KevinPittman.com

While tagging my latest photo on Flickr with the phrase UW I thought to myself, “Hey Self! I can do better than that!” So, I set out to do “better than that” by adding some context to where the photo was taken. I’ve heard of Geotagging but I’m not all that into longitude and latitude numbers as metatags on my photos. I just don’t find coordinates like that all that useful or interesting. Instead I decided to provide a link to a aerial/bird’s eye view of where I was standing when I took the photo. (more…)

While creating an account at an online financial site I ran across this little gem of a form and couldn’t help but laugh.

Wikipedia defines a signature as:

A signature is a handwritten (and sometimes stylized) depiction of someone’s name (or some other identifying mark) that the person writes on documents as a proof of identity and will. It acts as a seal.  

Can someone please explain to me how retyping my name serves this purpose? I’m sure there is some legal reason why this is required, but in all honesty this is a huge waste of everyone’s time. If the sole purpose is to confirm that the user has read and agrees to the terms said above then ask them to check a box and save them from useless typing.

Check it out at www.slide.com. Haven’t really played with all the features yet but the idea seems simple enough. So far it feels a little like flickr, but unfortunately I kind of feel like either I’m missing something or it is (what? no comments on photos?). Maybe it’s because I don’t any contacts yet? If anyone is interested my slide page is at http://kevinp.slide.com.

For the past week I’ve been reading through the blog of Jensen Harris, a UI designer for Office 12. In addition to being a preview of Office’s new features, it’s a look into the world of an interaction designer and what’s involved in redesigning an application as large as Office. Be sure to follow the links in the top 30 list for some of the more interesting posts.

Denon 3805 remote

Talk about a brilliant way to organize what would be 19884 buttons. With this thing I can control the TV, DVD player, and receiver… now if only it could start the coffee maker.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gustavog/22054241/

I stumbled upon this in the Seattle Flickr group and thought I’d share. Pretty creative use of the flickr notes feature if you ask me.

Soon there will be a brainstorm meeting at work to come up with ideas for a project that is based around the needs of UW students. There has been a lot of talk about collaborative software and other various group work tools, but we’re looking for more suggestions.

Some general ideas that come to mind are:

• collaborative writing
• homepage portal building tool (sorta like bloglines but customized to class info, eposts, etc…)
• project management software
• Notes/files/document sharing

Any other ideas (big or small) that you can think of? What technology/tools do you wish the school offered that would make your life easier?

Again my RSS comments were broken for the past few days. After realizing that many of my friends were having this same issue I finally grew tired of it and looked for the root of the problem along with a solution. What I learned was that special characters in comment titles were rendering my xml feeds invalid. For some reason the content of the comments is surrounded in <![CDATA[ stuff ]]> but the title isn’t. The simple fix I found was to just wrap the title contents in <![CDATA[ stuff ]]>.
(more…)

As some of you may know, I’m currently in the middle of the implementation phase for my capstone. One of the many challenges we have been facing is how to divide up the work and organize our efforts so that each person is doing something productive and not being held up by others.
(more…)

This year has been the year of the blog. Recently Jamie made the move to Wordpress and runs her site complete with a real web host and a spiffy domain. Other icrew have also started blogging. Trevor has started up again after a long hiatus, while C.A., Avi, and Trotter joined the fun within the past few months.
(more…)