Umamiblog

Day 1: Building hits tram

Day 2: Car hits tram


Day 3: ???

Best comment gets a Ponoko spinning top!

Update: All aboard the failtram

Update #2: UR STILL DOIN IT WRONG (thanks to Bwooce)

Day 3 (or 4): Bus hits tram

I got a chance (like several thousand others) to head to Craft 2.0 last Saturday at the New Dowse. I always enjoy walking around the stalls – the whole event has such a great feel.

First person I bumped into was Sue Quigley, also formerly of Intergen, who was selling her jewelry. “I haven’t got that much left, it has been a good day”. Fantastic.

Moving around I then saw Jeff and got to witness him selling one of his excellent tikis to an eager punter. I think I can now say I’ve witnessed every single phase of Ponoko end-to-end. Brilliant!

Got to say a quick hello to SuperVery Sue who was busy making sure things were running smoothly. Apparently 1000 people had made it through in the first 30 mins alone, at which point the New Dowse people decided to give up counting… Wow.

Grabbed a copy of Hannah and Thomas’ new baby, World Sweet World. The first issue, for autumn, made its debut at Craft 2.0. It looks and feels great, I love the size of the magazine and I really want to try out the beer glass article. I’m quite inspired that they’ve been able to create a magazine in as few as 4 months. Thinking cap is on to work out if/where/how Ponoko could contribute to the next one. Spiffy!

Then on my way out I saw Yana Skala aka Chromatophobic who was also reporting a good day. Can’t wait to see how her Retarded Raven turns out.

Craft 2.0 is simply awesome. If you haven’t been to one yet you really need to make the effort and head out for the next one. It also has sooo much potential – can’t wait to see it grow and develop (when is the online shop coming?).

S and I have been house-sitting for a friend in Hataitai for the month of March. Torture, as you can imagine, having to babysit a view like this (and one very very independent cat) every evening:

This is a timelapse looking over Evans Bay towards Miramar and Wellington Aiport. The lens kept adjusting for the lowering light in bursts which is why the timelapse looks like it’s almost flickering. I was surprised by the amount of activity on the water while playing it back. And if you look really closely you can see the odd plane heading in to land at the airport as well.

Beats staring at the side of another building in town…

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were spent in the Taranaki sunshine while eating, drinking, and listening to a World of Music, Arts, and Dance or Womad for short (I’d been pronouncing it “WO-mad” but some of the locals liked to call it “the WOM-id”).

It was most excellent and the venue was ideal. They’re putting on a world-class event in New Plymouth, trek up one year to check it out.

Highlights were the food, more food, yet more food. Kora, Phoenix Foundation, Neil Finn, and SJD for the locals. Sharon Jones & the Dap-kings, Clube de Balanco, and Beirut for the foreigners.

Woo!
In a few hours our first 10-Day Design Challenge open round draws to a close. We’re experiencing quite a fantastic response. We focused on jewelry or wearable art for our first challenge and looking through the pages of entries I’m blown away with the effort people have put in.

From here 25 are chosen to be made for the invitational round. Then it gets down to the business end with 10 runners up selected, each winning USD$300 and a grand prize awarded to the best overall design for USD$1,000.

It’s still technically possible to enter into the challenge. Start here, then watch the clock… 2.5 hours to go.

Moo!
Moo asked Ponoko to participate in their Moo Egg Hunt, we agreed. They’re running a really cool promotion which involves finding these eggs. Some in the real world, some in the unreal virtual world. Yours truly hid some around Wellytown – I think the photos are too easy and give it away, see for yourself.

Boo!
I’m popping up to Auckland on Thursday for the Auckland Web Meetup to talk about Ponoko. I hope to see some familiar faces. Anyone going along? Anything in particular about Ponoko you’d like to hear about?

Phew!
Then this weekend it’s WOMAD. Anyone else trekking up to the Naki for this?

I never managed to get around to a timely update of the fun I had Webstock. It was, as I’d hoped, a most excellent, inspiring, re-energising and fun conference – just like the first. The crew behind Webstock managed something that isn’t as common as we hope it to be in NZ.. which was to prove it wasn’t a fluke and pull it off for a second time. Well done guys, it’s no easy feat.

My highlights from the conference:

• As I said before Webstock, I couldn’t wait to see Kathy Sierra again. While she did have a hard act to follow, thanks to Damian Conway, it was great to hear her talk again about creating passionate users. Our apps do have aspergers and I’ve been thinking ever since how to include a WTF button in Ponoko. Nobody is passionate about something they suck at.
• Michael Lopp’s presentations on managing design and primal software development were great. Key takeaway for me was the “pony meeting”. Enjoyed talking shit about the iPhone outside Vintage with him at 2am too…
• Damian Conway was freaking awesome, if you only watch one Webstock video (when they are uploaded) it should be this one.
• Tom Coates – “Twitter is a service that displays error messages on the Internet”, “You can never have too much data”.
• Kelly Goto’s getting unstuck was incredibly thought provoking.

My feedback for the conference is fairly similar to some other bits I’ve seen around the place. A ponder at why LukeW and Michael Lopp or Amy Hoy and Dan Cederholm were streamed while Molly Holzschlag wasn’t. No need to mention the Wifi either

Only two more years till the next one, or is it?

Thanks to the ubiquity of things like iPhones and iPod Touchies all trying to connect to the WiFi as well as the usual laptops has meant no internet access for me since my first post this morning. I have been taking notes so the speeches from the afternoon will make it on here… eventually. Some of them were awesome!

Here’s a rather enterprising way a person let others now how he/she felt about the WiFi, cute:

Whoops. Got here way too late this morning and missed the welcome speech plus the first 20 mins of Nat Torkington’s speech. The goodie bag looks great and things around the conference hall look similar to 2006.

Nat Torkington
Nat presented well and only had minor hickups with his presentation with font issues that meant lot of text didn’t make it onto the slides. But he did really well dealing with it and probably had better audience attention because of it.

Nat talked about designing for the future using analogies from Victorian-era England. Strong messages were on measuring, gathering, and analysing data, then acting on it. The key trends he talked about were:

Growth
Growth in computing power just gets soaked up. We will use any addition power we create.

Media
Newspapers are dead and TV is starting to realise they have no control over their content. Journalism on the web (not citizen journalism) and what we’re seeing (more on the data message).

Immediacy
Users expect immediacy. Design for mobile devices! Ubiquity BUT they can be walled gardens.

People
They may be lazy and irrational but learn how they will act and react. Read Mind Hacks by Tim Stafford. Important notes: people focus on short-term gain, fairness, and the thrill of overcoming a challenge for the first time (hedonic adaption). We also overestimate our confidence.

Reality-based
Gather info. Admit you were right/wrong. Act based on the data.

Thoroughly enjoyable speech and a great session to start the conference.

Molly Holzschlag
Molly talked on why web standards aren’t. It was a good presentation on web standards but may have been a bit too focused for the whole audience. Slide design wasn’t necessarily poor but could be improved. Some really good questions were asked such as “have we failed on the ideology or has the ideology failed us?” “Is it standards vs. best practice or standards vs. interoperability?”. Molly has been working with web standards for 10 years!

Shawn Henry
Shawn spoke on making your website shine with accessibility. This was a tough ask with me because I don’t think anyone could beat Darren Fittler’s presso in 06. She used some great examples of people using mouth-sticks to type, or just their thumb. How is their experience compared to you assumptions on how people should use your site? The screen reader demo was good but it doesn’t top watching a blind Darren Fittler use it. Shawn finished with a good call to action – fight the good fight with accessibility.

Hands up who’s heading to Webstock this year? Cool! I’ll see you there.

I’ve been looking forward to Webstock for a long time now and I still question their decision to hold it every two years. But the wait is over and tomorrow the conference proper starts and then wraps up on Friday evening. Sibylle has already attended one of the workshops and she got to show off her goodie bag at work yesterday. They look insanely cool!

I think I’m most looking forward to Kathy Sierra, she was f…ing brilliant last time and I guess I’m not expecting anything less. She is breaking her “silence” at Webstock too. I feel quite honored she chose Webstock to do so.

Last time I tried my best at live-blogging the event and got quite a good response for it. I’ll see how it goes but there is a good chance you’ll see a dozen posts on this neglected blog for the next couple of days.

P.S. I’m still perplexed by that slogan. Are we really coding for freedom?

Dogfood is tasty. Well, sometimes it is.

The weekend just gone S mentioned she wanted to buy a bookcase for a specific nook in our lounge. After a fruitless search through the interior design shops on Thorndon Quay I remembered this cool web start-up I’ve been working at for the last 7+ months where you can make your own stuff!

It was great fun. Actually it was lots of hard work but sooo much more fun than I thought it would be. It spins me out a little that I made my own bookcase (and it works…).

So the process went something like this:

Measure area and scribble down ideas on paper.

Choose a material to work with and get designing in Illustrator. I ended up going for the Double-sided Whiteboard MDF 9mm

Get it laser cut through Ponoko

Get the pieces and peel protective tape off

Tolerance is never perfect first time and it took ages to get the pieces fitting together. A trusty hammer helped a lot…

Putting the pieces together it starts to look like a “real” bookcase.

Slowly the shelves start to build…

Almost complete… just making sure everything is fitting together snuggly… with no glue or screws either!

Here is the bookcase in the nook I had designed it for. It ended up being a whole lot tighter than I though it would be…

Now here is the completed bookcase, in place, and filled up with stuff.

If you like the look of it you can buy one off me or download the .eps file for free, customise it, and make it yourself.

My head is spinning with more Ponoko ideas now…

Girl: Hey, where is the Southern Cross?

Boy 1: On Abel Smith street

Girl: No…

Boy 1: Oh, maybe Wigan then?

Girl: No, no…

Boy 2: Yes it is! Abel Smith!

Girl: No, the Southern Cross. Y’know… the stars…

Boy 1: Oh, it’s that one up there. *points*

 - New Years Eve, Mt Vic

Last weekend we filmed our laser-cutter working on a simple Christmas decoration file we’d been preparing for this Instructable. Seeing the laser cutter in action is a pretty cool experience and it’s something I had wanted share with our users for a while. Kudos to Blair for helping us film it all. Wait no more: