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Make an alternate form to register for nanny taxes and increase state tax revenue
Ah, the nanny tax. Some quick Google searches show a range of 80 to 95% of people who are obligated to pay the nanny tax, simply don’t. (NYTimes, ParentDish.com) That’s a pretty whopping statistic. As I’ve been finding out, it would certainly be easier to just skip it. This past summer I hired a nanny…
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Much ado about phone numbers
Lately I’ve been thinking about formatting phone numbers. Of course, there are plenty of options in addition to the ones above, but these are some common ones, although the thin spaces option is perhaps not too common. I added it because I’ve been wondering about the value of the separator characters, and if we can…
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How can MI UPA, IxDA groups, and MichiCHI work together?
UX practitioners in the state of Michigan have an enviable problem. We have so many active professional groups that it’s easy to get confused by which one is doing what, exactly. Which groups? Usability Professionals Association, Michigan chapter (MI UPA) Interaction Design Association (IxDA), local groups IxDA-Ann Arbor IxDA-Lansing IxDA-Grand Rapids Michigan CHI (MichiCHI) Each…
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How I use utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign from Google Analytics
My friend Adam called me this evening to ask how I’ve used the Google Analytics tracking codes utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign. He’s working on an app to help marketers generate HTML e-mails, and is thinking about automating the inclusion of these tracking codes. The utm_medium is pretty straightforward in that the medium would be values…
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Mmm. Steak Sandwich and Garden Fresh Tomato Soup
I got the idea for the sandwich from an article on LiveStrong.com and I decided to track down a tomato soup recipe to make something of my abundant backyard tomato plant. No kidding, it was the best tomato soup I’ve ever had in my life.
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Aug 2011 Vacation Photos
This past weekend Lila, Eva and I returned home from a week-long vacation to the Keewenaw Peninsula in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I grew up there, and we caught up with relatives while there. Here are some photos from our trip. Taqhuamenon Falls We took a leisurely drive up and spent a morning site-seeing…
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Does Kanban hurt Agile teams by decreasing iterative development?
Kanban is a balm now being used by some Agile development teams to soothe the pain caused by timeboxed development cycles. Jeff Patton’s statement, “Short timeboxes herniate,” sums up that pain (from his excellent post “Kanban development oversimplified”). As a Product Owner with a team that started out using Scrum and has gradually drifted to…
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Small-caps, web text, and CSS
There’s a trick to getting small-caps to work on the web, and it’s counter-intuitive. Let’s say you had an abbreviation, like CSS, that you wanted to put into small-caps, say with a little extra tracking. You might think you could use the CSS property font-variant: small-caps, and you’d be good to go. Not so. Here’s…
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The problem with the line break (BR) tag
We’ve got the <br /> tag all wrong. It’s time to make it right. We all know the <br /> tag is used to insert a line break in HTML. But what we’ve been missing is that we were too often after something else. Let me explain. Common reasons to use line breaks Why would…
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A model for UX design reviews
Design reviews are so important for our work as user experience designers, but they too often fail us. Here is a model for design reviews that overcomes the problems of ego, emotion, and communication that so often get in the way of helpful feedback. Alaina Kraus, Caitlin Potts, and I presented this process for the…