Damion just turned me onto the Microsoft World Wide Telescope application. www.worldwidetelescope.org. What a fascinating project. The UI is very cool. It’s a virtual telescope program that enabels the user to view parts of the universe. It also allows the user to generate tours of areas. It has full motion and sound. Too bad they didn’t have stuff like that when I studied Earth Space science in high school. I probably would have had a lot more interest in it. At least I can study it now. I’ve always had an interest in astronomy. When I lived with my parents I had applied black paper to the ceiling of my bedroom, and then I used a hand-held guide to replicate different constellations. Of course this was a static representation that did not change depending on the time of year.

Other than that, last week I started redesigning the skin to the DSView3 UI. I am making it look more like its a program from this decade. I started coding the UI in HTML, but I need assistance with integrating it into DSView3’s JSP files.

This weekend is Memoria Day, so far we have a BBQ invitation, and I’m expecting a visit from my mother. I am looking forward to spending some time off (without being sick), I hope we have nice weather.

Who ever knew that having a blog would result in so much guilt. I feel like I don’t really have the time to keep this updated. I will try by summarizing what I’ve been up to.

Last week, spent 4 days in Utah. Engaged in a very in-depth class on Contextual Inquiry. I’m not sure if I will be able to adopt the methodology that I saw in class, but I will probably create a hybrid of methods for my own work structure.

Mother’s day was this past Sunday. I got a fantastic bicycle from my husband, a tote, and some slippers. I have been enjoying taking my son on bike rides every day since I received the bike. I feel more in shape, and look forward to getting some exercise until the day lite savings time ends. I have posted some pictures of my son and myself on my new bike on my website, my myspace page and my facebook page.

Now that I have been educated in the ways of Mental Models and Contextual Inquiry.  I need to start collecting user data. I am looking for users to use the Contextual Inquiry interview method on. These would be people at the corporate or datacenter level who are interested in monitoring their power consumption throughout their organization. I would simply interview and observe the user performing simple tasks in their current work process. I have called a few people, however I haven’t found anyone who has monitoring power on their to-do list.

To my surprize, I could not wait to log my thoughts into my new Blog this morning. The activities that transpired over the first 24 hours have not been super unusual, this feeling i’m experiencing must be an example of how people get addicted to Blogging.

Last night I attended the Refresh Miami 2nd Annual Party. It was a nice location, a nice spread of pizza and cocktails for the guest, and lots of young up and coming techocrats were there. So I’m sure most of the attendees did not show up at the spur of the minute by being invited by a total stranger on Twitter. I however could not escape the feeling that this whole Social networking phenomina was still strange to me. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been out of the circle since I took a year off from work to have my son. 

I’ve been keeping up with Gretchen3d, for over 10 years now. I have done several site redesigns over the years, probably at least 5 or so, and this past one was the one that really made me realize how much my site has grown, and how much work it has been to overhaul it. Now on top of that, I have a Myspace page, a blog, Flickr, Twitter and pressure to join Facebook. Where does it end? Even choosing a Blog platform was a major decision for me because it’s something that I will have to consider maintaining. It just seems like to keep up with the social networking requires a lot of time and energy. What motivates the users to keep up with all of these different technologies?  

Today is the start of my blog UXDIva. What is UXDiva about? I’m not exactly sure yet. I think it will define itself over time rather than me pointing it into a specific direction. I have been spending a lot of time investigating some of the new applications (and some not-so-new) that i have been avoiding for a while now.  As I have accepted this Human Factors position at my new job, I think it’s important for me to research new ways of doing things. So hopefully I will put some of my insights here. I started to do this on my Myspace Blog yesterday, but I think that it deserves it’s own space.

Some of the applications, websites that I discovered yesterday were Catalyst.org, which is a website dedicated to web application developers. I also used Addthis.com for the first time and added some links to my personal website, Gretchen3d.com.

Today I obviously learned how to create a new Blog. I don’t know how I’ve managed to avoid it for so long. Hopefully I keep up with it, and post my usability discoveries and learnings on a regular basis.  i’ve also been using Twitter, I’m still deciding if I like it or not.

Tonight I will be going to the RefreshMiami party. Should be interesting. Maybe I’ll write about my experience tomorrow.