Please don’t think I am a Big Brother fan but last night I couldn’t help but get drawn in to the opening night of the new series. The tv happened to be on (I was watching Property Ladder) while I was in the kitchen making dinner. I could here all the screaming etc and was intrigued to see what collection of freaks they were going to wheel out this year.

A whole house of girls! Very clever. Certainly got my attention. Not too bad on the eye apart from the irritating loud mouth woMAN (she had a beard), the scary looking freak in a rainbow crusty jacket who looked like she’d been wearing the same clothes since 1987 and the Germain Greer look a like. God know what they are all like as I didn’t follow it that closely.

I did have the misfortune of seeing the twins enter at the beginning. How awful are they. I’m not one for violence but I could see myself needing to hit something, hard, if I was locked in a room with them. Now there is reason number one why not to watch that crap.

Saying all that, somehow I know I will get sucked in, no doubt due to pressure from my wife, and end up discussing what a bunch of snide bitches they all are when going for a drink on friday after work.

We love to hate it.

I just spent the last week out in the States. I flew out to Dayton, Ohio on the Sunday where I spent the week through to Friday and then jumped on the plane to New York for a couple of days.

The reason for my trip to Dayton was that the LexisNexis UX department had their second annual UX week. This involved bringing together members of the team from across the States and Europe to participate in activities and talks on a range of usability subjects.

I hadn’t expected to go. I have handed in my notice with the company, leaving on the 1st of June, so thought I’d miss out and have to stay in London to focus on finishing off my project commitments. As it turned out I was able to get on top of this and so given the chance to fly over and take part.

As a result, I was suddenly put in the position of having to give a presentation on the Monday, after lunch, on the subject of accessibility. Given the short notice I spent the flight over writing up my notes for the slides in a word document, then when I got to my hotel at 4:30pm local time I set to work putting it all together in a flash presentation. Luckily I was able to use the Monday morning to wrap it up, adding the finishing touches. I’d hoped to cover more, including a review of the global product and perhaps some images to break it up but needless to say I ran out of time.

However, I think the depth of the information made the presentation credible, even if i struggled at times to remember the flow (having not had time to practice and review). I will upload the presentation to my site shortly so that it available for download.

The rest of the week was fun. Lots of things to keep us busy including, on the Thursday, a visual design competition. I had originally come up with the idea as a test across all disciplines. The test covering all aspects of interface design. I thought it would be interesting to see how each discipline coped with having to handle over areas of the process. In my mind I thought it would show that visual designer were the most prepared to handle other roles and could take a project from concept to completion.

The reality was that only visual design took part so it really just became a visual design test. In my mind it was a chance for us to step away from branding convention and try something new. I reality, on review it seemed that the designers couldn’t break away from existing visual styling. To be honest I was disappointed with the results. We only had 2 to 3 hours to come up with something but that is no excuse. It was a great opportunity for everyone to showcase their skills but it never materialized.

The resulting presentation at the end of the day to the whole of UX was fairly predictable too. I think people missed the point of the exercise and couldn’t see past ‘brand’ conventions. My design that had an underlying LexisNexis feel but tackled the brand in a completely different way:

• focused on ‘the grid’ removing the use of red
• tackled the poor navigation of the existing interface
• incorporated some marketing techniques
• introduced new graphical elements for a web 2.0 feel

As Carl pointed out, the other designs were essentially cut and pastes of other interface designs with the appropriate content overlaid.Click here to see my design.

On a social level it was great to see everyone, meet those I’d only spoken to by phone, and then get the chance to say goodbye one last time.

Before returning to London, I did a short stop over in New York, staying with my friend Andy just off 72nd & Broadway.
It didn’t look like we were going to make it at first. I had a car all week, a ford explorer, which I dropped at the airport on Friday afternoon but when we checked in all flights to New York were canceled. I ended up hiring a mini-van and driving everyone to Cincinnati so we could make a flight to JFK! On the way we passed a major crash on the opposite side of the freeway with cars flipped all over the place. Nasty.

Got in to NY at 10 and cabbed it to Broadway. Made it to Andy’s for 11 and went out to his local. Just like Cheers, everyone knew his name. Ha. Despite this we managed to drag ourselves down to a bar and watch the FA cup final the next morning.

That afternoon I went for a run round Central Park. Did a loop of the perimeter and then round the reservoir in the middle, clocking up about 16km. The result of this is that I have broken 500km since I started with Nike +! Pretty good going I reckon. Hopefully I’ll be well clear of 1000km before the end of the year.

Saturday night I met up with the other LexisNexis guys and went out for dinner at an over priced restaurant called Smith & Wollensky. They do steaks, the cheapest which is about £30. They might be big but you don’t really need that much food anyway. Plus, the wine was even more of a skank. I bought a bottle of house red and a white, and the price was roughly £60!! So much for America being cheaper the the UK. That really left a sour taste in the mouth. Especially when there are so many great, cheap places to go.

That aside I had a fun night. We met up with Andy again and went to a few bars in the West Village. The night turned vague toward the end, which I think was about 4am?

The pity of the trip was that I had so much work to do for Caroline Sylge’s website that I spent the whole of Sunday working until I got the plane back to the UK.

Who knows when I’ll next head state side. I hope it’s before my new jeans wear out!

The past few weeks I’ve been working on www.carolinesylge.com basically adding new content and revamping the layout. I originally designed the site at a fixed hieght. It was supposed to fit in 8×6 and used iFrames to present the content. So things have moved on since then and Caroline now wants a site that presents the content in an easier, scrolling format.

At this point I’ve avoided spending time attempting to redesigning the whole site so I’ve adapted the existing design so that it flows down the page. However, I was looking at the new version of the site and realised that the content looks out place if the side naviagation is longer than the main content area. Here is is for you…

The site has a two column layout presenting two boxed areas of information overlaid on a tiled background image, with a 20 pixel space between the two.

If the navigation column has a lot of information and the main content box doesn’t you end up with a long box of links on the left and an empty space on the right.

The solution to balance the page would be to make sure the two column both run down to the same level.

How do you do this?

Answer: Slice a 1px high image the width of the two areas providing the background colour for the two columns, with a transparent backrgound between them to allow the tiled background to show through.

Set this image as a background to a div wrapping the two over divs while they have background set to none. This will ensure that no matter which is the longer both will extend to the same length.

One thing I’ve been meaning to write about Nike + for a while now. Well actually theres a few things….

Firstly, I’ve managed to cut my 10km down to 36′55″! Wow. I know it’s me but I think that is amazing. I still remember when I was proud of completing a mile and doing it in 10 minutes.

Second, I’ve got a bunch of friends in to it too and we’ve got a number of challenges going. I wish I could display them on my blog as I show the few runs. Plus I wish i could show my average pace, best 1 mile, 1km, etc..

Challenges do rock. What a grat way to motivate people to work harder. Some of my friends weren’t interested in doing 10km or even really running to be fair but now they are out there every day (pretty much).  My friend Ade has lost at least 2 stone (28 pounds) which is great for him, and I was just wieghed by my doctor at 12 stone. I think that is the lightest I’ve been in about 20 years!

However, yet another problem I’ve run in to with the system is a danger that my run is cut short. Basically this has happen about three times. The most recent time was the most annoying - last saturday I went out for a proper long run, oe I’d not dnensince getting the system. I ran from Crofton Park out to the thames barrier and back to Grennwich along the river, then home. The whole trip clocked in at about 23km, but at 18km I paused at a kiosk to buy a bottle of water (it was a proper roasting day) and paused my iPod. When I pressed the button to continue to it said “Continuing run…” and then “Run ended…” and my run was over!  I am so pissed off! That run was the fist opportunity to break my distance record for a long time. It’s not often you have the chance to run that far. For one it take a lot out of you! But to not have it recorded on my Nike + account. Gutted!!!!

This has happened quite a few times too. Generally where I have paused for a moment to pull my top off. It is wierd how it happens too because the system initally appears to kick in to action but then stops for no apparent reason.

Has this happened to you? Is this a bug with the system? Be good to know because then we can pressure Nike to sort it out.

B

Oh, and by the way I managed the 23km in around 1′30″. Quite unbelievable I know. Must do the marathon next year…

Somehow it seem the only time I have to add to my blog is late at night. It is currently 1am on a friday night. I’ve had a fairly quiet night. went for a few drinks with Juan and Olly then came home as Yasia’s sister and partner have come down for the weekend.

They headed off to bed fairly early and me and yash watched The Three Amigos for while before Yash decided to hit the sack too. I will be joining her shortly but thought I’d just jump online and express a few views that have been holed up the past week or two. I must admit the Three Amigos had me laughing a fair bit. Don’t know what that says about my sense of humour which has certainly changed as I’ve got older, although it could be the wine.

I’ve friends who’d say it was either a classic or a dud as clear Steve Martin fans. I’ve never really been a fan although he has had his moments. Blowfinger (?) for example was, overall, a terrible film, but I still think it has one of the best comedy moments I’ve ever seen, which amazingly features Eddy Murphy. Personally I don’t think he’s done anything decent for about 20 years but the scene where his charater runs across the freeway is an absolute classic. It had me in tears and make the rest of the film vaguely worth watching. Basically beacuse you need to understand the context too as to apreciate the situation.

Anyway, moving on, I’ll split the rest of my ranting over a series of posts so that they can be suitable listed in the taxonomy.

For those of you who don’t know what taxonomy is,

• (a) it has nothing to do with tax, that you pay, and
• (b) it has nothing to do with stuff dead animals.

It is actually to do with the organisation of information, as in at a library, the use of meta tags, and results sorting. Hope that clears things up.