How Not To Design A Website

I stumbled across a great article by Josiah Cole called 19 Things NOT To Do When Building a Website. Aside from the obvious (not to mention tired) suggestions like avoiding the blink tag, purchase Josiah really hits home with some great advice. A couple samples:
8. If your website does not work in Firefox, welcome to 2007
10. If you use music on your site make sure the user can stop it, and it BETTER NOT start on page load without the user requesting it
11. Text navigations are better than images
17. If you’re delivering video, it better not ask the user which bandwidth or version of video they’d like.

Good stuff. Recommended reading.

Paintball

Today I played paintball for the first time. Never played before. Heck, I’ve never even shot a gun before, except for my old BB gun.

One word review: wow.

Optional second word: ouch.

The paintball outing was with my church’s men’s group and was organized by my friend Steve. In all, fourteen of us went to Revolution Paintball today.

I have to confess that I was pretty nervous, especially never having played before. I paid my fee, grabbed my gun and mask, and picked up my standard issue 500 rounds of paint.

Wow, I thought. That’s a lot of paint. 500 shots?

I went outside to get my gear ready, and I decided to check out the paintballs themselves. They felt hard. Really hard. The guys who had played before had told me that it hurts when you get hit, but I figured it would just sting a bit. But man, that paintball felt hard to enough to hurt quite a bit.

And as it turned out, they do hurt when they hit you.

The first hit I took was to the ring finger of my right hand. I did as instructed. I raised my arms, shouted, “I’m out!”, and left the field. It really throbbed at first, but it went numb pretty quickly, so I stopped noticing and got myself cleaned up for the next game. I was surprised to see my finger start to bleed in a half dozen places, though.

For those first two games, we were playing in a field called D-Day. It was pretty cool, but it was tough to defend the lower ground, so after two games, we went to the speedball field.

We played three games on the speedball field. In the first two, I went out pretty quickly, but in the third, I managed to hold my ground for a while. I also learned just how quickly those paintball guns can fire. Wow, they can really lay down the paint.

Then we decided to play fortress. This was pretty cool. One team was in the fortress and couldn’t leave, while the team was outside the fortress and couldn’t enter. The teams really had to have some strategy and work together for that one. Defending the fortress turned out to be much easier than we expected, and trying to eleminate the guys inside turned out to be really difficult. When I was inside, somebody managed to get a paintball through a crack in the wood, right into my chest.

After that, we took a short break, during which Bill, my friend and pastor, bought a case of 2000 rounds. Not just regular paintballs, mind you. Evil paintball. Seriously: that was the brand name. It’s really weird to see your pastor purchase a box of Evil.

Then we headed for a field they called Big Woods. That was a lot of fun, and I finally started to hit my stride with my first confirmed kill elimination. After a few games on that field, we broke for lunch.

After lunch, we played the jungle scenario, but we didn’t like that one as much. It was too big and there was too much brush. It made it hard to navigate and hard to get around. There was a lot of action, though. Owen shot me, and I shot Owen and approximately the same time. Before that, I shot Steve, and just before that, Steve shot Adam. The problem was that we were all on the same team.

So we headed back to Big Woods, where our ref asked if she could play, too. She asked if we were interested doing the Presidential Assassination scenario, where she plays the president, one team protects her, and the other team tries to shoot her.

At that point, I looked at her and said, “How often do you get shot in this job?”

She laughed and said, “Oh, four or five times a day.”

My team failed to shoot the president. We also failed to prevent her from being shot when we switched sides.

This was the game where I took my biggest beating. I was shot in the head. With an evil paintball. Fired by Bill, my friend and pastor. Man, did it hurt. As I raised my arms and yelled “I’m out!”, I took a shot from behind in each shoulder. These are wonderful friends I have. 🙂

We wrapped with a couple games of speedball, mostly just to get rid of the remaining paint.

All in all, it was a lot of fun. It’s hard not to feel like Rambo when you’re slogging through the weeds, carrying your gun, trying to stay low and out of sight, trying to identify and shoot anything that moves.

The downside? Well, I’m pretty sore, and I have quite a few bruises, but not nearly as many as some of the guys (Tim, I’m looking in your direction). And I have a nasty welt on the side of my head. Otherwise, I feel pretty good. It was a blast.

REAL World 2007, Day Three

A bit late, but here’s my post about the third and final day of REAL World 2007.

I started the day with “Unit Testing and Test-Driven Development” by Paul Lefebvre. It was a good session, and I always feel like I should be using unit testing more than I currently do (which is to say, not a lot), but I have trouble thinking up good unit tests for my apps. Oh, well, something to think about, I suppose.

I followed that session with “Data Mining and Content Management Techniques” by Jarvis Joyce. To be quite honest, I didn’t get a lot of new information out of the session, but then that’s the kind of stuff I do all the time. I guess I was hoping for more specific tips and tricks that I could use. But Jarvis did a good job of providing an overview of data mining techniques, and I don’t want to sound like the session wasn’t full of good information.

Lunch was comprised of barbecued beef brisket and warm peach cobbler. There was some other stuff available, but I didn’t care because the brisket and the cobbler rocked.

After lunch, the first session I took in was “Planning, Implementing and Supporting Cross-Platform Business Applications” by John Callis. John has a lot of experience in that realm, and he gave us some really good info. His presentation ended early, however, and the remaining time was filled with a demo of the Monkey Bread plugins by Christian Schmitz. That was interesting, as I ‘ve never invested in the Monkey Bread plugin suite. I’m not sure why. I guess I’ve found another way to do everything I’ve needed to do, despite their huge feature list and impressive capabilities. Maybe someday when I hit a wall.

The final session I attended was “Building a Web Application in REALbasic” by Joe Strout. One word review: wow. The demo gave me the same tingly feeling I got the first time I tried REALbasic. Joe really developed a wonderful framework, and then went and released it to the public domain. Brilliant and altruistic. I’ll likely be spending quite a bit of time with his sample project in the coming weeks and months.

After all the sessions had ended, most of us gathered for the final feedback session with Geoff and the other REAL Software employees. I’m constantly impressed at their willingness to stand in front of a crowd and solicit feedback, both positive and negative. And believe me, they get both every year!

Lastly, a dozen or so of us who didn’t have planes to catch until the morning wandered down to the Iron Cactus for one final meal together. We spoke of a great many things until we parted ways for another year.

All in all, this was the best REAL World yet. Maybe I’m just biased because I got to do three sessions, but it was a blast. Looking forward to next year already.

REAL World 2007, Day Two

And Day Two is at an end.

Dave and I woke up to two pleasant surprises this morning. First, the sessions didn’t begin until 10:00, giving us an extra hour to catch up with some other conference attendees. Second, they served a hot breakfast this morning (normally, it’s just danish and fruit, which is also great, but today they added eggs, potatoes, sausage, and bacon).

Anyway, I was running pretty ragged this morning. There were two sessions before lunch, and I was presenting for both of them. I started with my database session, which I thought went really well. My biggest problem was that I had so much information to share that I ended up rushing at the end to squeeze everything in. But it was still a lot of fun. The people who attended asked lots of great of questions and I had a great time. But then, I could talk for weeks on end about databases and not get bored. Next year, I’m going to pitch it as two separate sessions. There’s more than enough material for that.

“Cross-Platform Interface Tricks” was my second session. To be totally honest, I was extremely nervous going into it, even more so when I saw some of the REALbasic community’s heavy hitters in the crowd. But it turned out great. I wasn’t too sure about how it went, but afterward, I got a lot of compliments on the session and some people told me they really learned a lot. My favorite comment was from someone who told me that I was the first conference presenter he’d ever heard who pronounced Gnome (the window manager) correctly.

Then we broke for lunch: cold sandwiches. Conversation topics at our table included computer forensics, solid state drives, computer-generated music, DNA-generated music, and school security.

After lunch I was going to sit in on Marco’s REAL SQL Server session, but the room was so crowded that I headed over to Bryan Lunduke’s session on Designing for Linux instead, which turned out to be really interesting. I don’t know if Tangelo has a future on Linux, but I’m pretty sure Kodiak could. After that, I sat in on Keith DeLong’s most excellent session on report printing. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for the second half, because I was scheduled to teach my third session of the day.

That session was on open source licensing. I blazed through my slides in about thirty minutes, which was way faster than I’d expected, but we ended up having some really good discussions about various open source and copyright issues, including some talk about the upcoming GPL 3.

I wrapped up the day with Mike Woodworth’s session on optimization, which was also very good. Mike is a really smart guy and an engaging presenter.

After a break, we all gathered for dinner here at the Omni, then we had a trivia contest and a time for socializing. I snuck away for a while to video chat with my family, but we kept getting messages about not having enough bandwidth. Stupid wireless. Anyway, Dave and I got to spend some time chatting with Geoff Perlman and Matt Quagliana. I’m always amazed at what down-to-earth people REAL Software is made up of.

Speaking of Geoff, I forgot to mention one very important thing in last night’s post. After Trish Murphy’s band finished their set, they brough Geoff up on stage to play drums for a rockin’ cover of “You Really Got Me” by The Kinks (one of my all-time favorite bands, of course). Geoff was really great on the kit. The best part is that you can watch the whole thing on YouTube (please excuse the weird sculpture of the naked blue chick behind the drumset).

I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s sessions, especially Joe Strout’s session on developing web apps. I’m kinda sad the conference will be ending tomorrow, since it’s such fun, but at the same time, I’m really looking forward to getting home to my family.

REAL World 2007, Day One

The first complete of day REAL World 2007 is drawing to a close. The morning opened with Geoff’s keynote, some customer keynotes, and a keynote from Paul MacKay of Novell. Rather than rehash everything here, I’ll direct you to the transcript that Joe Strout wrote up. You can find it Stubb’s for some good old Texas BBQ and entertainment from Trish Murphy. Should be a fun evening!