2,2,2,2,then 5. I'm starting from an initial test of only two, and I didn't think I'd even be able to do 13 today already.
So as you can see by my lack of posts, grad school has seriously dampened my free time. Well that and changing jobs twice! October of last year I left my web designer job at Principle Data Systems where they had to let me go prior to having to sell off the company (was never without a job as I landed the next the very day I left). Then I was an information architect at imc2 where while it was a pretty place to work, it was also a bang it out get it done zomg it was due yesterday and you just got it today sort of place, needless to say - they sucked out my soul. This is especially true when you consider the traveling I had to do for them, the fact that I am a mother to a precocious 5 year old, and a full time grad school student. Working 60 hour weeks was KILLING me, so I found a way out after only 6 months (shortest job ever). I am now a usability and interface engineer at a small software firm. This all occured in the span of about 6 months and right in the middle of both semesters!
I also traveled to Mexico/Central America for my honeymoon in October, to North Carolina multiple times in December and January (for a client of imc2), got to go to SXSW interactive in March (which was cool as hell), and then to Memphis at the end of March where I podcasted the Society for Applied Anthropology conference.
Currently I am contemplating going to Canada next weekend, will be attending a Portus 2008 in July (I am their assistant web graphics person), and will be going to the Virgin Islands in October.
Yes, I am still alive - I'll try to stop by here more often. :)
hi, i've been slacking with online stuff (work is crazed and killing me), but...
went to Madrid and Seville in March--pics here
And these are just wonderful--love them!-- Jorge Bispo's pics--
VESTIDO DE NOIVA
It's a cover. It's prom the post-Dion Belmonts era, after their legendary leader left for a solo career. Bass vocalist Carlo Mastrangelo had taken the helm He penned this song, a nifty number in the Italian-American 'Greaser Soul' doo-wop style that the Belmonts epitomized. Mastrangelo's deep voice was often the Belmonts' secret weapon (check out his work on 'I Wonder Why') but without Dion's swaggering presence, the record feels more like a nice rough sketch than anything else.
Joan jett fills in that rough sketch perfectly. Her version of 'I Need Someone,' is near perfect example of a rock and roll single. It definetely contains the Belmonts' influence in the Blackhearts 'duh duh-duh duh-duh' background chant on the chorus, but there's also the Stonesy grit of the rhythm section, the Ramones-style guitars, the high, breathy Beach Boys harmony on the verses, the punk-rock growl of Joan's lead vocal, some organ that comes right out of Del Shannon's playbook and spoken word bridge where Joanie seems to be channeling James Brown. If you know what to listen for, this tune is a little history lesson/pastiche of what's good in rock and roll, and even if you don't it's a great record on it's own terms for the sweet sound and the full-bore passion with which all those ingredients are mixed. Joan Jett will probably never again scale the commercial heights she did with 'I Love Rock & Roll,' but I'm sure as hell glad she's still out their doing her thing. Here's to the ultimate rocker chick.
Lunar Eclipse as seen from Bariloche, Argentina, originally uploaded by matildaben.
We really had no idea that there was going to be a lunar eclipse (partially visible from Seattle, but fully visible in South America) when we planned our trip. We were in Bariloche that night, a place with a very clear sky, and to top it off, the moon was visible from the balcony of our hotel room.
sorry i haven't updated this in so long
but i just got back from Rome! it was wonderful--i was there for a week...
i'm slowly uploading all the pics to my flickr account here (it'll take a while) : >
there are also pics there from my Tokyo and Cologne trips
So, one of the customer service ladies at work had a really rough week, and she's very down about the fact that we don't have regular "accomplishments". We haven't rolled out a "big" new feature in several months - lately we're adding small features to existing modules and trying to keep our heads above water with "important" bugs. She'd like to "try something, anything" that could give us not only more regular "accomplishments", but a roadmap to the future, something that shows up where we're going, and naturally, as we pass those milestones, a way to look back at the things we have actually accomplished.
I gave her a brief rundown of (what I have read about) Agile Development/Management and Test-Driven Development, along with a rather blundering explanation of why it's rather painful to implement the latter into ASP.NET _Web Forms_. Because I've been doing the tutorials for Castle Monorail, I'm starting to feel a very strong pull to implement Monorail in our work application.
No, I'm not talking about "The Big Rewrite", I'm talking more of a "as we go forward, we will make a conscious decision about whether to implement any new feature or module in MVC/Monorail over WebForms" approach. If we were to attempt "The Big Rewrite" we might as well close down and hit Monster.com with updated resumes.
First things first, though. I have a few "need to do" items before I can present this to my team in a way that will get buy-in, and I really need them to buy in.
1. Rebuild/Build a new dev environment that's actually identical to production.
2. Install Monorail/Castle on dev.
3. Finish the Getting Started tutorial for Monorail.
4. Implement *something* that's part of our app using Monorail, as a proof of concept.
That's a bare minimum, and assumes I can find time for them along with my normal responsibilities, including squashing bugs, developing new features, managing my team, managing my boss, managing the CS team, etc.
Oi.
I've been reading a lot about Ruby on Rails, Ruby, Model-View-Controller, Monorail, the Castle Project.
Dealing with some of the Fertilizer Pattern implementations I've inherited at work, the idea of a strong separation of concerns is tempting. Too tempting to pass up.
So I installed Monorail/Castle Project on my laptop this morning and went through the first couple of pages of the Getting Started sample project... basic Hello World stuff. It's very cool so far, but by default, starting Debug from VS 2005, it uses the VS built-in webserver, and my work webservers are IIS. So I decided to try setting it up in IIS. Following the directions, with a brief detour to change my as-yet-unused localhost IIS from the original .Net 1.1 to .Net 2.0, I didn't find instructions on exactly what needs to be copied to the IIS folder for things to work.
I tried just the /bin folder. No luck, 404.
Oh, wait, it's still a .Net app, I better copy web.config and global.asax - should I take default.aspx, too? Nah, let's see what happens. Ooh, a real exception, not just 404! Progress. Stack trace says it can't find my view...
Ok, let's copy just the /views folder.... bingo!
Maybe I missed some docs on deployment-by-copying, but I feel pretty good about a)how little needs to be copied, b)that I was able to suss it out that quickly, and c)the general fun of learning a new model/language/pattern.
Next up on Getting Started is DataBinding, followed by ActiveRecord(which I'm very interested in, though I'm not sure it'll work for many of our more complex WebForms where we're updating multiple tables from a single form's input) and then, who knows?
This is a fun adventure, and I'll definitely be installing Monorail on our "real" dev server next week. Even if we only use it for internal "tools", I think it's going to make creating those tools a lot easier, faster, more maintainable/extendable, and should make it easier to "document" what some of the more arcane and obscure areas of the app do and, more importantly, how they do it.
More later...
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