Tamlyn

Facebook’s photo albums have the potential to be really, really good. As it is they’re just about passable. I’d like to present my vision for a proper, integrated photo sharing experience. If anyone from Facebook is listening, give me a call – I want to help you!

“Flying produces a fraction of global greenhouse gases” says the reassuring sticker on the seat in front of me. “Ah, well that’s nice. Now that I don’t feel guilty about flying I think I’ll book another holiday!”

But, just for fun, lets look at those stats a little closer…

Thanks to everyone who came down to the Fat Cat this evening. I had a great time and I think others did too. Here are the slides from my Pecha Kucha presentation.

So it’s Monday again and… what it’s Tuesday? Where did Monday go? And I’ve got to do what by the end of the week? If being back at work after a bank holiday weekend of basking in the sun is making you feel a little stressed, here are some cool things to cheer you up.

• Festo AirJelly – a flying jellyfish airship thing. Very calming.
• Clock Sculpture – 150 separate hands that rotate to spell out the name of the current hour
• One Day Poem Pavillion – holes drilled in the ‘pavillion’ form patterns on the floor which spell out a different poem every hour
• Do web sites need to look exactly the same in everybrowser? – unambiguously answers one question
• Lip Dub Stars – turn up the volume for this one!

It’s become quite a common practice to ask for websites to ask for your email address twice on sign-up forms. Re-confirming your email address supposedly reduces the chance of typing it in wrong altough I’ve often wondered if it’s really worth the extra effort. In any case I, like many people, save time by copying & pasting the address from the first form field into the second form field.

The folks at the Travel Lodge clearly decided that people like me shouldn’t be allowed to use our best judgement in filling out their sign-up form and have disabled pasting into the email reconfirmation field! By adding onpaste="return false" to each of the <input> tags they effectively prevent anyone with JavaScript enabled from pasting content into the form fields.

It confused the hell out of me. And annoyed me. But it did force me to retype my email address.

I’m honoured and excited to be doing a presentation at the first GeekUp Sheffield next Wednesday. It’s a condensed version of a workshop I did at PlusNet last month about how usability affects every aspect of our lives. By making people think about usability in everyday life I hope to encourage developers and designers think about usability in their work too. The presentation format is Pecha Kucha (20 slides shown for 20 seconds each) which I have never done before. I’m preparing the slides now and finding it quite challenging!

So if you’re in Sheffield on 7th May, pop down to the Fat Cat on Alma Street for some geeky fun. It’s free but you’ll have to buy your own beer. Big thanks to Jag Gill for making it happen.

I’ll be going to Chinwag Live: Real World Usability next week courtesy of PlusNet. It’s a panel discussion about where usability is headed as a discipline. Not sure quite what to expect but they’ve got some good speakers so it should be interesting. I’ll be blogging it on the Community Site.

Update: Blog review now posted

Do you sometimes feel you spend more time on the London Underground then actually at the office? Village Underground have gone a step further and converted some old Jubilee Line carriages into offices!

Going Underground has the scoop and more pictures.

Incidentally I rather like how the Village Underground site uses scrolling in an unconventional way. The foreground is fixed but the background can be scrolled about to see more images of the space. What they perhaps hadn’t considered is that this causes problems for people on mobile devices. The small screen of my phone means most of the content (and all the background) is hidden from view and cannot be scrolled.

[via Reaction!]

My original plan for a-mix-a-month fell through in January when I failed to produce anything. Now I’ll just put these out as and when I have time.

Featuring classics from Aphex Twin and Mr Bungle as well as some more obscure tracks, this mix showcases some of my favourite computer game-inspired music. It’s a bit shorter than usual because I wanted to keep the quality high. Extra geek points to anyone who can tell me which game intro the bonus track is from!

I’ve just been without electricity for half an hour while the landlady installed our new oven and I helped her carry the old one out to the bins. I suppose I could just as easily view it as an enforced exercise break