On that note, if you know of any companies in Vancouver currently looking for someone with a usability/human-computer interaction background, please let me know! I’ve got a few applications in and have had some good interviews, but nothing is finalized yet. I’ve updated my C.V. here on the website, and you can also find me on LinkedIn.

Along with the usual registration stuff like my age and t-shirt size, I was presented with the following question:

POWERBAR QUESTIONNAIRE: Please indicate how important the following benefits are to you when purchasing an energy bar. Please rank from 1-10 with 10 being most important

This was followed by a list of ten drop down boxes, one for each “benefit.” There was also a question about which triathlon focussed magazines I like to read. When I declined to fill out these questions on my first try at registering, I got a page instructing me that I had missed some required questions. If I wanted to register I had to click the back button and fill in answers for all the marketing crap.

I certainly had no intention of being forced to provide this information, so I filled in “dummy” data for both the Powerbar and magazine questions. Now, maybe I’m just a particularly ornery user, but I suspect I’m not all that different from most other people, and that many others did the exact same thing as me.

Required fields certainly have their uses (For example: to ensure collection of necessary information such as name and address; or for use in online surveys that users undertake voluntarily). But forcing your users to provide answers to marketing questions when they are filling out a registration form (and paying a tidy sum for the privilege of registering, at that!) will just cause a whole lot of noise in the data! If the event organizers wanted to collect valid data, they should have made these questions optional, so only those people who wanted to provide valid answers would fill them out.

I attended my first Northern Voice this past Friday and Saturday and had a great time. While blogging and social media aren’t really related to my personal area of study in HCI (I study people collaborating in the same space, rather than online) they are definitely areas of personal interest to me. I met lots of cool local (and not-so-local) bloggers, and saw lots of great talks.

At the conference I also realized that many bloggers aren’t techies like me, and there is definitely a market for someone who could help install WordPress or Drupal, or tweak a blog template to look a bit more original. What’s a reasonable hourly price for a blog software consultant? Because some of the prices I see people being charged for this stuff are crazy! I occasionally help friends with their sites or do a one-off project for a group I am affiliated with, but I am not very good at putting a price on my time. I am also not always the greatest at time management and am worried that freelance work would eat into thesis time. But if I could make it work it might be a good way to share my tech knowledge with others and supplement my grad student income.

Speaking of time management, today I’m trying to get my head back into “thesis” mode, as I need to finish up the final draft of my thesis proposal and put the finishing touches on the ethics application for my upcoming user study. I’m feeling pretty tired and unmotivated, though. I’m still decompressing from the conference, and I’m on day 8 of the d-tox, which is probably contributing to my low energy level. Other than having slightly less energy I’m very happy with the d-tox so far. I’ve been sticking to the list of approved foods (with the exception of a couple vodka-sodas at the Northern Voice opening party) and am feeling pretty good. Only five more days to go!

And earlier this week my father directed me towards an article from this month’s Walrus (registration required): Driven to Distraction.

Wireless devices encourage ill-advised multi-tasking: driving and checking BlackBerrys; talking on the phone and reading email; working on two or more complex projects at once. In corporate meetings, participants discreetly text one another or check email while the boss is talking. University classrooms are now filled with students tapping away at their wireless laptops. They may be focused on a document or a website related to the lecture or they may not. Digital technologies invite disruption and pose a daunting challenge to the possibility of a group of individuals applying their collective attention to a particular chore.

Sound familiar? I know I can identify! The irony of it all is that, in the hopes of streamlining my life I actually add to my interruption by subscribing to RSS feeds for sites such as Lifehacker and 43 Folders.

In fact, there’s a whole industry emerging around the idea of increasing productivity in this age of endless distractions. Somewhere near the bottom of my haphazard to-do list (which is also online, by the way) is my plan to read Getting Things Done – which I’ve bought but not yet looked at. Because though I’ll never be able to eliminate distractions entirely, maybe I can at least learn to better manage them.

The conference in question was CHI 2007. CHI is a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) conference, so it’s all about good design and user interfaces and whatnot… or so one would think.

Given this, it was quite amusing when I was presented with the following two choices when I tried to terminate my reservation:

Did I want to “Cancel”, or “Cancel this Reservation”?

Speaking of meaningless academic research… I’ve also been hard at work prepping my demo for the CSCW 2006 conference, which will be held in Banff next week. I’m excited to be returning to Banff for a visit and in addition to attending the conference I look forward to enjoying some beautiful hikes and possibly a dip in the hot springs.

In lighter news, Dan and I decided to display our geekiness this weekend when we went to two Halloween parties dressed as Battlestar Galactica Raptor pilots. (If you haven’t seen this show, I implore you to visit your nearest video rental store and pick up Season 1. It’s the best sci-fi show on TV today, and possibly the best sci-fi show ever!) Sadly, I didn’t bring my camera with me to the parties, so there is no photographic evidence. I plan to wear my costume again on Tuesday though, so I’ll try to remember to snap a picture then.

Qumana provides a local software interface to pretty much any web-based blogging software you can think of.  

While the software is definitely still a work in progress (they are still working out some bugs) I am impressed with what I’ve seen so far.  I tested it with Blogger and WordPress-hosted blogs, as well as my own installation of WordPress on jkparker.ca, and everything went extremely smoothly. In fact, I’m using it right now to post this entry.

One of the most intriguing features of Qumana is the "drop pad." It’s a small window that sits on your desktop onto which you can drag pictures, text, and other media.  You can then double-click the pad to create a post that contains all of your dropped items

I’m not sure Qumana makes sense for me at the moment – I only have one blog right now, and Qumana’s main draw is the ability to edit multiple blogs in a single interface – So I’m not going to completely abandon my handy dandy WordPress web interface just yet.  But I’m not ruling Qumana out either.