Slowly but surely things are getting back to normal for us locals here in Cancun. The first couple of weeks after Hurricane Wilma were hard since not much was open and the roads were crisscrossed with downed utility poles, wires and killer potholes. But gradually the major stores have reopened, the utility poles have been replaced and life is mostly back to normal in the city, though the potholes are still here.

The hotel zone, which is the strip where the hotels and beaches are, is another story. Many hotels are still closed and a couple are even going to be torn down due to foundation damage. Long strips of the beach are just gone. And many restaurants and nightclubs are closed for repairs. One exception is the G-Spot nightclub which has just reopened in the last few days. The G-Spot is located near km 11 and has a great location perched out over the lagoon, as far as I know it’s the only nightclub in the hotel zone that is open right now.

The government here has approved a plan by some hotel owners here to rebuild around 2 miles of beach in Cancun from Punta Cancun going south. The plan includes creating an artificial dune in front of 25 or so hotels. This compliments a government-financed plan to rebuild the beach in other areas of Cancun. There’s more information in this article from the Miami Herald, Mexico Edition. I have not seen any dates associated with these plans but since the high season begins on December 15 we can expect that both will begin shortly. I have read that the government plan will take 6 to 8 months to complete.

When I started out in the software industry usability testing consisted of getting someone, anyone, who was not actually involved in the development of the software to try to use it. If the person had trouble using the software then the development team would debate whether or not this was due to the fact that the tester was an idiot. If it was determined that the tester was not an idiot (yeah, like that ever happened), or not too much of one, then we would think about maybe, possibly, changing the software design. We were a bunch of hacks! What can I say? The industry was young, we were young and there was no one around to tell us who the real idiots were.

Now all that has changed (now we know we are the idiots). These days any designer worth the crumbs stuck down in their keyboard gets that the user’s experience of a software application, or a web site, is what really matters. We’ve changed the way we think about design to bring the user more friendly and more intuitive user interfaces. We’ve realized that we can’t just please the boss (or the client) anymore. Now we’ve got to meet the user on their level and we’ve got to make sure the user has an easy time interacting with our design.

These days there’s lots written about usability testing. One of the best books for a newcomer to the subject is Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think”. It’s short, well-written and very usable itself.

But I just found another resource which is WebCredible’s list of 8 guidelines for usability testing. It provides a straightforward outline of the basic steps involved in setting up a usability testing session. So now we really have no excuse. Damn I miss the dark ages!

Ok, so I took the wrong cat to the vet. I didn’t take the fat old lady cat who’s peeing all over. I took the young cute one who needed shots. But at least I took one of them. I’ll take the other one in a day or two. Around here someone always needs to go to the vet.

Our vet is actually two vets, two married born-again Christian vets. And their office is filled with born-again employees and little born-again signs in Spanish which say things about “being one with him” and “walking in his light”. I won’t say anything.

Regardless of when they were born these vets are very serious about helping the street animals in Cancun. Their policy is that they will neuter any cat we find on the street for free (or for a tip). We’ve brought them a lot of street cats so far, including one which we later learned wasn’t a street cat (oops). But there are always more cats around ready to make more unwanted kittens, so it will never end.

The cat I took today is one we found with a broken leg. She was about 4 months old when we found her and her femur had been snapped right in half. The poor thing ended up with a pin in her hip for a month. And as soon as she recovered from that ordeal (and she has recovered very well) she went into heat, so we had to do an emergency spay on her just to get her to quit all that horny yowling!

Today I took her to the vet because she had a string from one of her internal stitches sticking out through the spay incision scar. It was very weird. We noticed yesterday that the string was sticking out so today we decided to ask the vet to deal with it, which she did by just cutting it off (well now I coulda done that, I think). But while I had the vet’s attention I got her to give this kitty her vaccinations. So now that kitty is all set, finally, maybe, until something else goes wrong.

Meanwhile my husband has piled a whole bunch of stuff on our bed to make it an unpleasant place for the fat old lady cat with the leaky bladder to hang out. He’s got the lid from a plastic bin on there and a bunch of towels and some screwdrivers and junk like that; and he’s got it all cockamaymeed so there’s nowhere comfortable to lie down and lose control of your bladder.

But now I want to take a nap and my bed is a big complex lumpy mess. Looks like I took the wrong cat to the vet.

I just got back from a good hard run in the Parque Kabah. The Parque Kabah is a large park, located within Cancun, which has a decently long loop trail that goes through the woods. For a while after Hurricane Wilma the park was closed, but it’s finally reopened and is as busy as ever with runners and walkers.

Tons of trees got knocked down during the hurricane so the park feels different now. There are trees leaning out over the path which weren’t leaning before. And the canopy is less dense now since many trees lost their leaves during Wilma. Many of the visual cues I use to keep track of where I am along the path are changed or gone. Today I was running along at top speed (trying to shake another runner) and realized that I had no idea how far I was from my usual stopping spot. The path might as well have been on another planet for all I recognized of it. Finally I saw something I recognized, a worn-down tree stump on the left side of the path. I was very glad to see it because it meant I was only around the corner from where I would let myself stop, and by then I desperately needed to do so. I managed to pull away from the runner who’d been on my heels for most of a lap and by the time I did stop he was out of sight behind me.

The spot where I stop, and where most runners stop, is a clearing half way around where they’ve put in some apparatus for working out. All of it is made from logs bolted together and sunk into cement to keep them in place. There are stations for doing sit ups and push ups and whatever other ups you can think of. It’s always interesting to see how other people use the stations. Sometimes I’ll see someone who has come up with some new use for one of them and then I’ll take that idea and add it my already-too-long workout. If I actually run through my entire set of exericses I will spend almost an hour there. I’ve got 3 variations of sit ups that I do (and I never do less than 100 total). I also do push ups, stretches, lunges, leg lifts and some tricep exercises. Today the workout area was crowded but I still managed to get in all of my sets and even do some extra upper body work (which I know will make me sore later).

To get back to my car from the workout area I need to run a half a lap around the loop. When I’m tired I end up walking it but today I forced myself to run the whole way. And as I was running I was thinking how great it is to workout outside of a building. Back in the states I always belonged to a gym and though I would run outside when I could I always did the rest of my workout inside. But here in Cancun the weather is so agreeable that I can be outside comfortably all year long. And there’s no Top 40 playing on bad speakers, there’s just the sound of the various birds talking to each other and the distant (though not too) sounds of the city. And besides the only gym in Cancun that I’d consider joining got whomped by Hurricane Wilma and is now closed!

…actually she’s been sick for a while. She’s super-fat (she’s almost 20 lbs) and is 15 years old. For years the vets told me to get down her weight before she begins to develop kidney failure and diabetes. Well, we tried the diet thing but this cat would have nothing of it. She hardly lost any weight at all but trying to keep her on her diet made the rest of us crazy.

The poor thing has been peeing way too much for years. And she drinks more water than our other 8 cats combined. But now she’s started peeing on our bed. Sometimes twice in one day. And it’s not just the bed but the pillows too. I’m afraid she’s losing control of her bladder now. And I’m getting very tired of cleaning up cat pee (though I’m good at it now). We’ll be taking her to the vet tomorrow…

Once you’ve lived in Cancun for a while you get kind of jaded about going to the beach.

Cancun has more than 14 miles of sandy coastline so picking a beach is actually harder than you might think. Even now, after Hurricane Wilma, with half of Cancun’s beach areas wrecked, deciding which beach to visit is still something we have to debate. Before Wilma hit there were about 7 different stretches of beach in Cancun that we enjoyed going to. Now we’re down to only 4. Four is enough to make the decision hard.

So how do we decide which beach to go to? It depends on a lot of things. How much time do we have for beach that day? Some beaches are quicker to get to than others. What time of day is it when we leave the house? Some beaches are shadowed by tall hotels late in the day. What time of year is it? In summer we want beaches with shade, but in winter we want sunny beaches. How much wave action do we want? The northside beaches have smaller waves than the eastside beaches do. What day of the week is it? On Sundays the easy-access beaches are packed with locals.

But mostly it comes down to mood. Different moods dictate different beaches. Today’s mood was “I’d love to go to the beach but I’m too lazy to decide which one”. Sometimes too many choices is a bad thing.

One of the things I love about living in Cancun (and there aren’t that many, so pay attention) is the weather. I rarely get cold here. I almost never need to wear socks. In fact I pretty much only wear socks when I’m running.

This time of year it’s actually chilly enough in the mornings that I want to wear a sweater when I get up, that is, until I actually move around a little. By the time I’ve made my coffee the sweater has usually been discarded.

Everywhere else I’ve ever lived I’ve spent a significant amount of each year being cold or working very hard not to be cold. Now I live in a house without a heater and I’m happily barefoot most of the time.

When I first arrived in Cancun, two and a half years ago, I was talking to a fellow American, she was a “large” woman and she told me that the best thing about living in Mexico was that you could hire a maid to work full time for you and it would only cost $70 usd per week. All I could think was that if she did her own dishes she might burn a calorie or two.

Since then I’ve had many, many people tell me the same thing. The best thing about living in Mexico is the cheap labor. The best thing about living in Mexico is having a cheap maid to cook and clean for you.

I’m not dissing folks who want domestic help. It’s great to have someone help you with your housework. I love having someone clean my house for me.

But honestly I think it’s tragic that the economy here is so whacked that I can pay someone next to nothing and they will work hard for me and be happy about it. With $70 a week what kind of a life can that maid have? Can she own a car? Can she buy a house? Forget house, can she buy a refrigerator or a stove? Am I supposed to feel good about paying slave wages? I don’t and I can’t.

I know I dissed Flash usage in a previous post but I do believe that there are times when Flash is a wonderful technology to add to a web page. When it’s well-implemented Flash can provide the user with a wonderfully smooth intereaction with a web site. My daughter plays a lot of online Flash-enabled games and loves them. And I think when done properly Flash can make buttons and menus pop. And of course it’s great for advertising banners.

There are many examples of good Flash usage, these are just two of my favorites. Enjoy!

• Singing Horses
• BadgerBadgerBadger

Well, there are lots of reasons why I adore Eddie Vedder. One is that he has a big and open heart and he appears to be absolutely dedicated to the people he loves and the causes he believes in. The world desperately needs more men like him. Another reason I adore him is that he writes and composes music which makes me feel that I’m not alone in the world. His work touches me in a way that almost no other music or art ever has. And that matters to me, a lot. I don’t like feeling alone.

But this morning it occurred to me that one of the things I like best about him is that he’s very brave. He’ll do anything for his art. I was just listening to one of the Pearl Jam bootlegs from the 2000 tour (Tampa) and on it Eddie plays a song called “Soon Forget”. He plays the song alone, on a ukelele. How many rock stars would do a quiet little solo on a ukelele in front of 20k-plus people?

Here are the lyrics…

Soon Forget by Eddie Vedder

Sorry is the fool who trades his soul for a corvette.
Thinks he’ll get the girl he’ll only get the mechanic.
What’s missing? He’s living a day he’ll soon forget.

That’s one more time around. The sun is going down.
The moon is out but he’s drunk and shouting.
Putting people down. He’s pissing. He’s living a day he’ll soon forget.

Counts his money every morning. The only thing that keeps him horny.
Locked in a giant house that’s alarming.
The townsfolk they all laugh.

Sorry is the fool who trades his love for hi-rise rent.
Seem the more you make equals the loneliness you get.
And it’s fitting. He’s barely living a day he’ll soon forget.

That’s one more time around and there is not a sound.
He’s lying dead clutching Benjamins. Never put the money down.
He’s stiffening. We’re all whistling a man we’ll soon forget.