Details are sketchy right now, but there’s a very good possibility I could be doing some overseas travel, shooting video at a conference. In Abu Dhabi. Next week.
I would very much like to hone my videoography skills in a foreign country.
This week I had the opportunity to attend An Event Apart, a top-level design conference for people who work on the web. The founders are two people I still look up to after almost 20 years in the business, Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer. The speakers talked on a wide range of topics. Zeldman did the keynote, which was an overview of and advice about working in the business. There were speakers on accessibility, site testing, new tools and techniques, and design philosophies. (It’s somewhat heartening to see that nobody has yet been able to figure out how to move away from the 3-designs-5-sizes-and-a-million-comps model two years after I left the biz).
Monday night we were treated to craft beer at Caboose, a new microbrewery featuring the former brewmaster from Heavy Seas, courtesy of Facebook. Somewhat apprehensive about mingling, I drove to the venue and found my way inside, and after dropping my name in a hat and grabbing a beer (a delicious IPA), I found some folks to talk to and wound up having a very good time. Here’s to getting out of the comfort zone. And it just so happened that I won my very first door prize after 20 years: a set of very nice brush pens, a calligraphy set, and a book.
I told Jen it was the kind of focused experience I really could have used in 2011 or so to re-energize; One speaker alone shared knowledge about current features of HTML5 to alter the way I approach design and building, and another shared 5 new tools for building and testing I might never have known about. Overall, there was enough knowledge to make the conference more than worthwhile even though I’m not directly involved in the business anymore; my job demands that I stay current, and this was a good way to check back in.
I’m about 4 days behind at work (a combination of the conference and one of my designers being on vacation) so it’s hard not to feel some guilt for going, but I’m very grateful for the experience, and conferences like this are something I’ll be pushing for in future years for my staff and I.
My Hamilton watch is on its way to Secaucus, New Jersey this evening. I was in the shower last week and pulled my towel off the sink, carrying my watch onto the floor, where it stopped working. From what Rob tells me, high-quality mechanical (winding) watches are delicate beasts; the spring and moving parts are held together by millimeters and don’t respond well to shock. While I won’t hide the fact that I’m disappointed, I suppose it’s understandable.
Hamilton is owned by the Swatch Group, who also own the high-end brands Breguet, Longines, and Omega, among others, but their service procedures are straight out of the back of a comic book: You mail your watch to a nonspecific address and hope it gets there, then pray someone acknowledges receipt. No RMS number, no automated service; no way of notifying them you’re sending your expensive timepiece in advance. I’ve had better returns service from counterfeit sidewalk vendors in New York City.
Rob still has my Field Watch, and promises to get to it when he’s not pulling so much overtime. I miss old faithful.
At WRI, I’ve been working on a web project, which has been a lot of fun: I’m building a workflow to port all of the content from an InDesign file to HTML. I’ve been pushing to get all of our reports online in mobile-ready format, and built a template version using an open-source framework, a handful of jQuery tools, and some elbow grease. I’ve figured out how to get inDesign to spit out basic formatted HTML that gets pasted into the template, cutting back on the tedious work of formatting tables and boxes. The most time-consuming element now is formatting live charts, but I’m tempted to just use images. It’s been a lot of fun, having been away from pure web production for two years, to dive back in and get my hands dirty. I remember more than I give myself credit for, and after some initial roadblocks I got a lot of new technologies hooked up and working correctly. Not bad for an old man.
From the ever-informative Kottke.org, a Medium article with 9 excellent book recommendations on information visualization that aren’t written by Tufte. My Amazon budget for this month is blown.
I just got word last night that the Carbon Emissions interactive we built won another award– Best Entry from a Small Newsroom Under 25 People from the Global Editors Network, in their 2015 Data Journalism Awards.
I drove up to the mountains of southwest Pennsylvania today to shoot a series of videos for our Forest team at a retreat. I’m exhausted from the work but I have to say it was one of the most enjoyable days I’ve spent at my job in a while. The technical demands of setting up, adjusting, and shooting digital video with sound are difficult, made even more interesting when you add hiking through the woods and unpredictable weather to the mix (it was mostly sunny, but the mixture of clouds and howling wind through the valley made consistent lighting and sound challenging). I got six two-camera interviews in the can, with a small amount of B-roll and some solid ambient sound recording. I met a bunch of people, from new additions to foreign-based members, and learned about the possibility of some overseas travel. After we wrapped for the day, they fed us dinner with an excellent choice of beer and dessert, and then we played an epic game of kickball on the 18th hole fairway.
Huh, I missed this when it was published back in January, but it appears we’re in great company: 15 Data Visualizations That Will Blow Your Mind.
Hey, look! I’m internet famous for a day: The On Think Tanks interview with Bill Dugan. This is about the interactive piece we did for the Guardian a while back.
Here’s a video I shot and produced for my colleague Forbes outside the Capitol Building a few weeks ago. He talks about how climate change has directly affected he and his family. Everything was great except for the gust of wind on his mic at the very end.
Um, they didn’t contact me directly to mention it, but we kinda won this data visualization contest. I emailed the organization to get more details. Apparently there was a cash prize?