No! Not that kind of Brain Hacking, though I do hope for superpowers....

I have two goals I really need to get started on stat: losing weight via healthy eating and exercise and tapering my spending on clothing.

I started my exercise kick in college when I realized my teenage metabolism had waned and my current diet, featuring wine, liquor, and various cheeses was not doing much to keep me slim. I started running, little bits at first, but by the end of my senior year, I was cruising around for nearly 45 minutes to an hour per day. I loved the stuff! I started swimming in graduate school and then did some triathlons, but when I moved to Pittsburgh, the land of “moar fries on my salad plz” and “The gym, you do that?” I lost my diet/exercise support system and gained almost thirty pounds.

An extra thirty pounds meant that none of my clothes fit. After racking up a sizable Ann Taylor credit card bill and then spending my bored, unemployed time on Modcloth, I realized I needed a change for the sake of my bank account.

So therein lies my challenge: lose the weight to fit into all my old clothes without my old support system and stop spending money on clothes which, admittedly, has always plagued my finances.

I have instituted a personal policy that I am really hopeful will help me achieve both of these goals. My baseline goal for exercising and losing weight is in two parts. I have to exercise and eat right five days per week. Weekends are pretty optional.

But sometimes it is really really hard to go to the gym or hit the sidewalks when your boyfriend is working late and you just want to read another chapter of A Song of Ice and Fire (shit, that series is addicting). Other times, it’s really, really hard to deny that chocolate chip cookie when all you have to look forward to is three more hours of debugging a mobile style sheet. But, I have to do both of those things to lose the thirty pounds I’ve added to myself and the goal of weight loss just isn’t enough of a motivator.

Now, let’s introduce the spending problem. I can tell myself all I want that I will not click on that Modcloth tweet and buy dresses, or that even if I do click, I won’t buy anything, because I totally will you goddamn effective marketers.

For the record, I’m picking on them because a good portion of my discretionary income goes straight to them. I might as well just set up a direct deposit account for them at this point. To say I’m a fan of their adorable, quirky dresses is an understatement. I’m like the Tom to their Summer and I have 500 days to quit them. I have tried to set a monthly budget, but I stuck to that like those dudes trying to scale the Wall (ASOS nerds, you know what I’m talkin ’bout).

Catelyn, I love you so much and I know, I need to save and prepare for Winter.

In order to hack my brain, I have assigned a point value to dieting and exercising that directly corresponds to the amount of money I can spend on Modcloth. For the five days a week I need to exercise and eat well, I will gain 2 points for exercising and 1 point for sticking to my trainer approved diet.

I will also gain an additional 2 points for exercising and one free eating right on the other two days, but those days aren’t mandatory.

Now, my friend Kevin came up with an even better suggestion, not only will I gain points for every day I do exercise and eat right, I must lose double that amount of points if I do not exercise or eat right on the five days I’m supposed to. This means, I would lose 4 points if I didn’t exercise and 2 points if I didn’t eat well. His rationale was that instead of gambling for 3 points per day, I’d actually be gambling for 9 and it would make skipping a day more punitive.

I do have my first goal in mind. It is this wonderful dress that I can wear to work, or on my upcoming vacation to Martha’s Vineyard with Justin, who will be helping me maintain this personal goal by holding my passwords to my Modcloth account hostage. I did this once in grad school with my social media accounts when I really really had to study. Though I could reset them at any time, just having that extra barrier was enough of a mind block for me to not check Facebook.

So, that’s my plan! Let me know what you think

Personally, I hate this line of thinking. I must be lazy since I don’t want to work then, obviously. Right?

I don’t think so. It’s not inspiring to me to make minor updates on a page, so I find answering these requests irritating and just plain blah. Why would I want to do work I find completely uninspiring? It’s a waste of my time, doesn’t teach me anything new, and a waste of my clients’ money.

Instead, I prefer to do a lot more work by setting up a content management system for my clients, even if it means they won’t be dependent upon me forever. This even doesn’t cost them a lot extra since, depending on the CMS, it’s a lot easier for me to work with WordPress or Concrete5 than coding individual HTML pages and making sure they all link to each other properly.

For some clients, the ones who just need a blog or know some HTML/CSS, adding in a CMS is much easier than not including one. The difficult and costly part comes in when I want to create a full-proof CMS ensuring that clients without HTML/CSS knowledge won’t break my design. This is especially concerning if I’ve created a responsive design and I’ve put it in a CMS, so I take a little extra time to make sure they can edit and update their site easily without changing the structure, though if I’m a good web designer and content management strategist (yup, created my own title there), my back end should be good enough to account for any client error. This involves getting inside their heads.

First, during initial interviews and setting up the project scope, I make sure I know their capabilities with technology, as well as what kind of content they need to update. This can be easy, especially if they’ve had the same marketing strategy that has worked for them for a long period of time, or extremely difficult if they are a new or emerging business that is constantly changing their focus, adding new types of content or really growing.

I map out and list out the actions they want to take and then decide what kind of content management system they need and what kind of features will work. All of this means that I am thinking of two classes of users: the ones who will view the site and the ones who will update it. From a systems analysis prospective, this means that you are essentially designing two systems with two completely separate goals. Some designers will only think about the end-user, who views the site and just hand off a wordpress CMS with some training, but I try to really tailor the system to who will be using it.

Just as an illustrative example, I have one client who just wants to add new projects to his site. Each project has images, a short description, and belongs to a project category. The client also wants to add new project categories periodically, and each project category page has display of thumbnail images and captions that link to the projects. Other than that, there might be some minor updates on pages (like the resumes for the top people in the company), but that will be the bulk of the changes on the website.

Now, I could do this with two different CMS: WordPress and Concrete5. If I did it in WordPress, the projects would all be posts and the project categories would be categories of posts. I’d probably have to create special category pages with a php call that asked for the thumbnail and caption which would link to the posts. Projects could even be in multiple categories! I’d install a customized widget for the slideshow and badda bing badda boom… easy peasy system.

But I didn’t. That was an easy approach on my end, but I decided I wanted to go a little more complicated with Concrete5. Most people are pretty familiar with WordPress, and I really like WordPress, but then again, I know HTML and CSS. I can work around WordPress, but I wanted something extra flexible with in-context editing for my client whose Internet knowledge is limited to “I’ve heard of this twitter…”

I like Concrete5 a lot, with the limited amount I’ve used it. It’s extremely flexible. Has really easily edited add-ons and is free. Oh, and it’s ridiculously easy to convert your HTML files into templates. My biggest problem is usually over-thinking it. Basically, the backend of Concrete5 nicely shows your site map and you can add pages from there, based on HTML templates. So for my client, I created a “Project” and “Project Category” template, with some default templated content and let them click and edit.

You can read up on Concrete5 here. Again, I like it a lot.

Now, I wanted to make this as easy as possible. There’s a number of ways you can add content to a Concrete5 page. You can add HTML, “Content,” Images, Links, Autonav and a number of others. I wanted, for the project template pages, for the client to be able to add an image with a caption. The default for adding an image is just an image, no caption, so the easiest way for me to add an image with a link and a caption was to add HTML and instruct my client on how to edit and add HTML.

I could have just left it at that, but instead, I went into the back end of the “blocks” and changed the php structure so when adding an image, it would also add a div around the image and the caption that was inputted as the alt text. I had to add a div with a specific class, since without it, the caption showed up directly to the right of the image, and not underneath it. I also wanted to be able to edit the class with CSS. Concrete5 already had the function within the add image block to create a link to another page. Now, whenever my client wants to add a thumbnail link to a project on a project category page, he just adds an image.

The problem arises because the images on the project category pages are not the only images on the site. I also had images the client would want to edit on the sidebars of the other content pages. I could add those in with “content” blocks, but that would just be confusing. The client would always have to remember that on Project pages, he adds images with the Image block, but on other pages, he adds images with the Content block. Not acceptable.

Now, since I had added a div to wrap around the image, I should also mention that the project pages have a different body class than the sidebar. This means that I could edit the CSS so that they displayed differently. The images on the project pages were always a width of 30% with margins so that they would display three across with some space. The images on the sidebar, on the other hand, were 100% of the width of the sidebar. This was a pretty easy format with CSS, but I’m not going to go into the technical details since this post is already 1300 words long.

Which now lets me wrap up this post. Because I was focused on creating a great user experience for my client (as well as the end user) I was intensely passionate and focused on the project. In a month, when we’re (I’m working with a junior designer on this) finally done writing the CSS for the mobile styles and we actually launch the site, I won’t have to worry that the client is going to call to make minor updates or are super confused about how to update their site (I’m also writing them a guide with screenshots; it’s fun).

A second benefit to all of this was that I learned. Instead of just doing the same old thing and creating a WordPress template, I learned about Concrete5 and better ways to serve my clients who don’t have Internet experience (that’s what I’m calling it).

You can check it out at Cayuga Voices.

Another cool thing to note is the CSS3 transitions I put on the images on the homepage. I wanted to try out a cool animation and, at the time, I had just taken a workshop by the very talented Daniel Mall as part of Refresh Pittsburgh. The great thing about living and working in Pittsburgh is the great design community and the events and workshops they put on for a relatively low cost. Though, since I attended Web Design Day, I’ve wanted to go back and re-do every single design I’ve ever done.

Syracuse iSchool graduate student working to open school for underprivileged youth in India
Syracuse iSchool sends students to Silicon Valley for Spring Break
Syracuse iSchool sends students to “Southby” 2011 for Spring Break
Syracuse iSchool approved for CAS in Information Innovation, starting with a focus in Social Media
Syracuse iSchool Alum appointed ICT advisor to the Prime Minister of Albania
Syracuse iSchool to host 2nd annual “Girls are IT” event in March
Syracuse iSchool students present projects for social web and mobile web technologies
New Syracuse iSchool course promises to boldly go where no class has gone before
Syracuse iSchool alumna Sally Gore G’04 sheds light on need for information experts and new roles for librarians
Syracuse iSchool hosts college radio station WERW
TWiST meet up event highlights Brand Yourself, young entrepreneurs

That’s not all, but it’s a good sampling.

…for they are damn sexy

The following is an article republished from the print issue of Jerk Magazine. It is also available on their website.

I love nerds. And geeks. And all other individuals whose interests transcend applying toxic chemicals to their hair. Nerds pack knowledge. If you manage to coax them out of their states of paralyzing mutism, they’ll dispel little tidbits of knowledge like how Christopher Nolan only used CGI in The Dark Knight for about three effects. Hot.

Unfortunately, nerds and geeks are under tremendous social pressure to conform to the ritualistic dating practices of “getting laid at any cost.” Even Wired (the nerd bible) recently told the stammering men of my dreams that they need to act less socially awkward.

Fine, Wired. But maybe the techies and trekkies should seek advice from a publication whose focus is excelling in social situations and landing babes. Men’s Health directs young males to “wander away from the crowd, take in the scene, then find a painting, book, or view out a window” so women will find them more interesting. Everyone knows lying to get women into bed cultivates meaningful and lasting relationships. Just ask Tiger Woods.

Repressing geekiness isn’t just bad for the quality of one’s love life. The stereotypical social awkwardness that “plagues” nerds is what helps them create amazing things that “normal” people take for granted: Facebook, the iPhone, and some of the best cinematic adventures ever filmed (LOST, Star Wars, etc.).

So here’s a Big Bang Theory for the Leonard Hofstadters of the world: Try rockin’ it out with your horn-rimmed glasses and see what happens. I’m way more interested in your social awkwardness than that suit-wearing asshole pretending to be Ted Mosby, architect.

Illustration by Gabrielle Hastings

Andrew, Paper Justin, Shay: Founders of Capesquared

Ok, so I have three awesome guy friends (well more than three, but this is about them). They are Shay, Justin and Andrew and they are Capesquared. Basically, they design web sites and come up with cool ideas.

One of them is Qur.ly, which I have to say has drastically made categorizing all the things I do on the Internet so much easier. Wow. I sound like a PSA.

But seriously, as someone who is a pretty prolific writer with drastically different audiences, I’m glad I have one place to bookmark all the things I write for each site. For example, I can send a link to a professional PR service of all the work I’ve done for the iSchool web site. At the same time, I can send a link of all the things I’ve done for Jerk Magazine to a humor site bent on delivering inappropriate, unsanctioned and irreverent content. WIN FOR ME!

Basically, it gives you one URL for however many you want to list under it. It’s one big bookmark you can share with everyone. I’ve used mine on four of the five links under “Punkin Writes” to list every writing in those categories. It’s super easy to use too, though I would appreciate a “qur.l” more button to make the site a little more intuitive.

I’m the kind of writer that has to balance what she wants to write about (snark, NSFW things, shock humor) with what I write that pays the bills and is still pretty important to me. I wouldn’t work for the iSchool and write such great things about them if I wasn’t thrilled with my education and the work this institution does.

So, thank you Capesquared, for qur.ly, which I will continue to mispronounce because qur is NOT CURL!! Love all three of you, probably unequally, so don’t try to force me to name a favorite because I’ll just end up hurting JBreese’s feelings.

I did the responsible thing. I typed Amazon.com into my browser window, assuming the two sites were the same entity, and up popped my account since I’d logged on during the same browser session. I’m one of those types who rarely shuts down the computer.

There were no extra charges on my account, but I wanted to check to make sure my email address and password were all set so I clicked on Account Settings. Lo and behold, when Amazon asked me to input my password and supplied my email address, which was NOT mine. It was melalih10@gmail.com (and I have really NO problem publishing this email address.)

I searched the email on Facebook and found this guy in Algeria: Melalih Djamal Bechar (Vivia Algeria) who graduated high school from Knight Belkacem (written in Arabic) in 2002 and works in a municipality office in Abadla Algeria. (I used Google Translate today in order to get these translations. I wish I had done this yesterday for the French email, but I’m coming to that). And then I created a Facebook group that could see no personal information and I friended the hacker. (screen shot after the jump, click to see full image)

I called Amazon who put me on the phone with a lovely girl who told me that there were no charges on my account since I ordered season five of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and a book by an obscure Egyptian author. Yes, both were me, all was good. The guy could not have seen my credit card number as it was encrypted. My password and email were reset. All was good, but I would monitor my credit card.

And then this morning I checked my email again. Another email in French and I could see my parents’ address within the text of the email and it finally dawned on me to use Google translate.

The message basically told me that my order from Amazon France was going to my parents’ house. Also, because it had been shipped, the order could not be cancelled.

I called the bank and cancelled my card and disputed the charges and was complimented on how well I was handling the situation. What can I say? I’m taking Introduction to Information Security this semester.

Then I called Amazon again, a little peeved that these transactions that were dated the day before were on my account, but they didn’t appear on my Amazon.com account, just my newly created Amazon.fr account. This means that the lovely girl from the day before was not at fault. She was great. The structure of her institution, however, needs some work.

I first tried calling Amazon.fr using their fun tool where you input your phone number and they call you. This, by the way, is nearly impossible to find as I had to google search “Amazon Contact” and could not find the link from the actual Amazon page. This is a ridiculous usability issue that I’m sure stems from Amazon NOT wanting its customers to call them.

ALSO Amazon.fr does not provide the option for US customers to input their numbers to have them call you. So I called Amazon.com.

The CSR I talked to, who didn’t seem as competent as the original, informed me that he could not cancel or even view my Amazon.fr account as it was a completely separate entity from Amazon.com.

So let’s get this straight. A hacker can use my existing Amazon.com account to open an Amazon.fr account and change the email address and password on my Amazon.com account yet when I try to alleviate the situation with Amazon.com, they can do NOTHING because they are a separate entity from Amazon.fr? I, the customer am now supposed to call FRANCE on international charges, which I do not have in my cell phone plan in order to cancel my Amazon.fr account that I never actually opened.

This is a fundamental flaw in Amazon’s structure that compromises the security of my information and every Amazon customer should be aware of this.

The only thing I can say is “You have got to be fucking kidding me.” Now I’m just sitting at home waiting to file a police report.

A few days a go, the lovely Kelly Lux pointed me to this blog post by a VP of Marketing working in the wonderful male dominated industry known as “tech.”

Leslie Sobon decided she would give some advice to women about how to land a geek guy, because, (surprise, surprise!) geeky guys are actually really interesting and cool and fun to talk to! Now, this concept is something I’ve talked about myself over at Jerk Magazine: Blessed are the Nerds, Because They are Damn Sexy!

Yet although Sobon and I are addressing the same topic, she does it in an incredibly patronizing and sexist way, as pointed out by a guest blogger at GeekFeminism: “The bottom line is that Leslie Sobon’s writing is lazy and it reinforces gender and subculture stereotypes. Remembering that Sobon was writing for the least common denominator of a mythical female softens the blow somewhat, should she have been sixteen and posting to her tumblr blog. As an article directed at a general adult audience on the official blog of a publicly traded technology company, however, it is inexcusable.”

Her entire post is fantastic and I couldn’t have come up with a better response to the whole thing. She brings in a lot of nuances about being a geek and gender identity that are worth reading, from the idea that geeks are definitely not the answer to every girl’s relationship problem and why don’t guys ever seem to want to date the geeky girl. Seriously, read it. It’s good.

And as much as I disagree with Sobon and every sexist, antiquated sentiment underlying her post, and do agree with the blogger at GeekFeminist, I wonder, on a social media level, if this controversy isn’t good for Sobon. In fact, if she wasn’t so controversial, it wouldn’t have reached my attention at all and I wouldn’t have looked up the products she shills on each and every blog post.

After all, the woman has supporters and you can find them if you read the comments (though I’m pretty sure any negative comments are spirited away by the moderator gods at AMD). The bad press and appropriately visceral reaction to her has gained her some supporters. Good for her. I guess she really has figured out how to be a troll.

I will first admit this: I have not seen Sex and the City 2, nor do I intend to after watching the nine minute montage of scenes and reading numerous reviews. I also hate those who criticize something they haven’t seen, but I’m about to break my own rule when it comes to this, though most of this reflection has more to do with Sex and the City overall and how it relates to the greatest adventure of all time (Star Wars, the original trilogy) and one of the biggest disappointments of all time (Star Wars, the Phantom Menace).

A lot of the criticisms of the Phantom Menace are laid out in a humorous series of videos by Red Letter Media. If you want, you can watch them here. I’ve included the first episode below.

1. Charlotte is Jar Jar Binks

At some point in SATC, it was decided that dumb physical comedy needed to liven up the series. This was the purpose of the flaming idiot Jar Jar Binks who flopped around The Phantom Menace as if he were missing his frontal lobe. The difference between the two of them is that Charlotte starts out with dignity and her prissiness is why some of her flops are minorly entertaining in the television series. Unfortunately, Charlotte is put through some I Love Lucy style pie in the face equivalents, including accidentally drinking the water in Mexico the first movie and falling off a camel in the second movie.

2. Character development is stagnant

I really enjoyed the early seasons of Sex and the City. I really truly did. The characters, although they sometimes were caught in embarrassing sit-com like situations, usually learned and grew from their experiences. Moments of complete honesty and character reflection accessorized the sometimes ridiculous situations of the show.  Through conflict–like when Samantha slept with Charlotte’s brother and Charlotte responded by calling her a slut–the characters grew. Charlotte realized her idea of a perfect marriage embodied by her brother’s relationship with his wife, was a complete lie and Samantha helped him through his impending divorce.

Yet, just like how many of the characters in the Phantom Menace are flat and the audience is essentially “told” and not “shown” their development and relationships, the relationships in the SATC movies are contrived and remarkably caricaturized (yup, making up words). Samantha is a slut. All she is is sex on legs, a departure from the woman who was at least concerned with some interpersonal relationships in the series. Charlotte is a priss, and from what I’ve read in reviews, a terrible mother. Miranda, as always, works too much and has problems balancing her life..again. And of course, Carrie can’t move past Big v. Aidan. There is no new conflict, no new developments. The movie is no better than fan fiction, leading me into the next point.

3. The movie is a superficial caricature of the series

The idiot who wrote the script and directed the SATC movies took the most obvious characteristics of the series and slapped it on a script, without thinking about the depth of the series was the true gem, exactly how George Lucas slapped some new visuals together to call it a movie. The depth, nuances and character development–what essentially makes a good story–is completely gone.

In conclusion, Sex and the City 2 is the Phantom Menace of the SATC franchise. Caricaturization can happen to both geeky and sexy franchises.

Kate