The Wilson Project

Wanderlust : February 2011

Sorry for the month delay in blog entries but it’s been a non-stop rollercoaster of travel and events.

Here is the shortlist of what happened in after the last blog entry and a few important things happening this month:

WordPress DC Town Hall with founder Matt Mullenweg

1.31.2001 – Washington, DC

This event happened at Fathom Creative, down the road from CDG Interactive.  It was well attended and the sponsor even got an internet stream for online viewing and questions.  Matt was really relaxed, calm guest who talked about how WordPress was started (at the heart, WordPress started as a image gallery) and answered plenty of questions about it, running a business, some things in the works/future as well as what could be better. I asked about how it was doing in the mobile world and got the surprising answer (700% in two years! – with apps in almost every mobile platform).

IxDA Interaction 11

2.9-12.2011 – Boulder, CO

Decided to arrive early to this conference (third time for me) to relax in Boulder and get to a workshop for the first time. However, I fell ill Tuesday morning and spent the following 24-48 hours in bed.  Missed the workshop but attended the full conference. I even got to attend an after-party on the first night (it was definitely an experience, especially the music and its location inside the Boulder Theatre). This conference was well attended and did not disappoint, concluding with the keynote speech from Bruce Sterling (design critic as well as sci-fi writer).

All the keynotes as well as the individual lightning lectures were all interesting in one way or another.  However, the tone, in my perspective as a developer, was different in that were was more of a focus internally than the last two years. Whereas I was more in sync in the last two (especially with mobile coming up big during this duration), this was more internal than anything else.

• Related stories – http://www.ixda.org/interaction/
• For related keynotes/lightning lectures – http://www.ixda.org/resources

One of new additions to this conference was a day for design-related activities. In my case, it was geocaching, where I spend a few hours in the streets of Boulder playing hide-and-go-seek for hidden treasures. (Thankfully, I was well by then!)

I will be doing a CDG blog entry on my geocaching adventure later on this month.

Oh, BTW…it snowed 3-5” and went from single digits (Tuesday) to 60s (Sunday) in one week.

You thought DC had crazy weather!

Nixon in China

2/19-20, 2011 – NYC, NY

I packed bags again the following weekend, for a trip to NYC for The Met’s presentation of John Adams’ 1987 opera Nixon in China. I last heard this opera on CD a decade ago in college but the performance did not disappoint. Well sung by all the performers and John Adams (who conducted his own work) got a standing ovation.

What was interesting about the opera, apart from the music, was the whole scenery. As a person who grew up during the last glimmer of the Cold War, some of the scenes were familiar from all the news broadcasts during this time (you know, when you only had TV and print).  The opening scene of the Nixons stepping out of the plane matched the videotape footage to a point where it was eerie.  Of course, the big irony, particularly those in the audience, is how much has changed in the almost 30 years that meeting.  As a point, during a scene in the second act, Pat Nixon was presented with a jade elephant. The official near her remarked "We can make hundreds of them cheaply!", which was followed with laughter (with a tinge of irony) from the audience.

The second act ended with the agitprop play (the music the basis for a Adams’ stand-alone work The Chairman Dance), which really reminds someone of my age about the old Socialist/Communist displays in the 80’s, or more recently, in North Korea. Of course, the big irony is that so much of that change would start two years later.

Leaving memory lane, I spent a quiet following day listening to three Shostakovich quartet (11^th, 12^th, and 15^th) and Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue, Op. 133 at Bargemusic with the St.Petersburg Quartet. Back home on Monday (President’s Day).

And that was my month of February.

Will be returning to NYC for two concerts:

• March 26 – NY Philharmonic/Avery Fisher Hall for Bartok’s 1^st Piano Concerto
  — I will be able to say that I have heard all three concertos live – 3^rd in DC/NSO (2005) and 2^nd in Boston/BSO (2007)
• April 16 – Met Opera for Berg’s Wozzeck
  — Heard Berg’s other opera Lulu last year

Hopefully, things will slightly quieter further in the year.

Later (multiple crossing of digits…)

Tagged as Boulder, conference, Design, interaction design, IxDA, music, NYC, opera, user experience, WordPress.

EOY

As I am writing this, I am looking at a fabulous view from my hotel room in what some of my friends call my second home of Vancouver, Canada. Part of me needed to get away to here do some end-of-the-year evaluation and some focused thinking about 2011. Then again, I allowed myself to relax a bit during these last days of 2010 (and I watched the Canucks beat the Flyers 6-2 Tuesday night at the home area…)

But there are some things that occurred during the year that I need to mention before the final ball drop closes the year 2010:

Fencing

If you had asked me at the start of the year if I was going to start fencing again, it would have been a firm “NO.” There was no motivation to start again and no one was really asking to do so. And all the focus that I had with fencing went into my work, which paid off big. Irony, the only people who ever asked about me starting up again were my co-workers at CDG.

Well, after two years, I decided to try fencing again. It has been the only sport that I have some liking to. Not to mention, the least likely to get bored at.

Another bit of irony is that I restarted with Olde Town Fencing, the club I left almost four years ago. Despite that, the warming response made the comeback easier. Definitely a reminder of why I fence in the first place.

Despite dealing with various injuries the last month, I am determined to continue my progress and actually compete again after a 2+ year absence.

Travel

This year:

• Savannah, Georgia (IxDA Interaction 10)
• NYC for opera (The Nose and Lulu) and design (Cooper-Hewitt)
• Seattle/Canada (Victoria and Vancouver I)
• For my first time, travel outside the Americas with FOWA/London
• Of course, Vancouver for end-of-the-year

For next year:

• Boulder, Colorado for IxDA Interaction 11 (February 9-12, 2011)
• NYC for opera with Nixon in China (Adams) and Wozzeck (Berg)

Project Charles

Basically, stops and starts. At one point, it was dead in the water. At one point, I almost considered ending the project. However, I caught a break (and some motivation from Tame Impala’s InnerSpeaker album) and did the complete site mockups. Started to work on the HTML templates but delayed due to technical review from the last two conferences I went to. Both made me think about what I was doing and in the end, the decision to make some more substantial changes in my work.

Restarting work on templates in early 2011 and hopefully finishing the new site by The Wilson Project’s 10^th anniversary in April.

Work

High point was three conferences:

• IxDA Interaction 10 in Savannah, Georgia
• An Event Apart a few blocks from my office in Washington, DC
• FOWA in London, UK

Lots of work, punctuated with four blog entries and some other minor additions to the blog.

However, lots of reflection on my work process, especially considering many of the changes that affected my position as a UI/Front-end developer.

But more about that in the next entry in this blog…

Epilogue

In the end, I remember about ten years ago that I started what would become a 20-month unemployment period. Now, at the end of 2010, thing have changed so much. A number of things that I first experimented with such as XHTML and building pages without table layouts are now not only accepted; they have become the gold standard.

Now, with Project Charles heading for the finish line (?) in April 2011, more changes are in the pipeline for the next couple of years. Hopefully, 2011 will be a good one, not only for me, but for my family, friends, and especially my co-workers at CDG.

Happy New Year 2011 from Vancouver, Canada!

Tagged as Canada, CDG, Charles/TWP, conference, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, fencing, FOWA, front-end, IxDA, London, NYC, opera, Savannah, Seattle, Vancouver, web development.

London and Back

Just re-entered the country, after a week in London for the last FOWA (Future of Web Apps) conference for 2010. Take a while to settle down (not to mention get back to a regular sleep schedule). Spending a week going through all the notes and ideas from the conference. However, all this information will be slowly integrated for the remainder of this year. I was able to get some sightseeing, as well as going to The National Theatre (Hamlet) and a concert (BBC Symphony @ Barbican).

Now, going home to DC to a stack full of work at CDG.

Later.

Tagged as conference, CSS3, FOWA, html5, javascript, jquery, user interface, web development, xhtml.

In London

Currently attending the Future of Web Apps conference here in London, UK. The first time that I have gone outside the Americas in my life. Got off to a bad start by missing the first day due to the Tube strike (thanks for a memorable start, guys…) and mobile phone problems.

Hopefully, things will get better. Even as a write this, planning to do a few new things and the next two days will still hold some importance with regard to the work that I will be doing for the rest of the year.

And then, two free days in the city…yes!

Later.

Tagged as conference, CSS, CSS3, Design, FOWA, html, html5, javascript, jquery.

Another Blog Entry for CDG’s Book Club

On the train back from NYC last Sunday (8/22), I got a chance to write not only the last blog entry (26.08.2001) but also one for CDG. In this case, it is the third CDG Book Club review. The book was Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers, a brief intro into the hottest topic on the web – HTML5.

To buy this book – go to A Book Apart

Interview with the author Jeremy Keith from The Big Web Show (5/7/10) – http://5by5.tv/bigwebshow/2

BTW – The author will be in Washington, DC for An Event Apart conference on September 17th. Unfortunately, the conference has been sold out for months. However, there are some tickets still available for the one day workshop on Saturday, September 19th for HTML5/CSS3 with Ethan Marcotte.

Tagged as html, html5, javascript, web development.

Call Me Regent (or What’s In A Name?)

Next week, I am going to move this site to Linux server.

Not a hard process – its just a little more complex in my case since it will involve domain(s) names, file transfers, and dealing with Linux/Window server (well if you dealt with both you know what I mean). But since I am here and I made an important decisions two weeks ago, I might as well talk about it.

The “it” being…what’s up with the name “Charles”?

Click here – Table/Site Versions

The name Charles refers to Charles Darwin, whose bicentennial was in 2009, the same year the project started in March. It also added some inspiration because of the introduction of new ideas and concepts that slowly gestated and altered during the course of the project.

But the best thing about working on these projects is that it is sort of like my own research lab. It is where I get to try out new ideas before doing in the real world.

One part research scientist, one part Olympic athlete.

As for this version, I decided two weeks ago to name this version “Regent” because of its transitory nature. Unlike “H3”, it was never meant to be a final version and was always going to be more of a functional placeholder for the upcoming Charles.

And there it is.

Tagged as Charles Darwin, Charles/TWP, CSS, CSS3, html, html5, TWP, ui, web development, WordPress, xhtml.

Mental Steeplechase / Hurdle IA

After a some thought and some revisions, I decided that the homepage will take on the blog lister template. This caused the following changes in the primary navigation:

1. Changed primary navigation with addition of “Home” link
2. Changed “Information” with “About”
3. Replacement of “Blog” (main blog page) with “Blog Links” (gray section below containing Blogroll, Archives, and Meta)
4. Switched order of “Social Media” and “Blog Links”

An additional change was the addition of the site byline to the header.

As of today, this was the final substantial change to the look and feel of the Charles site. After almost a year and three concepts, Charles has its look and now I can move forward toward Charles’ completion in 1/1/2011.

Next steps:

1. Complete HTML5 code templates
2. Move TWP site from Windows to Linux server
3. Start initial steps/planning for CMS configuration

Tagged as Charles/TWP, Design, front-end, TWP.