Teaching
I decided I'd try out this whole "teaching" thing by taking a job at Tri-County Technical College, teaching 1 section of Introduction to Psychology. It was pretty fun.... then I was asked to pick up 3 more classes! So, now I'm nearly teaching full time, which is extra fun 
I never really thought of myself as a "teacher", but so far it's been fun and the students seem to be learning and enjoying it. I'll keep you posted as to how that works throughout the semester. So far, so good though.
Advanced Weightloss Center
Got Advanced Weightloss Center's website up almost a month ago, you can see it at www.advancedweightlosscenter.com . The design was a collaboration with Brian Harwood, Jennifer (graphic design guru), and me. The site is running wordpress, and uses a customized theme.
Recent Work
It's been a busy few months here at James Rubinstein Web Design.I've been working on a few new projects, notably the Upstate Healthlink and the Carolina Foothills Heritage Fair.You can see the live projects at their websites:
Carolina Foothills Heritage Fair
Anderson International Festival
There's also some new things in the works, which I hope to get into production soon
Birkenstock Engineering
A friend of mine, needed a website for his new business. He wanted something easy-to-use, good looking, and simple to navigate.
I chose wordpress as the platform for it's back-end and front-end user friendliness. Getting it to look 'right' was a challenge. It uses the Gear theme, heavily modified by me.
The look and feel is pretty slick, particularly with the 'lightbox' effect on the pictures
Check it out at www.birkenstockengineering.com. Be sure to check out the driving simulator
B&B SwapShop
Probably my biggest project to date. The B&B SwapShop is an online classified service tied in with B&B Sporting Goods & Pawn and WRIX FM radio. There is a radio show Saturday Morning from 930-10am, all the items on the show get advertised on the website, which is pretty cool.
There is still some work to be done, but it's up and operating and I'm quite pleased with it. It's based on Drupal 6.
Farmer’s Marketing
Since graduation last year I've been working at the Anderson County Farmer's Market. While that may seem a far cry from Human Factors, it isn't.
Much of the work we've been doing at the Farmer's Market has revolved around putting together some new and interesting programs to help put more money in farmers' pockets. To that end, Brandon, Allison, Diana, and I have created the Anderson County Farm & Food Plan. The Farm & Food plan is a comprehensive, system based approach to solving the food problems of Anderson County. The chief food problem being "Why aren't we feeding ourselves?". Anderson County has plenty of "farmland" (quotations because it's not used for farming, but rather as a tax designation", and we spend half a billion dollars on food. With much of that money going to other states or countries, that's a big problem.
To solve this problem we took a User-Centered Design approach to these agricultural systems.
To get more detail check out the Farm & Food Plan
Devin’s Website
So, I finished up my wife's website, for her wedding photography business. If anyone in the upstate, SC area needs a wedding photographer, check out www.devinrubinstein.com.
I built the site using drupal 5.x, using Brilliant gallery to make the gallery management easy for her. Check it out, let me know what you think.
Back to the grindstone!
Well, it's been a busy few weeks.
I've been working feverishly to finish up a testable prototype for my internship, while working on Balloonfest stuff. Of course, everyone around was all-hands-on-deck for the Balloonfest, too. That left me little time to work on the website . I haven't even gotten to the stage of surveying users, yet. I guess I'll be working on that over this semester, too. Still, it's the intranet that's so exciting. Developing something new like that for a company the size of AC government is a unique challenge, so I can't wait to get some user feedback on that.
By then it's the end of August; back to school time.
This semester I'm taking 1 class, which is IE802, Human-computer interface design. So far it's a lot of fun. Everything else is research. I'm trying to finish up my Master's thesis, trying to finish my internet search research with Lee, and get some work done on the diabetes research. Oh, and I have an assistantship with the AWE team, too!
So, needless to say it will be a busy semester, but I wouldn't have it any other way.
Blogging
So, the County job has been going well. Now I've been offered my own blog by the Anderson Independent-Mail.
I wonder if this means I can get a press pass?
Hmmmm....
Working for the man, man
No, it’s not the county farm. I landed an internship with the public information office at Anderson County. I’ve been tasked to design an intranet for the County, and to redesign the website in a more user friendly fashion. The intranet will be a new challenge for me, because I don’t have any experience with that, yet.
