• What: “Usability Tweetup”
• When: 7pm, Saturday, July 18, 2009
• Where: Ann Arbor Brewing Company in downtown Ann Arbor [Google map]
• Why: To discuss web usability, web accessibility, Twitter; socialize; drink beer

Note that this is the night of the last day of the Ann Arbor Street Art Fair.

Those of us who participate in meetups and groups such as Refresh Detroit do so for many different reasons.  We enjoy networking, continuing education opportunities, or sharing our knowledge with like minded individuals.  What other things draw you to groups such as this?  We’d like to know not only how to stay current and relevant to you, but how to stay “one of the best” in this area!

If you’re interested in finding more great events in the Detroit area, here’s a short list of resources to start with:

• Meetup
• Upcoming
• Eventbrite
• Gary’s Guide
• a2geeks: Events

We hope to see you at our next event!

Join us at the fifth annual Internet User Experience 2009 at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Michigan the week of March 30, 2009 to April 3, 2009.

Organized by the Michigan Usabiity Professionals Association , the conference promises a week of keynote presentations, panels, training sessions, and tutorials on developing effective, compelling and profitable websites for businesses.

I’ve attended the event three of the five years, and really enjoyed meeting fellow web professionals from Michigan and outside of our state.

The conference is invaluable for

• company website managers and stakeholders
• product managers
• marketing professionals
• advertising professionals
• web developers
• web designers
• user experience professionals
• information architects
• professional communicators
• students in any program

Experts in user experience design, online branding, mobile design, field research, effective web writing, and social media will lead sessions at the conference.

Tutorials are also available to attendees with 1/2 day and full-day workshops before and after the main conference days.

Discounts are available for Usability Professionals Association members and several other organizations, as well as full-time non-working students.

The event will be held at the Morris Lawrence Auditorium at Washtenaw Community Colllege (map).

Registration is open at Internet User Experience conference website. Register before March 10 and receive a free copy of Susan Weinschenk’s new book, “Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?”

I don’ t think we have any set topic or presenter scheduled so feel free to leave comments on what you think would be an interesting topic or if you would like to present.

Everyone have a happy holiday!

To show their appreciation, O’Reilly will select 10 people at random to receive a free book of your choice. The drawing will happen on Friday, October 17, so you’ll need to complete the survey by that date to enter.

The last question on the survey asks for your e-mail address. O’Reilly will use your e-mail address only to contact the randomly selected winners – and your responses will remain anonymous.

Joey has a great sense of humor and walked us through the .air file structure, what is involved and how to use a certificate to verify no one has tampered with the program or install file. He then went into the details of creating a basic application to open and read html files.

The example walk through brought up some great questions from the group which in some instances even stumped Joey. But as the questions rolled in it brought everyone into a common sense of understanding of Flex and AIR’s capabilities and potential uses.

We were fortunate to get around $400 in giveaways of books and t-shirts provided by O’Reilly and Manning Publications. We want to thank Joey again for stopping by and giving a great presentation.

At the TODCon conference I attended in June, Alan Musselman highlighted the new features in Fireworks CS4, and they looked great! I know a lot of web professionals who have downloaded the CS4 beta versions from Adobe Labs, and have been very impressed.

Note: September 23, 2008 is the announcement, NOT the official release date of Creative Suite 4.

When our second computer stopped connecting to the Internet this afternoon, after I installed the recent Microsoft Updates, I realized there was a different kind of connection going on, between Microsoft updates and Zone Alarm.

Searching on the web brought me to the Patch (The Entire Internet) Tuesday article at the Washington Post. It turns out a major design flaw exists in DNS, which impacts not only Microsoft, but many hardware/software companies around the world. Patches have started to be released for the fix; I just happened to catch the Microsoft patch, which caused issues with Zone Alarm.

Interesting story behind how the flaw was found, and how people around the world cooperated together to fix the flaw. Dan Kaminsky is the person who found the flaw; he works in Seattle, Washington, and has posted a tool on his site to let you know if your ISP provider/company is at risk. He also describes more about the flaw, and the amazing collaborative work he led.

ZoneAlarm posted a recommendation to uninstall the KD951748 patch from Microsoft.

From what I understand from the Washington Post article, using OpenDNS should protect the your computer, which we have used since last year.

Has anyone else experienced issues? Or found other solutions?

We’re putting our heads and our ideas and our skills together to launch startup companies in one marathon weekend. Startup Weekend has been bringing these exciting, community-building weekends to cities all across the country. More than 100 people from all kinds of industries and skillsets will launch 10-12 companies. Friday night we’ll vote on ideas and choose the top dozen or so. After that, you’ll be able to choose which idea/team you want to work on and spend the rest of the weekend putting everything together for a launch. When all is said and done, you’ll be a co-founder of an honest-to-goodness startup. We need all kinds of participants!

We need idea people, marketing people, design people, technical people, business people, etc.; everyone can put their skills to work in creating these new companies. And this is a perfect time to try out something new – if you’re a techie who’d like to try graphic design or an accountant who’d like to try a little marketing, this is an excellent opportunity to expand your horizons. Through the enormously generous support of McKinley, Inc., we’ll be holding the event in office space at Liberty Square, next to the McKinley Towne Centre. There’s plenty of room for us to spread out, good access to public transportation, as well as easy parking.

The registration page will ask you to choose a general area of skill that you’re interested in. You are free to choose whatever you’d like to work on, and during the weekend, you’ll be free to explore different roles on the team(s) you’re working on. Think of the choice as an indication of general direction, not a declaration that locks you into a certain role. Pick what you would like to spend your weekend doing, not necessarily what you do for your day job.

FAQ Why should I attend?

1. Be a part of your local tech community, help build it and connect people.

2. What did you do last weekend? Experience an amazing energy, it could change your life.

3. Meet brilliant, amazing, motivated people. Find people that you know can work hard, finish projects and work well with an unknown landscape. Find a cofounder.

4. Be a part of something bigger, get excited.

5. When is the last time you had a challenge such as launching a company in 54 hours with 100 or so strangers? When is the last time you saw your company on the front page? (more reasons and links at startupweekend.com/reasons-to-attend/ ) Are you starting real companies? Yes. If you have an idea, you can find a team to make it reality. And if you have skills, you can join a team and be a part of something new and exciting. What happens after the weekend? Each team will decide for itself how to proceed. It may be that the team continues work on weekends, or some other structure or plan that works for everyone involved