I'm listening to the first episode of City of Dreams. Wonderful! It'd be a grand thing if radio drama were reborn on the internet. I remember as a kid listening to some of my father's tapes of old radio shows. I miss those. What I've heard so far of scifi.com's Seeing Eye Theatre has been crisp, well-written, well-produced work. Highly recommended.
Now if I could just slow down enough to focus on the program instead of writing here... :)
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Back now, from Duluth.
I've been trying to catch up on my reading. I love most everything these people write. Their latest is no exception.
My friend Jim pointed me to "Kabalists that have done their magic on baby names."
A List Apart's latest: "Indie Exposure: It's All About You."
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The conference in Duluth was fun. Although I am not an HR guy, I enjoyed it--lots to learn, and I love to visit Duluth. The weather could not have been better, and I took full advantage of it by going on long walks through the city, though I didn't get to spend nearly as much time at the lake as I normally like to.
My own little part of the conference went well, despite the technical snafus that plague technical presentations. An HR director shared the web-based job application process her college has started using, and a web developer from SCSU (my friend Sara) gave some no-nonsense advice and guidelines for designing web sites, ideas for user-based design that are far too often overlooked. My message: the policies and forms that HR now publishes on web sites are a good start, but the web offers a tremendous opportunity as a platform for offering services--HR or otherwise, to employees and to others. The University of Minnesota is working on a really cool project in HR Self-Service, something that just blows me away. (Even better, they're using Zope!) That's an idea of the direction that HR should be moving with the web. The trick, of course, is to figure out how to move beyond the limitations on government web sites that I've mentioned before.
Buffy, however, was nowhere to be found on the hotel TV set. Thankfully K. recorded it for me. So with that, along with 5 days of Babylon 5 and the piles of reading that I somehow thought I'd get done this weekend, I'm pretty much set.
Neat: Wing Scents.
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The way that people position themselves on elevators fascinates me. We space ourselves out so that no one is too close and as much of the elevator as possible is used. Working on the sixth floor I don't get to observe the dynamics too closely, but I have been mixing things up a little to see what happens. Today, I didn't move to fill a spot when the person on the other side of the elevator got off. It was clear that I was the one who was supposed to move. After a brief pause, during which even I was uncomfortable, the guy standing behind me had already started to move over to the other side when the doors opened and I got off--much to his apparent relief.
A scene from my life:
S: "I never would have thought of cutting out the cat's stitches myself"
K: "Yeah, well, you probably didn't grow up in a family where people just went downstairs and sawed their own casts off."
For some reason today I felt compelled to buy coffee and brew myself a pot. Rare, very rare, my buying beans. But with the French toast for breakfast, it felt right. Tea just doesn't have the right mouthfeel. A yummy press pot of New Guinea from Dunn Bros is just perfect.
While waiting for the water to boil (I boil the water, then set everything up--taking out the pot, grinding the beans...by the time I'm done, the water's at the right temperature, give or take a minute or so), I came across J. Michael Straczynski's City of Dreams on scifi.com. How have I missed this? They're on episode 6 already, which means 3 hours of my day that I won't be reading Orson Scott Card. What's a guy to do?
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For a while now I've been using PageSpinner instead of Dreamweaver to maintain this site. It's been working well. I was hand-coding most of it anyway, so why not use a tool specifically geared toward that approach instead of a WYSIWYG editor? I can't speak to how it works compared to BBEdit--it's been too long--but I recommend it to you Mac users. I suspect, though, that for the sites I'll soon be developing, I'll go back to Dreamweaver. At least for the initial work.
Oh, whoops. This morning I accidentally overwrote some changes to this page that I made yesterday, which means that my reference to "another" article on banned live internet coverage was meaningless. Here's the first article I pointed to.
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Made a few updates to the way that CSS is handled on these pages. Until now Netscape users have been treated to a black-and-white version of the site. Now they're seeing the site a little closer to the way I intend it to be seen. More or less, mostly less. Due to some bugs in the CSS implementation, though, it's still kinda weird. In particular, on this page the fonts are mighty odd. I'm not sure why--seems to have to do with the size of the file, of all things.
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More Olympics internet shenanigans. Another article about banned live internet video coverage of the Olympics, and also one about how writers for web-based zines can't get press credentials--which means that ESPN.com's writers can't cover the Olympics except by using traditional sources like Reuters and AP. Ye gods, I hope that this is sorted out by the Winter Games.
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Marvel's got some plans to boost sagging comic sales. Could buying them on the web be far off?
We went to Cirque du Soleil's Dralion last night. Incredible! One of the most amazing shows I've ever seen. If you ever get the chance to see this or any of their shows, do!
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Camworld sent me to The Ideology of Ease, which in turn sent me to the Journal of Electronic Publishing, a smart collection of interesting, well-written articles. I think I know how I'm going to spend my Saturday afternoon...
I just noticed the distinct sound that bagels (specifically Bruegger's bagels; I haven't had the chance to test others) makes when you bite into them. The hiss of air releasing against the pressure of the bite.
Sylloge has a new look. :-)
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I realized last night that I probably won't be in Duluth in time to lock myself in my hotel room and watch the Buffy season premiere. Rats!
Wired: Most government web sites suck, citing a Brown University study that I can't find yet. As a developer of one government site, I gotta say: not so far from wrong, that. One thing was mentioned that I feel pretty bad about: lack of available translations. Duh. I have to do that. ISEEK has Hmong, Spanish, and Somali translations of their site, which I've been meaning to ask them about. Simply phenomenal.
A few thoughts on this, if I may be indulged a rant. (This may sound bitter and personal, inspired by my recent dealings within my own job. It's not. Really. If you don't believe me, let me know and we'll talk.)
The article mentions the idea that because government won't go out of business if it fails to "please its customers," there's not a strong motivation to comply with federal standards for web sites, or even develop good ones regardless o' the standards. Ah, the ol' "communism failed because people are motivated by greed" argument. <sigh>
Perhaps more to the point: government is big. Government moves slowly. Period. Even big companies are slow to pick up on internet culture, to move beyond their entrenched ways. Especially big companies, because they have more to lose by taking big risks, and are always gonna be slow to change their internal culture--which is what is really necessary to take advantage of what the web has to offer.
It takes a consistent, intensive effort to train people to think about putting resources on the web. It involves a change in institutional culture, how people think about doing their jobs. An unreasonably substantial part of my job is watching for things that people are doing that should be moved to the web. Even if the development talent is there, the web site content is hamstrung by ignorance and/or lack of understanding on the part of the content "owners."
A company can justify spending money on a web site. A company may have to. Few government agencies can. Or really, few heads of government agencies will feel comfortable admitting that they're spending any sort of money on building or maintaining a web site. They're thinking, how can I demonstrate that the funding was worthwhile? A company may be able to point to revenue. What does the government point to?
(The same arguments are raised about human resources, by the way.)
One HR director that I know resents all the requests that she gets for staff training in web technologies (usually how to use a WYSIWYG editor), even though they come from people whose jobs require them to design web sites. With no training. Learning web design is being treated like learning a new version of a word processor.
I have to tell you: it's not the same thing. Don't think that it is and then complain when the site is awful.
So these secretaries who have to design and maintain sites in their copious free time don't do as well as a professional web designer might.
So they can't spend all their time hounding their coworkers to provide the content necessary to make the site useful, because they're not given the time.
So even when they get the content, they have neither the skill nor the time (nor, perhaps, the interest) to present it on a web site in a usable, accessible fashion.
I spoke with someone once who manages a 25,000 page government web site. It sucks, yes, but are you surprised? Actually, I'm surprised that government sites are as good as they are. I am impressed by what these untrained secretaries accomplish.
Government web sites suck, yes. Good ones take time, work, and money, something that government agency managers don't seem to understand. Until they do, we're stuck with the same old crap.
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K turns to me just now and says, "Amarula and soy milk! Mm-mmm."
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I love what Google is doing for the Olympics. They have such cool fun.
Spending the evening tweaking a few things on the site and preparing for the MnSCU HR Fall Conference next week. Yes, that's right, the one that will make me miss Buffy. I'll be facilitating a conversation on delivering HR services via the web. I'm excited to hear what people have to say--there are some exciting things happening out there. Yes, even in HR. I wish that my current job could have stayed headed in the direction it had been going. :-( Oh well. It should be a fun session, not the least because it'll give me a chance to talk with my newish friend Sara.
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Inside Mac OS X's Unix Layer. (via Camworld) So tell me why I haven't ordered this yet.
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I seem to spend a lot of time trying to explain Zope to people. Found myself in a conversation just the other day with a ColdFusion user, in the same boat I'm always in: Zope is so tremendous that I don't know how to begin to explain it. I'm still a newbie myself, but a very enthusiastic one. For a long time I sent people to DevShed's intro, and I still would--after they read Web Review's intro. This is the best overview of Zope I've found.
Played around with PHP again today. If you haven't yet done anything with this language, you should. Even if you're a beginning programmer, even if all you know is a little JavaScript, it should be easy to pick up, fun to work with, and potentially very powerful.
Watching Romeo Must Die. Saw it opening night but thought it might be worth another shot--I mean, Jet Li!
Oh, yeah...Babylon 5 is coming to the Sci Fi Channel on September 25...widescreen. Gotta start buying some videotapes. I wonder if it'll ever be released on DVD.
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Bummer. Got a look at the site today in Opera 4.02 (on Windows). Not what I had hoped. It's what I want in IE5 (Mac and Windows) and in Mozilla. And I've got some decent workarounds for NN4.x. But I was rather hoping that it would fare well in Opera. Donno yet if it's my code or the browser's implementation.
A few months ago when I was reading Elements of Programming with Perl, the chapter on data structures and algorithms, thinking "this is all really familiar." Then it came to me: a one-image memory of my father teaching me about sorting algorithms when I was a child. For real. And I thought, "I love this stuff! No wonder dad thought it was cool!" Now I'm reading Mastering Algorithms with Perl. WOW! This book is amazing! I'm really beginning to think that a formal study of computer science might not be out of the question.
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I am going to be out of town the night of the Buffy season premiere. Hopefully K can record it. Or maybe I'll just lock myself in my hotel room for the duration of the show. This is not one to miss.
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I neglected to mention yesterday that MacOS X had been released. Yippee-ya-yay.
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It would seem that the dead bird I stepped on yesterday was not an ill omen. Not yet, anyway.
Schemantix, a web application development platform that uses XML schemas to aid in maintenance and updates, looks interesting. Have to spend a little time on their site later tonight.
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I stepped on a dead bird on my way into work this morning. I hope that's not an omen.
I've hesitated to post a link to this article on Suck because I was seeing it everywhere so I thought "why bother?"...but it's worth a read. "Sprung from a world of digital absolutes, nerd brains are woefully unprepared for the fuzzy gray shadings inherent in the legal system." Not that I agree there (geeks are some of the most subtle thinkers I've ever known, and I come from a strong liberal arts background that's supposed to develop minds oriented to "fuzzy gray shadings" and that so often does not), but the core argument is sound: debate about the future of the Internet has to happen outside the computer culture, where legal decisions that will determine that future are taking place. Preaching to the choir.
This is no different than any other arena, though. How much do animal rights protests or other rallies really accomplish? How much does it matter if Unitarians only talk to themselves about respect and tolerance for others' beliefs (which is a big lie, by the way, but I'll save that for another day)? Do I sound bitter enough?
Yes, maybe the lawyers rule the world. And yes, the government has --or should have-- a major role in the future of the Internet. And so certainly the geeks need to find ways to deal in the "real world." Part of what needs to be done is making sure that the lawyers do not rule the world.
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I am so fortunate to have a friend who's as insanely infatuated about espresso (and coffee in general) as I am. He called me over to his apartment today to taste an espresso blend he roasted on Sunday. And that was that--espresso tasted (excellent, BTW), we each went our separate ways with things to do.
Michael also happens to be the friend with whom I am going around in search of the worst coffee in the Twin Cities. The rules: it must be a coffeehouse (i.e. not Perkins), we must each order a small (usually 12 oz.!) cup of black coffee, and discuss it in the same way we would a fine coffee. Rules that were just implicitly understood: it can't be Caribou or Starbucks, and we can't choose flavored coffees.
The first round of SwillFest 2000 was held on Saturday, and man were the pickings bad! First we went to Black Bear Crossing in Saint Paul, which may have some mighty fine pastries or something, but the coffee was atrocious. A real shame, too, since we know the roasters and they produce some excellent coffee. It's all too easy to take great beans and ruin them, which Black Bear Crossings certainly does. All the flavor was straight down the middle of my tongue, with an acrid finish right around where I was convinced the coffee had chosen to commit suicide to end its certain misery.
Espresso ExposÔø‡, though, on the U of MN campus, was even worse. Barely tolerable. Actually, tolerable only to the arguably insane. Toward the end I added some cold water in the hope that I could drain the cup more quickly, but doing so only made me gag. Truly horrific.
We went a couple doors down to Espresso Royale for a good shot of espresso, to clear our palates of the 24 ounces of evil we had miraculously managed to ingest. One of the best baristas I have ever seen works there--she wasn't there that day, but it was still okay. A lifesaver, as a matter of fact. I think that was the basis of a new rule: we need to finish the day with good coffee.
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k10k has redesigned. Bandwidth-poor readers, beware! It looks cool and all, but I can't say that I like it all that much. Too busy for my meager brain.
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The other day I stepped outside into a hot, humid day and was surprised to see leaves on the ground. The disparity unnerved me. Fall is coming.
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K & I walked up to observe at a local martial arts school that happens to have weekly Tai Chi classes. We've been interested in Tai Chi for a while. At the last minute, though, we backed out and decided to find beginners classes at community ed or something. We are such chickens.
Just did a massive redesign of the site. I've moved away from the table-based layout and am now using only CSS. Turn off style sheets in your browser and you'll see what I mean. pretty happy with it, actually, although I have yet to test it on a Windows box.
Yes, it's an exceedingly simple design. I kinda like that. We'll see for how long. If you notice any major problems with the design--images floating where they ought not be, that sort of thing--please let me know and I'll do what I can. CSS support is still sadly limited but getting better.
Okay, more tomorrow. For now, I should pay some attention to my home life.
Zelencia. Damn, this is some nice work.
Webmonkey: Death of the Websafe Color Palette? Very good article.
Edd Dumbill: Distributed XML
Part of my job is user support, helping human resources staff run queries on a data warehouse. Although I'm none too fond of the subject matter--I am not an HR guy, and this is an HR job--I get a big kick out of helping people figure out how to solve their problems. I realized today that part of why I enjoy it is because I need regular reminding of how differently people think about things that I take for granted. I'm a database geek. Not everyone is.
Today I helped a user sort out a query that she was having trouble with. It was a mess. She was doing some good things, using techniques that she was taught in the training sessions I help with, but without a strong sense of the meaning behind the techniques. The biggest problems were choosing the tables to use in the query and figuring out how to join the tables. At first I was distressed because there are explicit, published guidelines for which fields to join when joining certain tables. Then I realized that she was following these instructions but choosing to join the wrong tables.
It would never have occurred to me to join the tables she did, and that's when it hit my hard that I just think about things differently than most people and that this is often to my advantage (and often the opposite). As if that were a major surprise. ;-)
No mind-crushing revelations ensued, but I was reassured that this is one area of my job that I like quite a bit. I wish that I got more user support calls.
Ya don't hear that every day.
Netscape 4.x users: please forgive the rather odd-looking table cell widths going on here. I'm converting the site to XHTML Strict, so I have to use CSS to specify table widths (there is no width attribute of <td> in XHTML Strict). I've done a lot
of hackneyed workarounds for Netscape, but it's still kinda funky.
Actually, I don't want to use tables for layout at all. I'd love to use CSS for positioning. But, well...Netscape again. :-(
So in case you've not yet got the message, browsers are not all equal. You might want to look into getting a better one. It's worth it. And if you're a huge Netscape fan, fear not--Netscape 6 should be out of beta by Christmas.
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I just realized that I hadn't been to the W3C web site in a few weeks--they changed the layout of the home page again. I wonder if they're catching as much flack for this as they did the last one.
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Fun story about a guy in Australia who's been experimenting with slugs to remove bathroom mold--they love the stuff. (via girlhacker)
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You may have noticed that the font is larger here than on many personal sites or weblogs. This is because I don't have so many hang-ups about specifying size as others seem to, and so I leave it at the default size. I guess I know too many people who can't read tiny fonts; these are often the ones who don't know how to resize the browser fonts.
That, by the way, is one of the things that I like about Internet Explorer and iCab--it's really, really simple to increase or decrease the font size using the toolbar.
If you're using Netscape Navigator 4.x, with its barely-tolerable CSS support, you're missing out. I've done what I can to prevent the browser crashing on you, and done some annoying workarounds, but that's about it. Download Mozilla or Netscape 6, you'll thank yourself later. And if you're using a Mac, fer gods' sake, download IE5. I used to feel guilty for using IE, but there's much to love in the Mac/IE5.
Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0. You'll need to be a Usenix member to view the whole study, but the summary is interesting enough.
If you have a couple hours, I recommend watching/listening to the webcasts from this year's O'Reilly Open Source Convention. In particular, be sure to catch Andy Hertzfeld's "Open Source and the Personal Computer Revolution." Along with some hugely amusing anecdotes about Steve Wozniak, he makes some cogent points about the directions that open source software development should be headed.
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No sooner do I finish writing this little essay, a few ramblings about why I think Usenet and BBSes are still around and will be for a long time to come, than I come across "Beyond the Browser" newly published on A List Apart. It's a fine piece, but the title and intro paragraph are misleading. Although it seems like Eisenberg is trying to describe new technologies that are moving us beyond the web, he actually discusses back-end stuff like XML, Java, and so on. Still, worth a read if you need an intro to some cool technologies.
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Visible Earth, which I mentioned a few days ago, is cool. But NASA's Earth From Space is also pretty spifty. (via Glish.com)
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Quotation of the day, not that I have a daily quotation:
Finally, one could argue that there is still a fourth American [espresso] cuisine, which I would like to dub espresso manqué, and which is all of the misinterpretations and misunderstandings of espresso being committed in the United States today thrown together; including watery, bitter, overextracted coffee; scalded milk; meringue-like heads of froth, all presented to the background flatulence of canned whipped cream being sprayed on top of the drink to distract us from the grim reality underneath.
Kenneth Davids, Espresso: Ultimate Coffee, 1993.
I met Ken once, and spoke with him a few times on the phone. Nice guy. This was a treat, since I had often used his books as training materials when I was working in the coffee biz.
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Yesterday I spent some time in my favorite local tea shop. Typically I bring a book to read or something to write while I'm having tea, but this time I deliberately chose not to bring anything, to use the tea as an opportunity to withdraw, to enjoy a moment in time. This is one of the things that first drew me to drinking tea, an experience in time quite different than when I'm drinking coffee, and it's something that somewhere along the line I've fallen away from. I have to get back to that; I need some time separate from the day's activities, a time to just be. Nothing so grand as a cathedral in time (Ôø‡ la Heschel), although that sort of sacred time is also essential. Just a few moments to step back and keep my sanity.
Via Slashdot: Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley
My friend Jim has published a nicely accessible non-technical PGP . Again, in case you've missed it elsewhere, I am a strong proponent of strong encryption. Please use my PGP public key when emailing me.
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My cat just sneezed on the monitor.
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Today a little girl stopped to hug the driver on her way out of the bus (the driver was a total stranger, he later said). She hopped off the bus, told her mom that she had just hugged the driver!, picked up a stick (a switch, really) from the sidewalk, and started flailing her brother with it.
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Another bus story. A year or two ago, a bus driver took the time to carry a stroller onto the bus for a passenger, and then later carried it off the bus. This was impressive enough, but later on that same route he got out of the bus and stopped traffic to walk an elderly passenger across a busy four-lane road.
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I am amused when I realize how much a sucker I am for advertising. A number of years ago, my roommate and I broke down and bought a case of Pig's Eye Pilsner, influenced by two factors: we were impressed that a local beer was outselling Budweiser in British pubs and just had to try it, and we'd recently discovered that we liked the taste of peanut butter and beer.
The beer was swill, of course. I think we ended up baking with it.
Today I saw a billboard for Pig's Eye Red Amber, and thought to myself, "Mmm, have to try that!"
What am I thinking?! I was fooled by Leinie's Creamy Dark, I should know better by now.
Unable to get Meerkat feed.
