While not writing about Foreigners hits or how underrated Corey Feldman/Haim’s ‘Dream a Little Dream’ was, I’ve been working on some other things.

• - In June, I’ll be travelling up to Canada with my friend and colleague, Brett Harned as well as my buddy Travis Schmeisser, to talk about feedback at NXNE
• - Still writing over at The Nerdary
• - Happy to be part of the group posting thoughts over at The Pastry Box
• - Been teaching for Girl Develop It Philadelphia
• - Finished up Site Week over at the Happy Cog Base
• - Periodically writing at our Cognition Blog
• - Still loving to write the CSS Gallery column for .net Magazine

So, I’m still here and have ideas to enhance these unicorns a bit more eventually. Hope all of your lovely faces are doing swell, too! And maybe see some of you in a few weeks down in Texas for SXSW? High fives!

You’ve got a keynote that needs some snazzing? I’ve got cat pictures with your name on it.

You believe there’s something missing? I’ll be here to add stormtroopers pictures and Museo Slab font.

You’ve got an illustration of a penis? Ill let you know that it might offend someone in your audience.

Its beginning to become a pattern.
Every conference I go to someone says something or has something in their slides and at least one person finds it offensive and next thing you know, #dildogate is a hashtag in your twitter stream.

It’s hard to be a speaker. Sometimes you’ll be up there talking and say something and think to yourself: did I really just say that? Trust me. I’ve been there.

And maybe sometimes it’s less a slip, and you put animated gifs of dancing vaginas of in your slide. At 1am, that might seem funny! And a lot of people will agree (perhaps me as well). Its a hard job to think of a universally funny joke that a room of 200 will laugh along with.

BUT you might also completely offend someone. And as speakers, when we get in the front of the room, we are the authority at the moment. People have signed up (and maybe even paid) to see us talk. And I think we all need to respect that.

We have different senses of humor. My approach is usually to cater to that and to err on the non-adventurous-dancing-body-parts side.

That said, you can still be funny! If you want to make a joke about nerds using the internets to look at porn, you can. But perhaps instead of having an illustration of a very naked lady (drawn very nicely, but still very full frontally), you have an illustration of some lemons with party hats drinking punch. Everyone likes a lemon party joke!

That one’s free! :$

Really though, we have all these standards bodies for other things, why not for nerd speaking ettiquette? I really want us all to get along and I prefer to go to conferences where everyone feels welcome and aren’t turned off by something that isn’t a crucial part of the fantastic content.

We’re all in this together friends. And Im sure no one wants to make anyone uncomfortable. So, feel free to reach out here (if you want to battle with my amazing spam content) or on twitter if you’d like to run any of these jokes by me and I will let you know if you making the ghost of Susan B Anthony cry.

I am now posting (at least) weekly over at The Nerdary about tech-related stuff, along with some other very smart developers (Mark Huot and Kenny Meyers).

Also, some new speaking engagements coming up:

1. I will be talking with some other Happy Cog folks at a Pencil to Pixel event, for AIGA Philly.
2. I am going to Berlin!! Yay! To speak at JSConf.eu

I’m very excited to head over to Germany. I’ll also be making my way up to Amsterdam after that, so maybe I’ll catch a few of you EECI folks up there!

Lastly, today I was featured at #9 on Mashable’s 15 Developer/Hacker Women to Follow on Twitter next to 14 very SUPER and SMART ladies. Totally rad.

Since I’m doing more dev writing at The Nerdary, I’ll probably be doing some occasional tech stuff here but also more talking about how Inception incepted fashion into me and now I can’t stop wearing my grandmother’s old scarves again, cause Juno looks so cute wearing them in the movie.

Also. Baseball!!

Dun dun dun….I love music videos with twist endings!!

Or close to it. If you’re rehearsing your talk while eating a cheese plate and watching the Phillies game, then it can take 2 hours. Or if your rehearsal is mixed with well-thought out feedback and thoughtful debate from your awesome coworker, one Mr. Mark Huot, then it takes closer to an hour and 15.

I’m pretty close to trying to get to that magic number, though. And really, really excited to be speaking at JSConf 2010 in DC this weekend!!

The conference was a blast last year, and put on by tremendously smart and awesome people.

Plus, I’m going to have that boat song in my head all weekend…which is quite alright in my book!
Pirate cruise!!!

Hope to see some of you folks there!

My bad.

Truce?

They build you up. You are belting along about deuces. You want to look into the sun. You imagine what “Gokart Mozart” would be like as a Mario character. But then what??

Don’t go through how to keep annoying pleasing your coworkers and loved ones withdrawal.

Here some sure fire follow ups:

Then a double shot of:

If you will also be in Austin, come see me and some super smart people (Mark Huot, Brian Warren, Ryan Irelan and Kenny Meyers) speak on our panel: ExpressionEngine 2.0: Total Domination!

It’s Monday at 12:30 – it will be more (or less) exciting than listening to some dude talk about wine. We can talk about wine, too. Srsly.

If you don’t hate fun, I will see you there.

Bonus: this is the office soundtrack to get pumped for today!

Long live sneeze guards.

The tweet (which followed a great many related tweets and blog posts) read:

“Interesting read: “5 Good Reasons Why Designers Should Code” http://cot.ag/aBMpdt Agree/Disagree? Should lines be drawn across mediums?”

If designers should code, should coders design?

How closely are these two practices intertwined? Let’s examine the other direction. As a developer:

• Are you proficient in Photoshop?
• How about Illustrator?
• Fireworks/ImageReady/Acorn/Painter/etc?
• Familiar with Grid Systems?
• Do you keep up with the latest design trends?
• Do you understand typography, horizontal/vertical rhythm, what about scale?
• Do you understand color theory?
• Are you comfortable in a design critique? Do you know how to critique your own work? What about someone else’s work?
• Would a designer want to play Layer Tennis with you?

Are these the skills that make you a designer? I have a degree in web design, I studied typography in school, I even, at one time, loved Quark. But at the same time I was loving my Database Structures and Coldfusion classes. Seven years ago: I knew a little bit about a lot. I was constantly receiving constructive criticism in school and at a design internship that I was spreading myself too thin. I was told that I had to choose a speciality. I chose Front-end development. My focus on design took a back seat, and while I certainly know the Adobe shortcuts to hide/show rulers and grids, I would not call myself a designer.

So how do you define being a designer? The questions above? Having that special something? Something else? Is being a designer different then knowing how to design? And what, if any of these, should a developer be expected to have?

<3’s

Let’s time travel back to 2006! Shall we?

Agreed. Partying is synonymous with blogging. At night.

Party Rats Thank you, Cowboy Tom.

With so much doubt getting in the way of trying to help, it makes your choices a bit more difficult. I knew my preference was to donate to a smaller organization – in hopes that the money I donated would reach the cause sooner – and I knew I didn’t want to get scammed. I decided to rely on some recommendations from my sister (who has the smarts in the Public Health world), a charity review guide, and the one thing I felt comfortable in judging: my reaction to the organizations website and how that organization’s website reacted to the situation. (Screenshots and observations are from Jan 13, 2010)

I started by visiting Charity Navigator, a charity evaluator to read reviews on the organizations I was looking into. I was leaning toward Partners In Health, as they already had a strong presence in Haiti, but wanted to see what else was out there. Charity Navigator had a list of featured charities, so I decided to visit some of them.

“Hmm. I don’t know about this” #1

Every 2 pages or so, Charity Navigator prompted me with a lightbox framed message asking me to donate to their site.

1. Is it strange that a charity evaluation website is asking for donations in this manner and this frequency?
2. If you were running this website, would you “turn off” these requests when a major disaster strikes? When any disaster strikes?
3. Would you prompt users to donate to a charity related to the cause?

I found the lightbox approach to be invasive, especially since it happened so often while I was trying to reach my goal of seeking out an external charity. Speaking of weird lightbox timing:

Charity Navigator now has a top list of charities responding to the situation in Haiti. Plus one for them.

The IRC has now turned off the slideshow. Still crowded home page, but one less thing to distract me.

I must’ve missed this when it was in its YouTube prime. In case any of you did as well, live life deprvied of the Katsak no more!!
Thanks for the heads up, Pete.