Dave Page

Karin from work and I attended a one-day course, Presenting Data and Information, by Edward Tufte at the Hyatt Regency Chicago.

I had read some of his stuff a year or two earlier, tried to go to the Chicago course, and our crack clerical staff missed the deadline and it was full. So here we go! Long walk from Metra station to E Wacker Drive. But nice. Good weather. Nice walk.

Showed up, found our way thru the rabbit warren, and registered. We were issued a heavy cardboard box of 4 of ET’s books, and a homework assignment for reading before the class started. I grabbed a Starbucks from the lobby, and off we went.

Big room, lots of people, and not a lot of personal space — typical seminar. We plopped down and read. ET held “office hours” for autograph seekers and questions before, at lunchtime, and afterwards. When does the guy go potty?

The course itself was interesting. The guy is a great speaker, engaging and interesting. The time flew by. He showed 16th century books as examples of books and graphics as timeless art. Neat.

We did the fast 15-minute lunch at Houlihan’s next door. In and out quick, I had a nice chicken wrap, but by the time you walk there, eat, and return it was time to get going again. And the Starbuck’s went away in the PM.

Most of the items listed on the list of items to be covered were indeed covered. The final items were design of information displays in public spaces and design of computer interfaces and manuals. These were the items we were interested in. We got some of the kiosk discussion, but I don’t think we got much of the design of interfaces and manuals. NOTE: I found a review of Visual Explanations with references to Web development, but upon review, it is good stuff, but not a cookbook, more a philosophy.

Tufte manages to get everything important about Web design onto pages 146 through 149 of this book: let the information become the interface, use text rather than icons, don’t let the Web site mimic the bureaucratic structure of the publisher. The most remarkable thing is that he wasn’t even writing about the Web!

On the way home, got some combo cheese-and-caramel corn from the Garrett’s popcorn kiosk in the Metra station. Made a nice snack for us later.

Summary: Good course. Neat to see the 16th century books. If you read and have the books, probably a waste of time and money. If you don’t do technical presentations with lots of tables trying to prove things, (like us) perhaps limited use. But hearing “KISS” once more can be a good thing. And bashing PowerPoint is always fun.

• One-day course, 380 USD per person.
• Includes:
• Visual Explanations
• Envisioning Information
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
• Beautiful Evidence

So when I try to use the latest Gallery Remote 1.5 I get an error message:

Error: http post failed (http 404 not found)

Using Wireshark to sniff the request from GR:

POST /gallery_remote2.php HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Gallery Remote 1.5
Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip, x-gzip, compress, x-compress
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-length: 59

cmd=login&protocol_version=2.3&uname=XXX&password=XX


The response:
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found

So it seems to be looking for a file called gallery_remote2.php. I don’t have it.

Went to see Katherine as a bird girl in Seussical at Wheeling High School. The show was good, the costumes were great, and it was fun to see Kat up there. I am constantly amazed at how talented high school kids are.

Note: see the “Horton Hears a Who” movie or read it and “Horton Hatches an Egg” or you won’t know what is going on. We saw Horton in FL on vacation…good thing.

OK so they warned me. They moved to a new Linux platform, and Subversion stopped working.

I used my own instructions to rebuild. No good. Errors.

After some Googling I found an article by Nick Sergeant and he basically had the same routine. But he dumped 1&1. I can’t afford to now.

So I tried the latest subversion 1.4.6. Looks like it built. Will it update WordPress and Gallery?

WordPress: yes. Gallery: probably. Looks like we are in business.

Why can’t 1&1 at least provide a subversion client?

I just bought another ergonomic mouse, an Air02bic Quill mouse.

I liked the Evoluent mouse, but its biggest problem is that you drag your hand on the surface of the table. Makes it hard to move. I wondered about attaching a base to it to prevent that problem.

The folks at Designer Appliances beat me to it. The AirO2bic mouse nestles your hand so it doesn’t even touch the table. It’s a little weird, because it almost feels like your wrist cannot move — like in a cast. I think it will take some getting used to it. The position of the mouse pad ($10 extra, but huge) seems more critical.

But you know, if my pen pad still worked on Windows XP/64, I would still use that. To me, the pen control is the ultimate controller.

Vendor: aerobicmouse.com

Bought from thehumansolution.com

Took a break from the TDI Dance Competition in which the Woodstock High Poms — sorry, Dance Team, old habits die hard — did great (to our eyes) in AAA Pom. While in Geneva, we hopped over to pick up Bette’s mom, and headed over to Honey, a new nouveau diner in the Glen Ellyn downtown area.

You walk in the corner door from the -5 wind chill and it feels like a bakery. Case with food in the front, welcoming people behind the counter. A hostess seated us. Ceiling old school tin, very sparse decorating, track lighting. Lots of wait staff in crisp white t-shirts.

We quickly got coffees - bottomless, strong and good. The menu had lots of good looking things. One was a special oatmeal, cooked then fried in a pan. Lots of good salads, sandwiches. Had to pick one.

I ordered the breakfast burrito with sausage ($8.95). Bette had the veggie burger (8.95) with fries on the side ($2.95). Grace had the steak sandwich ($12.95).

After 20 mins and another cup of coffee, the waitress brought out the two orders of fries, explaining the steak was taking a long time. We nibbled on them, they were wonderful, with some crusty salt thing and a hint of rosemary. They were, however, trending toward cold, but not cold enough to complain. They must have been sitting there waiting for the sandwiches. The table next to us spilled a huge hot chocolate and moved over and we watched them clean it up.

In all, a nice place with a good breakfast. A welcome change from the usual.

Honey 499 N Main St, Glen Ellyn, IL‎