RuthEllison.com

I’ve just gotten back from Adelaide where I was running some usability sessions. We had some big issues with the testing environments, but overall the sessions went well.

Just popping through to say thank you to all of you for the good wishes for my mum. My sister has been posting photos of mum’s progress in hospital. It makes me sad seeing mum looking so helpless in the hospital bed.

No matter what kind of disagreements I’ve had with my parents in the past, I love them very much. I tend to think that parents are always strong and nothing will go wrong, so it’s a bit disconcerting and scary seeing a parent being scared and helpless.

I’m off to work today (as it’s past midnight), then Thredbo for a wedding where we (Raw Honey) will be singing, then back to Canberra on Saturday where I’ll be flying into Perth to be with mum for two weeks. I can’t wait to see mum!

Got the good news tonight - mum is out of the operating theatre, and despite being in pain (which is expected), she is doing well! She will remain in the ICU overnight for monitoring, before being moved into a ward. Can’t wait to see her in a couple of days!

For something that is four months away, the wedding date is starting to zoom up upon me. It started feeling more “real” on Saturday, when the very first invite was made up. After working in the web space for some time, switching to the print media was an interesting experience. The same design elements still apply - type of font, font size (unfortunately, there’s no way for the end user to control the font size ;) ), white spacing, line spacing…. I went through about eight drafts but I’m happy with the end result. The invites are simple with a nice metallic red background!

I managed to purchase the materials for my wedding dress yesterday. Who would have thought that the materials would have costed that much? When I was told the final price, you couldn’t have told on my calm (I think!) face that I was having a mild panic attack. I gulped, and then handed over my credit card. So I’m now the proud owner of seven metres of white satin, five and a half metres of white chiffon, and seven metres of lining, which will shortly be made up into a dress. A consoling thought is that I’m not spending thousands of dollars on a dress.

Mum is going in for her operation today at 6.30am Perth time. Wish I can be there when she comes out of the operating theatre, but at least I’ll be seeing her in six days when I fly back to Perth.

Today was the very first Canberra WSG meeting, held at the National Library of Australia. We had a good turn out of people. Actually, I’m impressed with the number of people who showed up, considering that Friday afternoon tends to be happy hour for many people.

The speakers were Donna Maurer, who spoke about designing usable rich internet applications, and Dean Jackson, who spoke about the W3C. Donna’s presentation is available from her latest blog entry.

It’s always great having the opportunity to meet with fellow Canberrans who share a passion in the web standards/usability/accessibility field. Donna covered some interesting points about user expectations with rich internet applications. We’re still some time away until the state-like condition of this “newish” navigation model becomes more familiar to the user, but it’s definitely an interesting area to keep working away at.

As for Dean’s presentation, he asked some hairy questions about XHTML and HTML, and standards as a whole. He encouraged everyone to participate in reading the W3C specs, and providing feedback. On aside, I’m pretty keen on seeing his SVG demo ;)

Many thanks goes to Russ Weakley, Peter Firminger and Lisa Miller who drove up from Sydney to help us out with the first meeting. And many thanks of course to my fellow Canberra organisers, Michele Huston and Gavin Dispain.

Edit: Forgot to mention that WSG photos are available at Flickr, with more here and here!

This is going to be a short post, since I’m posting this on my lunch break - but it’s World Usability Day! Visit the World Usability Day website for information about events in your area. Australians - you can visit CHISIG for local events.

There are some interesting articles to catch online:

• Pushing the right buttons requires a human touch from Sydney’s Morning Herald
• Usability at the core of iPod emotion from The Age

Thanks go to Patrizia Bordignon for the two links above.