Pat’s Point of View

My dance card has been filled for the first half of this year, with two iterations of my newly updated Information Architecture Essentials workshop series. The dates and locations are:

• 9 April 2008 – Mercure Hotel, Sydney
• 18 June 2008 – Rydges South Bank, Brisbane

Here’s the blurb:

In this one-day workshop, Patrick Kennedy will present the fundamentals of information architecture (IA), the core methodology for organising and designing websites and intranets.

Key skills such as card sorting will be taught, and this workshop is designed to build in-house information architecture skills. A must for all web or intranet teams.

Since the last public workshop, I was invited to run essentially the same workshop for IBM Global Services at their annual 'Summer School' in Melbourne. This was a fantastic event to be a part of, even if the Melbourne weather in January was intolerably hot! I’ve made a few improvements to the workshop since then.

Whilst the workshop has been refreshed, it still aims to introduce the fundamentals of IA and user-centred design, and get people ready to go off and explore topics further. If you’ve attended one of the previous workshops, there’s no need to attend the new version.

See what people are blogging about: information architecture, workshop, training, step two designs

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This guy is my hero…

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Over a weekend of hot, humid weather I decided to stay indoors and do what any other red blooded Aussie male would do; bake. Having recently watched an episode of SBS’s Food Safari dedicated to Maltese food, I thought I’d try my luck at a Puddina recipe by Rita O’Dwyer. For those that don’t know it, Puddina is a dessert similar to that old British favourite bread and butter pudding.

In keeping with the spirit of Maltese cooking, I altered the recipe to make use of what we had lying around, so the actual recipe turned out to be:

The bread I used was Pana de Casa, this was as close to “good crusty Maltese bread” as I could find. It was still quite fresh so I ’staled’ it in the oven for about 5 minutes. I added the Wheatbix because we had some lying around and weren’t going to eat them, but it’s also a good gimmick. All the other ‘unusual’ ingredients are substitutions for what Rita suggested, based on what we had lying around (in most cases close to the used-by date).

This took very little time to prepare, and I reckon kids would love making (and eating) it. Especially the mashing of the bread. Not sure about the Sherry though, might need a substitute if the kiddies will be partaking.

I was very happy with the results, served both hot and cold. However, Jenn wouldn’t touch it. Said the smell made her feel ill. Hmmm, and she’s the Maltese one! Must be the pregnancy talking :)

Now on to something more challenging, Timpana perhaps.

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If you’re a fan of comics and you’re frustrated by the endless stream of fairly rubbish movies that film studios release to try and earn a few bucks, check out these great parody videos on YouTube (the list is reverse-chronological so start at the end). The one I’ve embedded is the first one.

The one guy made all of them and they’re very witty and packed with inside jokes about various comic book characters. They started off using the style of the “I’m a Mac and I’m a PC” ads that Apple have had great success with. This guy’s not a bad director himself…maybe he should direct the next Marvel or DC movie :)

Popularity: 26% [?]