Blog

Obviously this is an out-of-date entry. Contact me if you have questions. So, I’m working for myself now. Check it out: 201 Creative. Would love to work with you! :)

So I’m going to try this new thing - watch a motivational quick movie in the morning via youtube. I made a playlist of videos and have put the following code in cron for 5:30 every morning. It will send an email (which is actually email to txt on my phone) with a link to open the youtube player on my phone with a random item from my playlist. Hope you find it useful!

I’ve been working with my QA department to determine a faster, better way to test our pages in android browsers. The android emulator just seems to take a long time to load, to render pages, and is clunky to use. (True, I may not have learned about all of the options in the emulator, and I may be able to squeak a little bit of performance out of it.)

One of the applications my team develops is used by a group that we’ve determined to be very much beginners at computer usage and internet comprehension. We attempt to make the product as intuitive as possible - while staying away from the newest trends. I don’t believe our place is to challenge their current notion of what websites do at this time. We stay a bit behind the curve because they need to use this application to solve a task. The task is already hard enough, we shouldn’t be pushing them past their comfort zones.

At work the other day, our designer created an interface that had multiple checkboxes, and then of course a check-all checkbox. The thought was that if you check the check-all box, all items become checked. When our QA person started testing the interface, I noticed that a child item unchecked let the check all box remain checked. I explained to the programmer and QA person that this was not the desired outcome. As soon as one checkbox is unchecked, the checkall should now be unchecked. In addition, if you check all children by hand, the checkall should automatically check itself.

I think it’s pretty awesome that my daily job is making something out of nothing.

I’ve given a number of talks in the last few years. Each time I go to a new place, I have to bring this giant bag of equipment and three or four versions of my presentation. All too often, conferences don’t detail enough of the specifics for their presenters. Let me tell you, presenting and traveling can be stressful. So, to help reduce stress and anxiety, there are a few things you can share with your presenters ahead of time.

I’ve had a lot of people come to me for various mentoring opportunities. They’ll ask for help, follow up once or twice, and then just disappear. I’m left wondering: Did I make a measurable impact on their lives?

I’ve read the articles and studies about workers creating their own work spaces and I think it’s a great idea. (In fact, the company should too - it increases efficiency by 32%!) But, I never really realized how important it was until recently.

Oh, PHP - your love affair with arrays is like no other language. You can always tell if someone learned PHP first before all other programming languages. They think, design, and talk in arrays. Have a list? Make it an array. Have a heap? You mean array, right? Collection object? Naw, I’ve got an array right here.