/home/todd

I’ve been meaning to revamp the photography section of this site for a while now; this weekend, I finally found the time to do it. I registered a new domain, straylightphotography.com, and put together a portfolio consisting of my 20 favorite shots (<shamelessPlug>many of which are currently on display at Interzone through February 28th!</shamelessPlug>). I’m hoping to quickly expand the site with themed portfolios (portraits, urban decay, etc.), but… first things first.

Also, the new portfolio has been an excuse to play with CSS3 and jQuery 1.4.  Visitors using Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or Opera should see a site that behaves like it was created with Adobe Flash, but is fully accessible and doesn’t require the proprietary Flash plug-in.  Visitors using Internet Explorer… well… it at least degrades cleanly.  Mostly.

So for the past week I’ve been meaning to write up a description of the general awesomeness that was IUI ’09, but with end-of-term craziness in full force, it’s going to have to wait.  Suffice to say it was a fabulous week full of wonderful people and some fascinating research.  Photos are slowly making their way from my notebook to Flickr, and once the VLHCC ’09 submission deadline passes, the process should speed up.

Speaking of, the past week has flown by as we prepare our paper, and I’m certain the next two will be similar.  Today and tomorrow I’ve eight transcripts to code, plus an abstract to write and a clever title to generate.  Feeling pretty good about it all at this particular moment, though; met up with Andrea at a funky new coffee shop (Vibe) downtown this morning, and ran into her friend Lisa as well.  Now I’m exporting our final transcript video from the lab, then heading home to throw open some windows, put on a kettle, and code until I can code no more (and maybe a bit past that, we’ll see).  The past few evenings have ended with mini-marathons of Series Three Doctor Who, and I’m looking forward to finishing that off late tonight.

Friday I leave for IUI 2009, where I’ll be presenting a formative study about end users debugging machine-learned programs.  This will be my first conference presentation, and I’m about equal parts excited and nervous.  At the very least, I should a chance to head out with my camera in sunny Florida.  I’ve hardly even taken it out of its bag this past month, and that needs to change.

I finally finished running participants for our current research study… now to start analyzing the data.  The paper deadline is March 8th, which feels like it’s approaching rudely fast.  But hey, at least we’re still on track.  I’d been worried that bringing in participants would become a 2 or 3-week nightmare like our last study, which would have pushed things way too close to the deadline.

This weekend I bought Henri T. Cat a new scratching board, which he promptly fell in love with.  Maybe now he’ll leave my couch alone.

Also, yesterday I learned that I’ll be going to CHI 2009 in Boston!  First big conference, eep!

I wasn’t expecting to see snow for a few more days, but tonight Corvallis is being gently blanketed by soft, picturesque flakes.  I ran out to the store as soon as I realized yes, we really were going to get snow tonight, and stocked up on firewood and spiced apple cider.  I should be all set for the next few nights, and then it’s back to Michigan, where I’ll get snow plus blustery winds… while colder than normal here, it still feels pretty calm outside.  I even went out for a bit with my camera and tripod to snap a couple of photos.  Tragically, I discovered that long exposure times don’t lend themselves to rendering the snowflakes softly drifting down from the sky.

The view from my porch

Looking back at my apartment

Today I finished working out the kinks in my new photo album workflow.  The result: all of my photo sets since I moved to Corvallis are now available on the site’s Photography section.  I’m keeping the Flickr site for my best photography, but I’ve had all of these images sitting in Lightroom that I suspect friends would love copies of, so now they’re available.

For the curious, I do all of my photo editing in Adobe Lightroom (and occasionally Photoshop).  Using a heavily-modified version of the TTG Shadowbox Gallery Template, I export each album and upload the static HTML and image files to my server.  Nothing terribly exciting there, but now it gets interesting.  I wanted to have an index page that automatically shows all of my galleries, displaying the most recent first.  TTG supplies an XML AutoIndex module that does nearly everything I want, so I integrated that as my index page and hacked the PHP scripts to include better date and description information.  Finally, I wanted to provide an RSS feed of my photo albums, so people won’t need to constantly visit my website if they’re looking for new photos.  A quick modification to the XML AutoIndex script did the trick, so now you can subscribe to an Atom feed of my photo albums!

Everything seems to be working fine for my on Firefox and Safari.  If anyone notices problems with the photo albums or feed, please let me know.