On the long journey back to Florida from Hawaii, I found myself trying to enjoy a seemingly endless layover in Atlanta. Thankfully, I had decent connectivity to the Edge network via my iPhone so I was able to read some of my favorite sites and surf a bit. As much as I love my iPhone, I can only stare at it for so long before I have to look at something bigger. I opted to look at a big cup of coffee, yum! While sipping away at my newfound, delicious, scalding hot beverage, I got to thinking about how convenient and nice it was that the coffee cup had one of those little cardboard sleeves on it so that I could accomplish the simple task of holding the beverage without discomfort to my hand. Simple and effective. Shortly after that, I was sitting at the gate waiting for my next (and thankfully last) flight when an airline employee wheeled up the wheelchair pictured (ok, it didn’t actually have a PixelLevel logo on it) above. That got me thinking about how nice it was that we have things like wheels attached to chairs and ramps to help people who need a little help getting around. Again, simple and effective. I was beginning to see a theme here which got me thinking about web standards and specifically about web accessibility. It was a reminder to me that as web designers and developers we need to be mindful and remember that we too have our own cardboard coffee cup sleeves and wheelchairs and ramps (metaphorically speaking) that we need to use in our daily work in order to make the web sites we build useable by everyone.

On my recent business trip to Hawaii, I snapped an image of this cement row boat with my iPhone while relaxing and enjoying a cup of coffee at the Maunalua Bay Beach park. The park is a great place to hang out if you have some time to kill. Keep your eyes peeled and you just might be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of a turtle, ray, hammerhead shark, eel, or any of a number of other cool critters. Failing any critter cameos its relaxing to watch the small boats launch and land. Back to the boat – this thing actually floats! Much to my amazement a few of what I assume were high school students picked the vessel up and got it into the water, rowed it up and down the coast a bit and then pulled it back up onto the beach. It wasn’t pretty, but it did actually work! Immediately next to the cement boat were a bunch of beautifully crafted outrigger canoes. It was an interesting juxtaposition of technologies that got me thinking about the elegance of standards based web design versus the old days of table based layout. Let’s here it for technology!

I was in Hawaii on business last week and while cruising to the airport to start the journey back to Florida, I noticed two large jet black SUVs screaming up behind me as I approached a stop light. The two vehicles swerved into the open right hand lane next to me and when I looked over at the driver of the first SUV, I noticed it was Dog the Bounty Hunter! He looked over, smiled, and gave me a friendly nod so I immediately whipped out my iPhone and took a snapshot of him. Classic! After a moment the light turned green and he sped off followed by his wife in the second (identical) SUV and before I knew it both of them had completely vanished from sight. It was kind of a fun and interesting way to end the trip. I miss Hawaii already and look forward to heading back to the islands real soon!