First post in two months! Whee. As some of you may know, Valkyrie and I are embarking on a massive bike trip starting May 14. As part of that, we're building an awesome website that will feature photos, videos, and blog entries from the trip. We've started posting a bit about the preparation and training process there. If you're not already following Bike to the Earth, get on that! Other than that: just had my last exam yesterday (General Relativity - one of the hardest courses I've taken, especially since my predominantly CS and discrete mathematics background is of little help on the differential geometry side of the fence...) With that out of the way, I'm switching to full-tilt bike trip preparation. In terms of time and effort, it's almost a full-time job (albeit one that's quite rewarding!) I'll be sticking around the Toronto/Waterloo region over the next month, so drop me a line if you want to see me before I leave FOREVER ARRRRGGGGHHH :) What else? I think my last blog post was about FASS. The DVDs from that still aren't ready; something about sound level issues with the recorded footage. Anyways, I've got websites to run and blogs to post to; keep posted!

I could go on for days about how government websites are hopelessly mired in a funk of ancient design practices and proprietary databases - or I could just point you here, where the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services has kindly made my point for me. Among the snafus:

• Three separate stylesheets. Three: one for IE, one for Navigator 5 and up, and one for the rest - plus the browser detection code is crude.
• Those image links are killing me. They're ugly, they're unnecessary, the rollovers don't even line up properly. Worse, they're backed up by some horrendous-looking JavaScript that could be rewritten in about five lines even without pulling in anything like jQuery.
  
• Searching the site for CSS turns up...no results. How do you write about website usability without once mentioning CSS!? Simple: throw in a bunch of process jargon. And you wonder why these government websites never finish their usability reviews...
  
• That aside, finding anything on this site is a bit of a chore. Either I go with Search and receive what I'll refer to as "context-free results", or I poke through their gangly tab-list-hyperlink structure. Wait, never mind - this makes everything so much clearer, right?