I’m technically on vacation, but that just means I’m working about half as much as usual. I spent about three days on an upgrade of nwtekno.org, which is a forums site that I manage the tech side of. Or rather, I manage it pretty badly, since this is the first time I’ve paid it any attention since 2001. It’s got over two million posts and will be ten years old soon, so it was due. Unsurprisingly, many of the users are upset about the changes, but what you can’t please everyone. Luckily the day-to-day stuff is handled by Kim, the site’s founder, and now she has the tools to make it what it should be.

Another old freelance project of mine has come back to life like some kind of zombie, so I’ve been working on that too. Luckily it’s not too time consuming.

I’m not a big holiday person, so I’ve been kind of grumpy lately. The snow madness we had in Seattle was nice for a bit but quickly got old. New Year’s Eve involved a great dinner and some friends and some dancing, but lots of people left town for the holiday so that kind of brought the mood down. Now it’s just very cold and the city seems lethargic. I’m ready to get back to real work on Monday.

A couple of freelance projects I worked on a while ago have gone live. Actually they’ve probably been up a while but I’ve just now noticed. Both are for the International Quilt Study Center and Museum in Nebraska.

The first is the quilt collection, which presents 600 quilts in a pan-and-zoom grid, along with details about each and UI for searching the various collections.

The other half is the quilt maker, which lets you make and save your own quilt.

I believe these are also hosted as kiosk apps in the museum itself.

The project was designed and managed by the geniuses at Second Story in Portland. In both cases, I took the apps to a late beta stage, and final production and delivery was handled by Second Story. Both apps were implemented in Flex 3.