Welcome

Today I accepted a position with Manhattan Associated in Atlanta, GA for a User Interface Designer position. It should be an interesting job in that I'll be part of a new department that currently has two people the supervisor and one other person. We are working on revising the whole Manhattan line of supply chain management products to make them more user friendly. It is going to be a challenge but I am not one to shy away from that.

I leave Bloomington for the last time next week. It will be sad to leave behind the place I have called home for the last two years. I have met many wonderful people and learned so much since walking in the door the first day of orientation.

I am sure I'll be back since I am not that far away. The funny thing is that I am almost half way between the two universities I attended. Gainesville is about 5 hours away and Bloomington 8 hours.

Since we have wrapped up the intense part of Bloomington Startup Weekend I wanted to do a little wrap up myself. I didn't get much time to blog since I spent most of it running around trying to keep things moving.

I started out with user experience but since we were one of the largest groups there I opted to step back a bit and try to help fill in gaps. I helped find people work when the needed it, work with our tech guy from the city to getting a TV to watch the IU vs Ohio State game today. I helped coordinate and interview a few users thanks to the help of tall Steve and Kevin Makice. I also took care of things that needed to be done. Every group needs someone to do these things. I did come back to UX when I had time to give feedback and see what was going on.

I think we have an interesting idea that I can't talk to much about we are still working out the legal issues. I have volunteered to help with moving forward but didn't choose to become part of the core team since I know I will be leaving Bloomington in May. I don't know where I am going yet but I know I will be relocating somewhere.

We were joking about how the core team is Informatics and tall Steve. As we move to a smaller group and more time I think I will be able to move back into a user experience position. Sometimes you just need to be flexible and fill gaps when you can.

I met a lot of interesting people from the community including a few council members and people from a bunch of local businesses. I also got to talk to the founder of the whole start up weekend concept from Boulder, CO.

All in all it was an interesting experience. Whether it will turn into a real company is up to legal and man power factors. We have set a meeting for a few weeks out to regroup and discuss what is going on.

Our concept is event a central events database that will feed other sites and the primary place for finding events in Bloomington. The user experience team has retreated to the Informatics building to discuss the design of the pages and figure out details. We are somewhat unsure of the exact details since business development is not really sure of how everything should go.

I think we are going to hack on this for a few hours and the regroup tomorrow morning.

The process has been a little frustrating since we have had to move so fast but it will be interesting to see what comes out of it all.

This weekend I am trying out the Bloomington startup weekend. We are going to try and develop a company in one weekend. I am signed up as part of the user experience team and I might drift over to design a bit depending on what we end up doing. It should be an interesting weekend. I am looking forward to the presentations of the concepts tonight. I have seen a few interesting concepts on the ning group.

I'll try blog about it more as the weekend goes on.