For a while there I bet you all thought I’d stopped writing. Yes and no. I had stopped for a bit, but I’m baaaack…

I’ve been really busy with my new position at Pearson. What can I say…I love my job. It’s busy, I work with great people, I’m challenged daily to come up with unique solutions and really pushed to resolve our customers needs to have software that gets out of their way and let them do their jobs. It’s been great working on PowerTeacher Gradebook, PowerSchool and a new product that I’m not sure I can mention at this point. Anyway it’s great work and a lot of fun too.

In follow -up to previous entries, my Truvativ cranks continue to loosen on each ride. I carry an 8mm wrench with me at all times. I’m taking them to Performance tomorrow to talk to them about what they can do for me. It’s a total pain in my heiny.

On another note I watched the Blue Angels do flybys last weekend and here are some pictures from the event. It was the Capital Airshow at Mather Field in Rancho Cordova.

Well…to make a long story short I’m a loser. Not in the classical “parental basement dwelling” sense of the word, but in the “I’m neglecting my blog sense”. So here are the updates. I’ve started my new job at a fantastic company Pearson, as the Senior User Interface Designer. I will get to draw on my years of experience with user experience to help push their applications Power Teacher Gradebook, and Power School, to the next level along with a team of talented developers, and product managers. So far its great place to work and great people to work with.

In other news, and I post this with some reluctance, but I’m not given much choice. My wife’s former employer MusicTalk, Inc. has failed to pay my wife’s salary owed for last year. So far they owe us a total of roughly $20,000. We have heard nothing from their CEO Bobbie Brown, or any representatives of the company’s board of directors. We are awaiting the final judgment from the California State Labor Board, and once that is completed they would have 20 days to appeal. Considering that Bobbie didn’t show up to either the conference or the hearing at the Labor Commission I don’t expect that there will be any appeal, or any word from Bobbie Brown or MusicTalk. We will be looking into what our options are at this point. If anyone has information about this agency, or its business dealings please contact me.

I have participated from time to time on the DT&G forums. Mostly to get feedback on site designs, and to provide suggestions to other designers. I got this flippant comment on my design by somebody named fred. (I didn’t capitalize his name, because he didn’t) I chose to respond, by asking them to back up their claims with examples.
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Many people now rely on the web as a source for their lifestyles; research, maps, gossip, movie rentals, shopping. Now that this tool is so heavily used I thought it would be good to think about where it started, and where it is today from a design perspective. In the early days websites were pretty horrible to look at, lots of blinking, flashing things, dancing hamsters, BIG FONTS, red text on black backgrounds etc… (I could go on, but I know some of you are already getting nauseous. Thankfully most of the world wide web has moved past designs like these:
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I did it. I uploaded my new site design, and made it live. Now I need to create the blog template using this same style.

Here it is, my site design is fractured and disjointed. I admit it. I added the blog capability, and started a gallery portion, and then never integrated everything together. Shame on me. So now that I have a lull in the storm of projects that were on my plate I am going to start working on tying everything together.

I’m still debating the gallery though…Maybe someone has a suggestion. I could use the gallery I started to set up. Or Flickr, which I already use. Or build something in Flash. Or… See it’s a problem too many choices.

Lastly I’m excited because I get to ride in Santa Cruz tomorrow! I’m planning on hitting the hills going towards the summit of Highway 9. It’s a mixed blessing, as I haven’t done much climbing in the last few years so this may be a very painful day in, and out, of the saddle.

Hello again and welcome to the Microsoft show, the greatest show on earth. Where the marketing department seems to have a bigger budget than the developers. It seems now that they aren’t pleased that so many people are waiting until the big bugs are worked out before upgrading to Vista. They are now about to launch a new marketing attack to coerce consumers that everything is ok, they don’t need to wait for the service packs. Do they really think that jedi mind tricks work on consumers?I won’t rehash the article but I would like to articulate why people are legitimately hesitant; no two people can agree on whether or not it is worth upgrading! Continue Reading »

I’ve been stacked up lately with contract work. It’s nice to have the extra, but man some nights I would like to just like to kick back. Oh well, no rest for the wicked. Beyond the training development that I am working on at HP as my day job, and the work I just completed for Strukture.com, here are the projects on my plate:

• A new Diablo Cup t-shirt design
• A minor site redesign for 1031it.com
• Updates for ThomasCory.com
• The FarishtaMakeup.com site design
• Updates to my site for a gallery, and changes to my portfolio

I was just visiting Google Analytics and noticed a fresh new interface. The graphs are bolder, and the data seems to be better organized. All good news for everyone using this free Google service. Oh, pay no attention to the dismal traffic that my pitiful excuse for a web site is currently drawing…unless you want to spread the word to bring me all kinds of traffic.

I first ran across the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project while browsing Gizmodo one day. My first thought was why would children in developing countries that don’t have access to schools, textbooks, or teachers need laptops? Continue Reading »