All posts by kleucht

Skiing’s best kept secret: Big Sky, MT

Recently I attended an IEEE technical conference in Big Sky, Montana. In case you didn’t know, Big Sky is a very nice ski resort located about an hour north of the west entrance to Yellowstone National Park. I mostly attended this conference because I was presenting a technical paper on a PLC software translation utility that I had prototyped. I seriously had no clue that the conference was being held at a major ski resort. It’s a really nice place. Here are a few photos. The main peak is called Lone Peak and it sits at elevation 11,253 feet.

After my paper was approved for this conference, I found out from a coworker (Glenn S) that it was a major ski resort. Luckily I grew up skiing in Colorado with my family and still had my old skis stored up in the attic. They hadn’t been used in probably 10 years, but they appeared to me to be in decent shape, so I packed them up and took them with me. My ski boots which were also stored in my attic for those 10 years were destroyed … from the heat I suppose. Mental note: Do not store expensive plastic items in the 150 degree attic! I borrowed some winter wear from a friend (Dave B) and did a couple half-days worth of skiing while I was there. Some photos are shown below. All the skiing I did in Colorado growing up led me to believe that I would never experience any better skiing anywhere in the world, but I must say that the conditions at Big Sky were better than anything I’ve ever experienced. This is a top notch ski resort and they take great care of their slopes.  On a side note: My bindings were so old the ski shop refused to touch them and by the end of a couple days skiing, one of my skis was starting to de-laminate.

Here is a short video I took while skiing down a trail right to my room. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_nHN09zgbc

One day when there was nothing going on at the conference, I drove an hour or so down the road to check out Yellowstone. Here are a few photos I took along the way. Sadly, Yellowstone was closed for the winter. I felt a bit like Clark Griswold in National Lampoon’s Vacation after traveling all that way to find the park closed. But I made the best of it and watched an Imax movie and ate dinner and did some shopping in the little town of West Yellowstone. The town was mostly shut down also, though. It was almost a ghost town.

Back at Big Sky Resort, one night while I was walking around the base of the mountain after eating at a local restaurant, I heard the cheers of a large crowd coming from the mountain. I followed the noise (and the stream of people walking that direction) to find a quarter pipe competition in full swing. It was pretty fun to watch. Luckily I always have my camera with me when I travel, so I took a few photos and also some video.

And here is a short video compilation from the Quarter Pipe Contest at Big Sky, Montana. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg3tpHSaQVg

So that was my experience at Big Sky, MT. It was fun and I would definitely do it again.

Kurt

Sun ‘n Fun Airshow at Lakeland, FL

I took a much deserved day off work on Friday and attended the Sun ‘n Fun Fly-In and Air Show in Lakeland, Florida with my buddy Les. It was a beautiful day for an airshow and this was quite an airshow.

.SUN n FUN

First we walked around and looked at all the homebuilt airplanes that were there for the fly-in. Then we walked around all the vendor exhibits for a while. Then we watched the airshow and it was quite impressive. Then after a dinner break, they put on a very cool night airshow. And after that, they put on the most spectacular fireworks display I think I’ve even seen in my entire life! It was quite a day. Here is a short video compilation that I posted to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UqFCnRzDso

And here are some of the photos I took:

.Sun 'n Fun

.Sun 'n Fun

.Sun 'n Fun

.Sun 'n Fun

Kurt

KSC Beach Cleanup

Last week I was able to take part in an annual beach cleanup on the very remote beaches of the Kennedy Space Center. It was a lot of hard work, but it was pretty cool to take part in this worthy cause. I put a short video from the beach cleanup on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjT6dTbacg0

This is an annual event at KSC and it is organized by the Fish & Wildlife Service, who owns most of the land that KSC sits on. They do this every year before sea turtle nesting season starts.

There were some pretty interesting items that were collected, in addition to a ton of bottles and bottle caps, which I noticed were the most frequent item found. A lady right directly in front of me found 2 separate messages in bottles. One of them was a letter from a 9 year old girl in the Bahamas who’s whole class had put messages into bottles for a “sea-pal” exercise. The lady who found the message said she was definitely going to write the little girl back. I found quite a few bottles, but none with messages.

It was hard work in the hot sun, but I’m going to sign up again next year.

Kurt

User Interface Annoyances: Indicator Buttons

As a software programmer, I feel the need to make the user happy so that they will like my product. We all just want to be loved, right? In order to make the user of my software happy, the user interface must not be annoying and the whole user experience must be positive. I personally have lots of opinions about what should and should not be done in a user interface, and I’m sure the whole world will not be totally in agreement with all of my opinions, and that’s fine. We can agree to disagree.

Today’s annoying user interface is inside the elevator in my building at work. It’s not very nice to make your floor indicators (which cannot be pressed by the user) look exactly like the floor selection buttons. (Sorry about the poor quality photos.)

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Now, I consider myself a fairly sharp guy, but on the rare occasion that I actually use the elevator in my 2-story building, the indicator lights which look exactly like the floor buttons always throw me for a loop. They look like buttons that can be pressed.
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The only reason I haven’t been tricked into pressing them is because they are way up high on the panel. But still, last time I was in the elevator I had to try to press them just to make sure they were not actually buttons. They’re not. But they sure look like buttons. Why would any user interface designer in their right mind design an indicator to look exactly like a button? Is this a game they play just to mess with our minds or something?

This would be even more annoying if this were done on a software user interface. But I don’t have any examples of that to post right now. Let’s just try to avoid using buttons as indicators, shall we?

Just my opinion,

Kurt (with a tip of my hat to Joel Spolsky)