Monsoon season starts about this time of year (May) in kerala. A monsoon is a tropical wind that blos continuously. More information about monsoons can be found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsoon

Its normal practice in India to use surge protectors to protect against power surges during storms and power surges during regular use as well. Within a few weeks of reaching India I purchased a 500VA/200W UPS to protect my computer system. While the UPS couldn't support plugging in a 17 inch CRT (issues were caused during boot up where more power was needed by the system during boot up than the UPS could channel leading to BIOS error,) it was more than enough to protect all the components inside the computer casing and a DSL Modem. >>> Read More

With todays screens being wider than 1024px, many text containers tend to have a width greater than 600 pixels. I had earlier thought that text should have a width of 600 pixels less for faster horizontal eye scanning and did not notice margin sizes also affected readability.

The link on http://hubel.sfasu.edu/research/textmargin.html states that its not only text width but also margin sizes that affect readability.

Since most websites have a margin width between 10px to 24 px, a column width of 576px (8 inches on a Windows PC although I find 552px to be more widely used) for text columns seems to be the best option for websites. For margins of 27px onwards, a text column width of 288 px (4 inches) seems to be optimum.

I recently came across 2 posts defining the difference between usability and user experience

The post on The Battle Between Usability and User-Experience by Thomas Baekdal provides an easy to understand difference between usability and user experience using roads as an analogy.

The 9th comment on that post also provides 2 more examples on how usability alone isn't enough for a successful product. One example being the creation of the Betty Crocker cake mixes.

I've been using a Asus EEE 701 PC 4G for about a week now. My initial plan was to purchase the Asus EEE 8G which has a 8 GB SSD and 1 GB of RAM. The SKU for the Indian market is the 4GB SSD unit with 512 MB of RAM and built in webcam so I bought that instead and included 1 GB RAM upgrade in the order.

I decided on a black version to reduce eye strain. I have a white ipod video but unfortunately viewing a LCD screen surrounded on a white background seems to induce more eyestrain than viewing the same on a black background. >>> Read More

The following is a direct quote (with actual images instead of image links) from a post I made on:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/10105#comment-34593

In acidfree galleries, having the vertical tabs horizontally laid out above the node content wasn't exactly the best placement.

I re did a theme and inserted vertical tabs to the left of the node content (floating the tabs to the left and the node content to the right with complementary widths.)

The image link displays how vertical tabs can be used to navigate between local tasks (I hope thats what local tasks are) of view and list options in acidfree galleries:

Vertically Tabbed Node Options >>> Read More

I've teamed up with a couple of designers to flesh out my wire frames visually. To clients who are used to graphically rich templates, a puristic wire frames (http://www.scribd.com/people/view/196844-stevejbayer) may seen too barren and difficult to accept as deliverables.

To avoid such difficulties, I've teamed up with designers who would be generate to add logos, icons and other artwork that would satisfy client needs for graphically rich content. I am confident in my selection of the art designers (who also happen to be capable flash developers) and have already started forwarding their services to more than one client. >>> Read More

I added a Xoom page with button links for present and future clients. The page is not in the header links but the url is relatively easy to find and the built in search option should bring up the page in search queries for Xoom.

http://stevejbayer.com/xoom

There are links with titles such as:

• User Experience Architecture with a Focus on increasing Brand/Product Awareness:
• User Experience Architecture with a Focus on Interaction Design:
• User Experience Architecture with a Focus on Easier Content and/or Product Navigation

As one can see, I've currently focused my efforts on 3 areas: >>> Read More

While setting up a hobby (non-client work) fansite for one of the characters in the Terminator: Sarah Chronicles TV Show, I came across Taxonomy Menus for Drupal 5.

http://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_menu

For users new to Drupal, taxonomy is basically another name for a more advanced form of categories. A taxonomy is actually multiple sets of categories (well thats at least how I understand it) where each category contains a certain type of information. Images belong in an image category. Forum topics belong in the forum category. Images do not belong in the forum category and vice versa but images and forum topics can be in the same taxonomy system under separate categories. >>> Read More