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I think I might want to work at starbucks... ok, not really. But if I had to get a part time job I wouldn't throw it out as an option. Why? The starbucks in town has done very well and so the corporate coffee giant wants to expand. The result is that they have been conducting interviews. This often happens in the same area that I work in. Again you might be asking yourself how someone so hip and edgey could succumb to working at someplace so unpunk. The answer is that I get free internet there (thank you Penn State) and they have a parking lot which is worth its weight in gold in State College. Why State College has been more of a pain to park in than any other place is beyond me but it is the total truth. Also, I am addicted to Cafe Amercanos but that is another story for another day. Anyway, back to my future employment.

They have a really strong speell (spelling?) about being a partner and how working for starbucks, you are listened to at the highest level of the company. They also make sure to mention that you need to be passionate about their product and the successfull transmission of the starbucks brand. I really can't say why it appeals to me but on some level I believe the fluff. Let me be clear, I don't plan on filling out an application anytime soon but rather I would like to point out that it appears to be a pretty reasonable place to work if you are looking for a part time job. Of course, I could be wrong. You never know, maybe next semester I will take a break from computers to delve into the mysteries of being a barista.

Back to my Cafe Americano...

I just read this and I think it is awesome. I can only hope that someone catches wind of all my blogging experience and I get to make the big bucks for a year or so...

Seriously though, I do think it is interesting. I have a lot of respect for some bloggers and little to none for others. The ones I respect just enjoy the mix of journalism and technology while the others feel that blogging as a culture is a crucial element to the Internet as a whole. This I cannot and will not believe. This is a short sighted view that does not reflect where the web is really going and where the real innovation is. The web is a source of information that will continue to be aggregated and developed as a database. The technology is not moving toward making the web a infinite entertainment network full of insightful commentary and reflection.

This doesn't mean that blogging as a medium for reflection or commentary is bad by any means. It is fun and there are some great writers that express interesting points of view all the time. My point here is that people think blogging is good way to make money or can be a good revenue builder and I say not a chance. But, if someone wants to pay me to help them blog, they are more than welcome.

Well I finally upgraded to wordpress 1.5. I really didn't want to because I knew I would probably have to screw with my theme. Sure enough I have a new look and I could care less. I will probably change the header to some photo but in the mean time I am styling defaults.

In other news... I have been messing around with an Ajax library. Ajax doesn't really stand for anything. It is one of those acronyms that just kind of caught on because someone wanted a shorter name for something. It is similar to dhtml which is nothing more than a descriptive title to using javascript to make things happen. So far it is kind of alluding me. I am not going to spend too much time on it but I do think it is a pretty slick technology. Google uses it for gmail and google maps which is easily the most popular example. Currently I am just trying to read a file line by line into a text field. It isn't going too well but I have a feeling that has more to do with the library I am using.

Finally, school is almost over and I am very, very happy about it. I am tired of being in school and I am ready to move on. Fortunately I don't have much to go and for that I give a "woot", an unknown word that makes no sense to me. Use it in a sentence today!

Well I am once again seeing how this gnome-blog applet works out. I am thinking I will looking into adding a category chooser for it so maybe I could start migrating from Wordpress to my own blogging system. I created one for a class and I made some semantic aspects that I would love to try and improve upon. My next blog will have nothing to do with blogging... I promise ;)

I realized I would like to be able to blog without actually visiting my blog. My other dilemma with this is that I would have to have an application on my computer to allow me to do this. A stand along app for blogging is just not going to happen for me at this time. A gnome applet on the other hand seems like a great idea so I am trying out. I hope it works!

Today I took some time to read this. It is an article arguing the benefits of using OS X. Specifically, his point is that many hackers are switching to OS X and they are doing so because OS X they care about usability. I am not an user interface expert by any stretch of the imagination but I do have a theory of sorts regarding designers commenting on usability. There is an obvious link between usability and design, yet there is not a link between design and usability. Designers know how to make things look good, hot, cool, hip, as well as other emotional adjectives. Usability experts understand what makes something easier to operate or use correctly. Emotions can blind the most objective of eyes. In other words, I truly believe much of the "usability" in OS X is embedded in its beauty. I do want to point out that it can be more fun to play with the less convenient tool when it is much cooler. The fashion industry is proof of this. OS X is designed very well and is by far the most beautiful desktop I have ever seen. With that said, I can't say that all the slick graphics make for a usable environment. At the same time, it could very well be the most usable operating system ever. My point here is that usability seems to be a hip designer term right now. Too many sites comment on how a design is usable without any explanation of why. There is no argument as to what makes a design or interface helpful for the user to complete a task. A quick look through most descriptions on freshmeat or sourceforge will find project descriptions such as "This project is to create a _BLANK_ that is usable and robust...." I think usability can't really be measured so easily. It is not always how fast a user can work or how easy it is to hit the desired button. It can be something associated with the tasks and how one piece fits in with the rest of an evironment. Usability could be how accessible the application is or how it can be used in a creative way. I am confident that the interface is the not the only aspect that needs to be usable. No one thought Google was a great search engine because it only used one form. It returned good results and allowed for imaginative uses. Usability is not a measure of how the designer sees the effectiveness according to the designers scale. It is looking at how the software or tool is used in relationship to the users life.

For those that read my blog, I am being pretty hypocritical yet again. Oh well. Check out the Umevan.

So, yesterday I realize that evolution has really large icons that have no hope of ever seeing the light of day because they are just too big. After a conversation on IRC I found that it was not the icons, but the text below them that made them span across my desktop. Before I go on, just to give you an idea of how wide I needed my window to be in order for all the icons to be seen, consider my monitor. It is 1600x1200 which I have always thought to be pretty big. In order for me to show all the icons on evolutions top toolbar, I have to keep the window around 85% of my desktop width. This may seem pretty trivial but I can't even imagine using evolution on a 1024x768 resolution! So, in order to actually use all my icons (they are there to be used you know), I had to find a way to make things smaller.

My search started with a right click on the toolbar which used to provide options to change things like whether or not the icons were large or small. I then checked the preferences, searching for some way to get reasonable sized icons, but again, I found nothing. At this point I am very confused because I distinctly remember doing this in earlier versions. In addition, I am switching from Thunderbird, which has always made editing toolbars very simple (IMO). I am getting a bit frustrated at this point and go back to IRC to see what someone else might know about it. A comment regarding a gnome-ui-system-tool-thing was pointed out to me. I had remembered seeing this before so with a few clicks I had no more text and reasonable looking icons.

I wondered why I had a gnome setting dialog that would change my evolution icons. It didn't make sense to me why I had to do things this way. I asked on IRC (#evolution) about this and the answer was essentially that no one wants to change all their icons on a per application basis because it would be a pain. I agree if I had thirty applications that I needed to do this on, it would be a problem the one instance I had to do it. On the other hand, if I install a new application with an icon bar that makes no sense to me, how do I know what these new icons do? The answer I got was to view the tooltip. Now, I don't know if this seems nuts to anyone else but it does to me. Think about it for just a minute. If I can customize my most used applications to help increase efficiency, then this is helpful. Smaller icons are arguably less usable but in some circumstances it makes more sense, such as saving screen real estate because you exactly where the icons are in the toolbar. When I install a new application though, I would like to know what the icons do. A good example would be a photo album program such as f-spot. There is not a international sign for resize image or add a comment. A text label then becomes a huge help in learning the interface quickly. If I have to wait a second or two for each icon in order to learn what it does, I am wasting time. If I install 2 or 3 new applications, there is a good chance I have already lost the time saving I got from using the gnome preferences. I realize the convenience and appreciate the opportunity for a default setting that covers the entire desktop. My problem is that for occasionally used programs the text is helpful. I am only likely to customize a few programs and not every application I have.

With this in mind I turned to the HIG to see what it said. It was pretty clear saying that an application should provide the option to turn text on or off as well as have large or small icons. At this point I was livid! It seemed that a gnome preference dialog had completely broken the HIG in very serious way. Linux is hard enough to learn to use without having to spend all day waiting for tooltips! Anyway, to make a long story short, I talked to a friend of mine about it and he said that evolution was not 100% HIG compliant. I tried Gedit out and it had the same flaw. I am not saying either of these programs are bad of course. My main concern was that the HIG specified a really stupid setting. This not being the case, I can let it go that two of the more important gnome apps don't follow the HIG to perfection. So, was all this very important? Not really. It was interesting though and I think I did learn a little something.

At this point I am very very tired. If you haven't noticed, it is very obvious that I am tired of writing for the night. I will now brush my choppers and head to bed. Tomorrow I have class until 7:30 pm so I need to get some sleep. Nite.

It is pretty amazing how much time I spend reading articles on technology. With all the news sites about programming, open source, linux, gnome, etc., I feel like a tech news junkie. This has made my prime material for April Fools. I can't tell you how many times April 1st rolls around and I am reading some unbelievable story about Microsoft going bankrupt due to years of padding the books and thinking to myself, "This is Nuts!!!" The next thing I know I am calling Lauren to tell her the news and looking around on other news site for more details. When I can't find any I return to reading slashdot to find yet another story making no sense whatsoever. By this time a third story has caught my attention and I am thinking the world has turned upside down. I usually end up reading the comments on one of these "jokes" and realize the occasion.

The first couple times I did this I laughed so hard I almost cried. I couldn't believe I had been duped so easily. As time went on I became somewhat prepared. I still lost track of the date but I usually would put two and two together before trying to send mass mailings to let the world know of my discoveries. Now I simple have a chuckle and move on looking for some "real" news. At this point though I am pretty tired of it. There are stories that are obvious and others that could be considered crazy that may be a joke to somebody but I really can't tell. It is really too bad I caught on because it is a lot more fun to get duped than it is to read silly headlines. With that said, I did think this was pretty funny. Happy April Fools Day!