Month: November 2007

A List Apart: Articles: Understanding Web Design

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.
from: A List Apart: Articles: Understanding Web Design

One could just link to A List Apart and be done with it. That would be short shrift to some excellent content though. A List Apart has damped the zealotry a bit in recent years and most of the preachy comes out of empirical observation these days. Take this article and its author for instance. Zeldman used to be all fire and brimstone but now measures his statements (somewhat). Where the article might have lambasted the designer who revels in brochureware, it now quietly mocks.

And underneath it all is a really good article on what web design is and why it isn’t like designing in any other media.

Reasonably lacking in fun

What passes for the mothership-in-law will be staying with us this evening.  Here are some ways in which this promises to not be fun:

  1. She self-diagnosed her sinus infection as a mini-stroke
  2. Incessant demands for all and sundry to “feel my forehead.  Isn’t it hot?”
  3. Requests to “just hold my hand” made almost as frequently
  4. Reportedly her attempt at a bath this afternoon lasted for approximately 120 seconds

This added to the fun of having to clean the house top to bottom, rearrange said house to accommodate a sit down meal for a baker’s dozen, and plan and shop for an elaborate meal in anticipation of hosting the first joint family holiday celebration.  Elz recently recovered from a bout with pneumonia and is now nursing someone with a raging sinus infection and getting increasingly run down from it all.  Thereby opening herself to further ailments and possible hospitalization.

I’ll save further editorializing for off-list conversations.  I will say that I’ve spent nearly an hour on the phone with Elz here at work calming her down.

Why do people insist that holidays are fun?

Intimidating Spam

Subject: FUCK YOU
From: “HEY YOU PIDAR!!” <order@carderproduct.com>
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2007 09:55:23 -0400
To: me@mydomain.com

HI SHITTER

IF YOU WANNA BUY SOMETHING —>

GO TO http://www.carderproduct.com

FUCK YOU, SHIT!!!!

EVEN DONT THINK TO ABUSE FOR SMPAM!!!

If that doesn’t get me buying something, nothing will…

Ballads, Beats, and Bawdy

In an effort to boost production here on the ol’ blog, move my old content into this implementation, show some solidarity with the writers who are on strike, and bask in my faded glory as an overnight community radio DJ I’ve decided to repost my old radio shows. Ballads, Beats, and Bawdy originally aired on October 16, 2005. Here’s what I had to say at the time:

Podcasting too hep for an anti-hipster like you? Go ahead and use this direct link to download the audio file.

Got yer tunes lined up now? Good. Here’s what’s on tap for you this week:

Playlist after the break…

Continue reading “Ballads, Beats, and Bawdy”

Lemon Curry? No, It’s the Larch.

Is YouTube bad? Is it good? Would it exist if it strictly relied on user-generated content? Who cares?

Not me when you can find someone has compiled links to 150 Monty Python Sketches hosted on YouTube. Then again, you’ll have to act fast as many of the sketches have already been pulled.

Which, ultimately, is sad. It’s not like the grainy as all heck postage stamp sized video has any real worth besides keeping the sketch in memory where someone is more likely to drop the $X.xx it would require to purchase a damned DVD box set.

Word Bites, #483 in a series

How to control the page numbering in a Word document

This could also be titled “how to finally put to rest a stupid, recurring problem that plagued you all morning because a patron was trying to conform to some byzantine thesis submission guidelines someone else in your work place drafted.”

Not mentioned in this article as extra bonus stupidity: If you start numbering in a section in the middle of the document, it will bork it’s way back into other sections that should not be numbered. I could be wrong about this though as the patron’s document was so filled with page and section breaks by the time I got there who knows what flipping rules were being applied.

Which gets me on the brink of yet another rant about Word and the academic community. Suffice it to say, there are other, more appropriately engineered and time-tested environments for someone who wants to publish a bound manuscript. The fact that you need to learn an additional markup language is apparently sufficient enough barrier to 99% of all academics—faculty and student—these days. The pain and suffering that comes with corrupt files, capricious layout quirks, and multi-layered kludging are apparently more abstract than LaTeX.

But, as I said, it is a common rant if you happen to work near me. No need to spill over into my blog and the wider universe. So I’ll stop here.

But, fercryinoutloud, Word can feel so hemorrhoidal sometimes.

Near Future Laboratory Digicult Interview

Near Future Laboratory » Blog Archive » Digicult Interview

Interesting article/interview. I like how the lab is positioning itself in that middle ground between immediate applications and future research. As they put it, “…a mixture of today’s seriousness and fantasy, utilitarian and non-utilitarian situations. It’s made out of cardboard, dirt, duct tape, tubes, bad wiring and vinegar waiting to be turned into a playful and sustainable environment.”

Back when I was considering pursuing the PhD in information science instead of escaping with my terminal masters, I kept running in to this friction amongst the faculty about building near-future information systems. They were right, of course, it’s not what one would really consider academic research. On the other hand, the sort of tinkering on the edges of that research and real-world systems doesn’t really belong in the corporate world either—too much profit-driven pressure. That leaves this middle ground that I find most interesting, and most likely to pay off in the long term. That there was no support for this in the program I was in was the primary reason I left.

I think that the corporate world would do well to provide more support for this kind of research; and to be fair some do. For example, Google asks employees to set aside several hours a week for self-directed research. I hear that employees have to guard this time fiercely, but at least there is institutional support. For the most part, however, development is based on 60 – 80 hour work weeks and geared toward product releases at least every twelve months. Yet most of the paradigm shifting applications to come about in the past 10 years or so have been born out of the efforts of hobbyists, graduate students, and people working on their own time. Napster, Blogger, Flickr, Facebook, etc were not spawned directly out of academic research or corporate R&D but from individual or small group effort.

This is the kind of environment that most excites me. The EVIADA project was exactly what I was looking for. Even though it was based on academic research and was grant funded, the project was essentially toying with edge technologies and information research with some well defined goals and a four year life cycle. My present position offers very little opportunity even though I’m theoretically able to draft my own project agenda. Unfortunately, the everyday world intrudes to the point that there is no room for research projects.

So now I’m looking at returning to school, this time in computer science. Shoring up my technical chops should give me better options in terms of finding work that combines my twin joys of programming and information organization/discovery.

To bring this all to some kind of conclusion then… This interview struck me as an interesting place to position one’s self, especially as I consider moving forward in to another round of education. I’m still relatively certain that academic research isn’t what I want to do. Thus it looks like another terminal masters is my goal.