A belated happy new year to all of you! I’ve been battling a bacterial infection while I’m on holidays, which hasn’t been fun.
My friends Donna, Andrew and Matt recently tagged me for the ‘8 things you don’t know about me’ meme. The rules are pretty straight forward:
Link to your tagger and post these rules
List EIGHT random facts about yourself
Tag EIGHT people at the end of your post and list their names
Let them know they’ve been tagged
So here’s eight random facts about me:
I’m a covert rubberstamper. I have a fairly large range of rubberstamps, mostly arty styled stamps, and a nice range of interesting papers. I love the different textures of paper and love to mix and match stamps to papers. You may end up getting a hand made creation from me (but only if I know your birthday!).
I was born in Singapore and spent 8 years growing up there. My family and I migrated to Perth, Australia in the 1980s - a period when people were scared of the “Asianisation” of Australia. It was an interesting experience growing up in Australia. For a long time, I tried to deny my Asian roots after being told many times “to go back to where I came from”. I’m now totally comfortable with all sides of my heritage and am a strong believer in living in a negative-discrimination-free society.
I love quirky hand crafted pieces of art.
I play the djembe. I don’t play it particularly well, but I love it.
I used to be a pretty severe stutterer, as were my dad and my uncles. I used to get really frustrated at not being able to verbally express myself clearly. I knew what I wanted to say but could not voice what was in my head. It was even more frustrating seeing other people get frustrated at me. I managed to overcome this issue by sheer force of will (both my parents and I were unaware that there were various treatment plans available to help overcome stuttering). Although I don’t stutter nowadays, there are times when I get close to it but the problem manifests in being unable to pronounce certain words in certain conditions.
I saw snow for the first time in 2003. Prior to that, I didn’t even realise that we had snow in Australia! Ever since 2003 we’ve been hitting the ski slopes every season.
I actually get grumpy at times. Just ask my hubby.
I love retro tin robots. I like robots in general and have always had a fascination with them. At one stage, I thought I was going to grow up to be a roboticist.
I tag the following folks as I’m interested in finding out more about them!
Lisa Herrod - I know she’s already been tagged by Donna, but she’s being tagged again :)
Kenji Walter - I’ve only met Kenji recently, at the Canberra Web Blast
Minnie - she’s a wonderful artist, writer and photographer.
Gary Barber - I first met Gary at one of the earlier Web Directions conference. I was so excited at meeting a fellow Perth person all the way on the other side of Australia.
Wishing all of you a very Merry Christmas! I’m currently in Perth and have spent a great day full of Christmas celebrations with friends and family. I’m also quite full with champagne!
I was hoping to get some photos of a pretty cool Christmas lights display in Perth this year but when we got there, the displays were turned off due to some complaints from within the neighbourhood (apparently the road was so congested that residents couldn’t get into their houses). So I leave you with the YouTube video of the place we saw (except we sadly didn’t get to see the full display shown in the video).
There are 26,500 light bulbs, 128 lighting channels, 5 kilometres of electrical cable, 220 man hours to set up and $3.40/night in power to run this display. Every light is synched to music which is heard by motorists on a FM92.5 as they drive past this home in Bishop Riley Way, Churchlands Western Australia. The home owners aimed to raise $10k for Princess Margaret Hospital but ended up raising $11,839.
You might have notice another phenomenon going around Twitter at the moment - a sea of peas in the avatars of many Twitter users. This is in support of Susan Reynolds, artist, author and social media consultant who, ever since she discovered that she had cancer in early December this year, has been twittering her breast cancer journey.
I love Twitter and how I can drop in and out of conversations, getting ongoing insights into people’s lives. I love social networks and social media. I love how much more human and real the stories are. I love the interconnectedness I have with friends and family who frequent the same social networks that I do. I love how I can reach out, metaphorically, and there’s someone listening or someone to talk to and to exchange ideas with. I love the whole concept of ‘little’ ideas and news taking off in a big way, stuff that the mainstream media doesn’t always get to.
Social media is a lot more than blogging, podcasting, and social networks. It’s effective at reaching the people beyond the keyboards and microphones and connecting them to important things.
So back to Susan Reynolds. I wish her all the best with her recovery (she’s out of surgery this weekend). You can follow her blog, Boobs On Ice. Also, check out the Frozen Pea Fund website where you can make a donation to Breast Cancer research.
For those of you in Canberra, the Canberra Web-blast is happening tomorrow night. It’s free to come along with free drinks and free food…plus lots of door prizes!
So what is Web-blast? It’s a huge end-of-year party for the web community - bringing together web designers, web project managers, interface designers, information architects and other web professionals. Join a range of Canberra’s web communities and celebrate the end of year in style.
Today marks the third annual World Usability Day. It is an opportunity to increase the “public’s awareness of the need to make the services and products important to human life easier to access and simpler to use.”
There are multiple events happening around the world.
In Canberra, we had a one hour lunch time seminar with different presenters speaking about various things. We had about 8-10 minutes each - I did a presentation on Accessibility and Design: a holistic approach. Other speakers included:
On Friday, I said goodbye to my workmates of 14 months. I was really touched by the effort everyone went into organising a great farewell, in particular Viv who did a lot of baking and organising! I was sent off with a very delicious morning tea (lots of divine homemade goodies), beautiful flowers and a fantastic present. This was followed up with drinks at Old Parliament House. I was humbled by all the comments and gestures from various people through out the day, with emails, phone calls and face-to-face conversations.
I learned a lot over my 14 months and got to work on interesting projects. Met lots of interesting people and made some good friends. I will miss my workmates and hope that people keep thinking about creating great user experiences.
As of tomorrow (Monday), I will be working at Stamford Interactive. I’m looking forward to a set of new challenges!
With a number of presentations coming up, I wanted the ability to remotely trigger my presentation slides. A quick search on eBay revealed similar remote devices at varying prices, mostly from overseas. I ordered one, but while waiting for it to show up, hubby suggested that I look into using the Wiimote as “it’s just so much cooler”.
We tried a few things…and found a solution that works.
Here’s what you’ll need to get your Wiimote to work with Powerpoint in Windows Vista:
A Bluetooth enabled PC - the standard Microsoft Windows Bluetooth stack isn’t completely compatible with the Wiimote. I ended up downloading and using BlueSoleil.
DirectX 8.0 or higher
Once you install GlovePIE, you’ll need to set up a GLovePIE script to enable the Wiimote to function in Powerpoint. Here’s the script I’m using at the moment (just save it as a .PIE file somewhere easily accessible). As you can see, it’s really basic. I haven’t had time to play around, but there’s a lot more cool stuff you can do!
Mouse.LeftButton = Wiimote.A
Mouse.RightButton = Wiimote.B
PageUp = Wiimote.Minus
PageDown = Wiimote.Plus
up = Wiimote.Up
down = Wiimote.Down
left = Wiimote.Left
right = Wiimote.Right
At present, the Wiimote mimics the page up and page down function and up/down/left/right arrow keys.
A federal district court judge issued two landmark decisions on the 2nd of October in a nationwide class action against Target Corporation.
The first decision involved the court certifying the case as a class action on behalf of blind Internet users throughout the country under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). In addition to violating the ADA, the suit charges that Target has also violated two Californian civil rights statutes: the California Unruh Civil Rights Act and the California Disabled Persons Act.
In the second decision, the court stated that websites such as target.com are required by California law to be accessible.
This is a step in the right direction, although it’s sad that it has to get to this stage before action is taken by the big corporations. Remember, accessibility is best done proactively - not reactively.
