On Monday and Tuesday, of this week, I attended An Event Apart Chicago. It was a really great group of sessions this year. The only one that I didn’t enjoy was “The Seven Lies of Information Architecture”. My favorite sessions were “Best Practices For Form Design” & “The State of CSS In an IE7 World”. My biggest take away from the conference was… how can I have been doing web standards design for almost 4 years and not have heard about Dean Edward’s IE7 project? How?

Yesterday I was awarded an “All-Star - Honorable Mention”!

This week was Association Week which is a time when associations take a moment to celebrate their accomplishments over the past year. And since I work for an association we took that moment and gathered for some staff awards and yummy ice cream. A couple weeks back we got to nominate a coworker as an “Association All-Stars” to recognize his/her standout performance within our association.

There were 4 “All-Stars” and 4 “Honorable Mentions”. I was announced as one of the latter and given a paper “Certificate of Appriciation - in recoginition of valuable contributions to your coworkers”.

Honorable Mention? I guess at least a few people appreciate me.

Yesterday, at work, I recieved an email letting me know that I had been “selected to volunteer” (Oxymoron?) to be the Floor Captain for our new emergency evacuation plan. Now I’m a Floor Captain and have 2 searchers and 2 stairwell monitors that report up to me (if there’s an emergency that is). But, the real question is why me. Was I selected as the Floor Captain because they feel I would have the ability to take control in an emergency situation? Or is it that I’m expendable and there’s no hurry to get me out of the building? I’m going to assume it’s the former.

Yesterday, it was brought to attention that one of the sites I was the lead designer on had won an award. It was a bronze level 2007 Horizon Interactive Award under the category of Public Service / Non-Profit. Here are a couple screen grabs from the site.

I’m not sure what else to say other then thanks. Oh… and that I can’t take all the credit myself. It is very much a team effort at HIMSS and the entire web team effects the final outcome of any given site we do.

This year was the first time I ever participated in an office Halloween contest, but I had such a clever idea that I just couldn’t not use it. So, with my mexican wrestling mask (from my friend Kevin), a cape from Quincy’s dress up box and a tie I transformed myself into “Nacho Lieber - HIMSS CEO and Mexican Wrestler”.

The joke is that the last name of my CEO is Lieber, which sounds similar to Libre. So, playing with words and referencing a currently popular movie, Nacho Libre, I was able to come up with a hit costume. In fact, I won first place in the costume contest. Funny stuff!