On the creation of my contact (business) cards

2012-06-17

Recently I have been attending bikey and techy events/Meet Ups and have begun to find that I have a problem when it comes to easily and quickly transferring my contact information to someone. In the "mature" world of business this task is accomplished with the handing over of a "business card", and while I am looking to keep touch with people outside of work-related services I decided it was time for me to make an equivalent "contact card" of my own.

There are a lot of clever people out there who have taken the craft of contact or business cards to surprisingly creative levels, and while it is inspiring to see lockpicks, a trebuchet, or a functioning iris I think this is all overkill. For my part I want a card which I designed from scratch, that reflects my passions, and reinforces the connection with the card to me so the recipient can remember me later. I decided to include something bike related and a QR code pointing to my website's About page, I considered this appropriate since cyclists and tech-savvy folks are the most likely people I will hand one of these cards to.

Earlier last week I placed an order with Botanical Paperworks for their double-sided business cards that can be planted to grow wildflowers, and hopefully later this week I will be receiving them. This will be what I ordered to be printed on them:

 
Contact card front and back.

I'd like to go a little in to the process of the design process I went through to create these cards, I had a lot of fun working on them and I'd like to think there are some elements which are interesting to share.

From the outset I decided the front of my contact card should have something that links me in the mind to the person I give it to, as well as some form of immediately useful contact information. I wanted the focus of the front of the card to be the link to me, and have the contact information be simple. My goal here was to keep it simple and clean to create an elegant appearance, the more visually smooth it is the more likely someone will remember it and link it back to me.

Featured prominently on the front of my card is the identifying component, the thing which will make people remember who it was that gave the card to them, the abstraction of a cyclist. I recently started taking basic drawing classes at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education with Douglas Kornfeld. The style focused on abstract, elegant curves. For my card I wanted to apply some of the visual appeal I started to appreciate from these classes which also reflects on of my major passions (and targets the second most likely group of people I will likely be giving my card out to, bike enthusiasts), here is what I came up with before starting my card design:

Cyclist drawing.

I later installed and began messing with Inkscape, a vector drawing program similar to Adobe Illustrator that is free and open source. In a couple of hours I watched a few tutorials and had begun dabbling with it enough to feel comfortable with my paper-to-digital adaptation. My drawing became digital, editable, and scalable:

Cyclist made in Inkscape.

At no point in this design process did I intend to put my phone number on my card. Here's the thing: I am an introvert, my most favored form of communication is face-to-face and very small group settings of, at most, a few individuals. I don't like talking on phones, they are barbaric and require syncing time away from other activities for both parties involved while each person remains in separate locations, possibly lacking privacy or even causing a disturbance to others who may be within earshot of the conversation. If I'm going to bother to sync my time up with others then I prefer to meet in person, and barring that I favor asynchronous communication like text messaging, e-mail, or Twitter. As for text messaging I opted to leave my phone number off since it's difficult to convey my discomfort with phone conversations while leaving open the option for accepting text messages. It takes an entire paragraph here to explain this facet of my introversion, and even in here I feel I'm abbreviating my reasons.

Of course the point of contact information on a card is to allow continued communication when not in direct human contact with the person. For brevity and economy of space on the card I came up with the idea of combining my Twitter handle and GMail e-mail address as for me it's the same handle with the '@' sign on opposite ends. Recently Twitter announced their new branding, and a quick image search provided me with the iconic symbol for GMail. Putting everything together provided something I found rather well balanced and succinct while providing enough information for most tech-savvy people to find usable (this is one of the more likely groups of people that will receive one of my cards, so I intentionally target their ability to recognize the branding). I first messed around with the concept in the GNU Image Manipulation Program, GIMP, to see how viable the concept was and if it would read well.

Twitter handle and GMail e-mail address combined.

Between the hand drawn and digitally rendered cyclist I decided I wanted to create the cyclist with shapes that could be reused in another design, my initials DLK. I have come up with a way that I write my initals so that, when turned to the side, it looks like the basic shape of a human. I wanted to find a way to bring this concept to my card as a personal touch, and while I could have added clues that this reuse of shapes between cyclist and initials was intentional I decided the card design needed more whitespace and less clutter, so this tidbit I left for explaining in person or on this page.

 
Initials DLK drawn in marker.

With the rendering I made of the person on a bike I had a collection of shapes I used to construct my initials. This required some work and the end result is still imperfect, but for about two hours of tinkering in an image program I only just began to use I felt comfortable enough with the results and felt the effect was good enough for now. Time was a factor in trying to get these cards ready for handing out in upcoming events I already have planned to go to.

 
Conversion of bike drawing to DLK initials, with color guide.

The back of my card has both my initials and initials-as-a-human displayed, as well as a textual URL that matches the QR code. I used a freely available online QR code generator and placed a copy of my initials-as-a-human over top, this still functions as I wanted it to because the QR code has enough redundancy in the pattern that it can handle a certain amount of it to be obscured by the graphic. The back of the card is also where I wrote the instructions for growing the wildflowers the paper contains seeds for.

Which brings me to my finally decision of what my medium was going to be for the cards, the seeded paper material. I remembered reading about the existence of plantable-paper and was excited with the idea that something beautiful could be grown from my discarded card. I really like the idea of my card being used once to provide a continued connection, then the holder of the card would have me in an electronic address book and no longer need the card. In the near future I will work to make that even easier as I think I'll provide a link to a vcard on my About page for easy importing to electronic address books. After its first use the card may be useless for assisting with contacting me, so I wanted to add a secondary purpose to the card's existence while also bringing some amount of joy to the holder of it. If you receive my card, please plant it and let it grow, maybe the flowers will be a pleasant reminder of me and I would be quite happy about that.

Thoughts during my analysis of flight N48DL

2012-04-22

My day job is as a software developer for a flight tracking company in Boston. We do not have anything to do with air traffic control; however, some of what we do involves receiving flight data from various sources, including the FAA, and working with it to provide it to the public in a way that may be useful.

While I think mentioning the name of my company would not be negatively received, or if I wrote more about the culture (great) and day-to-day happenings (often boring), I am not looking to turn this into a space to offload my work stresses. I am making an exception in this case.

Sometimes the work I have is not routine, and it may require on-the-spot data munging and specialized code to be written to perform some task or analysis. This kind of work can cause a flurry of activity and bring out the best in my team's individual and group-oriented capabilities. I usually look forward to this sort of activity as it is stimulating and engaging on an intellectual level, and can sometimes lead to new ideas on how to improve and grow.

Dealing with flight data can also mean rare moments of non-routine activity which are tempered with seriousness and situational gravity. On Thursday there was an event which caused flight N48DL to crash into the Gulf of Mexico a couple of hours after contact with its pilot had been lost. As this situation was developing I found myself working with another colleage to collect and analyze the data for this flight, and as we were doing so I reflected on the humanity of the moment, as well as on the unusual position I found myself in to have access to the particular information around me, which had in some way allowed me to connect with the drama while it was developing.

Two forces are simultaneously at work in my mind when I prepare this kind of work. There is the sensitivity to the people involved and their feelings on how they may perceive seeing information like this broadcast widely while not knowing how the events will proceed and conclude. There is also the determination to share the information so that the situation can be better understood by the general public, and perhaps also those more closely involved as they may be looking to know this information, too. The interplay of these two concerns has timeless attributes resulting in a decision to provide the information so long as it does not risk causing escalation of the situation, or lead to some general panic.

In short order, my Thursday became personally stressful as I worked on cultivating and preparing ways to present flight information on what ultimately was a fatal plane crash. We are not the only company with access to this information, and many news organizations that were looking for a graphical representation of the flight's path found better examples elsewhere than with my company. My work was not completed in a timely enough manner to be used in its originally intended purpose; but, I think that it may still be released publicly as it may still provide use in research or education on the behavior of the plane.

The information contained in this KML file is in the public domain and anyone may reproduce my efforts provided they go through the steps of acquiring the flight information. I have worked to translate the original flight plan, last amendment to the flight plan, and position information into a format which can be viewed in Google Earth and Google Maps.

To use the file in Google Earth you may either download it by right-clicking on the link above and saving the file locally, or by referencing it as a URL by copying the link location. To use it in Google Maps paste the link location into the search field, or click this link where I've done that work already; it may be helpful to unclick the checkbox next to the folder name "Flight points of N48DL" as these provide time and altitude information in a way that can clutter the map. Alternatively, you may use this link which is to a version of the data omitting the individual flight path data points with time and altitude information.

Along with this blog post I am presenting this information on the transportation portion of my site, including with graphics and an embedded Google Map area, available here.

Grandpa

2011-12-17

We will miss you, Grandpa.

Multi-Blog!

2011-12-11 14:28:00

Some of my recent website updates have provided the ability for me to easily build and maintain multiple blogs on one site. All of my posts so far have been about the work put in to building the site to this point, and now I'd like to prepare this space for more personal posts.

I've copied all of my older posts to a new website project area. I will also keep the posts locally to this blog space for posterity.

I've also decided that I'm going to prepare my website building script and skeleton framework as an open source project. There's a considerable amount of cleanup and prep-work on the code and example files, plus a lot of documentation to write, before I'm at a point where I feel comfortable sharing it. I'm happy to say it's early enough in the work of this project for me to be considering this where the impact is not huge.

I'm not sure who would benefit from my website builder package (I guess I'll have to think up a decent name at some point), but hopefully some good will come of sharing something I've written.

Syntax Highlighter Upgraded

2011-12-11

That Syntax Highlighter library I added yesterday has been upgraded from the version found on Google Code. The latest version by the author has a few more syntaxes, a different approach to calling for highlighting, an autoloader (which I won't use as I'm doing all the work myself already), and a slight change to the syntax selection.

I've upgraded the library files, am skipping the autoloader, skipping the legacy proxy, and am curious about the change to the toolbar space as it appears functionality may be lost.

	
		
	
	
		
Hello again, world!

	

I've also stripped out the functionality of adding the Syntax Highlighter code to the RSS feed as it has no use there, code blocks will still be rendered in the default manner but will not be very pretty.

Syntax Highlighter Added

2011-12-10

A few years ago I played around with a javascript library that would perform syntax highlighting on identified code snippets. It looks like the project has progressed and is available now on Google Code, so I added it to the site.

	
		
	
	
		
Hello, world!

	

In blog posts I look for any identifiable code snippets, collect the languages being represented, and add the Syntax Highlighter libraries needed to work on them. Above the fold is a code snippet for HTML, and below is also a JavaScript example. In the snippet on a blog page only the HTML library will be called (unless other snippets on the page have code examples), and the full blog posts will have JavaScript as well.

RSS posts will have post-level Syntax Highlighter library references, as well.

Keeping separate lists of snippet/full-post code language references was necessary to make this work in different ways where blog post content would show up, and to prevent duplicate library references. I also had to go inside each "pre" tag and alter < characters due to a limitation with the Syntax Highlighter code.

Fixed RSS blog post linkage, moved .post files to new path

2011-12-08

Today I fixed a bug with the post links in the RSS feed, and moved my posts to subdirectories for better organization.

The RSS bug was that blog posts had a link back to the full post page, but the path was incorrect. It included part of the build path where the final .html content gets prepared before being deployed to the web service path.

I also decided that putting all of my blog posts into a single directory was a bad idea, and have adopted a YYYY/MM model for keeping the clutter at bay.

After some code restructuring I found some other bugs with sequence of path operations, blog post URL errors, and more RSS file content issues. Over the course of a few hours I restructured the code some more and set limitations on how deep blog post formatting would go, and expanded the count and scope of RSS files.

I now have rss.xml files populated at all tree levels where a blog post resides down a farther branch. This means each of my major directories can be have blogs in them, which may come in handy as a mechanism for creating and maintaining multiple separate blogs. The blog posts will only link with other posts that same major branch down from the root path, which provides local scoping to that major branch. The root level's rss.xml can capture all blog posts, so it could operate as a master site feed.

I will probably have to do more work within the RSS files if ever I do start to distinguish other blog paths and use them, the content in the header information of the RSS feed is not dynamic to the source of the content.

Now with RSS

2011-12-05

Today I added an RSS feed to the blog. It includes the full post content, not just the snippet.

One of the earlier design decisions I made was to have content in my blog post files be reusable as content to be displayed on the main blog page, various flavors of blog pages, blog posts (permalink, full post version), and items in an RSS feed. For the last of these I wanted the content to be plain, devoid of frills like Prev/Next linkage, and complete instead of just being a snippet.

RSS can be a powerful and simple way to share content, though it is by intention very stripped down. I appreciate that philosophy, and though it doesn't work with every need of content providers it is enough for the simple kind of content I intend to provide.

One of the problems I ran into while implementing the RSS file construction was formatting the dates of my posts into RFC822 standard, which looks like this: "Tue, 06 Dec 2011 05:30:04 GMT". I have been keeping dates in human-readable YYYY-MM-DD or similar formats, and to go from that format to RFC822 required some work, most of which I received help on from an old Perlmonks article.

Now that I have an RSS feed I'll have to be more careful when I restructure my blog post files into date-based subdirectories. I should have instituted a better method than dumping the files all in the /blog path where they will accrue endlessly. Another task for another day.

Blog posts linked to each other

2011-12-04 20:58:00

Earlier this morning I pushed out my latest updates and found a few problems. Today I went about fixing things, and added another feature to make blog posts have Previous and Next post links at the bottom of the page.

When I pushed my changes I noticed that my blog posts no longer showed up in the order I expected them to. This is because I was using the `stat` of the post files to order them, and it slipped by me that using version control means the mtime isn't a reliable mechanism for determining post order unless I build an elaborate scheme to record my original file mtimes and re-touch the files after checking them out from Fossil, and really scratch that!

So after making some hotfixes I spent some more of today scrapping the mtime mechanism, in favor of reading content from within the posts themselves. On single-post days I should only need YYYY-MM-DD, and on multi-post days I'll also need time information to help disambiguate and order correctly.

The method of adding Prev/Next links is something I'd like to clean up, it's a bit kludgy and was hacked in and means I now need to iterate over my list of blog post files and open them twice for edits in order to do the bi-directional linking. I might ease the process and open for edits once if I do something else, maybe store post file metadata into a SQLite DB. I'll revisit this later, I think next up is either working on the calendar content or attempting to fetch my Twitter feed and display that content in the blog as well. ]]> http://howahumanwon.org/blog/2011/12/BlogPostsByFile.html Sun, 04 Dec 2011 03:21:00 EST http://howahumanwon.org/blog/2011/12/BlogPostsByFile.html

Blog posts by file

2011-12-04 03:21:00

I have now implemented adding blog posts by creating separate .post files.

Included in this is an after-the-fold piece so that the blog front page can be trim and show snippets of posts, with links to the complete post. As demonstrated here:

There are a few other improvements to my site building script, as well as the site itself. My latest changes include:

• adding Creative Commons licensing
• moving some hard-coded configurations to a JSON config file
• beginng separation from my JustMeOverHere domain, focusing on switching to HowAHumanWon, or an even more generic option
• improving coverage of logging in the site building sub-processes
• adding logging to file
• adding replacement identifiers so that static files can contain placeholders for dynamic data, such as blog post snippets for the main blog page based on content in other .post files
• preparating for future enhancements, like Twitter feed integration

While it doesn't look like I've been very active I have been working on some of these improvements in a sandbox space while testing new functionality. There are still some migration issues going over from the sandbox to the hosting site, such as making sure all of the Perl packages I am using are available and correctly installed in both locations. My sandbox actually has issues with Data::Dumper for some reason, and I haven't found the correct flags for the compiler to generate reliable .so libraries when fetching/updating Perl packages. For this and other reasons I have pared down my reliance on external Perl packages as much as possible.

I have started using Asana as my task list organizer and am very pleased with how it works. I'm so happy with it that I've also adopted it for work at my company and have vastly improved my task management when the project count goes higher than a handful, which during the holidays it inevitably does.

I think once I get a bit further along in my site building I'll be able to post more often, and with less website navel gazing. It will be nice to write some opinion pieces and get into some of the underlying decisions I've made to guide me in the style and behavior of this site.

Later. For now I'm going to commit all of my updates to the project and go over my list to see what features I'll work on next.

Hello, world!

2011-10-22

Some years ago I purchased this domain in the hopes of using it to express myself on the Internet.

I have a feature list of things I want to have on this website that I am starting to implement. I'm going to build many of the components for constructing and maintaining this site on my own. I'm also going to document the process now that I'm at a state where it is practical to do so.

I began with building a very small framework in Perl to generate all of the website's content from source header, sidebar, menu, content, and footer files. I am learning to use the Fossil version control system, using it will help me to track my progress and the source files used for this site.

This site, and this blog is completely in its infancy. As I type this the blog consists of one static HTML page with absolutely no frills. Over time I will grow my small framework to allow me to author posts as separate files, and the main blog page will display fragments of these posts with links to the full content.

More posts will follow, as will more features to the site. I'm going to enjoy learning some new things along the way, and that's the whole point. Lastly, I'd like to point out that if you double-click anywhere you'll make Usagi Yojimbo show his angry face.