Nick DeNardis

Planning a wedding for Andrea and I has turned out to be relatively stress free. We got most of the hard work done early and now 3 months before are just wrapping up the details. Our families work well together and so far there has been no drama. That all changed this week when we received a pretty odd letter from one of my relatives.

Not only was the contents out of the norm but it was sent on her companies letterhead. It was all about etiquette and a few stabs at the family. What I thought odd initially was it was addressed to my mom and not me. I have personally only met this in-marriage family member once when I was probably 13 years old. The least she could have done was address the letter to me, I am an adult and it is my wedding.

Anyways, here is the contents of the letter. You decide for yourself if Carollynn Andren is accurately representing her company, Renaissance Enterprises, inc.

Dear Cindy,
I am in receipt of your invitation to the shower for Andrea DeFillippo. Additionally Jeff and I received a “save the date” notification for your home last month.

Jeff and I thought this rather strange since we have not spoken to you or your family since Christmas of 1998. By my math that would be 10 years ago.

First of all my name is Carollynn Andren, not Carollynn Kondrat. You and your family seem to be the only people that I know that can not get this straight. I married Jeff, more than 10 years ago and it never has been a problem for him, my family, friends, or clients. Professional women that get remarried, rarely change their names, in the real world.

Cindy I have coordinated 27 weddings in my life, some small, some very large, (800 people). I always sit down with the bride, groom and their families and talk about what is and is not proper. Sending invitations to people you have not seen in years is not proper.

We with both the bride and groom and their families, good luck and best wished. We will not be attending any of the events that are associated with this wedding. We do believe that your family’s desire to eliminate us from your social events, was made clear to us years ago. We shall continue to follow this way of life, with respect for the privacy and life style of all parties involved.

Sincerely,
Carollynn Andren

After being a member since opening their online doors I have decided to kick blockbuster online to the curb. The reasons have been building since I joined. I have summarized a few below. If you have your own thoughts about Blockbuster feel free to share them.

Abandoning Early Adopters

The initial pricing was simple and cheap, it got me in the door. After a year the prices went up, I was surprised to see they recognized me as an early adopter and gave a 30% discount plus without changing my current features. Then after the second year they forgot all about me, back to regular pricing and missing features got replaced with non-enticing features. Looks like no more benefits for us early birds.

Not Progressive Enough

Blockbuster still leverages its brick and mortar store by letting you exchange movies on the fly without the shipping. Which is great, don’t get me wrong but they don’t have to rely on it exclusively. A few people at work have Netflix and if they want to watch a movie at lunch it is just two clicks away. Blockbuster has not even mentioned a feature like this.

Clunky Web site

Recently they released a new version of their site. I tested it before they made it public and I commented on a few things, only one of which was fixed. I can now use the site in Safari. The other points have been addressed by their staff but never fixed. Really heavy pages, slow loading times, movies showing up multiple times on the listing pages. It has been almost a year without improvement.

Movies Go Unwatched

I use to check out movies and have plenty of time in the day to watch them, now a days my time has been slipping away. My major time killers are of course the wedding, my last class (graduation in May), Grad School coming up, buying a house, writing a book and my freelance work. Movies are the last think on my list.

Conclusion

I may start my movie renting adventure back up again in a few months but I will definitely be doing some shopping around before I decide to go back to Blockbuster. Their Web 1.0 thinking with a fake 2.0ish look is not fooling me anymore. Don’t take it personal Blockbuster, you should start listening to your customers.

After two weeks of downtime my new Mac Mini has arrived. Its an eBay purchase so the 30% discount was worth the extra week of wait.

Ended up getting the processor I wanted but opted for minimal ram, hard drive and just a dvd reader since those parts worked well on my defective mini.

First step, open it up and rip it apart. Two putty knives and some elbow grease was all it took. Next unscrew all visible screws and lay it all out. The photo shows the dissection in progress.

After all the old pieces were in I fired it up and gee golly it worked. It was like it never left the desk. The old hard drive didn’t even blink on the new motherboard and recognized everything as if it were there all along.

After twenty minutes and eight updates the system was rolling. Syncing all my files back from my laptop took another ten and we were back in business.

Now on to reactivating Time Machine, the software that froze my old mini each time it loaded. I can officially conclude the old mini was freezing due to a defective motherboard. This new mini is backing up 50 gigs of new data as I am typing without any issue.

Last but not least just for kicks I reassembled my old mini with the new parts in it just to see if it would boot. Sure enough it did and stayed on for 15 minutes before I turned it off. Just my luck, I am going to leave it on all day tomorrow just to see if it will freeze, if successful ill be selling a working mini on eBay instead of a parted out version.

I am just glad this whole ordeal is over with and I can stop thinking how much fun it would be to throw my mini against the wall.

Merry Christmas to all! The world revolves around great people with great intentions. Don’t forget to give what you can and make things a little better for someone else. There is a greater good happening here and you’re in it.

Without inspiration nothing gets done, nothing good at least. And although good things are subjective its easy to notice when you see them.

My inspiration is talks, I love listening to them, reading slides and see what people are working on. Their passion inspires me, their love for their projects and leading edge work makes me want to further my work. Its not to compete with them its just their pure passion they are pouring out to the crowd makes me inspired to pour my passion into my work and hopefully be able to present my work to an interested crowd.

Secondly inspiring blog posts really get me going and ready to work on something that will change the world. I have a philosophy that if something you are working on will not change the world your time as a living thinking human is being wasted, might sound a little harsh but i am not an absolutist. Of course things like shopping or cleaning are not what I am talking about but all interactions with people and work. The thought of expanding the human race always needs to be a motivating factor.

We are all human, we all have the same goal in mind, lets not loose sight of that.

Your not told what your not suppose to know.

So I decided it was time to update the look of my site. I knew I needed more room for content, code snippets just don’t fit in 300 pixels. This update was primarily inspired by my recent decision to move from Palm to Blackberry.

Back to basics, getting rid of the clutter and flare, my site is not here to sell a product but instead teach ideas and present research. One thing the Blackberry does that Palm lacks is the back to basics text driven menus and single application screen and single method of traversing the phone.

The Palm reminds me of Java, over the years it has grown to try to fit everyones needs without realigning or saying no to features which only fit one category of customer. Clunky interfaces and random restarts often happen because of the lack of integration.

In addition to the actual functionality improvements the screen on the BB is a tiny bit smaller but RIM has way better font support and smoothing so making the text quite small increases the amount of text on the screen by 25% over the Palm. I didn’t make my text size any smaller but what I did was increase the space for each entry and went to a fully em controlled layout for more flexibility.

Realigning the content with the right column in my mind was the best decision of the realign, before all my “personal” data was scattered at the top, left and bottom. I decided to concentrate it all on the right column to a clear separation from the article and personal items.

Another thing that bothered me about SimpleLog is that it did not natively validate. The Archives and Search page had some terrible nesting issues. Diving into the core code I changed these to produce a better POSH structured site. Before I was experimenting with the Blueprint CSS framework, well lets just say it was thrown out the window in this version, way too much overhead and not enough benefit.

The design will transform as time goes on as all things but as of right now straightforward is in and I am sticking to it.

Overseeing the current Wayne State University homepage is like running with a tiny pebble in your shoe. You feel it every step but your going so fast you cannot stop to take it out.

Working with a site so large it can become discouraging but taking one step at a time one can accomplish anything. Yesterday we took our first step, moving the site to a new server in an environment that we are comfortable and flexible in.

The old version of the site was sitting on an NT box, a requirement of the company who built it over 4 years ago. When I started I had a few goals, one was to get the site off that server and get it validated and rewritten in POSH. Well that day has come and we managed to sprinkle in a few other goodies along the way, here are some highlights:

• Valid XHTML Transitional
• No More Tables
• No SQL Requests
• ADA Accessible
• Way Prettier Print Version
• Mobile Version
• Microformats
• Opensearch
• YSlow Grade B (83)

It took some work to get here but we made it. There is still some tweaking to go but all in all its setup. Now its time to concentrate on the content, we are going to be doing a page by page overhaul and adding greater functionality and layout to each child page.

In addition to the content we will also be shrinking the file size and HTTP requests further and further down to the base minimum. Right now we are ~90k depending on the panel that loads and 16 HTTP requests with an empty cache, we hope to cut the size down by a third and get rid of 2-4 requests.

Stay tuned for more progress.

Taking something large and packaging it into something short, sweet and understandable is a designers passion. Taking a step back it is also a programmer and teachers passion.

Yesterday I had the honor to give a top down talk and tutorial of a web site manager to my Senior Seminar group. This included all the logic behind a site managers functionality down to the implementation using PHPSimpl

It was really great to be able to explain my passion for the web and visualize it on a whiteboard to people who initially could not grasp even a part of the process, to in the end being so excited about the system they wanted to run to a computer and start coding.

My first attempt to get the group involved was to trace through a web manager and go into detail about how everything connected, this failed miserably. So taking a step back I reverted back to my love for design and took a high level approach and then lead down to the actual code.

A whiteboard is the best teaching tool in my opinion, you can sit at a computer all day and look at code and understand but without seeing the relationships between everything coding can only go so far. Understanding the whole system only breeds better system development, less chance of code clash and fewer bugs.

What it comes down to is the ability to take the huge world of a program, a site, or a collection of sites and package it up to give relevance to the actual user. We do this when creating navigation for a site all the way to creating features for the content management system which houses over 200 sites.

The best programmers, designers and educators can take the massive amounts of data and sum it up, package it and deliver it directly to the brain to influence excitement and energy into the students and process.

My hat goes to all those teachers out there who get to practice this passion to inspire, keep up the good work.

So it has been a full day in my own office and unfortunately I didn’t get much time to myself. The Publications team was gone to a conference so we moved all of their desks and computers to their new working space. I was only in my office for increments of 5 minutes to check mail and phone.

The photo attached is the office how I got it. Nothing of mine in there and nothing cleaned. Not at least my computer is in there, things are cleaned up and I have a whiteboard. I will post another picture when it is all done.

Having your own space is like being inside a bubble, I am use to working in a large room with eight or so people. If I had a question about something I could just ask it while still staring at my computer and working. Who ever knew the answer would shout it out and work would continue. Although my office is right next to the pit I cannot hear whats going on out there, I have to rely on alternative methods to communicate. IM mainly but typing is though on the wrists sometimes. I kinda wish everyone had an iSight and we would all just talk and see each other.. nevermind, creepy.

Anyone have any good suggestions on how to deal with communicating when isolated in your own office?

• When you are doing a project that is in your profession?
• When you register a domain name for your “company”?
• When you create a logo for your “company”?
• When you consider creating t-shirts for your “company”?
• Or is it when you apply for a doing business as name?

Just pick one. We unfortunately just have one left…

Staying motivated while the going is touch is a pretty daunting task, especially if the big picture is just out sight. Weather it is for a short period of time or half the year everyone hits a hard point in their life. The key is to not think of yourself as being singled out, things just happen, getting past it is the first step and then getting things done is the second.

Getting things done really means keeping yourself upbeat, there is always a light at the end of the tunnel. The more thought going into the situation the less amount of time you have to work on a solution.

Think of the big picture is my solution when I get into tough times. Thinking about how I will learn from it when I am old and grey. Challenges are meant to be solved, its like any good math problem, some solutions are elegant and other are just plain ugly but there is always a way to an answer.

Know when to move on and either cut your losses or start a new path. A key think for me is not getting comfortable in a situation that does not allow for growth. Not only in a work environment but in any personal situation. I always look for that next chance to improve or to improve on someone else’s life. If there is a point where no more can be done and idle is the best you can do it is time jump to a path with open arms to learn and grow.

Plan for the brick walls because they are unstoppable and unbreakable. Always have at least two or three options open as backups. Mainly when it comes to generating money, sometimes the most creative ways surprise the best of us. And small side jobs end up taking the burden from working crazy hours and keep things flexible.

Always showing your best work when doing any task. Impressions happen all the time and you cannot tell someone you are about to impress them, it just happens like a brick to the face. If always showing your best work means working an extra mile instead of a few feet then you are in the wrong business. It just comes down to thinking more about others than yourself, you are not doing something to benefit yourself you are accomplishing a task to help someone.

And always ending on a good note will never hurt your integrity.