What I’ve Been Reading – HTML5 for Web Designers

August 16, 2010


What I’ve Read:
HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith

There’s an underlying belief throughout the non-tech-savvy that computer and Web programmers are a secluded, arrogant group; fiercely loyal to their language, looking out for themselves, unable to share their findings lest they make themselves obsolete. It’s this belief that leads us to stop trusting our company’s IT department and automatically mistrust the kid Web developer signed on to work our church Web sites.

It’s not necessarily true.

In my experience, Web developers aren’t maniacally protective of their knowledge, but simply frustrated that no one else is bothering to commiserate. When you show up with the ultimate in ignorance – like asking a CSS expert to help you get rid of spyware, or expecting a .Net developer to automatically help you purchase a digital SLR camera – you’re not facing arrogance.

You’re facing exhaustion. That expert? He or she is simply tired of being misunderstood.

If there’s one thing I’ve discovered over the past two months in Web development, it’s that Web developers want to talk about Web development. They want to share their secrets, often to the point that your eyes glaze over.

Ask a pointed question, though, and you’ll discover something even greater: the Web developer’s desire to spread knowledge. Which brings us to A List Apart’s first publication, HTML5 for Web Designers – a short and easy to digest primer on the changes being made through HTML’s newest iteration.

As a Web guy whose exposure to HTML and CSS has come exclusively from the routine hacking of free WordPress templates, HTML5 for Web Designers dives into the subject at my level – highlighting the changes and features of code that could change how the Web is organized and developed. Even better, it does so in a way that’s akin to the “spreading the gospel” model of Web talk – 100% devoted to letting the reader understand the code.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s not going to make my mom understand Web development.

That being understood, it’s a wonderful look inside the mind of a development evangelist; Keith’s knowledge takes a 900-page slog of a standards guide and boils it down to the 80-some pages you’ll actually need to read.

Because, you see, developers don’t aim to make people feel dumb. At least, not as long as we’re willing to listen and make a concerted effort to understand.

It’s our inability to grasp the nuances of technology that’ll take care of that for us.

Tags: Books, Career, Journalism, Literature, Technology, What I've Been Reading |

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A quick note on children’s brands

August 15, 2010


Proper spellings of children’s brands that I’ve encountered today.

Outside of Crayola, I’d have spelled every one of these wrong. The last is the most surprising to me. Not Milton Bradley, which was a staple of my childhood, but MB Games. Flip the box over, and you’ll see a link to Hasbro.com. A quick Wikipedia search confirms that Milton Bradley was taken over by Hasbro.

In 1984.

My peanut butter is in my chocolate and all of that, right?

In other spelling foibles, Fisher-Price has a hyphen. I had no idea. Also, I swore Play-doh was spelled without the “y.” Funny – I’m convinced it’s spelled EVEN MORE wrong than it actually is.

This is all without mentioning the brand-less watercolors I wiped up yesterday.

Tags: Isaac, Sierra, Words |

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There is no greater sports star than the sports star I become … in my head.

August 11, 2010


There is no greater sports star than the sports star I become in my head.

In a vacuum, with no one forcing me to adjust for defense or change my direction, I am a scrappy hitter. I am a freaky consistent jump shooter. I am a Gold Glove defender.

I am Ichiro Suzuki. I am Oscar Robertson. I am Ozzie Smith.

My swing is true. I don’t hit home runs, but I do the little things that win games, despite the fact that I’m not actually playing games, relying only on a glorified batting practice to show off my amazingly consistent wares. My flow is sweet, my follow-through fluid, my confidence at its high; every shot snaps the bottom of the net, every juke and every fake – each one as fake as its name – unstoppable, every twist and turn like a gibbon effortlessly climbing a zoo cage.

Of course, I know the truth. I know what happened the last time I played one-on-one, the “one” itself betraying the number of points I was able to score in two combined games. I know what happened the first three times I saw a slow pitch softball this summer, how the breeze off my bat kept the outfielders cool, how even the mosquitoes kept away from me lest I miss the ball and knock them into the back fence.

It’s such childish bull, really. We’re supposed to grow out of it, right? We’re supposed to understand our place and buck up and admit that we’re not made for sports and that we’d do a lot better if we just stopped playing and started worrying about Brett Favre or some other tabloid sports crap.

That’s not how it is, though. Not for me. Not for any sports fan, regardless of talent.

We all want to imagine that we’re the best. Even if we know, without a doubt, that we have no chance in making it that far.

I don’t play sports to win. I play them to dream. To have fun. To taunt my friends. To imagine that I’m actually on a real field. That I’m actually a real athlete.

Because, on my own, with all of the quirks that come with a home court, or with the guiding hand of a friendly pitcher, I can pretend that the talent is real.

Without defense, I am All World. There is no greater player. No one can match the effort and skill and talent of the sports star I become. In my mind.

Tags: Baseball, Basketball, Sports |

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I’m afraid of everything

August 8, 2010


Thunderstorms. They’re loud and wet and can cause unruly weather-related harm on whatever they pass over. They are a precursor to floods and tornados and hail. They ruin picnics and kayak trips and weddings.

Who cares. It doesn’t matter. I haven’t been afraid of thunderstorms since I was three.

That is, until this past week.

Now, every rumble scares me. A severe weather forecast makes me nauseous. The mere mention of rain causes my bowels to churn, my forehead to sweat, my entire disposition to revert into panic.

We’ve spent the last ten days dealing with a too-high water table and a constant threat of leaking water. A once-in-a-lifetime weather event, one we’re fortunate enough to receive only a portion of, has left us scared. We’ve finally torn out floorboards and sheet rock. We’ve fretted over the future. We even cancelled Sierra’s 3rd birthday party.

Don’t even ask me about that one. It’s enough to bring me to tears.

But it’s not the rain we’re worried about. We’ve got that covered through a system of wet-vac hoses and split second deployment processes that would qualify us for medals and special compensation from most major U.S. military branches. And it’s not the flooding, either – we’ve got everything torn out, so we certainly won’t be ruining anything new. It’s not the repairs. It’s not the money. It’s nothing material.

It’s that we don’t know when this will end.

We go through life with a series of end dates, our plans developing natural conclusions, our dreams the only items worth putting off indefinitely. We know when things will end and we feel safe in saying, “Well, this won’t last much longer,” even though sometimes it does last a lot longer and even though sometimes things never really end. We have that date. We live by that date. We understand the date, what it is that we’re working toward, what it is that will save us from the unspeakable fate of falling into confusion and uncertainty and utter shame.

Right now, we don’t have that. We don’t know what the weather will do. We understand that a sudden inch of rain will throw us back into the frantic wet-vac switching monsters we have become over the past week.

We as humans use knowledge as a crutch, assuming we’re in full control of our situation as long as we’re totally comfortable with the facts. If we know the outcome, we can plan for the outcome, and we can learn to live with the outcome, and we can move forward, the outcome a major part of our life but still there’s an outcome to understand so we’re richer and more lively human beings because of it.

Without that knowledge, however, we melt. We become useless. We snap at our kids and break down into tears and feel so utterly helpless that nothing else matters.

I know. I’ve been working through it, living with this stupid fear of rain, of waking up knee deep in the water that’s been haunting me even in my dreams, forcing me to misinterpret our dog’s curled up torso as a water leak in the middle of the night, causing me to reach for the floor to feel if it’s dry.

I know that someday I won’t be afraid of thunderstorms. Instead, I might be afraid of the future of my industry. Or of what my kids are doing when I’m not around. Or of the march of time and its effects on my personality and health. Or of dying. Certainly, I’ll be afraid of dying.

Ultimately, it’s just the fear of the unknown. And as much as we all may try to deny it, we all suffer from it.

If anyone has any cure, let me know.

Tags: On..., Vilhauer |

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Keep it simple, stupid

August 3, 2010


Sierra got a camera for her birthday. A digital one: the VTech Kidizoom Plus. It takes real pictures and everything. She was excited. I was excited. We were all excited to get it going.

But it wasn’t the easiest thing to figure out. Part of that is because, in essence, Sierra also got the following for her birthday:
• A photo editor
• A game system
• A framing kit
• A slide show
• A movie camera

All in the same package.

Sierra is a three-year old girl. She likes to take pictures with her camera – not play games, not film movies, not put wacky frames on wacky shots. To her, this is merely a camera. To me, it’s a monstrosity in over-indulgence; some “design by committee” product spec that attempted not to make a great product but, in the way committees are wont to do, make a product that tries to appeal to every single demographic available.

Sierra loves her camera, and I think it’s pretty fun. Grandpa Dennis did a great job picking it out. We’ve already started a Flickr page with Sierra’s pictures. (They are fantastic, by the way, if you like blurry, off centered pictures of her family and the backs of their legs.)

But the insistence of modern manufacturing to pile on the features and added benefits – often to the detriment of the original reason for purchasing the product – is frustrating and, dare I say, ugly.

Kids want cameras to take pictures. They will be happy with a simple camera that takes good pictures and – here’s the kicker! – is easy to use.

That means no extra features to bog down the button landscape. Just a few buttons to work the camera, like the old Holga models.

Do people really want all the things on this camera? Or are they simply a way to create false competitive advantages in a crowded toy marketplace – competitive advantages that are then one upped by the competitors, which are then one upped by the original product, which continue ad nauseum until soon there isn’t enough room on the package to explain what the damned thing does.

Here’s the thing: it’s a toy. For a kid. Yet, it’s become so complicated that even I had a hard time working it.

Did we forget about the simple rules of making toys? Rule Number Two: TOYS ARE FOR KIDS.

It’s all I ask. Simplicity. Better design. Something Sierra will be happy with. Something she’ll have no problem grasping and understanding. Something we all can be proud to purchase.

And, thanks but no thanks, we’re okay without the wacky hat slide show.

Tags: Annoyances, Photography, Sierra |

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Remind remind remind

August 2, 2010


While we’ve spent the last four days vacuuming water out of our basement – 48 hours of nonstop humming from four wet-vacs, followed by a brief respite and, thanks to another storm, a reprise – our annoyance doesn’t tell the whole story.

Or, to be more honest, our annoyance tells TOO MUCH of the story.

Our basement didn’t flood. There was no standing water. There was no need to cut away feet of sheet rock or call a cleaning company. Our windows are intact; in fact, outside of some carpet we were planning on replacing someday, we lost nothing of value.

We didn’t lose heirlooms. We didn’t lose furniture. We didn’t lose electronics or hobby cars or pictures or pets. We lost sleep. We lost a little hearing from that damned constant mechanic whir. We lost all hope a few times, our minds worn down and the end nowhere in site, but we always gained it back.

It’s easy to fall back onto the willing arms of first-world bitching, its hands reaching out like some perverted game of trust. See, we vacuumed and we dumped water and we tore out carpet and we washed the smell of quickly molding foam, and – at times – we felt justified in our complaints. We always do, right? What happens to us at THIS MOMENT is the best or worst thing that’s ever happened in the history of the world.

But we didn’t lose anything we would have missed.

A lot of people did.

In Sioux Falls and Harrisburg, people lost their basements, their things, their sense of security. In New Orleans, people lost their homes and their city. In Darfur, people lose their lives.

All things are relative. We reminded ourselves that every time we felt like falling back into complaint. This was a major flood, and we came away with only a few sleepless nights and an over-reliance on Ridgid and Shop-Vac products. Others weren’t so lucky. Others have decisions much more costly and much more important to make.

And I still have to keep reminding myself. Remind myself to continue working. Remind myself to look forward. Remind myself to keep calm and carry on. Remind myself that things could be worse. Remind myself to let it go. Remind remind remind.

Tags: On... |

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Music for Cleaning Basements

July 31, 2010


A list:
Albums listened to between 9 pm and 3 am while surrounded by the hum of four wet-vacs as I desperately fought to stay ahead of the seeping water slowly trying to fill our basement, thanks to a recent ridiculous bout of wetness.

1. Pink Floyd – Animals
2. Tool – Aenima
3. Modest Mouse – The Moon and Antarctica
4. The Mountain Goats – Sunset Tree
5. Jets to Brazil – Perfecting Loneliness
6. The Hold Steady – Heaven is Wherever

So. Tired.

Tags: Music, The Top..., Vilhauer |

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