for work and play

Let it be known, if its’ not clear to you the reader already, that I am a nerd. There are positive and negatives to this. One of the negatives is the topic of this post - lack of physical fitness. I can definitely be better in this area of life. So that’s what I’m gonna be - better. I used to be in decent shape, but somewhere in my mid 20’s I started to backslide. With that said, now is the time to start reversing the trend. It begins with Junk Food Free July.

I was first inspired on the idea on a twitter post by SourJayne. She participated in Junk Food Free June. I should have tried it then, but I didn’t. Then, about a week ago, I read a posting on LifeHacker about someone using Twitter to build in accountability for their weightloss plan. That is a great idea. In order for this to work, I need to define some parameters. I thought about the things I’m doing regularly, that I know are the wrong things but they’re easy or convenient - and do them anyway. One is eating out. I do this everyday. This is due to 2 factors. The first is convenience. The second is a dislike for preparation and cooking. I dont enjoy the process like others do. Another bad habit is not eating fruits and vegetables on a regular basis. Also, its not uncommon for to get another mocha as i hang out at a coffee shop or meander about seattle. All bad things. On the upside I can run further than i could 2 years ago, and I’m playing (and enjoying) volleyball on a weekly basis. So I’ve done some good, but it’s just holding things level and not improving.

Since I’m a nerd, I created a guide where each item is based on a power of two. I call it the “Power of 2 Guide”. Pretty creative title, eh? It was designed to establish rules against the bad habits I’m currently implementing. The directives keep me on course. The items themselves are my todo items for a successful implementation. Without further adieu, here is the guide.

Power of 2 Guide

Directive 0 (The Prime Directive): Anything you consume must add value.
Directive 1: Cannot eat food from a restaurant by myself

• 1 salad per day
• 2 coffee drinks per week
• 4 fruits per day
• 8 ounces of fish per week
• 16 Km of running per week
• 32 ounces of juice per day
• 64 ounces (mininmum) of water per day

Now that I’ve got my plan, let’s discuss logistics. I need a target and some monitoring. My current weight is 271 pounds. To complete July 2008 junk food free is the short term goal. The long term goal is reach my target weight of 230 pounds by Dec 31, 2008. For monitoring, I’ll be using Twitter on a daily basis with daily result #PO2 PASS or #PO2 FAIL. I’ll write a weekly update on my blog. Tuesday July 1 is Day 1.

If you have any ideas/strategies on cooking/preparation, I’d be glad to hear it. I encourage you all to participate. If not, at lease cheer me on! Wish me luck!

One aspect of website development that has been redesigned over and over again is navigation. As time has progressed, web designers have battled multiple issues - usability, accessbility, client preferences (I want it look just like Amazon’s), tradition (other sites do it “this way”), cool factors. But what if you the designer never had to design another navigation? How cool would that be? Very, you say?! That’s what I thought.

In short, my idea is to put your website menu in the browser chrome. The browser chrome, as defined by Urban Dictionary, is “a euphemism for the graphic control elements of your browser interface.” It would work like this: The webdesigner would create an XML file in the root of the website called ’sitemenu.xml’. The browser knows to where to look for the sitemenu.xml. It finds the xml file, parses it, and generates the nodes in the toolbar menu under ‘Site’. The toolbar menu is the same one that has File, Edit, and Bookmarks. So this means that the contents of the Site menu are dependent upon the website in the browser window.
Why would we want to do that? you might ask. Well, there are several reasons:

1. Web Designers would spend their valuable time on other aspects of the site
2. Accessibility would become a non-issue:
   • Anyone using a screen reader already knows how to use there application menus.
   • Usability is increased since the user doesn’t need to relearn the navigation style for that website
3. There’s now more room for the content without the navigation consuming space on the page.
   • Reduced Page Size - A good thing for the mobile environment, since currently subscribers have to pay for the data charges.
   • Can be cached for browsing multiple pages on the same site.
4. It would work identically on your mobile browser as it does on your desktop

Can this actually work, you say? Sure! Why not? All the pieces are available. Google already uses a similar idea for crawling your site. Browsers are already doing something similar with a favicon (the image that shows up when you bookmark a site). There are challenges ahead, to be sure. The biggest one is browser adoption. Theoretically, I could create the optimal XML file and associated DTD, give it to Opera and Mozilla, and they’d have it implemented in a fortnight or two. However, Microsoft would probably get around to it with IE9 because between this day and that, they would create a slightly different implementation that they would force upon the development community. Then there’s the mobile browser manufacturers. The fragmentation in the mobile community is great. With the numerous mobile browser manufacturers out there , It could take years for them all to catch up. Like I said before - there are challenges ahead. However, I still think it can work.

I like to help out when I can. Also, lately I’ve been trying to be healthier by getting fit. So I’ve been running and joined a volleyball league. Running isn’t easy for me yet, so it definitely helps to have a concrete object to work toward. So when a new friend of mine Erika Hargadine asked me several weeks ago to be on her team for the Race for the Cure, I told her I would. What’s is this event about? In a word: breasts. Need a few more? Health. Life. It’s about ending breast cancer through research, and help those who have it to afford treatment for it. It touched my mom and it touched Erika, both of whom are survivors. Not everyone is so lucky.

When I told Erika I planned on it, it was just a promise. Today, I’m officially signed up. There are multiple events you can participate in, but I will be participating in the Co-ed 5K run/walk as part of a Erika’s team “She’s My Wingman“. As a participant, my objective is to raise $150. If you’d like to help by contributing, that would be great! If you can help me meet the goal of $150, I’ll add $200 to the total pot.

Social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn have been popular for a couple of years now. But lately, a new breed of social networking is on the rise - mobile social networks. Mobile social networks allow you to use your mobile device to communicate with your friends while on the go. Some of the bigger names at the moment are Twitter and Blue Pulse. In my neck of the woods, I’ve been hearing about Twitter. Out of curiosity, I’m taking the opportunity to learn more about it.

The way Twitter works is that you login to the site, and leave short, “blurb-type” messages about what you’re doing at the moment. Then people who follow you receive these messages in their account. The more followers you have, the more people know what you’re doing. You too can follow people. It’s only fair, after all. If you register your phone or IM with them, you can also use that to post your messages. This is where things get interesting. I can use the shortcode for twitter to send the system a number of commands. For instance, you could turn off the updates you get from other people temporarily. This is great example of a mobile application that takes the context of the user into consideration.

I’d be interested in talking with a developer from Twitter or any other mobile social network to discuss the opportunities and challenges of building the app, particularly the interaction with SMS. So I have a few questions for you, the reader. Do mobile social networks interest you? What is your favorite, and why? In your experience, have they enhanced your relationships?

The night before last I attended my first, but definitely not last, Refresh Seattle event. Refresh Seattle according to it’s home page is “a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of New Media endeavors in the Seattle/Puget Sound area”. Another way to say it is an opportunity to meet some fellow web professionals who happen to be a group of smart and cool people. The evening started with the speaker Kevin Stewart who’s an Engineering Manager at Adobe Systems. He presented to the group about his experiences and perspective on leading a team of software developers. At the moment, I don’t have experience leading a team of developers, so it was interesting for me to be exposed to this topic. I’m sure when it’s my turn to take the helm of a team, I’ll think back to this and say “So that’s what he’s talking about!”.

I met a number of people afterward at Dad Watsons, a bar in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle. It’s a very short walk from the Refresh Seattle meeting site. A couple of these people are Craig Saila and Jeff Croft. Jeff has the distinction of not only being a web standards guru, but more importantly he brought a nice camera! He snapped several photos of people, including myself .

I’m already looking forward to the next one.

It was cold morning, even with the sun shining. I was feeling the morning chill, even with 2 tshirts. I arrived at Seattle Center by cab. There were 15,500 participants. If you include the non-registered runners and the crowd, there were probably over 20,000 people. It was exciting to see so many people.

The majority of the course was the along the Hwy 99 northbound lanes. The runners were traveling south. That’s right, we were running the wrong way! We like to do things a little different here is Seattle. This provided the runners with an outstanding view of the Puget Sound and Qwest Field, our destination.

I had a goal for this event. My goal was to do the entire course (3.58 miles/ 5.77 km) without walking. I’m happy to report that I accomplished my goal. As a result, I finished with a time of 38:01. That is a 10.6 minute mile average speed. I look forward to the opportunity to beat this next time.

Over the weekend, I went out walking around downtown Seattle. During a session at the Local Color coffee shop at Pike’s Market, I discovered two very cool mobile websites - Yelp and EarthComber.

Yelp is great because it lets you discover restaurants, nightlife, and any other service that might interest you, as well as feedback from other users. It’s not the first time I’ve heard of Yelp, but it is the first time I realized they had a mobile site. If you’ve never been to Seattle, it’s divided into neighborhoods (Belltown, Downtown, Capitol Hill, etc…). So it’s nice when you’re given the option of filtering your search results by neighborhood. I did a search for “pizza” near “Pine St and 8th ave, seattle, wa”. When I filtered the results by neighborhood using “Capitol Hill”, it shows my favorite pizza place Hot Mama’s in the number 2 slot! Very cool.

Another site that’s great is EarthComber. Their mobile site looks fantastic on my Treo. They have a fair amount of overlap with yelp (search by topic, ratings, user comments), but they have some additional functionality. One of the great promises of mobile applications is Location Based Services. They’ve taken a step in the right direction. When you have a friend in your list, and you’re both members, you can see on a map where they are in relation to you. I say its a step in the right direction because each person is still responsible for updating the location. In a true LBS application, your phone location would be known already by the system. With that said, it’s still really cool. Another nice feature is that you can save your location information. So as you revisit places, you won’t need to re-enter everything. Just select it from a list. They do have an option, where you can set the location on the map by using your internet connections’ IP address. I haven’t had accurate results with this, but it maybe enough to get you close enough. I’ll have to try again in a few weeks. Maybe it’ll be better, who knows.

On March 16, 2008, I’ll be participating in the Henry Weinhard’s St. Patrick’s Day Dash for my first time. I signed up 2 weeks ago, while I was doing some contracting at Ascentium. I look forward to the challenge of completing the 3.5 mile (5.6 km) run. To prepare, I’m using the treadmill in my apartment building and running around Greenlake. If you live near Seattle, I encourage you to participate.

I came across a site promoting “Email Standards”. It sounded like a good idea so I checked it out. What they are actually talking about is applying Web Standards to email, which is something entirely different. Web standards is about making web content available to everyone in a consistent way. This is partially achieved by writing well-formed valid (x)html documents to deliver the content, and keeping presentation separate by using CSS. So this group wants to bring this methodology that has rendered benefits to developers and users alike to the email experience.

If the web development community is interested in using the existing email standards, they would see their work is already done. “Really? Tell me more!“, you say. Think about the word document you sent to your boss, or the photos you sent your friends. That was made possible by a technology called MIME, that every email client understands. Now imagine that file is an HTML document that you’ve designed using web standards, complete with unobstrusive javascript and CSS. Your customer clicks on it, and it opens in their favorite web browser. It displays perfectly.

But what about displaying my HTML page in the message of the email? The fact that it works at all is amazing, and not in a good way. The incompatibility issue is not a small one. Lets say its 2017 (10 years from now), and the email vendors got on board with the whole “email standards” campaign of injecting HTML into email messages, and its been completed successfully. What does that get you? Not much. Because to move forward, all the email vendors standardized on xhtml 1.1 (the current standard of 2007), but in 2017 the standard is xhtml 5.3. If MIME is used to deliver the HTML content, this becomes a non-issue.

So instead of campaigning to inject web standards into email, lets push for keeping the web standards on the web.

Some say that its best to have one document to serve all audiences. Jeffrey Zeldman wrote about this idea in his book “Designing with Web Standards” While it’s a nice thought, and simplifies things for developers, it doesn’t work all the time. Now I’m not trying to go head-to-head with the Big Z, but rather I’m trying to my best to provide an optimal experience for a mobile user.

Think about a news site like CNN. It’s not uncommon to see a related video or some large images on a page, next to the story. If I went to that same site on my Palm Treo, I’d download all that media because it’s part of the markup. That’s unfair to the mobile user, since most cant view it. That’s especially true for those who pay for the data beyond what their wireless service contracts allow. I’ve tried changing the setting on my treo to not download images. But what really happens is they seem to get downloaded anyway, but not displayed. Now I’m not complaining (well maybe just a little), but I think that it’s currently not feasible at the moment.

As I mentioned in my post for the Engadget to Palm blog entry, the mobile stylesheet doesn’t work on my treo when a screen style sheet is available. But lets pretend it did work. Would doing tricks like display:none in a style sheet be enough for mobile users. From what I’ve read lately some screen readers don’t respect display:none.

Another approach is to serve a separate set of files. Each of the sites in my top 5, use this approach and it works well for them. We the users get a better experience because of it. I’m sure the developers of these sites are reusing most of their code from the main website. Sure, it’s a little extra work to maintain, but nowhere close to building another full scale website. So what’s the harm?