So I’m headed to the SIG CHI Conference! My team’s project was a winner in the first round of the student competition. The best part of it all is that all four of the teams from the School of Informatics were accepted…meaning a whole bunch of us are going to be travelling to Portland together. I’ll be there for my birthday! This means a whole bunch more work will have to be done in the coming months, but I have a feeling it will all be worth it.

Tomorrow’s the first day of a three day seminar on ActionScript, the programming language used with Macromedia’s Flash package. I’m really pumped. Flash is ubiquitous on the web and makes it really easy to build beautiful pages. There is a downside, however. Flash pages are not as usable as they should, or could, be. Because web designers can simply create web pages from vector images, many do not hold the same web standards as pages built in HTML. This means beautiful web pages that are not usable. Flash must do something to fix this. They could implement a Flash style guide that makes it easy to keep web standards while making pages look good, or something like that. Whatever the case, after Thursday I’ll know my ActionScript, and will be able to make beautiful and useful webpages (but that’s only because I’ve taken classes that cover usability).

I’m due to build a piece of software in the next few days that will let you all know how my marathon training is going. I ran 2 miles this morning in 16:28 (8:14 splits!). Not bad, considering I only started training a few weeks ago, and that was following a 3 mile (long) day. The next step is to not catch the flu/cold that is going around the halls at school. That would be greatly detrimental. Good thing I’ve been taking my multivitamin.

Ok, time for bed…long day of coding tomorrow… 🙂