No no, seriously. It's really really hot outside. What happened to our habit of afternoon showers? :(

Gavin and I were up at the AOL Developer Conference last week in Reston, pretty good times and great to see some of the innovations taking place within AOL. Edo from Relegence easily wins the coolest presentation award with some of the raddest technology I've seen in awhile. I won't go into specifics, but that's a very interesting company and I'm glad they're a part of AOL.

I gave a presentation on UCD titled "Mockups are RAD," showing how some simple user centered design principles can greatly benefit rapid application development. I'll stop short of calling it "agile" or any other kind of process, but basically we went through how the blogsmith team operates. It's a "getting real" kind of thing, I suppose. The idea was to split it into 2/3rd's slides and then 1/3rd discussion. It ended up being about 50/50, but the discussion seemed to degenerate into pretty negative we-dont-like-aol-processes kind of talk. I guess I should have expected that, but I still tried to spin things positively. AOL is a giant corporation coming from a client background. Giant doesn't work on the web, nor does a client development process.. Sooo... it'll be interesting to see the culture shift over the next few years.

We got back to Orlando just in time for the shuttle launch. We left the airport and drove out to Space View Park in Titusville. Great location to watch from (it's directly across the river), and an unbelievable day. There's supposed to be something like 20 launches this year between the shuttle and various air force rockets, so it should be fun. This was Kat's second time seeing the shuttle, and she's two for two. With how often they get scrubbed, that's pretty dang good!