I think we missed all the camera club meetings in September, but we made it yesterday. I submitted two images. This one placed 1st of 6 in Projected Pictorial - Basic:
(And yes, the car is on the wrong side of the road. I flipped the image because I felt it looked better with the car on the right than on the left. We'll just pretend it's in Japan.)
It's been chilly and rainy here today!
Of course, I've been stuck inside with a nasty headache, but still. I'm excited.
Kyle and I got to take another, very quick, trip to Utah right after my birthday. Like, we left the day after (9/21) and came back that Friday (9/24). The reason for the trip was that Kyle was being sent on another recruiting stint for the Lab. So he would be at BYU's technical career fair and interviewing students all day Wednesday and Thursday, but for the price of my airfare I got to tag along and spend time with friends. Which is something I enjoy. (We did the same thing last year, too, but it doesn't look like I ever got around to blogging it. Oops.)
...Did I mention that I got sick the day we left? Yeah. Woke up with a sore throat that morning and was all stuffy and needing my Sudafed by the time we left for the airport. The cold was definitely a damper on the whole experience. Usually, though, I get sick after traveling, so I think my body was trying to just preempt that whole scenario. So instead of getting infected, I would get to infect others! Especially all the children I was planning on seeing! Bwahahaha.
Anyway, we flew out on Tuesday. Nothing too memorable about the traveling. Oh, except that I packed the wrong book (3rd in the series I'm reading, when I needed the 2nd) and had to buy a new one at the airport. I got a good one, though, so it worked out. But we got together with Erin, Bryce, Will, and Sawyer for dinner at Brick Oven that night. It's always good to see them. Bryce, I still feel a teensy bit bad about eating your bread. I hope you have forgiven me. Also, Erin made some wonderful cupcakes ('cuz when you're 30, the birthday celebrations just keep going?)—white cake and cherry frosting. With sugar sprinkles on top. So good. And Will read us a bedtime story! The Monster at the End of This Book, which I think is a classic. When he was done, Sawyer wanted to sit in the rocking chair and have a turn. So he opened up a book and "read" it to us, with some commentary from Erin about what it really said.
On Wednesday, Kyle had to be on campus at 8 am, and I went with him. My understanding of how the career fair went is that they stood at their booth all day and talked—along with about a billion other people in the ballroom, so they talked loudly. Kyle was 'xhausted afterward. I spent the morning just sitting around. Got breakfast from the Scoreboard Grill and hung around the Wilk with my computer and book. Then we had lunch at the Skyroom with Kyle's co-recruiter and some faculty from the technical departments. That afternoon, Kyle was back to the career fair and I had an appointment with my old academic advisor, Irene. The goal was to figure out what I need to do to finish my degree. More about that later.
Tianna came and picked me up from campus after my appointment, and we went back to her house. It's so great to just hang around with her and Kessa, who is an adorable baby (just over a year now; is that still a baby?) and such fun to play with. Wednesday night we had planned a get-together with some friends, and it was awesome fun. We didn't even end up doing anything in particular, just sat around eating ice cream cake and talking.
On Thursday, Kyle had to be back at campus early for a day of interviews, but I slept in at the hotel instead of going with him. Tianna came and got me around noon and I spent the rest of the afternoon with her again. (Yes, things would have been simpler if I had been allowed to drive the rental car!) Kyle came up when he was done, and then we went to dinner at P.F. Chang's with his co-recruiter and some of his family. (Ordinarily, they would have invited star recruits to dinner with us, but I guess there weren't any this year. Which is not to say that nobody looked hireable, because they had some good prospects from what I hear. I dunno; I didn't make this decision.) We had a good time, though. And I love those lettuce wraps!
After dinner, we had one thing left that we had to do: taste our wedding cake. Erin's had the top of our cake in her freezer for months, since her mom brought it out. We should have gotten it last time we were in Utah (which would have been closer to our anniversary), but we forgot. So we got it from her on Tuesday night and took it back to our hotel to thaw in the mini-fridge. Thursday night, though, we still hadn't tried it, so we decided it was time. Now, we'd heard from a lot of people whose cakes were disgusting after a year, but also some whose were still quite good. We thought mebbe the secret was in how well it was wrapped up and protected. Unfortunately, when we opened the box, it was not wrapped at all. In fact, it still had flowers on top of it. Yep, big dead flowers. Not a good sign, right? Well, we cleaned it off as best we could, but the safest bit to try still seemed like just a bit of frosting off the side. I made Kyle try it first, which took some coaxing, but he did. It was not good. He spit it out, actually. Said it tasted like mold. And then got mad when I refused to try any!
Friday was the day for leaving, but not until evening. So that morning, we swung back by campus for another chat with my academic advisor, now with even more information. Then we went back to Tianna and BJ's for an hour or two before they had to leave, when we went back over to Erin's to hang with her and the boys. Kyle had a good time playing hide-and-seek with them (though Sawyer tended to follow him and then shout, "Will! He's here!"), and I had a good time watching and advising (far too tired to actually participate, though). The boys didn't seem to mind when we were tired, though: they were very willing to just drag out all their toys to show us.
Finally it was time to go, so we headed off to the airport. We'd left 2 hours to get there and on the plane, which should have been plenty of time. We forgot, however, to consider all the construction going on! Our flight was at 8:00 and we got into the airport at about twenty 'til. Not good. We couldn't even use the kiosks to check in, it was so late. So then we had to go to the counter and explain what was going on. The first guy to help us couldn't get his logon to work, so we wasted a maddening 3 minutes or so there until he passed us off to another guy. Finally we were checked in, and they called the gate to let them know that we were on our way down. We still had to get through security and to the gate, though. Thankfully the line was short, but still. Stressful. And then we took off as fast as we could go down the terminal, arriving with a few minutes to spare as the plane didn't leave on time. It was officially the closest I've ever come to missing my flight, though, and I'd just as soon never do it again.
All in all, it was an exhausting trip. But we had a good time!
I was taking some trash out and saw this guy sitting on the wall. So I tossed the trash, and zipped back inside to grab the camera.
There wasn't a lot of light and I didn't know how long it would stay put so I used a large smattering of settings hoping that one would come out well enough. That's the best shot. Most of the others are too grainy from using too high of a sensitivity.
Anyone know what kind of bug that is? Mom, I'm looking your way.
I read The Design of Everyday Things awhile ago. Since then I've noticed basic design principles that are either good enough or bad enough to draw notice. Sometimes it's only in contrast with a better (or worse) design that you realize how bad (or good) a design is.
I came across a particularly illustrative example of this while we were rearranging our books after having purchased another bookcase. Occasionally when you buy a set of books they'll come in a thin cardboard box. This is the cardboard box that a set of J.R.R. Tolkien books was packaged in:
Notice how it's built like many simple boxes with a flap that tucks in. You don't think anything of it until the moment you attempt to slide a book in on that side. The cover hits the flap and you risk damaging the cover if you try to force it.
This is the design of the box that all of the 3-packs of books from the Wheel of Time series came in:
Specifically designed to have no flaps that might interfere with sliding a book back into place!
Since a lot of my work involves user interface design I try to pay attention to functional designs and pick out what is good or bad about them.
It turns out that it's really hard to create good interfaces, which is why I try to appreciate them when I find them. It can be painful to watch users interact with some of the interfaces we put together at work. As a team we bend over backwards to make things as simple as possible—then you watch someone still completely fail to interact with the system successfully without coaching. It's hard, but we're really figuring things out and have been getting a lot of praise for our most recent designs.
If you're in the application development world and you've never really watched an "average" person use a computer, you need to do it. You'll have your mind blown by how kooky their actions are. It never occurred to me that some people will always drag-and-drop to copy/paste text. They do it because it's faster than right-clicking and selecting copy and then right-clicking and selecting paste. But they've never learned that ctrl-c / ctrl-v is far more convenient. We made some people really happy when we made sure to account for this drag-and-drop behavior in our application. It wasn't hard to do, we just never imagined it would be useful!