Apr 29 2008
Tomorrow I face the surgeons knife. Hopefully this will lead to a short road to recovery. I know in my heart it will be longer than I’d like. But I hope to be out kayak surfing some time in early June.
I will most likely be doing a lot more strength training before I begin serious running/cycling again.
Wish me luck!
Mar 23 2008
In the sea kayaking blogosphere and especially in the expedition blogs there seems to be a plethora of dynamic people creating top flight content. Unfortunately it seems mostly created out of misery, breakups, arguments, failed partnerships, failed romances, divorces, but surrounded, if not wrapped like a falafel sandwich in the pita bread of spectacular paddling trips and seasoned with heroic efforts. Of course people like Shawna and Leon break that rule.
Greg Stamer has created his first Blog for his trip around Newfoundland as a sponsored paddler. In his post on blogging he stated that he doesn’t enjoy reading blow by blow travelogues of kayaking trips. I can understand the aversion to the gory details. But I also wonder if this is also an aversion to the medium due to the seeming over-saturation of kayaking expeditions to the same four places: Iceland, New Zealand, Australia, and Newfoundland. Do we need another one?
Who wants to read another blow by blow of a trip round New Zealand? Chris Duff pretty well had that covered in his spectacular book, Southern Exposure. I wonder though if Chris might have been tempted to blog if it had been available as a mass consumed medium in 2003. In five years so much has changed about the web. Certainly the overused phrase of Web 2.0 and consumer generated content is paramount here.
Sea kayaking has seemed to me; as an athlete of both running, cycling, and soccer a sport that is horrifically uncompetitive. Before this comes off sounding terrible, there are some very athletic, talented sea kayakers that are very impressive. But in order to become sponsored as a runner, or a cyclist, or as a soccer player, one would have to be so much better than everyone else that it would stagger you to think about it. I’ve played soccer against a few semi-pro and professional players in pickup matches and I can tell you that despite years of training the difference between us was night and day. Running and cycling again are perhaps even worse. My marathon time of 3:40 while quite fast for an amateur and a first marathon is still one hour and thirty minutes slower than the guy who won the race. Cycling again is so competitive that in order to stay in the game performance enhancing drugs have become the norm not the exception.
So where am I going with this? I think with Greg Stamer stepping into the realm of professional kayaking, his blog, and his trip Sea Kayaking might be entering into the realm of professional athletes. As strange as this might sound to Greg, I see this as the end of amateur night. For better or worse. And before you say it this is not so much about Greg, but about the trend. Greg whom I’ve never met, and only emailed with occasionally when debates got heated on Qajaqusa.org forums. He seems to me to be a terrific person and a very dedicated paddler, and who is a great ambassador for paddling in general, not just traditional paddling.
Justine Curgenven’s This is The Seavideos over the last few years, Brian Smith’s Pacific Horizon Video all lead to an increasing marketing push to fund bigger and better trips for more people over a year. This is great in that it brings visibility to the sport, but maybe sad in a way. I think it may eventually lead to a decline in accessibility to good informal training from people as great as Greg Stamer, Leon Somme, Shawna Franklin, Justine Curgenven, Jeff Allen, and Simon Osborne.
Because I help plan a small symposium I’ve noticed that most of the professional paddlers in the years between 2003 and 2006 were fairly accessible and inexpensive to consider, as the years have gone on there are more and more symposiums every year, and a growing number of great paddlers with very booked social calendars. This is great! But also I fear the beginning of the end for smaller local symposiums with low budgets.
For those that might not know this, these symposiums have traditionally been run by local clubs with no profit at the end. The object is to net out at 0 so that the symposium pays for itself. And this may be how all symposiums are run, certainly no one is getting rich, not even the sponsored paddlers. There aim is solely to get their name out to do more symposiums, support their sponsors, and because it is fun. My worry is that the little, out of the way symposiums, in non-glamorous places like Muskegon Michigan may no longer be part of the whirlwind tour. I hope I am wrong.
William Gibson said at the release of his previous novel (2003), Pattern Recognition, that life these days doesn’t seem to be so much about the avoidance of marketing, but the inevitability of it. And for Sea Kayaking that time may have come. White Water paddling has certainly been there for ages with a small number of inapproachable stars who compete for small pots of cash at events. Eric Jackson being the most notable. Surf Kayaking also has its stars, note the wrap up of the Santa Cruz Surf Kayak Festival.
Because Sea Kayaking is more about journeys than pulling of sweet tricks in a hole, (this is the sea notwithstanding), I think climbing may be a more accurate partner for the commercialization of sea kayaking. Who knows perhaps it is this approachability to the amateur that makes Sea Kayaking so great. Anyone can get in and do it. And unless we really are talking about circumnavigating Iceland it is a relatively low impact, easy going sport with little risk.
The people I’ve met through paddling have been some of the greatest I’ve ever met. I certainly am not calling up old soccer buddies to crash on their couch and play pick up games when I have free time. But I certainly will call up just about anyone I’ve met paddling even once to go paddle, sleep on their couch, eat their food, and vice versa.
I think this may be that moment for paradigm shift, or a nodal point where everything seems to change, but who knows maybe some people saw this moment 10 years ago. Paddle sports are quite unusual.
Feb 22 2008
I will be attempting to migrate to wordpress over the next few weeks. For a quick preview of the new keithwikle.com, head over to the new Keith Wikle.com
Textpattern has come to a dead end from a development standpoint. There have been no new releases in some time. The developers are working on a new branch of the project with no release date in site.
I’ve liked a lot about Textpattern. However there were some things that didn’t jibe.
The image management sucked. You had to toggle between two tabs in the admin interface to integrate an image into the post.
Creating pages that were not part of the Blog took some serious jury rigging. I finally managed to do this with the last incarnation of my theme.
Also while on themes, everytime I updated my theme it really took a lot of work to configure and tweak everything into place.
Wordpress allows you to add static pages and children pages with little difficulty. Image management seems to be more streamlined with posting content. Themes can be updated merely by dropping files into a themes folder in the directory and then selecting the theme in the admin tool. I’ve also imported all of my 200 posts. I just need to work on getting the wordpress textile plugin working so that all of my images and formatting tags from Textpattern will still appear. And as I stop using them in Wordpress it will be great.
Feb 22 2008
Finally a channel just for the rest of us: The Bicyclist
The acting isn’t bad. The writing is pretty good, maybe better than Friends. And Steve may be hotter than Jennifer Aniston. (Steve is a girl!)
Oct 16 2007
Sometimes everyone needs a little technical assistance from Storm Trooper tk1801.
Oct 03 2007
Ok, my work life has been interfering with my enjoyment of web sites for some time. I may have to step onto the pulpit here to proclaim the importance of usability on the web.
My daily work consists of working on corporate consumer sites, designing usable interfaces for the web. In this work I look at a lot of web sites and I have a mental list of quite a few that really irk me. But nothing irks me more than when I am interested in a product, a product I may purchase I might add, and then I am presented with a user experience that is so poor that my desire for the product is totally killed.
Crumpler Bags is just such a site and a product. I was reviewing one of my favorite blogs, Commutebybike.com and found a cool image of the Crumpler hard laptop case. Wow! Cool product. So I go to the web site. Low and behold, it is possibly the worst consumer product web site I have ever seen. That is a stretch, there are worse. But it is pretty bad. Let me give you a few reasons why.
All Flash sites can be done well, or poorly. Typically the failing is in how the information is laid out, (or the information architecture), and how the navigation is handled. On the crumpler site when I finally receive the home page after watching their none too clever flash loader, I receive their home page. The home page has no text navigation present on the page by default. The user has to roll over each item to reveal its meaning. Clever, but pointless some text above or below each item to indicate to the user what each item is would instantly allow the user to see what they wanted to click on. All of the navigation is non-standard and tells no story the user is familiar with when the page finally loads.
User’s don’t care about your clever artists, they want your information. If they don’t find it, they will go somewhere else, so why make them guess.
This is more of a pet peeve than a usability issue, but why would you put annoying/blaring music on your site by choice in 2007? Why…. And then to make it worse, the shutoff for the music was the music symbol in the lower left. Why not make the music off by default and if the user happens to find your icon they can turn it off and on at will, rather than coming to a page with annoying music that is controlled by non-standard navigation that is not labeled.
I have a sense of humor, the diarrhea button was pretty sweet. However the chain pull where you have to click and drag to clear the poop from the screen was a drag, it took me a while to find it and know what it was for. Maybe a little text to explain it would help? More non-standard controls that interfere with finding information, no matter how much it appeals to my juvenile sense of humor still makes a poor impression.
I finally find the computer bags link on the bottom and go to the shopping experience. All of the products are listed in a scroll bar frame at the top. Not great, in terms of being able to see all of the offerings at once on one page that scrolls, (yes user’s scroll), but it’s ok. The computer bag is selected on the page, I do have some clear default options that are labeled. If all I wanted to do was go with the default option and click to add the item to the cart I would be fine. But let’s say for now I wanted to look at the tech specs first. The tech specs display below the product area, and are displayed on a color background that is hard to read, not organized very well. As red/green color blindness is the most common amongst men, 7% of most adult male populations, why, oh why would you do this?....
Let’s say after not being able to understand the nav, or shut off the music, or clear the diarrhea from the screen you chose to purchase this computer bag. Once on this screen, I have a page where I am being asked to make a purchase decision on a colorful product, with no picture of the product. I have to select the product with the tiny drop down box, with no color sample from a color abbreviation name. So let’s say I can’t remember what color red/dk red is, how do I go back and look at the color on the last page? Oh sh#t I can’t. This page has no navigation to go back to the previous page to look at the color selection. So I hit my back button to look at the color selections. Now I’m pretty sure I like red/dk red, so now I am going to go back to the cart, oh sh#t how do I get back to the cart? Hmm there is no navigation to do that. I can either click add to cart, or use the forward button in my browser. I’m pretty savvy, I hit the forward button. Oh terrific, it adds another bag to my cart, now I have to remove the second item from my cart.
Guess what, no I don’t! I’m leaving the site and buying another Chrome Messenger Bag product because their site kicks ass.
User testing and thinking about how someone will actually use the web site you make will sell your products.
You can still have your diarrhea button, but you gotta get the basics down first.
May 21 2007
My son found this on You tube.
Hmm… more consistent parental filtering is obviously needed.
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