But, if you’re thinking you won’t have any idea how to spend all that free time, we’ve got some suggestions for you from the good folks at O’Reilly. No matter if you’re a jQuery guru, PHP developer, MySQL ninja, or project manager rock star, you’ll find some good tips in the following online webinars.

All you need to do is register. Did I mention the webinars are free?

• Five jQuery Mistakes You’re Probably Making in Your Project, presented by Jonathan Sharp July 13 @ 10am PT
• Flexible Scaling with CouchDB Replication / Or how I learned to stop worrying and love Eventual Consistency, presented by J. Chris Anderson on July 14 @ 10am PT
• Cloud Independence with Dasein Cloud, presented by George Reese on July 16 @ 10am PT
• MySQL Upgrades With No Downtime, presented by Sean Hull on July 27 @ 10am PT
• The Upside of Downtime: How to Turn a Disaster into an Opportunity, presented by Lenny Rachitsky July 29 @ 10am PT

Check the O’Reilly Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events.

The day started with a joint presentation on “the first 15 minutes”  by Daniel Burka, Director of Design for Tiny Speck, and Rob Goodlatte, from the Facebook UX team. Next up was M. Jackson Wilkinson of LinkedIn, with a presentation on the seven core principles of product strategy for UX designers.

This discussion moved into a presentation on remote user testing by Juliette Melton of Deluxify. The morning session ended with a presentation on sustainable UX by Nick Finck of Blue Flavor.

After a break for lunch, the afternoon session started off with a presentation on card sorting by Donna Spencer, who wrote the book on the subject.

Next was a joint presentation on mobile web design by Jenifer Hanen, mobile web designer and developer, and Cindy Li of Yahoo. Last, but certainly not the least, was a presentation on practical prototyping by Sidebar Creative’s Dan Rubin.

For the sake of time and space (I took nine pages of notes, single-spaced), I won’t go into detail for all of the presentations. Instead, I’ll give you three things that I found incredibly helpful:

1. Rob Goodlatte told a short story about a user test that essentially changed the design of Facebook’s sign-up process. Watching a participant struggle in a user test brought the Facebook UX team to their “AHa!” moment. Facebook is about connecting users to people in their lives. Period. This realization lead to a significant change in the design of Facebook’s sign-up process.
2. M. Jackson Wilkinson’s seventh core principle regarding product strategy is to “sweat the important details”. If nothing else, take one part of your product and make it seem like magic (make it so easy and useful that users won’t know how you did it). A well-designed and usable product nurtures and develops trust.
3. Dan Rubin’s explanation of his prototyping process on a recent project brought up an important point about users and their tasks. When designing or redesigning a website, clarity must be paramount. It is more important than anything else that users are able to find a clear path to accomplish their task.

   Something that goes hand-in-hand with this is the implementation of Inherent Value tests. Find out what users love so that you can protect it. Don’t destroy something that works because it seems old. “Familiar” is not synonymous with “old”. Keep the things that users like. They’ll be happier and it will make less work for you in the long run.

So here they are, three of my favorite concepts. Of course, there were many many more. Every single speaker had amazing insight (and some very quotable phrases).

I look forward to another UX Web Summit in hopeful anticipation. Here’s to another fantastic Web Summit with great conversation and, hopefully, pants!

Of course, this year’s summit would not have been possible without the generosity of our sponsors. A big thank you to all of you for making this happen! Thank you,of course, to all of the speakers! Also, a big thank you to  Deborah Edwards-Onoro and Environments For Humans for making this available to those of us in Ann Arbor!

• 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!

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?