cheryl jerozal's Field Reports

The Washington Post got a world-famous violinist to play (unannounced) in a DC metro station to see what would happen. …read more

Have you ever done something quick and dirty even though doing things "the right way" would only take a little more time? Maybe you didn't have a little more time? Of course. Haven't we all? Here's an example. Recently, I was creating a conference registration form for a client on her Plone-based site. Ideally, the client would have created and maintained the registration form herself, since the tool we were using has a graphical form creation interface. However, the documentation for the tool we were using was out of date. I thought about updating the documentation at that time and then helping the client through it, but that would have required a lot more time than just setting up the form myself. Also, I was going to be out of town shortly (for the NTEN conference) and the client wanted to start accepting conference registrations as soon as possible. In the circumstances, it seemed a reasonable solution for me to create the form, so I did. Many form tweaks later, I think I have spent more time on updating the form than it would have taken to update the documentation, which could have helped others besides just this client. …read more

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in my first "sprint". In a sprint, a bunch of people get together and work on an open source project for a few days. In my two days (and one night :p) of sprinting, I learned a lot, met some awesome people, and contributed to the start of a project. I highly recommend sprinting to anyone who gets a chance to do it. However, one thing I noticed when sprinting was the difficulty of getting to a point where you can make progress on a project. For example, before you could work on my project, you had to download and install particular versions of six different tools. And then you had configure your system properly (set environment variables and run scripts and such). …read more

Am I the only one who doesn't necessarily always fill out online forms from top to bottom? The way some forms are designed makes it seem so. For example, visit the free Basecamp account signup page. At the time of this blog post, if you fill in item 3 and then fill in item 2 with something different (and then click in a new field to have the change to item 2 "sink in"), what you have entered for item 3 is replaced. …read more

Before I became a Vista, I naively hoped that the health benefits provided to us would include dental care. Thus, I put off getting my teeth cleaned and checked until when I thought my time of lacking insurance would be over. At this point I haven't been to the dentist in a while, so when I recently read an article called A survival guide for the uninsured (containing such cheerful news as "The more than 45 million Americans without coverage will get sick more, earn less and die earlier than those with insurance") the best piece of info I got from it was the idea to try to find cheap dental care at dental schools. …read more

MSN messenger was mentioned as a possible way for members of our priority area to stay in touch. I said that it wasn't necessary to use the Microsoft messenger program to chat through MSN. As long as you don't need voice and video chat, you can instead use Gaim. Currently, you would need to use this version of Gaim (get the "gaim-2.0.0beta3.1.exe" file) for it to work with MSN, at least on Windows. By the way, if you don't already have an MSN ID for chatting, you can get one by creating a Microsoft Passport Account. …read more

One of the things I am working on is creating websites for nonprofits. In the past, I used CSS a little for changing background colors, fonts, etc because I saw it somewhere but I had no idea what it was capable of. (For anyone who hasn't heard of it, CSS can be used to create designs for HTML pages. It allows one design file to be used for multiple pages in a website so that changing the font all across a site, for example, does not require changing each page in the site.) The CSS Zen Garden project provides a webpage for designers to create CSS designs for, which are then posted online. Each of the designs use the same HTML code (so they have the same content) - the only difference is the CSS (including images) design. Of the hundreds of designs posted online, here are a few examples that I liked and think show a good variety of designs: Museum, Pretty in Pink, Obsequience, contemporary nouveau, and Garden Party. Isn't this cool? …read more

i really hope we all keep up with our blogs, because i want to be able to keep up with all of you! ok, now for some "vista life" type stuff i've been thinking about / looking into:   *** food stamps *** according to stuff online, i don't think i am eligible for food stamps since i have too much savings (too much being more than the limit of $2,000). savings in an ira must be included toward this limit, even though according to wikipedia "a debtor in bankruptcy can exempt his or her IRA from the bankruptcy estate" and this seems like it should be a similar situation. …read more

i don't have much to say right now. but in the future this space will be filled with tales of my trials and triumphs as a ctc vista.