I’ve been on this new project at work which is giving me the opportunity to work in Blend again (YAY!!  It’s been a while, I’ve been the queen of html/css lately – that’s right, I’m royalty!  )

So, working on this project – I could open the solution in Blend and Visual Studio, could build in Visual Studio, but in blend?  Nope.  I’d been plagued with this error message.  This was really screwing with my work because some of what I was doing NEEDED for me to build the project.

The error message looked like this:

After getting any updates I could find for Expression Blend 4, which took 2 hours to install, I was still experiencing this issue.  *sigh*

Thanks to this post on stackoverflow, I was able to get past this and actually build my project!  The two options:

• Delete the conflicting environment variable “Platform” in “Control Panel — System — Advanced — Environment Variables”. Restart Blend and give it a try (maybe you have to restart your computer to make this work).
• If this does not help: With the registry editor (Start — Run — “Regedit.exe”) go to key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment and selected the key Platform. Delete the value BNB. If you do not find the specified key, try repacing “CurrentControlSet” with “ControlSet001″, this worked for in one case, too. Then restart your computer.

Option 1: here didn’t seem to be anything related which would come into conflict, so I went for option 2.  Found platform and removed the BNB value and restarted.  Tadah!

Support the outcry to not let this bill pass

… this video hit my funny bone in a way that makes me want to post it here on my blog.  I had nothing to do with this video, but it is so well done…

That it needs space here on my blog.  Enjoy!

Let me paint the scene

The other day, I was walking down the hallway with a few of my coworkers to get a cup of coffee.  One of the people I was with said something, and I responded back, but one of the words that I said was a bit off.  The beginning of the word was right, but the end… not so much.

… and then, a theory walked in.

I’ve found myself doing this quite often as of late and it seems to be occurring more and more frequently.  In my head, I find that I am already thinking of something else by the time I speak and so I am losing track of what I was trying to say.  After talking to my sister about this phenomenon, she came up with a pretty solid theory.

She thinks that it’s autocomplete’s fault… and I think she might be right!

Autocomplete – its being used more and more everywhere, from typing on my iPhone, to generating search result terms.  Even facebook and twitter use autocomplete.

So where does this lead?  I can’t imagine that I’m the only person who has experienced this.  What I do wonder is if this is even more of an issue for individuals who are glued to their devices more so than I am.  I do search a lot and use my phone, but I am also off the computer often enough to have meaningful conversations with my husband and to play with my kids… daily(I know… I know… I need to cut them off, right?  But I can’t!  Their faces… they’re just so darn cute.  How can a person say no to those faces?!).  I even cook and exercise!  So what about those other… more normal computer and device users?  Did they somehow get an upgrade?  Or… oh, I have a better theory.  Maybe they just don’t talk any longer.  Maybe they mind meld with each other.  That’s got to be it.

Progress!

Either way, it’s an interesting issue to have.  Does anyone know when “they’re” going to upgrade the autocomplete scripts in my head?  They seem to be pulling up the wrong words lately.  I wonder if the project lost its funding…

I don’t really mind advertisements on the sides. Facebook is an incredible resource which we use daily and its free for us to use, but somebody’s got to pay for the servers and employees who provide updates and security patches along with many other resources. Advertisements are a necessary evil.

Sometimes, there’s something that I really like advertised on the side, so I click. Maybe that’s stupid of me, but I want to see that item, see how much it costs, etc.

The thing that gets me is that I cannot actually FIND the item in the picture. This devalues the… value… of the advertisement. If I click, I expect to find what I’m clicking upon. The image did grab my attention far more than the words (i.e. human nature).

What I’d really like is to have the ability to FIND the object in the image. This object may be far outside the price range that I’m willing to spend. Maybe it will be exactly what I’d expect for the object to cost. Either way, I want to find said object and have the option to buy it, see reviews, read comments about it, etc.

I don’t think I’m asking for much. What it really comes down to is relevancy.

If you are a company who is providing advertisements to bolster the attraction to your business, please do your potential customers a favor and provide relevant imagery to represent your business. This not only will bolster the attractiveness of your products, it will also increase customer loyalty and trust.

This project is…  - well, I can’t talk much about it (yet), but what I can say is that I’m very excited to see its launch and the potential progress throughout the future as it gets bigger and more people get excited and start using it.

One of the challenges faced, you might guess by my title, the use of a custom font.  Now, this isn’t a “new” thing across the web, quite a number of places do this – that being said, its not as common knowledge as one might think.  There are plenty of places out there which talk about how to do it, what can and cannot be done, etc. but I find that there are gross contradictions from one article and/or blog to the next.

I’m always up for a new challenge, but it seems that each time I find myself hunting after something which initially seems simple, it becomes quite complicated.

After much searching, I was able to locate a great resource that cleared a great deal of the fog.

Back in 2009, Scott Kimler posted on his family/personal blog  xBrowser Fonts

My goodness did his post help me a lot.  Between his post and a few others which elaborated on a few points that his touched on, I set forth to tackle this and wipe it out!

Here’s some of what I learned:

1. Don’t use Microsoft’s eot font generator – the file it creates is quite large and can only be used where you set its allowance to – as in if you didn’t think about every last place its going to be used, it won’t work… for IE browsers, that is.  The other browsers don’t support EOT fonts
   • Instead, use EOT Fast – it’s easy to use.  just download it, unzip it, and then grab whatever font you want and drop it, literally, on top of the install file.  Vwalla, instant font creation.
   • btw: I feel that kudos should go out to microsoft for having an option for so long while other browsers only just  recently caught up to the wave of font embedding desires.
2. TTF rules all – just about the rest of the browsers, except for IE, accept true type fonts
3. Include the others: SVG for mobile, WOFF, for older mozilla browsers, and OTF – for just in case
4. Syntax is EVERYTHING – if even just the tiniest misstep is made, it won’t freakin’ work.  It might for one browser, but it won’t for the rest.  This includes using the proper case for the format types.  The mac and firefox (on Windows 7) are quite particular about the proper casing of OpenType and TrueType.
   • @font-face {
     font-family: “My Super Font”;
     src: url (‘fonts/superfont.eot’);
     src: local(‘Super Font’), url (‘fonts/superfont.otf’) format(‘OpenType’);
     src: local(‘Super Font’), url (‘fonts/superfont.svg’) format(‘SVG’);
     src: local(‘Super Font’), url (‘fonts/superfont.ttf’) format(‘TrueType’);
     src: local(‘Super Font’), url (‘fonts/superfont.woff’) format(‘WOFF’);
     font-weight: normal;
     }
     .thisnewclass {
     font-family: ‘My Super Font’,Arial,Verdana,Sans-Serif;
     }
5. It CAN work cross platform, including on a mac! (more on this in this blog)
6. Without bringing in any jquery, you can have control over BOLD and ITALIC in your css
   • Notice how the example in #4 has the font-weight: normal?  What you can do is create essentially the same @font face (a second time), stick with the same font-family name, and have the call to the exact file location change to the specific font file   (often, its the same font name with a b added to the end of it’s name for bold and i for italic) then set the font-weight to:bold or :italic. �

      

     This will give you control in your css to call 1 font family, but to designate the font weight being bold, italic, or normal.  If you are desiring numeric weights, you’ll have to specify that in the @font-face rather than using the words “normal” “bold” or “italic”

All of that after quite a lot of hunting.  There are some great tools out there to assist in creating the different file types.  I’ll let you do some google or bing searching to discover them if you really want – just do a search for “embed font creator” or “embedded font generator” and you’ll find several options to choose from.

Currently, I’m faced with a perplexing issue.  As much as I can get all of these things to work across browser on a static piece, I’m running into troubles getting this to work when using a css tree system while deploying to Azure.  It could be the font, as it is a commercial font, or it could be azure, but I’ve gone through much trial and error  to get cross-platform viewability to work.  I’d assume that its not a font issue:  I was able to use the same font files, create a static file, and get those to work and view perfectly on a mac, but once deploying to azure…. no dice.  They instead revert to a font that’s stuck in perpetual BOLD mode.

I’ll continue hunting for a solution to this issue.  If I find that solution, I will update this blog post with the details.

I’ve recently been working on a lot of IA and am finding myself coming back to the essential contents on this post.  Along with this is the discussion between alignment of said buttons and orientation.

So many interfaces (including mobile devices) differ in the placement.  Even the organizational order of which comes first first next, if it’s left, center, or right aligned – all of which seem to differ.  I remember the other day being confused at the store when the touch-device upgrade changed where the buttons were… I ended up accidentally canceling a transaction because they moved the cancel button to where the enter previously was!  Do they really think everyone reads the buttons every single time?

A blog that I’ve read on a few occasion points to a very strong opinion on this based on user tracking Why ‘OK’ buttons … best on the right .

I feel that it comes down to contextual consistency.  There are some cases where anything which is a “moving forward” action item is on the left, at which point, that platform has made a consistent effort to instill the expectation for the user to locate anything which requires action to be placed in its own space on the left, as though the person was reading and moving to the next line.

Then there is the windows phone 7 platform.  This one goes all over the map, but always within the means of contextual navigation.  Related actions which bring you to new screens are centered and to the bottom.  Specific navigation within the context of the content delivered on the screen (such as going to contacts and then touching someone’s name to get to their profile) is directly delivered in-line, while sections of globally related content are a slide/pan left or right (think of a top-menu navigation on the web.  This would be a series of globally related content items – they relate to the website and support its purpose… hopefully).

Then there are installations of applications – this one is where I get my pantyhose in a bunch where the windows platform is concerned.  Every application seems to take a different direction.  Some have the buttons side by side, aligned to the right, but with the “next” button first and the “cancel” second.  Some have those buttons flipped, some have the next button all the way on the left where the cancel is all the way on the right…

There are so many variations!  Personally, it makes sense to me that if I’m going to the next screen, that I’ll look for the next button to be directionally placed – to the far right.  Where the cancel button is can differ, but this is where wayfinding comes in.  We as human beings use a whole lot of wayfinding metaphors.  They make the best sense considering where we’ve come from on an evolution sort of way.

What do you think?  Should there be a standard regardless of platform?  Is it contextual?  How would you make that decision if you were the one with the power to instill that decision – or do you even think about it?

I don’t believe I’ve put it off for TOO terribly long, but I did continue to push the “update later” button until this morning.

Most of the time, when I update, I hardly pay much attention to the message by the Firefox reps regarding the update.  I’m just wanting to use the browser and consider the frequent updates to be a bit too frequent.  I understand, security risks are a factor as well as patching performance issues and implementing new user experience features, yadda yadda yadda.  By the time I finally push that button to update, I’m getting more than just 1 update, and am just looking for the notification to please just stop asking me to upgrade.  I’ve posted before about my disdain towards too frequent software patches, so I won’t go deeply into that topic here.

Like I said before, the button was pressed to update Firefox and for some unfathomable reason, I paid attention to their little welcome message illustrating what this update was about… and glad I am of that!

Being a creature of habit, I tend to go to the same places when browsing - so this new tabs group thing is very nice.

Whomever it was that came up with the idea to integrate this functionality into Firefox - should be given some serious kudos.  If they're seattle based, maybe the company can pay for their parking for a month or something.

Anyway, I thought it worth mentioning.  Kudos to Firefox and maybe kudos to their messaging or marketing team who made the upgrade details screen stand out in such a way that I actually was inclined to pay attention.

This week and the last, there have been quite a number of security checks to verify that all who are riding the train have paid for their trip.

First, I’ll explain how it works

Essentially, when you take the train, you do so by 1 of 2 main ways.  You get a current-day ticket at the kiosk, or you have an Orca card.  There are several ways to have your Orca card loaded with money.  This Orca card works much like a lot of company’s security doors, where you touch the card to a reader, and it beeps at you confirming that it read your card (or gives you one of 3 warning beeps which have different meanings, from a low balance to an error reading the card).

There are several different styles of beeps and it even has a visual display to tell you what’s up if you get an error type of a beep.  When you exit the train, you again scan your card.  If you don’t scan it when you get to your stop, then you are charged for the entire trip, which can get pretty spendy.  In the end, you pay for the distance of travel.

My commute costs me about $4.25 each way.

When security checks happen, there are guys who walk around with a hand-held reader and they go around and either check for a current-day boarding pass, or they scan your Orca to verify that you touched the card reader before boarding the train.

There are ways to circumvent the system to get a free ride.  If these guys aren’t doing security scans, you might get away with boarding the train and going the entire trip free of charge.  For the commuting train and buses to continue running, it’s kind of important to pay though… or we’ll be stuck driving on the freeway, getting stuck in traffic, having to pay twice if not three-times as much for parking, and increasing our carbon emissions among other things.

The toad on the road caused a fuss on the bus train…

Well, there was a guy who accidentally double-scanned sitting in one of the seats directly behind me.  (Double-scanning: scan the first time and then scan again, it cancels the transaction.) This caused quite the ruckus on the train.  The guy didn’t cause a lot of commotion, I think it was likely an honest mistake, but the lady next to him got quite irritated and started this very loud conversation which lasted the rest of the train ride about how the system is broken and how the security guys are going way over-board by double-checking two and three times a week, and that the only reason they’re doing all of this is to get their hands on as much money as possible.  Her tone basically was saying, “How DARE they try to make so much money from these poor innocent people who ride the public transportation system.”

…

What the heck is wrong with making money?  These people are providing a great service, they’re likely in debt because it costs quite a LOT of money for them to go through and put the system together, to fix up tracks which hadn’t been maintained for so long, to put together parking lots, new bus lines for commuters, park & rides, and provide a system for people to easily and affordably get to and from work.  Then there are maintaining what they built, operational costs, … the list goes on and on.

If my 1-way ticket costs $4.25, and out of 200-500 people on the train, if even 2% of these people don’t pay, by accident or on purpose, with trains running every 30 minutes, the public transportation system will certainly be missing out on precious dollars which they need to maintain the transportation, as well as pay for people to be employed.

If they can manage to actually make a profit… Good For Them!

Sadly, I doubt they are making any profit – which means that these security checks are that much more important.  The lady really bugged me.  I really don’t understand why its such a bad thing to make money…

If someone knows why making money is a bad thing, please enlighten me.

On the note of the back and forth where contradictions are flying left and right depending on what you read, I figure that this stuff should fall under the same darn rule as much everything else – let’s be safe rather than sorry.  I feel that my kids are the most important beings in my life and it just kills me to think of what they would go through if they were to lose either their mother (me) or their father to illness or accident.  Because of this, we try our best to eat right, fit time for fitness into our lives, filter our water best way we can, and provide safe environments for us and our kids.  This deodorant thing is just another step in that direction.

Just a tiny bit on the “science” and your body’s reaction.  Deodorants that I’m familiar with use these aluminum bases.  A person’s body reacts in such a way that it causes our skin to swell a bit.  This swelling causes the pores to be closed off which prevents the leaking of sweat from those pores.  Something about this doesn’t sound right though… I’ve known individuals who perspire a little TOO much, but should all of us be preventing our body’s built-in cooling system from at least trying to do its job?  I’d rather something that can absorb and neutralize any scent rather than shutting down my body’s ability to vent water from my pores.

So the experiment is on.

To give you an idea of who I am and my body-type, I’m a petite woman, around 120Lbs (~55 Kgs) standing at 5ft 3inches.  I’m moderately active, and I have just started commuting to and from the work place which includes about 15 minutes of walking, plus break-time walks around work.  When I’m at home, yard work happens and I do enjoy going shopping from time to time – I don’t want to go all-natural, no deo.  I don’t want to nor do I want anybody else to “smell my pits”.

My husband is going along with this  experiment too, and he’s not petite like me, standing at 6ft 3inches, not as fit, but not overweight either (not telling you his weight because I frankly don’t know it).  He feels that he’d like a little muscle toning and a little less around the middle.  I think he looks healthy – not close to “fat” at all.

We are both human, and we perspire, especially when we exercise or get a bit warm.

So that’s us.

So far, I’ve tried 4 brands deo alternatives.

Tom’s of Maine natural deodorant

I’ve tried 2 different Tom’s deodorants, and they’re not bad… but I’m finding the need to use the stick about every few hours (or else…)  My under-arms aren’t liking it too much either.  Whenever I apply this, I’m feeling a bit of a razor-burn even though I have none.

Though this does work, it’s not what the label says, “Long Lasting” or maybe it is?  Perhaps their measurement of time isn’t the same as mine?  Maybe their previous line only lasted 30 minutes?  By that measurement, 3ish hours truly IS “long”.  My husband had a different scent of Tom’s, and didn’t need to use it quite as frequently as me.  He got about 4 – 4.5 hours.  Not too shabby.

For me… Tom’s just isn’t cutting it.

Jason Natural - Deodorant with Aloe Vera

Jason Natural Deodorant – with Aloe Vera

This line of deodorants is fairly extensive.  This gave me a good feeling.  If they’re successful enough to sell more than 1 scent, perhaps… perhaps these guys are onto something.  So I picked up their main product – their aloe vera stick.  This had a pleasant but not too strong scent and seemed to go on pretty smoothly.

Sadly, 3-4 hours later, after several days of use, and I’m having to reapply… and the B.O. is worse than Tom’s.  Gladly, I didn’t have the same “Razor Burn” feeling when wearing this, it felt nice – but was a dud… for me.

Jason’s deo didn’t do the trick for me.

Nature's Gate - Spring Fresh

Nature’s Gate – Spring Fresh

While I was trying the Jason brand deodorant, my husband was trying the Spring Fresh scent put out by Nature’s Gate – partly because to me, it had a scent which wasn’t really “spring”… it smelled almost like a really light good smelling cologne.

Nature’s gate is a brand which I’ve used in the past for lotions and they were quite nice, so I had hope… but the price point being around the $4 mark made me a bit leery.  It seems that most natural products of quality, tend to be more pricy (but they also last a whole lot longer than the standard consumer product, so it makes up for the cost).

This stuff, for him, was  a no-go.  Part of it, he’s not a “gel” type of deo guy.  It was odd to him.  He’s used to and prefers the stick.  So he maybe didn’t use enough – or it just wasn’t right, but after 3 days of use, he said that it gave him only 3 hours of protection and he had to run out to the car to re-apply another “smearing” of deodorant to keep the B.O. away.

I didn’t give it a try, so I can’t say whether it works for me… for my husband, the frequency of use was a deal-breaker.

Arm & Hammer Essentials - Natural Deodorant

Arm & Hammer Essentials – Natural

At this point, I’m beginning to wonder if we’re going to find anything that works.  There are still quite a number of brands out there, but the best we could find at this point was Tom’s.  My husband had been to the doctor who asked about the rash on the skin in his armpits… he hadn’t been feeling the “burn”, but his skin still wasn’t reacting well to the deodorant’s contents.

I was grocery shopping and just took a glance while at Top Foods.  I saw that Arm & Hammer had a deodorant.  I trust their brand for a myriad of reasons and use baking soda for cleaning, drain unclogging, and cooking, and also use their toothpaste after reading in a dental magazine article about their brand being the only consumer brand which doesn’t scratch up enamel in their whitening line of products.

So… I had a bit of hope.  They had several different ones – but I picked up the one which said it didn’t have aluminum and parabins.

First day… it was so-so.  4 hours in, and I needed to reapply.  But day 2, I applied a bit more carefully in the morning and went the entire day.

With my personally success, I told my husband.  So he gave it a try, and on the first day, he had all-day success!

The WINNER!

So that’s that!  Arm & Hammer, you’ve won me over, yet again.  I love your products and will continue to use your natural alternative to the standard consumer deodorant.  But Arm & Hammer… why oh why did you stop selling your chewing gum?  I miss it.  It was the only gum that I could chew which didn’t hurt my jaw.  Bring it back!

For those of you who are looking to do the same, I hope my quest helps your discovery process.  If anybody that I work with is reading this… well… maybe you didn’t want to know about my little secret experiment.

Too late!