Read the post by Mr. Ebert when you have time to savor it.

It’s been a busy couple months work-wise.  I have some great clients right now with some challenging (in a good way) work.  I finished a project this summer where I was traveling across the Midwest visiting farmers for a project.  This project was a classic example of the value of personas and the value of going to visit your customers.  It brought a level of understanding about how the farmers are using computers and the context in which they are using them. 

This, however, involved a great deal of travel for about six weeks.
I can tell you a couple things I’ve learned doing this much traveling, mainly by car:
- I could never travel that much for a living.  
- Audio books are a gift from God
- In small towns, look for the library.  I had a plenty of down-time between visits, and I discovered that, even in cities with a population of a few thousand, the library has incredibly friendly people, and free wifi.
- If you can swing it logistically, a "home base" is best.  I couldn’t always pull this off, but when I could stay at the same hotel for more than a night, I was more comfortable.  That could just be me and my love of some routine. 
- If hotels are booked, Bed & Breakfasts are a great substitute, sometimes even preferable.  I stayed at a B&B in North Dakota and it was fantastic.

I’m currently working on two projects, both of which are internal applications.  I wrote a post about the benefits of user experience for internal applications over on my work blog. 

I had some bad news this fall.  My wife’s grandmother passed away.  Then a week later we found out my uncle has cancer.  It is quite traumatic when an illness like this hits a close family member.  It is dramatically different than thinking about cancer in the abstract than thinking about it impacting a family member who is close to you.  I hope to see my uncle as often as I can the rest of the year. 

The thing is, I want to give proper attribution to the picture because it is not MY skills on display there, but I cannot find the photo online now.  So if anyone reading this can point me to the picture online, please do so and I will give all due credit to the photographer who took it.  It was under a creative commons license. 

And if you are out there, thank you whomever took this great picture.

I’ll go into my way back machine and post about some of the events I’ve attended.  Most of you will have forgotten them already but it’s worth jotting down anyway.

Lots worth discussing on various topics too, how the business is going here as I continue to meet new people in MN, design thoughts on some recent projects, fun summer activities.  So stay tuned for my own personal blogapalooza as I write more frequently. 

If I had plenty of land, I shouldn’t fear the Devil himself”. The devil, upon hearing this story decides to tempt the man. The man is offered as much land as he can walk off in one day in a square, provided he returns to his starting point by sun down. The man gets greedy and walks too far for the first two sides and ends up cutting corners on the last two sides. He dies within sight of the end, the narrator stating that 6 feet of land (in which to be buried) was in the end all the man needed.

I’ve been feeling this way lately about my “web presence.” I’ve signed up for a lot of services and new sites to see what they are like and kept signing up for more to make sure I didn’t miss out. I’ve been going too far down the ‘first side’ grabbing as much land as I can. And now that I’m coming up on the last two sides (actually using it for something useful), I find I’m cutting corners.

LinkedIn, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Flickr, gmail/hotmail/yahoomail, zooomr, magnolia, greader, multiply, and utterz, biznik, and more were all sites I have a ‘presence’ on, only I don’t really. I have a user name, an existence but not really a presence.

For Facebook and LinkedIn (and PlaxoPulse) I’ve relegated those to rolodex and ‘long lost’ status, i.e. staying in touch with those on my list, and being on the site in case a long lost friend signs up and we find each other. Beyond that, I don’t really use them, and I’m cool with that.

I really like Multiply’s site, primarily because of the vastly better security controls, so I can envision keeping that as my kids get older. Every other site I am pruning down to remove duplicates, e.g. I don’t need to be on Flickr and zooomr, I don’t need to be on del.icio.us and magnolia, etc. I’m sticking with Flickr mainly because so many other tools I use have tools for Flickr pre-built, and while del.icio.us’ design is certainly minimalist, again, it has the tools elsewhere that I already use, e.g. browser buttons, RSS fees, so let’s just say I’m comfortable there.

For blogging, I am a Wordpress fan, I have the wordpress.org version downloaded and installed on BlueHost (a terrific web hosting company by the way). I’ve tried several blog readers and Google Reader is my favorite by far and away. Whitney Hess did a terrific comparison, Dr. Jack Ramsey style (for all you Bill Simmons readers out there).

And lastly, there is Twitter. I am not a Twitter guru, or someone who follows hundreds of people. I’ve stumbled across people and follow about 70 people and about 40 follow me. But this service has become as important to me as blog reading. I leave it up on my 2nd monitor (I happen to use Twitteriffic, but I find there’s not much difference in the Twitter clients unless you’re hard core) and occasionally glance over to ‘follow the stream’ as they go by. What’s amazed me is how this has become a source of breaking news for me much quicker than anything else. Off the top of my head, horrible weather, Bhutto’s assassination, election coverage, are all examples where I’ve heard it first on Twitter. I’ve started to follow people in my field, user experience design, and in my area, Minneapolis. Thanks to Twitter, I’m going to the inaugural Social Media Breakfast this week and am hoping to meet some people there as well.

I’m sure I’ll be tempted as new flavors of the month come out, but, for now, I’ve staked out my claim, got enough land, and want to enjoy it and cultivate it, before all I need is six feet.

Tolstoy’s grave…

But having this personal trainer with me while I exercise, and knowing I had a session coming up, kept me motivated to work out in between sessions, and really bust my gut during the sessions. There is no way before I started these sessions that I would have pushed myself like I have in these sessions. Today was my last session, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to have check-ins with her either every month or every other month.

I think the aspects of having someone looking over my should that improved my exercising, are for many people, myself especially, a key reason to blog. Putting my thoughts and ideas ‘out there’, getting in the game, joining the conversation, (insert cliche here), is motivating to write better, think better, engage better. And that is a good thing. I can see why the blogger for http://www.backinskinnyjeans.com/ puts herself out there, or why I like the site www.traineo.com for sharing your exercise routine with others.

So, welcome to anyone who has stumbled across this, friends and strangers alike.

I will write on four topics, Design, Development, Web 2.0 and Where I live:

• Design: I work for Gomoll Research and Design, a highly regarded User Experience Design firm located in the Midwest. I love working with clients to create passionate and elegant solutions for their users. I’ll write about examples of this but primarily will write about design in general. We’re putting up a blog on the Gomoll site so I’ll put you to that once it’s up.
• Development: My other hat is to continue growing Texo Dev as GRD’s development partner. If a blog goes up there, I’ll point to that one as well.
• Web 2.0: yes it’s an over-used term, but most people have a sense for what it is, and I haven’t heard a better term. I’m an early adopter and will talk about new tools, without hyping them.
• Where I live: I’m violating blogging rules by throwing in something completely unrelated, so we’ll see if this sticks or not, but I live in Victoria, MN and love living here. I will write about experiences in the Twin Cities, and in suburbs where I live.

In my next post, I’ll tell you where I am on the web, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn et al.

Tools: I’m using Wordpress.org, a MacBook Pro, a 22 inch flat panel monitor, and, for now, writing my post on the wordpress site.  I’ve got Journler for my Mac but I’m doing something wrong because it was only posting the title.