In my career in the "Online world" as a Web Developer I've worked with more people that had "Art History" or "Fine Arts" degrees than people with "Computer Science" degrees. Go figure that one huh?

I just wanted to remind everyone that tomorrow is Shutdown Day. Get outside, enjoy the beauty of the outdoors, spend some time with the family and get away from those time vacuums! Enjoy the life "outside of the monitor"! For those of you not familar with "outside" here's a quick list of things you can do.

• Go for a nature hike
• Go to a local park
• Visit Family (Seriously guys, your grandparents miss you!)
• Garden (You could even make it a green garden
• Check out the Library stick with the books!

Happy Life

For a long time I've been a fan of Jakob Nielsen's work. His articles on paper prototyping are brilliant. At my work we've used these methods before when doing major website designs with overwhelming success.

However what about web forms. For the most part as web developers we just slap it together and worry more about the back-end functionality more then how it looks to the users, let alone how easy it is for them to use. How many of us have written some ultra cool little application that only we know how to use? I know that I have. We are so eager to get to the part we love (code)that we skip over the most important part, how users are going to interface with our code. This is what Manuel Clement calls "pouring concrete too early".

UI Design is more important to the user than our code. Why? Because the UI is what they see. It's what the feel, its how they interpret our application. It doesn't matter how great the application is, if the UI is bad the user will assume the rest of the application is bad too. How many users are going to care that we used serializable classes, or that we've written our error log to be an RSS feed? None! We need to take care of the users.

Why use PowerPoint for doing Prototyping. There are three simple reasons:

1. Almost everyone has it and can modify your prototype. Yes, let them change labels, something as simple as this makes the stakeholder feel more involved, there for you'll have more buy in on the project.
2. No coding is involved. This is very important, if you start trying to auto-fill dropdowns using dynamic form objects you're missing the point. This is not the time to be coding, we are defining the user interface. While this may seem like a very simple point you'll be amazed how often you keep reaching for you IDE to start coding.
3. You can give the user a feeling of how the application will behave. With PowerPoint you can link to other sides. In fact you can create clickable areas and disable Advance Slide "On Mouse Click". This allows you to create buttons, links, radio buttons, etc.

Why Webforms
The reasons for prototyping webforms in PowerPoint is it allows up the ability to make changes quickly to define what the user/customer wants. Again our goal here is not to do any coding yet. By prototyping we are actually extracting the customers requirements in a feedback loop much like agile programming methodology does.

There's nothing worst then a marathon programming session where you've killed yourself to get the webform done, to turn around and have all your labels changed and to find out you didn't have a clear understand of what the customer really wanted.

Here is the current PowerPoint Toolkit I'm using for Webforms. This is done in PowerPoint 2007, which is amazing. The drawing tools are more useful and complete then in previous versions of PowerPoint. As I do more and more prototyping I'm sure this will grow. This will give you a starting point for yours.

Web Form Toolkit.pptx (45.21 KB)

The best advice I can give you is to just try it. You'll be amazed how quickly you can create a simple prototype without writing one line of code.

Also here is a some helpful URLs I used started.

• Code Horror: UI First Software Development
• Wireframe Prototyping Using Powerpoint 2007 (Video)
• A List Apart Paper Prototyping
  

Happy UI Designing

The thing about gluten-free living is that it isn't something you can do alone. It's hard hard work, and you need someone to help you through the tough times. I'm very fortunate in that I have a very loving family that do their best to be supportive. My Beautiful Wife is amazing. She's basically had to relearn how to how to cook, because almost ever recipe calls for wheat. Things you don't think about like gravy or chicken. My Beautiful Wife has to read every label in the grocery store every time we shop because things that didn't have wheat in them last week, do this week. There is so much work that she has to put into each meal, and I greatly appreciate it.

My brother J actually ordered a burger wrapped in lettuce for me from In-N-Out and that's how we discovered protein style. My Mom when I lived at home had to learn what had wheat in it, and she also had to re-learn to cook family favorites.

It really isn't something you can do alone. I'm thankful to my family for wanting me to feel better and working so hard to do so.

How much time do you spend on the computer during the week? I know I spend at least 60 hours a week. True I need a computer for my work, but that's still a lot of time spent in front of a machine. That's a lot of time not being active. I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately. Well Saturday May 3rd 2008 is Shut Down Day. The premise is simple, don't turn your computer on that day. See if you can go 24 hours without a computer. More important it's about realizing there is life "outside the monitor". I know I can do it, and I'm sure you can too!

I'm going to start by warning you that this post is a rant. A rant that I'm sure most Technology Workers have from time to time. A minimum of once a month I meet someone new outside of work and my family. After some chitchat about the weather or whatever we have in common that brought us to whatever event we are at to keep the conversation going they always ask "That" question, you know which one. "So what do you do for a living?". I hate this question.

There are two very good reasons why I hate this question. First, what I do for a living doesn't really tell you what type of person I am. If you'd truly like to learn who I am and what I'm about, ask me about my family or my hobbies. Ask me what I'm passionate about. These subjects are something I can speak volumes on with such enthusiasm we'd talk for hours. I'd be delighted to tell you what the Little Boy did yesterday. I'd love to tell about my Beautiful Wife, and how we meet, and how wonderful she is to me. Heck, I'll even be happy to talk with you about film verses digital photography and the merits of both.

My second reason, most people have no idea what I do. I'm not trying to be mean or condescending. It just from personal experience I know people who don't work in IT (Information Technology) have no idea what I do. They'll ask me what I do for a living and I say "I'm a Sr. Web Developer." And their eyes glaze over while their brain tries to connect any synapse to any other connection to the words "Web" and "Job". The most common reply is; 'my nephew just built a website, I should send you the link, you'll love it! It's got blinking banners and a cute little bunny picture, it's great!". Honestly this has happened at least a dozens of times. So in a futile attempt I try to clarify by telling them that what I write is Online Banking software. Again, the glazed over look, and then they tell me, "You know I have trouble logging in to my Online Banking, why do you think that is?" By this point I just simply shrug my shoulders and say, I have no idea and change the subject.

After my last post, my Beautiful Wife and I were talking and she suggested that I write a follow up post about all the food that have wheat and wheat gluten in them that you wouldn't suspect. We've found these foods after trial and error. Now that I've been living without wheat or gluten in my regular diet, I find that I can taste wheat immediately in almost anything that actually has it. This has been as valuable as being able to read the labels. There is still somefoods out there that don't correctly list all the ingredients. However most are doing a really good job of it. Hopefully this quickly list will help you as in learning to live gluten free.

Candy
Unfortunately I have a sweet tooth a mile wide. So finding which sweets you can't eat is as important as the ones you can. As with all food, you'll learn that you have to read the package, even if you think it's safe.

• Red Vines: Wheat is it's main ingredient. I loved Red Vines, so this one was hard for me to give up.
• Twix: Twix has a cookie center, wheat...sorry
• KitKat: KitKat is just like Twix

Snacks

• CornNuts: CornNuts, as will most snack foods of this type use wheat as an agent for making the artificial flavoring stick to the snack. The last time I looked original CornNuts were okay, but any of the flavored ones, watch out for.
• Doritos Nacho Cheese Chips: Like the CornNuts, Doritos use wheat as an agent for making the artificial flavoring adhere to the chip.

Condiments

• Soy Sauce: Wheat is the second ingredient in Soy Sauce, water is the first. So as much as we may love it, we have to avoid soy sauce or using very sparingly.
• Hollandaise Sauce: While the original recipe for hollandaise is butter, lemon juice and egg yolks most chain restaurants use a prepackaged hollandaise sauce that they just heat up. Of course this prepackaged sauce uses wheat.

Like a growing number of people, I have an intolerance to wheat gluten. I've had this for the last 10 years, and it definitely makes meal times a little harder. My intolerance to Gluten is due to celiac disease. While I don't have the most severe case of celiac disease, it definitely has several negative affects on me. So I work very hard to avoid wheat gluten whenever possible, and believe me it's a lot of work. You'd be amazed how many foods use wheat gluten as a thickening agent (almost every brand and favor of soup) or just to add texture and crispyness (is that a word?).

So What is Gluten? ¹Gluten is a composite of the proteins gliadin and glutenin. These exist, conjoined with starch, in the endosperms of some grass-related grains, notably wheat, rye, and barley. Gliadin and glutenin comprise about 80% of the protein contained in wheat seed. Basically Gluten is a protein that cause a person with celiac disease not to be able to properly digest and absorb nutrients from their food. The side effect of that for me is severe fatigue.

My challenge is to find things I can eat that don't have wheat, or wheat gluten in them. So the obvious quick meal choices are out, sandwiches, pizza and any kind of bread product. But there are food that have wheat gluten in them that you wouldn't think of. For example French fries are out of the question at the majority of restuarants, however  I can eat the ones at In-N-Out.

Below is a short list in no particular order of fast food restaurants in my area. Some of them have many gluten free choices, and some have none at all.

In-N-Out: In-N-Out is simply the best because basically you can get any burger "Protein Style" Which means they wrap it in lettuce instead of serving it on a bun. Protein Style is listed in their "Secret Menu" Also their french fries are made fresh from potatoes that were wash peeled and cooked minutes before they are served to you. They simply have the freshest food of all the fast food chains in my area.

Wendy's: First off, bravo to Wendy's for having menu items without gluten listed on their website. Not all of the bigger chains do that. Basically all of their hamburgers can be order without a bun. All of their salads that have curtons on the side so you don't have to try and pick them out. Their baked potatoes and chili is gluten free.

Taco Bell: According to Taco Bell's Allergen chart there are only three things on menu that are gluten free.

Side of Rice

Side of Pinto Beans and Cheese

Tostada

Panda Express:  Panda Express' site is very to the point on their FAQ/Contact page , the question is "Which of your menu items are gluten free?" the answer "None of our food is gluten free".  I actually just found this out today doing research for this blog post, and man was I surprised!

McDonald's: I personally don't eat at McDonald's. However I did look at their site to see if they posted an allergen chart. Which they do but they don't. They've mixed the allergen information with the "ingredient" list of their food. Basically they've made it hard to find which items do and don't have gluten in them. With other fast food chains being so forth coming with this information McDonald's hiding it in such a way that they can technically say it's on their website, makes them seem a little shady to me.

Subway: Subway does actually have a few items on their menu that are gluten free. It took a little looking but they do have a allergen chart on their website. Of their 16 salads listed on their menu, 13 are gluten free, 3 are not. Here are the 13 that are gluten free.

• Chicken & Bacon Ranch (includes cheese)
• Cold Cut Combo
• Ham (Black Forest)
• Italian BMT®
• Roast Beef
• Roasted Chicken Breast
• Tuna
• Turkey Breast
• Turkey Breast & Ham
• Spicy Italian
• Subway Club®
• Subway Club®
• Veggie Delite®

Jack in the Box: Like McDonald's Jack and the Box does List the Allergens with the Ingredients of each item, however they did do a little better job of highlighting which items have which allergens. That being said I didn't find any entree that was gluten free.

Carls Jr: It took a little digging around on their site to find the Allergen chart, but they do have a pretty good one. That's the good news. The bad news is that there are really only two items on the menu to eat.

• Lo-Cal Six Dollar Burger
• French Fries (maybe)

I hope you've found this helpful in your search for gluten free fast food.

Bon Appétit

^{1. Quoted from Wikipeda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten}

For the last three days my Beautiful Wife and I have been vacationing in Yosemite National Park. If you haven't been to Yosemite it is truly amazing. It is one of the most beautiful and breathe taking places in the country. This is a trip that we had planned for a few months and it was as fantastic as we hoped it would be. This was my second trip to Yosemite and my Beautiful Wife's first.

Saturday was the first day of our visit to the park. We came through the south entrance. It is about a 25 mile drive from the south entrance to Yosemite Valley. Your first view of the valley is just before the tunnel, after going through the tunnel you are greeted with Tunnel View. This is an amazing view of the valley floor. You'll see El Capitan to your left, Bridalveil Falls to your right, and Half Dome smack dab in the center. I'm sure just about everyone has seen Ansel Adam’s "Clearing Winter Storm" photo of this view. This is the first place you’ll learn just how many tourists are there to see Yosemite. We parked the car and I hopped out like a giddy school boy. I quickly gathered my tripod and camera pack and walked over to the wall where the tourist congregate to photograph Tunnel View and start setting up my camera. If I haven’t mentioned it before I’m a hybrid photographer, which means that I use both film and digital cameras. So I’m standing at this beautiful vista, looking out as I set up, which takes about 5 minutes or so. I take out my light meter, get the reading, and set my shutter and aperture accordingly. In the time that it takes me to go through these steps several people have come up, taken their snapshot and ran back to their car and drove away. While I’m composing my shot and checking my settings, I had several people come up and ask me if I’d take their picture. I am always happy to oblige, but what cracked me up is that four out of five times they feel the need to point out to me which button trips the shutter.

Well most of Saturday was spent taking photos of all the popular spots. Then something happened while I was taking some shots from Sentinel Bridge, I thought I had taken 9 or 10 shots but when I checked the film counter was blank. Apparently when I had reloaded the film I forgot to completely wind the camera. So all the shots I took, didn’t actually get recorded. Which I feel, ended up being a good thing because right then I decided that I needed to take photos that weren’t like everyone else’s. I started looking for My Yosemite and not the one I had seen and read about in books. Don’t get me wrong Ansel Adam’s photos of Yosemite are amazing, but I didn’t need to make a perfect copy of his photos. I needed to make photos that were mine, and in my style. I stopped being as concerned about the photos I was taking and started concentrating more on experiencing this beautiful place. One of the most unexpected experiences, which we don’t have any photos of, yet I doubt we’ll ever forget is of watching a coyote running across the meadow walkways.

We were on the north side of the meadow on the Yosemite Falls side, and our car was parked over by Sentinel Bridge. I had just finished taking some photos of Yosemite Falls when we decided to head back to the car. As we started across the meadow footbridge, it started to rain large cold rain drops. We started to pickup our pace when I noticed a healthy sized coyote coming from the west up to the footbridge. My Beautiful Wife looked up and saw him just as a couple that was walking towards us about 75 yards away saw him. We both slowed down, and watched as the coyote looked at both of us to judge our speed and intent. He decided that we were no threat to him and he crossed the footbridge and ran in to a heavily wooded area to get out of the rain. It was such a beautiful and natural moment that we where stunned and in awe.

Sunday was the day we almost made it to the valley floor. However the closer we got the more it snowed, so not having chains, we decided to turn around and decided to go back toward home. However we didn’t rush back, we took our time and pulled off and investigated some of the beautiful creeks on highway 41 that most people drive past at 40 mph. These little creeks and vistas are filled with natural beauty. Alder Creek has to be one of my favorites. I’ll post photos from Alder Creek on my photoblog as soon I get some film developed.

Monday we went to both Bridalveil and Verner Falls. While they were both very different, their beauty is undeniable. I do have some recommendations, if it’s less than 40 degrees, you don’t have to hike all the way to the base of Bridalveil, because it will be very wet and cold. You're hands will freeze quickly and your teeth will chatter so hard, you may have to go to the dentist afterwards. However on a hot day, I’m sure it’ll be nice and cool and just what the doctor ordered. Verner Falls is something else. I do have to warn you that it’s a good hike. I don’t mean miles and miles kind of hike, I mean it’s a good hike uphill the entire way and at a fairly steep grade. Being that I had my 50 pound camera bag on my back, it was a lot more work than I expected. One of the beautiful moments of that hike was about half way up the trail to the footbridge, on the west side we saw a beautiful, powerful spring fall that simply won’t be there a month from now. To see such a rare sight on such a hard hike was very rewarding. It was a great trip and I can’t wait to go back to My Yosemite.

Happy Trails

7 years of bliss

Tomorrow my Beautiful Wife and I are leaving for an extended weekend getaway. We plan on spending some time with nature and each other. I've been looking forward to this trip for months as I know she has too. It's not that often we get out just the two of us, so this is something special.

Saturday will be our 7 year wedding anniversary, again it's something special. My Beautiful Wife is the Love of my Life, and my Best Friend. She has a beautiful heart and a rare and deep understand of people and emotions. Not only that, but she's got a great sense of humor. For those of you out there on the interweb not married yet, go with the girl with the great sense of humor she will make you happy for the rest of your life, and she'll make sure you don't take yourself too seriously.

As you may or may not have noticed, I've been working to post something of interest at least twice a week. Mondays and Fridays to be exact. I've decided that each post should do one of two things. Make you laugh, or be informative. Since I'm not going to be here Friday or Monday, here are five links that will make you laugh and five links that are informative.

Something Funny:

1. Pearls of Wisdom from Merlin Mann: I read this pearl of wisdom and couldn't stop laughing to 5 minutes.

2. Why I Cropdusted a Three Year Old: Danny Evans, is funny, wrong, but funny. Warning: yes this is a fart joke.

3. More Merlin Mann Funnies: This one is entitle "Elanor's Agenda", just watch and enjoy.

4. Bottoms Up: My good friend Rick is a nature photographer who specializes in birds. He's found that some times birds just don't want to be photographed. Here's one of his photos that proves that point.

5. Chuck Norris Facts: You've all heard the legends and the urban myths, here's the low down on Chuck.

Something Informative:

1. The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!): Joel On Software explains Unicode, and this is something every Web Developer and Software Engineer should read!

2. The First Rule of Programming: It's Always Your Fault : Yes, it is your fault, and Jeff Atwood explains why.

3. The Developer Life, Yo: Dead Programmers Cafe explains just what a Sr. Developer does. I loved this article, it explains it so well, I was speechless.

4. Is Eeyore Designing Your Software?: Yes it's a strange question, but it's a great blog post on software design.

5. Twitter: The Uselessfulness of Micro-blogging: Scott Always has something funny and interesting to say.

I got a call from my friend RP today. He had a story to tell me that he was sure I could appreciate. You see he rides his bike to work almost everyday. However his ride home isn't along traffic filled streets, with hundreds of cars puffing out smog. He rides right along the marina. He gets some great photographs on his rides to and from work. If you look at his work you can tell that birds are the majority of what he shoots and posts. Well a few days ago he posted a pick of a seagull. He half joking said, please feel free to print it out and use it on your dart board. RP grew up in Florida along the beach. He grew up fishing and surfing, so he knows that seagulls are rats with wings.

Well today, that changed, he saw a seagull that was in a bad way. Apparently this seagull had a lure that was hooked in it's beak and his feet. In the water this little fellow wasn't going to make it. So RP did what most people wouldn't, he hopped off his bike, ran down and fished the seagull out, took him to the boathouse near by and free the bird from the lure. He did a good thing, even though he doesn't like seagulls.

This made me think of a time that I hopped into a fountain to rescue a pigeon that I didn't want to see drown. Like RPs dislike of seagulls, I detest pigeons. I mean "pig" is right there at the start of their name. So why don't I like pigeons? Well I didn't always have the desk job I have now. I worked with my Dad for many wonderful years. However the jobs weren't always wonderful.

On one rainy cold night we got a call from a client, a bank that isn't around anymore, anyhow in one of their loan offices there was a mess to clean up and patch. You see the building had a flat roof. The pigeons had found a way between the roof and the ceiling. Well with the rain, there were lots of pigeons in that nest. Lots of pigeons equals lots of pigeons poop! Well with all the water from the rain and the mess that the unfortunately this pigeon bomb, made the the ceiling collapse right on to a loan officers desk. Our job was to clean it up and to patch the ceiling and to patch the roof in the rain. The pouring freezing rain. So of course I think, strike that I know that pigeons are rats with wings.

So you could see why I don't like pigeons, and I'd imagine that RP has a story like it.  So why did RP save that seagull and why did I save that pigeon. Well respect for life. That's something worth respecting.

Happy Life

Childhood dreams are important, do you remember yours? I can tell you some of mine. I wanted to fly. Fly like superman, I can't tell you how many good bath towels got used as capes and snagged on the old swing set as I'd try to jump of the swings and grab the "cape" to fly. I wanted to be a computer programmer (yes, honestly I was a geek from way back. I'd check out byte magazine from the local library and then type in the programs into the Apple IIe they had in grammar school) I wanted to be a photographer. I was always fascinated with cameras and how the worked. I took pictures in my head all the time as a little kid.

Well now that I'm a "grown-up" I've looked back and can see that I've actually achieved some of my childhood dreams. By day I'm a Sr. Web Developer,  so definitely get to program computers. In fact I get to program for all computers that have an internet connection. How cool is that?

Of course my hobby is photography. (Hobby is used in the most generic way, but obsession is much closer to the truth.) I've taken more pictures of the Boy then I can count (10 or 20 gigs worth). If you want to see some of my work, I have a photoblog, feel free to take a look.

I feel pretty fortunate about both of those things. However I don't think I would of ever realized that both of these things were childhood dreams if I hadn't sat down and watched Randy Pausch's lecture.

Randy is a pretty interesting guy. A Professor at Carnegie Melon, and a leader in the Virtual Reality field. His lecture is called "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams". It's part of a lecture series called "Last Lecture". The concept behind this series is simply this, hypothetically if you knew you were dying what would your last lecture be?

However Randy has a little twist on this, you see he is actually dying of Pancreatic Cancer. His lived longer than the 6 months that this doctors gave him, but mostly from his courage.

This is one of those inspirational things that I think everyone should watch. The repised version of the lecture that he gave on Oprah is embedded below, his full length lecture is here: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Good In = Good Out

Fred Potatoes
This morning for breakfast I had a yogurt. (I'm sure you're thrilled to know that, but wait there is a point to it.) So this morning The Boy (he's not a little boy any more) saw me eating this for breakfast, and he proceded to lecture me on that not being enough of a breakfast. Then he started to list off alternatives that would be acceptable. Oatmeal, Eggs, a bowl of cereal with Soy Milk (yes he was that specific) or even "Fred Potatos"! Of course he meant Fried Potatoes, I knew that. But this one really made me laugh. Not because he misspoke but because it was the first time in a long time I've heard him say something like this. The little kid goof up of words. I adored them when he was 3 and now that he's 7, I don't get to hear them that often. Soon they'll be gone. But today I'm relishing in Fred Potatoes.

A Shave
Last night The Boy asked me if it hurt to shave. I was a little startled by this question, but I answered no, it pulls a little but it doesn't hurt. He simply said "ohh". So I explained how to hold the razor and which way to move with it as to not cut yourself. While I was answering his question in my mind's eye I journeyed back into the house I grew up in, that little house on the main street and the alley. I saw the 14 year old version of me and my Dad teaching me to shave. I remembered the way the afternoon sunlight fell into the room, the way breeze through the house felt, the smell of the shave cream, it all flooded back and drenched me like a huge wave.

Talking with my Beautiful Wife about the Boys question last night she suggested that I show him how to shave. He hasn't really seen me shave. I'm the kind of guy that does all that stuff in the shower. So this morning I changed my routine. I took my shower first, then got dressed and asked him to come in as I was going to shave and I wanted him to see how to do it. So he ran in there, and I shaved in front of the sink, and showed him how to put on shave cream, which direction to use the blade, the whole bit. You know the stuff us adults take for granted. I even showed him on his arm that the blade doesn't hurt going in the right direction. He looked a little nervous at first, but after he saw that nothing happened, it stood there amazed. It was the best shave I've had in a long time.



The Other Three Words
There are three words your Dad always told you that you never listened to. I don't mean "I Love You", those words we can't ignore, and I'm happy to tell you I heard those words often. No I mean the other three word. You know them, "No", "Listen" and "Be Careful". 

"No", which of course taught us that we don't need everything we think we want. No also taught us that there was always a good reason behind his answer. Not just that he wanted to see us miserable, which of course we all thought as teenagers. No meant learning self-control.

"Listen" which means, don't just hear the words, listen to the meaning and the way they are said. Listen means don't think about what you are going to say as we are talking to you, just recieve what I am saying to you. The older I get the more I understand that to listen, is very valuable advice.

"Be Careful" Okay, you caught me, be careful is actually a two word phrase, but I never heard one without the other. Be Careful seems simple, but it's really a phrase that is inviting you to think. Think about what you are doing. Does it makes sense? Will you hurt yourself? Will you hurt others?

All three are really great advise. Well Dad, it's taken almost 35 years, but I think I'm starting to get it now.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Everyday we are bombarded with information. We get online and there are all these great websites with tons of useful information. Some of them very specific to our interest. At work we have to deal with the avalanche of email we all get everyday. There is so much thrown at us from every direction that information overload  in inevitable. It feels like we are trying to Drinking from the Firehose.  Most of us are classified as "Information Workers", which basically means we add value to information we gather and receive.

Let's face it, most people you know work behind a desk in a cubicle. It's very rare for people to work outside and have something tangible to show for their work at the end of the day. A long time ago I had to come to the conclusion that if the electricity goes out, my work simply doesn't exist. Also in software development, to stagnate is to go backwards. Technology moves fast, and that again requires a ton of new information everyday.

So how do we keep up with all this information that coming at us. Well you make the pipe smaller. That sounds good but how do we do that? Yesterday we talked about email so today lets talk about the websites. Most of these websites or blogs have RSS feeds. An RSS feed is simply the content of the website without the wrapper that can used in anyway the reader sees fit. Now we gather a list of the sites we read most often and we pull all of the data together with a RSS Reader. I personally use Google Reader. This lets me access my feeds from where ever I maybe be without having to have a RSS Reader client installed. However as we discussed yesterday we have to limit how often we access this information and how often it access us. I read about 40 sites a day through it. Not a lot by some, a terribly large amount to others. Either way if the reader is open all day long it will take all our attention just like email would.

I personally try to only check it twice a day. I find skimming through the Feeds in the morning while I drink my cup of coffee is a great way to ease into the day. Then in the afternoon, around 2 or 3 when my focus seems to wain I take skim through whatever was updated. So lets talk about skimming for a minute.To steal a phrase from Stanley Spadowski's Funhouse, I'm trying to find the marble in the oatmeal this is what skimming does for me. I find the three or four post a day that really interest me and I find relavent. There is some really great content out there in internet land the secret is make sure you're drinking from the garden hose, and not the firehose.

Happy Hunting

Hi Y'all, it's been a while, you know it, I know it, lets move on. I've been reading a lot of blog post lately that have to do with being more productive. There are a whole laundry list of them, zenhabits.net, lifereboot.com, 43folders.com, Tim Ferriss ..etc. Of course I'm aggregating these sites through Google Reader (an amazing time saving tool if it's used correctly if used incorrect, a time vacuum). One of the common threads that I'm seeing with these sites/blogs is that they are helping Common Sense make a comeback.

Now it seems to me that Common Sense and the business world as we know and work in it have very little to do with each other. For example, lets say your have a company policy that says all emails and calls need returned within the business day. This is pretty typical of most places. In itself this is not a bad policy, but what ends up happening is you have Senior staff that expect instant responses to email. Now email is being used as a poor substituted for Instant Messaging (Which is a whole other subject). So now you have your email client open all day long. You have the little outlook window popping up to say hey look at me, and you are living in this world where you are trying work and concentrate with a non-stop distractions of emails popping up. Whether they be legitimate work emails, spam or bacn.  So we've all learned to live in this haze of email clients flashing message in our face like flashing lights and ringing bells in a casino. Well this makes no sense, no sense at all. Well  there are growing number of people are demanding that Common Sense makes a comeback. And you know what, it is.

So lets take my email example. There is tons of material written on how to handle email, but I think none are quite as good as what Merlin Mann is doing. His Inbox Zero concept is brilliant and is something I think everyone could truly use and gain from. I highly suggest that you watch the video as well.

Lets talk about eating habits. Something I've not been very good about as of late. Well Zen Habits, had a great post on this topic. It's called " A 12-step Program to Eating Healthier than ever before". I high suggest reading it, it's well worth the 15 or 20 minutes it takes to read it. The best part about it, is it reminds you of things you already know. Eat more fruit. Eat more vegetables. Eat at home. This is all Common Sense stuff, yet he softly reminds you that you already know it, and gives you a new way to try it. For example Number 6 of the steps is pizza, who doesn't love pizza, I know I do. So check this out.

6. Make pizza instead of ordering. Homemade pizza is the best, and if you haven’t made it yet, you should. The simple way is to get a ready-made whole-wheat crust, although making your own tastes even better. Start with the simple version, though, as you don’t want to make things too difficult. For the simple version, just add some gourmet spaghetti sauce (not Ragu), cut up some veggies (I like tomatoes and mushrooms and spinach and olives, but you can use anything, even potatoes). Brush the veggies with some olive oil. You can add grated cheese or soy cheese if you want, though it’s not necessary. Bake till it looks cooked. Mmmm.
-Exerpt from zenhabit.net

You can't tell me that doesn't sound better than that greasy delivery pizza that they are pushing on Tuesday nights with their 10 pizzas for 20 bucks deal, and it takes the same amount of time.

So to recap, Common Sense is making a comeback....Thank goodness!

Happy Life

Hi, my name is Russell Kelly, I'm happily married, to my Beautiful Wife for 7 years now. I have a step grandson who I lovingly refer to as The Little Boy. We live in Southern California, where we get to enjoy hikes and sunshine.

When I'm not in the office, I enjoy spending time with my family and photography. I'm a "hybrid" photographer in that I shoot both digital and film. I have a photoblog please stop by and take a look.

By day I'm a Sr. Web Developer for Lockheed Federal Credit Union and a Microsoft Certified Professional. In this capacity I get to write .NET applications. Some large, some small but all interesting. Which means I've worked on everything from multiple servers, load balanced transactional systems to AJAX enabled web pages. I've recently started implementing GTD (Getting Things Done) in my day to day work.

Badges

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Back to the Blog

Lately I've been thinking and spending quite a little bit of time reading about organization. You see currently at work I'm the only Developer. We lost a great Developer (Ed) to a company that offered him more money and the kind of work that he wanted to do (Could you blame him, I sure couldn't). Our remaining Developer who we affectionately call "Eggman", took a long flight across a big ocean to see his family(I couldn't blame him either). However these two events leave me with a lot of little things to get done that will come in  at rapid succession.

 

So I am changing a few things. First Email, well we all know that there is way to much of it. So a good system for sorting through it is required. With a little simple logic and some Outlook email rules this is fairly easy to accomplish but it does take a change in behavior. First thing I had to change, my Inbox is not my repository for email. Its more of my To-Do list. If thinks in the Inbox can't be accomplished quickly they are moved to the @Action folder. Everything in the action folder is something I am actively working on. If it something that needs read, but isn't as urgent as inbox or @Action folder, it goes in the @Review folder. I've also set up a rule that anything that is address to the company wide email group ( theentirecompany@mycompany.com ) is sent to the @Review folder. The Next folder is the @Snooze folder, items that go in here are in more of the back burner project area. I don't want to forget about them, but they aren't as urgent as the previous folders. I have two other folders that I am using that are new to me for managing my email. I have a @Waiting For folder, which are items in which I am waiting for a response before I can move on, and a @someday box, these are the emails which have good ideas that need a safe place to live until I get to them. I do have to say after several google searches, I of course landed on Scott Hanselman's blog, and these Ideas are from his article ZEB (Zero Email Bounce) and a new Outlook Rule.

So far this system has been working fairly well for me. I have added one more folder, that email tasks that have been finished and need put in to our tracking system are moved too. To make sure I have a put in a record for every completed task. So now not am I getting more things done, it looks like it to my supervisors as well.

Reading Lifehacker.com today I came across a post that peaked my interest. It's called "Discovering your learning style". I thought this was an interesting think to learn about myself. How exactly do I learn the best. So I did my best to be as truthful as I could answering the questions. The suggestions they gave actually surprised me quite a bit but really do seem useful. Anyhow here are my results. Let me know what yours were.

Happy Learning

Visual/Nonverbal 32 Visual/Verbal 28 Auditory 18 Kinesthetic 34

Your primary learning style is:

The Tactile/ Kinesthetic Learning Style

You learn best when physically engaged in a "hands on" activity. In the classroom, you benefit from a lab setting where you can manipulate materials to learn new information. You learn best when you can be physically active in the learning environment. You benefit from instructors who encourage in-class demonstrations, "hands on" student learning experiences, and field work outside the classroom.

Strategies for the Tactile/ Kinesthetic Learner:

To help you stay focused on class lecture, sit near the front of the room and take notes throughout the class period. Don't worry about correct spelling or writing in complete sentences. Jot down key words and draw pictures or make charts to help you remember the information you are hearing.

When studying, walk back and forth with textbook, notes, or flashcards in hand and read the information out loud.

Think of ways to make your learning tangible, i.e. something you can put your hands on. For example, make a model that illustrates a key concept. Spend extra time in a lab setting to learn an important procedure. Spend time in the field (e.g. a museum, historical site, or job site) to gain first-hand experience of your subject matter.

To learn a sequence of steps, make 3'x 5' flashcards for each step. Arrange the cards on a table top to represent the correct sequence. Put words, symbols, or pictures on your flashcards -- anything that helps you remember the information. Use highlighter pens in contrasting colors to emphasize important points. Limit the amount of information per card to aid recall. Practice putting the cards in order until the sequence becomes automatic.

When reviewing new information, copy key points onto a chalkboard, easel board, or other large writing surface.

Make use of the computer to reinforce learning through the sense of touch. Using word processing software, copy essential information from your notes and textbook. Use graphics, tables, and spreadsheets to further organize material that must be learned.

Listen to audio tapes on a Walkman tape player while exercising. Make your own tapes containing important course information.

What is a Web Browser: Simply put, it's a software application used to locate and display web pages. Okay that's simple enough. What is HTML?

HTML is the the standard method used for the creation of Web Pages. HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. All browsers understand HTML is it is a web standard. The W3C says that "HTML is the publishing language of the World Wide Web. Who is the W3C ? Well in their own words, "The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential."

The current version of HTML is HTML 4.01 which was approved and recommended by the W3C on December 24, of 1999. However there is a reformulation of HTTML 4.0 that is a combination of HTML 4.01 and XML 1.0 called XHTML 1.0. Most modern browsers are XHTML 1.0 compliant as well.

So why do we care about this stuff. Well if HTML is the publishing language of the web, that means that all of our website use html. Even though Online Banking is a very complicated application, in the end HTML is sent to the members browser. Okay, so now we know that all the websites send HTML to the members browser, but there is a standard so all browser should render it the same way right. Well, no they don't you see different companies interrupted the standards different from others, and other companies (Microsoft) deviated completely.

How bad can it be? The Web Standard Project created the Acid Test II It is an HTML document that is written that uses HTML,CSS and PNG written to the current W3C standards. Its amazing how differently it looks in the different browsers. (If you'd like to learn more about the Acid Test, check out this article .) Heres a quick example of how the Acid Test looks in some of the common browsers.

Firefox 2.0.0.x:

Internet Explorer 6.0:

Opera 9.2:

Safari 3.0 Windows:

As you can see the difference range from very slight to no where near the mark. Now we see the importance of knowing the each browser will render the same page differently. So what a can we do if troubleshooting and figure this out....Well this one you get to blame on the Developer. 

Getting Started

To get started first we will need to learn how browsers get web pages. Then we will need to set up our test machine (virtual machine) and load several different browsers in it. Let’s start with how browsers get a web page by learning its protocols.

HTTP Protocol

What’s HTTP

Before trying to start troubleshooting browser issues we should take a quick look at the HTTP. HTTP is an acronym for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. This is the basic protocol that all browsers use to sent request and receive responds to display web pages. This request/response happens between a client (the web browser) and the web server. The client, sends a request to the web server in the form of a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), for example http://www.mydigitalsplendor.com. The web server takes that request and response by giving the browser that page (see figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1

HTTP is a stateless protocol, which means that once the Request and Response is done, the server has no idea what is on the clients browser and the browser has no idea the server exist, till the next request.

HTTP Cookies

HTTP cookies, sometimes known as web cookies or just cookies, are small blocks of text sent by a server to a web browser and then sent back unchanged by the browser each time it accesses that server. HTTP cookies are used for authenticating, tracking, and maintaining specific information about users, such as site preferences and the contents of their electronic shopping carts.

Allowing users to log in to a website is another use of cookies. Users typically log in by inserting their credentials into a login page; cookies allow the server to know that the user is already authenticated, and therefore is allowed to access services or perform operations that are restricted to logged-in users.

Another use for cookies is to maintain a session state with the web browser. But wait a minute, you just said that HTTP was stateless, so what is this session state stuff. You see web application Frameworks like ASP.NET (what Online Banking uses) or PHP use mechanisms for storing information session information, and give that information a unique id or session state id as a method for working around the fact that HTTP is stateless.

So what does a cookie look like:

Set-Cookie: SessionId=732423sdfs73242; expires=Fri, 13-Jul-2007 23:59:59 GMT; path=/; domain=mydigitalsplendor.com;

HTTP Headers

HTTP headers are how HTTP handles the request/response nature of the protocols. Both web browsers and web servers use Headers to communicate what they want and what they are giving each other. For example a request from a web browser will look like the following:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.mydigitalsplendor.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4
Accept: application/x-shockwave-flash,text/xml,application/xml,application/
xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,
text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive

 

Okay, great, that’s what it looks like but what does it mean. Well let’s go through each field and talk about what they mean and do.

GET / HTTP/ 1.1 : Hey web server, I want something and this is what protocol I’m using to communicate with you. host: www.mydigitalsplendor.com: This is where I want the page from. The server is set to serve up a specific page when just the domain is given as in this example, but we could ask for www.mydigitalsplendor.com/blog/default.aspx and get the same thing. Now the rest of the Header is telling the server what the client it and what it can do.

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4: this is simply the type of browser you are using and what operation system you are on. So from this User-Agent information, we can see that the user is on Windows XP, they are using an US version of windows, and they are Using Firefox 2.0.0.4 with a version that is using the Gecko html rendering engine.

Accept: application/x-shockwave-flash,text/xml,application/xml,app-lication/xhtml+xml,
text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 This is all the things the browser is capable of doing. For example, this one says it can handle, flash, xml, xhtml, html, plain text and images.

Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Is just what you think it is, it tells the server what a language the browser is set to use. So from this line we can see that the language being used here is English, however it also tells us the country as well, so not only is it English, but it is English spoken in the US. This is helpful to the server to allow it to server correct content. A good example of this is currency. If the server sees this field and its EG-US, it uses the US Dollars as the currency to calculate, however if its EG-GB (Great Britain) it will use the British Pound for the currency.

Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate

Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7: This is what character set the browser is using. This one is especial helpful when you see a square box or question mark instead of the letter "A". IS0-8859 is character set known as western. UTF-8 is the Unicode 8 bit character set. So this browser is telling us it can handle both of them. Keep-Alive: 300: This one simply says, this is how long I will keep the connection open waiting for you to give me a response to my request.

Connection: keep-alive: This means that the browser will keep the connection alive waiting for the response to the request.

Now that we've sent our request, the server responds with this HTTP Header which looks like the follow:

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2007 14:58:43 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

Let's go over the response like we did the request. It's full of HTTP goodness. so let's check it out.

HTTP/1.x 200 OK : This is the server saying, hey, we're using the same protocol and everything is A-OK with your request. The code 200 is what tells us that.
Cache-Control: private : This tells us that the server wants the cache to be controlled by the browser and not let some proxy service getin the way.
Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2007 14:58:43 GMT: This is the date and time that the page was served up and sent to the browser.
Content-Type: text/html : Here we have the content type of what is being served. So its giving the browser an HTML page,
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0: This is the kind of server that is giving us the date. Microsoft, is the software creator, and IIS/6.0 is the web server products name and version number.
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET : This field tells us what framework the server is using, which in this Server happens to be ASP.NET,
which is what you'd expect from a IIS server.Content-Encoding: gzip: Content-Encoding is telling us that content coming from the server has been compressed using HTTP-Compression and that the browser is going to have to uncompress the content to be able to read it.
Vary: Accept-Encoding: This field is saying that it can Accept-Encoding in a Variety of ways and it "Varys" depending on the browser.
Transfer-Encoding: chunked : This field means the message body is send to the client as chunks that are stamped with the
size of the chunks. With chunked transfer encoding, the client can make sure that it has received all of the data that the server sends.