Is it time to update the blog yet? Might be …

I’ve spoke about accessibility before. To be exact, Jasna, a classmate of mine, and me did a paper on it last semester. The professor liked it. So we decided to publish our paper online (part I, part II). We’ve got some positive feedback on it.

A few weeks ago, the professor offered us to present the paper on a student seminar in Zagreb, Croatia. Naturally, we said yes and are quite excited about it. It’s taking place on October 10th, 10.00. There are going to be a few Croatian and a few Slovenian students speaking on various topics relating to print and interactive media.

Our speech will be in Slovene, but we were told to prepare the slideshow in English. It’s still in its beta stages, but I’ll publish it here when it’s done. For you to know and learn :)

Back home from the north! :)

I’ve visited Tallinn, ate some great pancakes and had a big laugh at the hostel. Totally euphoric.
We continued the trip to Helsinki, where I stayed for 2 weeks, learned a few things about product development, visited Nokia, Tekla and Fortum and spent a really great time with great people.
Then we took the ferry to Stockholm, where we finally got to see the reindeers.

Well, they say a picture is worth a 1000 words, so see the photo gallery for a better description on what was going on.

Farewell, dear readers, I’ll be back in september

SC2008 - Developing good, better and BEST products
(obviously, as the website shows, this course does not deal with web design)

Yet again, it rained. It started off with a terrifying thunderbolt and lightning (very very frightening). This has happened before, at which time I had my camera out and ready in no time.

Lightning strike.

So I wanted to give it another try, but this time keeping the windows closed. I had no luck catching the lightning, so I took a few blank shots. Surprisingly, I’m quite happy with these.

Ideally, there would be a lightning right in the middle of this photo - maybe next time

Since the windows were looking quite nicely with raindrops on them, I decided to take a few more shots. They weren’t turning out all that well, until I decided to fetch my flash. I bounced the light off the ceiling and got some nice photos (kudos to my mom for providing the flowers)

I also experimented with off-camera flash, thanks to Dare, who asked me to take good care of his wireless flash trigger, while he is gone for vacation.

Flesh was resting on the table just bellow the clothespin.

To finish off, I designed a pair of bunny ears out of two clothespins.

I decided sunlight was sufficient for this, so no flash used here.

Naturally, clicking on any of the images will show you a bigger size of the photo.

All in all, it was quite a nice experiment. And I’m very happy with the results. See today’s photos, along with some older ones in my balcony set here.

I haven’t written in a while. Mainly because I didn’t have much to write about, or was just too lazy to do it. So to anyone interested, here are a few bits that have happened to me lately.

I’m done with my 3rd year in faculty. Well, sort of. I still have to collect a few signatures (oh the paper work …). And there’s this little piece of an album I have to do for photography class.
What have I learned this year? Besides the usual, “learn and forget” stuff, two classes stood out:

• Photography - mostly for reviving this old hobby of mine. I couldn’t say I learned much in the class, but it was a good enough reason to buy my first digital camera and go out and shoot. So to anyone who hasn’t seen it, I’m proud to present my photostream. And if you’d like to see me in action, here’s a 5 am shot :).
• Typography - For a while now, I’ve wanted to devote some time to the art of type. So this class came in quite handy. For a change, the lectures were great, thanks to Klementina Možina, who introduced typography to us students. But I guess I still have much to learn and have to change a few of my writing habits in order to claim “I can do typography”.

While talking faculty, I am also being exhibited throughout the summer, along with a few colleagues at the typography class. The works being shown are my study calendar and the corporate identity for Fora d. o. o.. So if you find yourself in a big purple building, see my works in the 2^nd or 3^rd floor (not sure where exactly). Here’s my version of the invitation poster, which was sadly too poor to be exhibited. Come to think of it, I have another version, which I’m not too ashamed to show here.

For those who’ve seen my post Introducing web accessibility, let me point out that the 2^nd, more technical part has been published as well. The first part has gotten a lot of feedback - from the “I don’t wanna do it, it takes time and brings no money”, to the “Hey thanks, this is what we all needed”. Strangely enough, the second part has gotten almost no feedback. Maybe not provocative enough? Should I take is as a good thing, that no one has anything to complain about it?

And what’s new on the www scene? Let’s see that in an unordered list …

• Some influential British people started laying out a standard for accessibility. Hooray for that. I wonder how many referendums we would need to get that in Slovenia …
• Opera presented a Web Standards Curriculum, a series of articles to help beginners as well as more experienced developers to understand HTML better. I only skimmed trough the articles, but didn’t fully agree with them in some aspects. In short - I don’t fully agree with strict doctype being the only rational choice, not until we get an alternative to target=”_blank”. And yes, I know you and me don’t need it, but I can assure you that my aunt needs it, as not to lose that page she was reading. Nevertheless I do recommend reading these articles.
• It’s still too early to use the modern web technologies, like css 3, alpha transparency in png files, svg, …, since a bunch of people are still using the 7-year old IE6.
• Firefox, Opera and Safari are coming along quite nicely in delivering fine browsers. Seems like the competition is doing us all a great favor.

To finish of, I’d just like to link to a blog I’ve found recently (but has been running for a while). It’s the Photoshop disasters blog. It’s quite fun to read but also teaches you about some common mistakes you should be aware of when photoshopping.

A bunch of irrelevant thoughts thrown into one post. It’s just my way of saying “don’t blog about every stupid thing that happens in your life”. Blog about five of them together ;)

I’ve written about working on an accessibility paper before. It’s been finished, presented and liked. Me and Jasna (who I did the paper with) then decided to give more people a chance to read it. Why? Cause we want more people to be aware of the whole accessibility case. So Primoz at Slo-Tech agreed to publish the article. We did a few modifications, made some hyperlinks and split it into two parts for easier understanding. First part therefore deals with introducing the trouble some people are having at browsing the web and the second part is aimed at the web developer who wants to make accessible websites. Second part is still being worked on, but you can read the first part

Dostopen splet I
The thing is in Slovene, so sorry to anyone not fluent in the language.

You can also read the discussion the article has started.