Here’s the announcement about the First-Ever Arizona UPA Meeting - Thursday, April 30, 2009. Not sure if I’ll make it up there - a 2-hour commute each way on a weeknight is a lot (unless I can convince some other Tucson UX people to rideshare!)

Please join us for the first-ever Arizona Usability Professionals Association (UPA) Chapter meeting on Thursday, April 30. Dean T. Barker, Director of User-Centered Design at Sage Software, will speak on integrating user-centered design into various software processes.
Dean will explain why software projects fail and how user-centered design (UCD) can be used to improve and optimize your product development methodology. He will present a structured approach to tailoring and integrating UCD into the software development process. In this presentation you will also learn about the critical gaps in your software development methodology, how to unify design and development, how to express UCD in the “language” of your methodology, how to promote usability activities within development, and how to make UCD a routine part of your software processes regardless of whether you’re using waterfall, agile methods, the Rational Unified Process (RUP), or other methodologies.
You’ll also learn about the UPA and meet local colleagues who share a passion for all things related to creating compelling user experiences.

Speaker Bio
Dean T. Barker is the Director of User Centered Design and User Assistance for Global CRM Solutions at Sage Software. He has over fifteen years of experience in design and software product development. He has been a co-editor and author of ISO standards for Software Quality and is co-author of the book Designing Effective Speech User Interfaces. Mr. Barker has a B.A. in Business Management and Communication and a M.S. in Software Engineering from the University of Minnesota. He is also the Membership Chair for the Arizona UPA Chapter and is the Phoenix-area Local Ambassador for UXnet.org, an online community connecting people, organizations, resources, and ideas to enable the growth of User Experience as a practice.

Meeting Location
The Art Institute of Phoenix
2233 West Dunlap Avenue
Phoenix, Arizona
Note: The meeting will be in room 456

Map: www.artinstitutes.edu/phoenix/AboutUs/Map_Directions.aspx

Agenda
6:00 pm Arrival, networking and snacks
6:30 pm Brief business meeting
7:00 pm Presentation - Invited Speaker
8:00 pm Adjourn

This is a free event, but space is limited. Walk-in attendees are certainly welcome, but please RSVP to this address so that we can ensure we provide the appropriate accommodations.

You do not need to be a member to attend. Feel free to come and check us out!!!

Though it’s exciting to me, I was a bit surprised at how exciting this operation has been to lots of other people. We made the newspapers (Arizona Daily Star and the Tucson Citizen) and I’m told the monkey was also on tv last week. The big move was Saturday. Just in case anyone else ever needs to move a 17-foot tall cement monkey with attached palm tree, here’s how we did it!

First we had to brace the separate pieces.

Then a concrete-cutting specialist got up on a ladder with the biggest old circular saw you ever saw.

There was a bit of settling, but nothing too drastic!

Once separated from the monkey, the tree needed to be separated from the ground. It was fairly narrow, so the circular saw worked just fine.

Up up and away! The tree was lifted over the fence…

And onto one of the waiting trucks. Sometimes it’s good to have a friend who happens to own a truck that can carry 5,000 pounds!

He looks kind of sad with his arm missing like that, doesn’t he? He was hanging off that tree for about 40 years!

Before cutting, we hooked up the crane to a halter around the monkey. That way, if anything unbalanced, we’d have a safety backup in place.

This part was tricky. The feet were too wide to use just that circular saw, so we had to have a jack hammer and multiple people clearing away debris until we loosened the monkey from his base.

The big heavy crane lifts him over the fence. Estimated monkey weight=4,000 pounds.

We had to lay him down for transport, but he didn’t lay flat and required even more bracing. And ropes. And strapping. Good thing we had a couple of engineers on hand!

Good bye, Magic Carpet! We had our own mini-parade heading down Speedway - two trucks, the crane, various helpers, and even a couple of newspaper photographers.

At the new location, we do it in reverse. Well, not the cutting part, just the lifting. First we pulled into the driveway…

Then lifted him onto the side yard. This part wasn’t quite as dignified as the first lift.

And there he’ll rest for a bit, waiting until we can arrange to set him upright again.

In case you missed it, here’s my post on the purchase!

I just got the new tweetup badges for the STC Summit coming up in May - and they look GREAT!

I placed the order on April 1st and they showed up today (total turnaround including shipping=8 days). This means that if you want to get one for yourself, but missed the first round, there’s still time! One detail you might want to note - the “@” is actually silver, not the bronze color it appears in the photo.

OR, if you want, I can do another group order. Same deal as before - drop $3 in my paypal account, and I’ll order them as a group and bring them with me to Atlanta. Deadline this time around is April 22nd. The more badges we do at once, the more cost-effective it is, so tell all your twittering friends!

And of course, I’ll tweet the offer now and again closer to the deadline. I’m looking forward to seeing you all in Atlanta!

Yesterday I posted a note that I had just adopted a giant concrete monkey statue from Magic Carpet Golf. It didn’t even occur to me at that time that people might think I was joking - that it was all one big April Fool’s Joke. But I wasn’t joking, and YES, I really did just adopt this monkey.

Some background:
In the late 1960s/early 70s, a man named Lee Koplin built two miniature golf courses on Speedway in Tucson and opened up “Magic Carpet Golf”. Each hole had a different (usually gigantic) concrete and stucco sculpture, many of them modeled after the “Goofy Golf” course he had built in Panama City Florida. Fast forward 40+ years to late 2007: Magic Carpet is run-down and starting to look shabby, and other miniature golf courses in town offer more! better! faster! attractions for the same price. The owners decide to sell, and a local car dealership buys the primo property.

At this point, no one knows what’s going to happen to the statues - clearly the car dealer wants the land for his CARS, not giant tiki heads. Rich Luhr was one of the people who went to take pictures of the course on the very last day it was open. He writes about it here (including a link to his Flickr set):
http://tour.airstreamlife.com/wordpress/?p=1137

Another year goes by, wherein the preservationists in town (and there are lots of them here!) try to find public spaces that are willing to take on the cost of moving and maintaining these statues. The largest, a 30-foot tall tiki head, has already been moved over to a tiki-themed restaurant called “The Hut” on Fourth Avenue.

Four others are slated to go to Valley of the Moon, a sort of fantasy-park. Finally, they decide to let the rest of the statues pass into private hands rather than be destroyed. THIS is what I’ve been waiting for! Bids are due by the end of March, so I get mine in and hope for the best. And my luck holds out: I WIN THE MONKEY! He even comes with the tree that he’s hanging on. There was once a motor in his butt that made the tail swing slowly back and forth, but that’s long gone. I’m told the eyes light up, but haven’t seen that in person yet.

Now all I have to do is arrange for someone to cut him out of the ground, separate the monkey and tree, lift them onto a flat bed, drive over to the downtown house. He’ll probably rest there (on his back!) for a while until I can get the new site properly prepared - slab, or footing, or something. Then “simply” stand him back up, re-attach the tree, and we’ll be good to go.

Added 4/13/09 - post with pictures of the big monkey moving day.