First session attended was “Using Jquery to create smarter Interfaces” by Dmitri Gaskin and Amit Asaravala.  Amit gave some useful examples of how to use jquery with the Nice Menu module.  Also some great examples on dynamic form components, showing character count in forms…I’m definitely going to try these two techniques on my sites.  Now off to lunch!

See, both my fraternal Grandparents in Malaysia dealt with diabetes, and my father is currently dealing with it. The value of the article is in exposing the falsehood in some common suppositions about body type and risk of diabetes. Given that I stay active and keep my body weight under control, I might tend to think that I’m not a prime candidate for diabetes. Not so. I tend to have an insatiable appetite for sweets, often eat irregularly, often find myself losing focus and even becoming anxious between meals and without a quick snack. These characteristics were also plainly laid out by the article’s author as warning signs for diabetes that is not easily noticed by blood tests and common indicators of the risk for type 2 diabetes.

“Many physicians really don’t have a clue about preventing type-2 diabetes in someone thin like me. My doctor mumbled something about switching from white rice to brown rice and told me to come back in 6 months, even though insulin resistance is a complex metabolic disorder requiring sophisticated, continuous management. What’s more, the typical advice offered makes you wonder if Americans are being given an antidote against or a prescription for the disease. For example, everyone from my doctor to the American Diabetes Association (ADA) tells people with impaired blood sugar, or prediabetes, to make carbohydrate-rich foods such as breads and grains the foundation of their diets. This despite a growing body of evidence that points to carb reduction as the best anti-diabetes strategy. After all, there’s another term for people who are insulin resistant: glucose intolerant. Meaning they don’t respond well to carbohydrates. The higher the dose of carbs, the more problems those carbs cause.”

I stayed with good friend Abel Henry who resides with his fiance in Hyde Park, within a few blocks of Barack Obama’s residence and the location this video was filmed in (will post pics soon).  Took the #4 from Washington Park to McCormick Center (the Convention Center).  The real estate boom in Chicago surprised, kind of like Oakland, but on a much greater level.  Seemed like every block had signs for new “upscale” “luxury” available from the “mid 200’s and up.”  Interesting to see how that plays out with the sagging economy and the brutalized real estate market.  This housing boom will certainly be valuable eventually, however.  As I learned in a panel about Climate Change and Communities of Color, the Great Lakes hold 1/5th of the world fresh water supplies, and sits app. 600 ft. above sea level.  As water sources become scarce and the privaitzation of the water becomes more possible, and when the effects of climate change become more extreme, the historically chocolate citites in the Great Lakes region, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Gary, Indiana, will become some of the most desirable places to live in the world (they also don’t have many natural disasters, if you don’t count frigid winters as a disaster - sometimes I do.)

Can’t wait for my next trip back!

H.

One of my favorite features of an Apple product:

Cover Flow.

With the digitization of music as a commodity, and the rapid replacement of Mp3 players over any other medium, you might think album artwork would be dead. If there’s no tangible album, where can you put the artwork on? Apple not only solved the problem, but they created a magnificent platform that might rescuscitate the beauty of album artwork. Cover flow is dangerously addicting and and time consuming for perfectionist types, but flipping through my digitized music collection by artwork was something I never thought I could do. I own a considerable record collection in Oakland (and in New York), and always regret not being able to enjoy the vinyl cover more since I refer to my digital music collection more than my vinyl, or cassettes and CDs.

The production process of the site took quite a while, as there was signifigant front-end coding necessary. I had to take all the Smarty templates, which were written in html (ugh, tables!), and reconfigure them with XHTML and CSS. It was a joy to comp, re-comp, and re-re-comp them with my trusted accomplice, Marke B., all the while testing them out in Firefox, Safari, Opera, and IE (fun!).

Further projects I have on mind for sfbg.com are getting a video / “TV” section, posting audio to an iTunes channel, developing a new CMS (in Drupal, of course), and building an events db.

All the credit to keeping the system afloat, and apache, mysql, and linux happy goes to the guru Mr. Netik.

He went through ten points for great design, giving the audience clues into his creative process, and wowing the crowd with some past mock-ups he’s prepared for clients. Not only were the tips useful, but his work was inspiring. I left the session with a feeling of urgency to step up my game with design and create with both functionality and beauty, because good design is indeed a gift in many senses of the word.