and the extensions he’s created. He piqued a lot of people’s interest — I think there’ll be quite a few Flock downloads coming out of that talk!
Andrew Cavers was next up, talking about Edinburgh Menus, a restaurant review/maps mashup he’s about to launch. It was interesting to hear the development process he’d gone through and some of the design decisions made — although I’m still not sure about the little flash image-drawing widget… 
Andrew’s slides can be found here.
Brian Suda was next up doing a microformats introduction. He got swiftly derailed into a disagreement about the appropriateness of his markup, which was a little unfortunate for anyone who didn’t know about microformats yet, but useful for those most interested in best practices. Brian’s slides and some other resources are here.
John Sutherland was up next discussing the business case for web standards. He seemed disheartened by something that Christian had said the previous, which has prompted Christian to start up a wiki to capture the various business cases for web standards. Hopefully this’ll turn into a great resource for anyone needing to sell the idea.
Dan Champion then talked about the development of Revish, a new book reviewing site. I’ve cribbed the following great advice from his slides:
- Be passionate - build software for yourself
- Don’t compromise your standards - build it right, don’t cut corners
- Pick one thing and kick its ass
- Ajax is the last thing you need to think about - one of the most interesting design decisions was that he gives users the option to permanently turn off Ajax, largely for accessibility reasons
- Forced registration sucks
- Free your data (RSS, API, Microformats)
- Don’t obsess about the competition
- Be the “Design Dictator”
- Serve RSS and your API from subdomains - this was great advice, mainly because if your traffic goes through the roof it makes it easier to balance load the performance
- Avoid Google dupe penalties - have content in one place and one place only
- What can we release in 4 hours?
- Integrated admin
- Recruit testers early (and look after them) - sounds like Revish already has a close-knit burgeoning community from the tester base
- Don’t launch during a period of major life change - advice he’s just developed since he went freelance and launched Revish in the same month!
- Don’t take advice from strangers
The last session was a presentation from the boys behind groopit. Personally I found this app to be the most interesting of all those on show on Friday, because they’ve chosen to focus very specifically on existing real-world groups, in contrast to most other social software apps. Their site intends to make it easy for existing groups to meet up and spend time together more often, which I reckon is a great mission! It’s also led to a number of interesting design decisions - for instance, each group has an automatically private (members only) area.
The other cool thing was that the community feel at the event meant they got a lot of feedback from the audience on their feature design as well as the more technical back-end decisions. This was true in all the presentations, but especially evident in this last session since I think it really caught the imaginations of the group.
All in all, Refresh was a fabulous event and I hope there are more to come in future!
Tags: refresh edinburgh, refresh, edinburgh, speaking, project management, management, geekmanager.
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“There are two classes of Free Electrons. Sr. Electrons and Jr. Electrons … The Junior versions have all the ability, they just don’t have the experience of dealing with people because they spent a lot of the youth writing their own operating system as an intellectual exercise.”
There are two main things I’ve learnt since starting up Make Me A Speaker!:
- Write/talk what you know
- You need to invest in becoming a speaker, much as you would anything else
As a result, you can see me speaking this Friday at the latest Refresh Edinburgh event.
I’ll be talking about Geek Project Management, which is a topic I feel pretty comfortable speaking on. Although it’ll be similar to the session I did at BarCampLondon2, I’ve got a bit more time and so I’ll be going into more details of how to run a successful project without getting overwhelmed by loads of useless documents and meetings.
Which brings me to the other thing I’ll be talking about to everyone over the next couple of days: we’re in the process of setting up the first BarCampNorthEast as well, so sign up if you’re interested!
UPDATE: Talk is done — if you weren’t able to make it and would like to check out the slides, you can download them from here.
Tags: refresh edinburgh, refresh, edinburgh, speaking, project management, management, geekmanager.
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Loving the recursive D&Ding…
Dear Bloglines,
Much as it does feel something of a relief that you seem to have zero-counted some of the feeds I read, I can’t help feeling that I’m missing out. If this was an accident, I suggest you fix the bug asap.
Meanwhile I’ll enjoy my holiday and try not to worry about the fact that I won’t even know what I’ve been missing anymore…
Thanks
Meri
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Google once again lead the way in cool April Fools’ products.
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“All accommodation, meals, and evening activities will take place at the station, with the possibility of guided tours in the beautiful surrounding area.”
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“The internet is the past. Newspapers are the future! See you in the funny papers.”
Check out the hilarious list of things that can’t be referred to in the comic anymore too.
A couple of weeks ago I got the chance to travel over to Torino. It was a bit of a whirlwind tour (I didn’t even manage to take photos!) as we were presenting at two different universities in the course of a day, but I thoroughly enjoyed my first visit to Italy.
The nicest thing about it was experiencing it with some of my Italian colleagues, one of whom had attended Politecnico di Torino. There’s really no substitute for visiting a city with someone who really knows all the secrets — the best places to have ice-cream, or to hang out in the evenings.
This was particularly evident when we ate — some dishes that I would never have thought to order based on the menu descriptions, like vitello tonnato and focaccia lardo were absolutely amazing.
By biggest concern is that I’ll never be happy eating pizza anywhere else in the world ever again!
