April 2005 Archives

I've got a preliminary version of my portfolio now available for your consumption. I've been working on a version that's a little more complex, but I figured it was more important to just get something out there. It fits with my minimalist tendencies, anyways, so the bare-bones look isn't such a bad thing.

I apologize profusely for the portfolio's less-than-scintillating copy—I'll work on that over the weekend.

If I can work some DNS magic between Dotster and my web host, aliotsy.info should point to that site sometime next week.

Adobe acquires Macromedia for $3.4 billion.

At the pre-donation screening for the blood drive yesterday, the nurse needed to ask me some questions to make sure that I really was, well, me.

"Street address?"

"Thirteen-thirty Antelope, number nineteen."

"Phone number, last four digits?"

"Nine-one-three-zero."

"Last four digits of your social security number?"

"One-one-seven-oh."*

"Airspeed of a B-52 bomber at a 10-degree incline into a gale-force wind taking off from a cliff?"

"Um…"

"Gotcha."

"500 miles per hour?"

"Pretty close. Not bad. Take this form over there and fill out all the questions, then get in line at the green balloons."

"What is the airspeed of a B-52 bomber?"

"Oh, I don't know."

*Like I'm going to post the real sequence on the internet. Ha!

The past 48 hours have been a whirlwind, and I still can't quite believe that I'm writting this from a New Orleans hotel room.

I always forget something when I go traveling, and this time it was a comb and the cord for my digital camera, hence the next couple "on location"—

Update, April 11: And that concludes the sum of my attempt to post "on location" from New Orleans, kind of like the Quebec special I wrote last summer. Between late nights and general exhaustion, I haven't really had the motivation to finish this entry until now. Incidentally, for those of you who may not remember the context, we were on our way to New Orleans to participate in the 2005 NAQT Intercollegiate Championship Tournament, after "accidentally" qualifying for the tournament at the West Regional Tournament back in February.

Transit

Thursday evening was crazy. My mom and I dropped off some stuff at the dump, and then I hurried to Kabul, the new Afghani place downtown, for a mini-high school reunion with Maichi (and her boyfriend Raymond), Yen, and Iman. I got there around 7, knowing that I'd need to leave for the airport around 10ish. Kabul had a waiting line, and already has a reputation for slow service, so we went to Thai2K instead—which also turned out to be packed. I suggested Cafe Mediterranée, and so we finally got to eat around 8pm. It was fun catching up with old friends, and a little weird since this was the first time we'd met as college graduates. All of a sudden we were talking about grad school and jobs and the suddenly more tangible concept of Real Life. The night ended with coffee before I rushed home to finish packing and get to the airport.

We met at the gate at Sacramento International about an hour and a half early. Our flight was due to depart a bit past midnight, so we passed the time cramming for the tournament—Ruwan brushed up on O-Chem, John started writing out the history of the English monarchy, I tried memorizing Latin American authors, and Rishi browsed through Sin City. The 3.5-hour flight out of Sacramento was to Continental's hub in Houston, and I spent most of it asleep. From Houston, we took a 50-minute flight to Louis Armstrong International in New Orleans, arriving around 9am local time.

To boldly go…

The South, I'd forgotten, is humid. The weather in New Orleans was actually nice, in the low seventies, but the mugginess took a little getting used to. After inquiring at an information desk at the airport, we took a convoluted trip to our hotel—first taking the bus to Canal Street in downtown New Orleans, switching to a streetcar on Canal, taking that for about a half hour, getting off near the Warehouse District, and then walking fifteen minutes to the hotel. The Warehouse District sounds nifty—many of the old warehouses near the Mississippi are being converted into art galleries, restaurants, and hotels—but a look around tells you that there's still a ways to go before the reinvention really takes off.

The hotel room was great, which is nice since four guys were going to be staying there over the next couple days. We relaxed for a bit, then went down to Riverwalk, a mall overlooking the Mississippi, for lunch. Eager to get some Cajun cuisine, I ordered a tasty Jambalaya PoBoy. Mmmmmmm.

After lunch, we went back to the hotel to watch a little TV and get some sleep in before that night's games. Deep Space Nine was on, much to our delight. Scratch that, three of us were delighted. While Ruwan, John, and I talked about which Star Trek series was better, Rishi called the rest of us dorks and went to take a shower. For the record, Deep Space Nine is way better than Next Generation. John agrees, Ruwan dissents, Rishi, I'm assuming, doesn't particularly care.

DS9 was followed by an episode of Next Generation, which started with the Enterprise encountering—surprise, surprise—an unusual anomaly. It was actually kind of an interesting episode, but I fell asleep.

Nationals

After resting up, we walked to Robert E. Lee Circle (which has a towering statue of the Confederate general) to catch the St. Charles streetcar to Tulane University. Tulane is located in New Orleans' scenic Garden District, surrounded by all these big 19^th-century houses. We checked in at the imposing McAlister Auditorium, which evidently sports the world's largest self-suspended concrete dome. It felt big and national and I just stood there in wonder: wow, we were really here. Quiz Bowl nationals. The biggest nerds in North America.

Ok, I'm getting tired, so I'll continue this tomorrow.

Disclaimer: If you're one of my regular readers who aren't into web design (which would be, um, all of you), this might be a good time to take a walk (it's nice out!) or maybe get back to your English paper. Of course, I have previously whined (I admit, that's what it was) about how people who don't get this side of me may not really get me at all, so it might benefit you to stick around. I guess I should also say that you'll probably see a lot more posts on web design in the near future. I'm thinking about migrating them to another blog, but for now they'll be here.

Moving on…

My mind was wandering (as it often does) while I rested between reps on a machine at the ARC today, and dwelt on an interesting conundrum—if KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is really such a huge tenet, how does Apple get away with the click wheel on the iPod?

I'm particularly speaking in reference to website navigation, such as number of menu items, placement of elements, and other best practices. We go to a whole lot of trouble to develop intuitive, "no-think" interfaces, hopefully coupled with well-thought-out information architecture.

And with the click wheel, Apple essentially thinks different. I'm not saying the click wheel is hard to learn—I figure most people could pick it up in a couple minutes, and it thereafter seems quite intuitive. But minutes? Those who worship at the altar of Nielsen repeat the mantra "8 seconds or less, 8 seconds or less"—that is, the amount of time one has to capture a user's attention. In this arena, seconds are a luxury; minutes a fanciful impossibility. Why so different?

The obvious answer is that the contexts are totally different, and this is true. But I have another hypothesis—commitment.

Commitment, specifically, to the object being navigated. Someone learning how to navigate an iPod likely has some sort of commitment to it—as the owner who just spent a good deal of cash on it, for example. Commitments to websites are much more fleeting—if a user can't immediately find what he is looking for or trying to accomplish, he'll move on, quite often to a competitor's site.

So how should an awareness of user commitment affect site design? I have some ideas, and I'm thinking of trying them out. First, I'd like to start with minimalist, core navigation up front—on the home page, and perhaps somehow unambiguously distinguished from other navigation elements on subpages. This will let new users immediately recognize where they are and what they can learn or do. The idea with these types of users is to increase commitment, minimizing or throwing out elements that might act as barriers.

Naturally, a small, core navigation isn't sufficient for most websites, so the next step would be that complexity and detail increase iteratively. Rather than occur as a separate entity from the core navigation (for example, as a left navigation menu along with a top menu), secondary navigation should build, repeating patterns in the core navigation to spur learning. Someone using secondary navigation inherently shows a greater level of commitment, and that shouldn't be squandered by forcing her to learn (and commit) to a new system.

I'll be the first to admit, the idea of user commitment and pattern use in navigation is hardly an original idea. It's seen all over the web, and applies to user tasks as well as navigation. I remember a particularly good example (though I can't remember the site) which used zoomable squares, starting with 4 core navigation elements (if anyone knows what I'm talking about, please point me to the site).

The last site brings up an interesting weakness, though: fully-committed users (specifically, returning users) would have to go through the stages of commitment again to get to something specific. A user would have to start with the same navigation elements that new users had, and drill down to more specific information, rather than circumvent the learning stage and jump straight to what interested her. This brings up the third, confounding point of my hypothesis—don't punish committed users. Somehow, a site design should keep a minimalist navigation for low-commitment users, and yet not shackle high-commitment users by limiting them to it.

How should these conflicting interests be resolved? I'm not totally sure. But I think I'm gonna spend some time over the next few months figuring it out.

Some people seem convinced that the life of an unemployed college graduate is one of ease and leisure, of endless days of nothingness. I assure you, this is not true—I too have the same angst and stress of my full-time counterparts. Sure, I don't have homework, midterms, and labs, but nonetheless, my life is hard.

Ah, who I am kidding?

So what am I doing these days? Primarily, applying for jobs. If you know anyone in Northern California looking for a web developer (preferably in the greater Sacramento area), feel free to pass along my resumé. I'm trying to find the motivation to compile samples of my work into an online portfolio, and there are two sites that are begging me for redesigns. So I'm keeping myself busy.

And spending a ridiculous amount of time on Thefacebook, finding old friends, Malagasy students in the US (I had no idea there were so many!), and random groups to join. I somehow managed to get accepted into the uber-exclusive Beautiful Peoples' Club at UCD. I applied with a mischievous bent, to see if they'd accept someone whose face isn't even clearly visible in his user pic, but I didn't think they'd actually let me in. To confuse matters further, I was rejected from the Davis Gorgeous Peoples' Club, but was gladly accepted by The Ugly Peoples' Club.

Yeah, way too much time on Thefacebook.

Speaking of Thefacebook, I randomly stumbled on their office. Our family took a day trip to visit Stanford (appropriately, on the first day of Spring Quarter at UCD), and we were wandering around downtown Palo Alto, looking for lunch. We turned a corner and saw the menu pictured here at the bottom of a staircase. I went up to take a look around, and it was everything you'd expect a dotcom startup to look like—scant office furniture (save a long conference table), half-finished bottles of soda, bags of chips, and a random guy walking around talking on the phone. There were at least two other people in the back, and no one seemed to care that I was standing in the middle of it all. Cool.

We had lunch at an Italian place down the street, Pasta Pomodoro. Even though it's a chain, it was the best Italian restaurant I'd been to in ages. The service was great, the food was excellent, and the prices were reasonable. What a great find! For Davis folk, there's a Pasta Pomodoro in Elk Grove…might be worth checking out.

Was Pasta Pomodoro the best Italian I've ever had? Until this Saturday, I would have said yes. Now I'm not so sure, as my family went to Osteria Fasulo to celebrate my graduation. Although it's reputedly the best restaurant in Davis, not a whole lot of people have heard of it (it used to be the Plumshire Inn), mostly because it's nestled in a residential neighborhood. My mom has been attending a series of seminars over the past couple weekends, and one of the perks is that the restaurant opens exclusively for seminar participants for Saturday lunches.

So the inevitable question: how did it compare to Pasta Pomodoro? Well, my lunch at Osteria Fasulo (including an espresso and gelato) came out to nearly twice what I paid at Pomodoro, for less than half the portions. But it tasted good. I guess the real question is: what's the money value of taste?

This is a throwback to old school web design (back when Joshua Davis and the whole Kioken crew were like rock stars), but I figured I'd participate in this year's May 1^st Reboot, and its (new school?) derivative, the CSS Reboot.

Why? Because things around here are getting a little unmanageable, and I could use the change.

Why am I telling you? Because I'm more likely to commit to this if I tell people. :)

Speaking of old school web design (and I doubt any of my regular readers are gonna get this), only one April Fools' gag really got me yesterday, and consequently had me cracking up (after some initial confusion). Chris over at K10K announced that kiiroi.nu has updated, so I rushed over, all eager to see the long-promised (and long-forgotten) redesign promised, oh, three or four years ago. Of course, nothing's changed, and I just kinda sat there going "huh?" until it dawned on me that it was April 1^st.