Kim Siever’s Blog

As I mentioned in a previous post, I wish there was some standard or convention or consensus on what values to attach to the name attribute of common input elements.

I thought it would be a good idea to open up a thread to devote to this very thing, so feel free to add your comments below.

First, just so everyone is clear, here is an example of the code to which I refer:

<input type="text" name="foo" />

The attribute I am referencing is name="foo". We will be discussing the value for that attribute (in this case, what replaces “foo”).

Here are some suggestions.

What do you think? Do you have any other suggestions? What are some other common fields?

If you know persons who might be interested in this idea, please let them know about his thread so they can contribute to the discussion.

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Since the start of the year, my full-time position has been evolving.

A previous employee in our department was charged with fraud last fall. As a result, many of the policies in our department needed to change. Our department is a small (four employees) IT department in one of the faculties at the University of Lethbridge. Previous to these fraud charges, a single person controlled purchasing, receiving and inventory.

In the last six months, I have been made steward over all the technological equipment used by our faculty. This amounts to hundreds of items on three campuses with a total value of roughly $500,000. As steward, I have been responsible for auditing all of the equipment we have on all three campuses, reconciling these records with those in the central Financial Services department, developing a new policy manual with the financial analyst and the department supervisor.

In addition, I am also responsible for receiving all new shipments, tagging them and recording their details (serial number, P/O info, etc) in our tracking software; managing salvaging old equipment; tracking purchases and flow of consumables (such as printer toner); filing copies of receipts for purchases made with professional supplement funds.

As a result of these new responsibilities, there has been a shift in my duties. As the responsibilities and steward position evolve, less of my time is focused on web design. This is not a bad thing necessarily; after all, working on the same website for five years can leave much to be desired. Also, working on the same website for five years has stifled my enthusiasm for web design in general.

Because of all of this, I have come to realise that I do not think my career future is in web design. For that matter, I do not see my career future being tied to any single industry. While I do believe I have strong skills in web design, the industry does not allow me capitalise on my many other skills. The new responsibilities I have do allow me to do just that.

Acting as steward and working on these small projects these past few months have helped bring enthusiasm into my work life; an enthusiasm that has been gone for a long time. In fact, it has given me hope that I can actually take my career somewhere.

As a result of all of this, I am undergoing a personal rebranding effort. I am analysing how I am branding myself and my skills currently and doing what I can to change this in order to highlight my strong skills and accomplishments. There will probably be a few changes at HotPepper.ca over the next few weeks as I come to some conclusions. I’m not sure what the future of this blog specifically will be, but I think things will definitely be different here in the near future.

I fell good about this decision, and I hope to see myself better off.

Google has released a new feature in GMail: reply by chat.

I have wanted to do this numerous times. On the surface it looks cool, to be able to see someone who has sent you email is online. There’s more however; it also groups the resulting chat log in with the email conversation.

Very cool.