It seems this past week that I've been more in my car than at my desk, work has taken me on the road Tuesday, Wednesday and I'll be leaving shortly for Fredericton again today for a work function. From there I'm off to Halifax for the weekend to compete at the Dal Open fencing tournament. It reminds me a bit of my younger days when I was more footloose and tooled around in an ancient and battered electric blue Mazda GLC named Zeke. (He was a hand-me-down car from my sister). I took to leaving a backpack of clothes and some shoes/flipflops in the trunk for those impulse days of heading out to a beach, or out on the town clubbing, or road tripping with friends. Now it's mainly road tripping for work or fencing. I don't mind the driving so much but it's so much more interesting under clear blue skies. I was wondering what the new highway from Fredericton to Moncton was like after seeing the almost lyrical writeup in the paper about the "soaring vistas" and "rolling hills". I wish the weather wasn't so gloomy today so I could enjoy the view - well perhaps it will clear a bit for me. One can always hope so anyway.

Not too long ago Six Apart acquired Rojo networks and now I've just discovered the new free Vox blogging tool brought to you by Rojo. I've just created an account and it's pretty much a no-brainer. Like MySpaces your can add your friends/family/contacts to your "neighbourhood" and build (yet another) social network. It's also very easy to change the layout and design of your vox blog - I really like their use of ajax in the design configuration section - and the supplied templates are fairly decent.

Get your invites here.

A good article over at Vitamin that discusses Why Standards Still Matter.
Are you tired of hearing about web standards? If you're a standards-based web designer it's so easy to relate to what Roger is saying. We tend to surround ourselves with other standards-aware designers, read their blogs, visit the same sites etc. and forget that we are the minority here. There is still a huge population of web authors who don't know, don't read, don't care about standards, accessibility or bottom line best practices. Roger has some good ideas on reaching out to them.

Interesting article by Stephen Turbek over at Boxes and Arrows with 8 tips on making it real. The gist of it being wireframes are not meant for external audiences. Which makes sense in that the client will have difficulty relating to the spare (sparse?) wireframe document when it comes time for review. Rather, present the client with a wireframe that makes sense to them, a pseudo prototype with their branding, colours and elements so they can focus on how things work rather than the presentation.
Here is Stephen's 8 tips on making it real:

1. Make a header bar with the company branding. It should look like the site they are used to, showing the company logo.


2. Use color. Hyperlink color is a basic requirement.


3. Put a web browser frame around the image (or at least the first page).


4. Use real form elements, not drawn replicas of them.


5. Create a template or library of real form elements (feel free to share yours in the comments below).


6. Avoid lorem ipsum. Instead, use: “Descriptive text that will explain this product.” to avoid confusion about greeked text.


7. Use accurately sized fonts (this also keeps you honest about what can fit on the page).


8. Use real detail such as products names and data. Especially on transactional tools with expert users, users care about what they are reading and recognize and use data like account numbers. It may not be important to us, but they have expectations that need to be met.

Ugh - caught some sort of kid plague up in Dalhousie over the weekend. It seemed like most of the kids were sick at the tournament so, lucky me, they passed the misery along. Achy, sniffly, sneezy - no fun. Spent the day in bed, medicated with DayQuil/NyQuil and slept and read the day away. Hopefully will feel better tomorrow...

So ends day 1 of the Aux Quatre Vents fencing tournament. Surprisingly for being the first tournament of the season for the Atlantic Fencing League, it wasn't that well attended - neither Nova Scotia or PEI came up to Dalhousie NB for this tournament, but it was still pretty fun. I was a bit disappointed in my showing for the Open Foil event (5 out of 17 I guess) but redeemed my standing in the Womens Foil Event (1 out of 6). Still - it's one of my goals to increase my Open Ranking so I'll just have to buckle down and do better in the mixed events. I'm not sure what the problem was today - I'll have to sit down and do some analysis with my coach, Rick Gosselin (hi Rick!!). Lack of focus perhaps, not enough intensity, heh - not very good point control obviously. All things to work on.

Tomorrow it'll be a day of refereeing the Under 17 Foil and then the long (5 hour) drive home. And who knows - perhaps I'll fence in the Open Sabre event tomorrow. I haven't decided on that yet.

Huh? This essay by Don Norman on the surface seems to fly in the face of design/production techniques we've embraced over the past while. After all - doesn't it seem reasonable to do the user study up front to help develop the requirements document so we can build the appropriate structure? Well yes, of course it is, he maintains - but outside the project cycle. Norman opines that perhaps the correct order should be to design/build using rapid, iterative prototyping, and have user studies to perform the "beta testing" - bugfixing, defining enhancements etc.
An interesting argument and maybe one that bears more thought.

Well, it's hard to believe it's September already and here we are closing out the first full week. It's been a busy, busy time for me since my last post in mid-August as I was part of three interview teams for some new hires in our department, as well as trying to keep up on top of the project work that builds to a frenzy as the start of term nears.

And while the on-campus frenzy was building to welcome students back to school - a different freny was building at home as my daughter started in high school this year. I honestly cannot believe how quickly the time has gone. It really seems like it was just last year that she was starting in kindergarten. High school! So day one went well for her and all the anxiety was for nothing. She happily making new friends and signing up for all kinds of stuff so here's hoping she has as much fun there as I did.

And, of course, the new fencing season is starting up and I'm right in the thick of things getting prepared for the first tournament of the season on the weekend of the 16th. I've been invited to the High Performance squad again so I might look into starting a new blog just to track my training. We'll see. It might be a bit ambitious of me to work on two blogs when I barely have time to nurture one.

So all in all, yes, it's been a busy summer but things are moving forward and stuff is getting done and that's a good thing. I expect I'll be able to make time to post more often now - so stay tuned.