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When I saw a couple of people link to “the perfect iPhone ringtone” last week, I had that sinking feeling that comes from being beaten to the punch. I knew I should have stayed up an extra hour that one night and just gotten it done!

But wait, hold it, never mind, cancel the panic parade: it was not, in fact, the perfect ringtone. Crisis averted! Still, the sinking feeling lingered, reminding me of what could have been, so last night I sat down and got it done. Now I bring to you the absolutely most perfect ringtone ever.

Feel free to preview it using that link, if you really feel that’s necessary, but frankly you should just charge ahead and download the .m4r AAC for instant ringtoniness. If for some reason you’d rather have the audio source and do your own ringtone conversions, you can get the same file as a .m4a AAC or a comfy old .mp3. And for all you completists, there’s a .zip archive of all three formats.

Go. Ring. Enjoy.

Five years ago, the phone rang and my life was forever altered. It was the first of two utterly transforming phone calls we would get that year, and by far the worse.

Shortly after hanging up, I put in place the temporary home page I’d prepared ahead of time, complete with errors of fact which had grown out of my inability to think clearly about what I knew beyond any doubt was going to happen. The next day, I noticed and corrected the errors, and then realized after a while that my corrections were incorrect and corrected them. Correctly, at last.

When I appended the block of text a day or two later, it was a straight copy-and-paste job, and I was able to avoid introducing errors. I was able to find a perverse solace in that.

To mark this anniversary, I’m publishing the piece I read on stage at Vox Nox 2005, which was the only time it was shared publicly in the last five years. The stunning part, even to me, is that every bit of that piece is the raw, unedited, unaltered truth.

In some ways, I still can’t believe that it’s been five years and that she’s really forever gone, that she’s missed everything that’s happened in my life. In some ways, I can’t accept that she will never know her granddaughter, and that her granddaughter will never know her. And in little ways, I do my best to bridge that yawning chasm with myself and what I learned, what I was taught, over all the years of my life… minus just a bit less than five.

Five years. Five very busy years. Five awful, wonderful, stressful, liberating, irreplaceable years.

I miss you, Mom.

My referrers lit up recently due to Jonathan Snook’s article about CSS resets and how he doesn’t use them. To Jonathan and all the doubters and nay-sayers out there, I have only one thing to say:

Good for you.

Seriously; no sarcasm or passive-aggressiveness intended. If I thought my reset styles, or really anything I’ve ever published or advocated, was a be-all end-all ultimate solution for every designer and design that’s ever been and could ever be, I’d be long past due for six rounds on the receiving end of a clue-by-four.

Reset styles clearly work for a lot of people, whether as-is or in a modified form. As I say on the reset page, those styles aren’t supposed to be left alone by anyone. They’re a starting point. If a thousand people took them and created a thousand different personalized style sheets, that would be right on the money. But there’s also nothing wrong with taking them and writing your own overrides. If that works for you, then awesome.

For others, reset styles are more of an impediment. That’s only to be expected; we all work in different ways. The key here, and the reason I made the approving comment above, is that you evaluate various tools by thinking about how they relate to the ways you do what you do—and then choose what tools to use, and how, and when. That’s the mark of someone who thinks seriously about their craft and strives to do it better.

I’m not saying that craftsmen/craftswomen are those people who reject the use of common tools, of course. I’m saying that they use the tools that fit them best and modify (or create) tools to best fit them, applying their skills and knowledge of their craft to make those decisions. It’s much the same in the world of programming. You can’t identify a code craftsman by whether or not they use this framework or that language. You can identify them by how they decide which framework or language to use, or not use, in a given situation.

Craftsmanship is something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit recently, as has Joshua Porter. I delivered a keynote address on that very topic just a few days ago in Minneapolis, and my thinking infuses both of the talks I’m giving next week at An Event Apart New Orleans. I’ve started looking harder for evidence of it, both in myself and in what I see online, and I believe striving toward being a craftsman/craftswoman is an important process for anyone who chooses to work in this field.

Because this isn’t a field of straightforward answers and universal solutions. We are often faced with problems that have multiple solutions, none of them perfect. To understand what makes each solution imperfect and to know which of them is the best choice in the situation—that’s knowing your craft. That’s being a craftsman/craftswoman. It’s a never-ending process that is all the more critical precisely because it is never-ending.

So it’s no surprise that we, as a community, keep building and sharing solutions to problems we encounter. Discussions about the merits of those solutions in various situations are also no surprise. Indeed, they’re exactly the opposite: the surest and, to me, most hopeful sign that web design/development continues to mature as a profession, a discipline, and a craft. It’s evidence that we continue to challenge ourselves and each other to advance our skills, to keep learning better and better how better to do what we love so much.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I was reading an article on cosmology, as I am sometimes wont to do, and it brought back to me one of those questions that I’ve had for a while now, concerning the redshifting of light from distant galaxies as it relates to the history and expansion of the universe.

For those of you not familiar with this topic, the general idea here is that when we look at galaxies outside our own, the light they give off is shifted toward the redder end of the electromagnetic spectrum, which means the wavelengths are getting longer. According to our present understanding of physics, the simplest explanation for this observation that the further away a galaxy is, the faster it is receding from us—thus redshifting the light it gives off, thanks to the Doppler effect. It turns out that the amount of redshifting is directly and linearly proportional to the distance of the galaxy, a ratio named the Hubble constant in honor of Edwin Hubble, the man who first made this observation. (He’s also the namesake of the Hubble Space Telescope, of course.)

It seems to me that this explanation either overlooks or glosses over one kind of important point: we don’t see those galaxies as they are right now. In fact, we’re seeing them as they were in the past, and the further out we look, the further back in time we’re looking. If a galaxy is a five million light-years distant, then we see it as it was five million years ago. Double the distance, and double the amount of time involved, which would seem to mean that greater redshifts are as much a product of how far back in time we’re looking as they are distance.

So why is it that distance is regarded as the primary factor here? Why don’t we assume that the universe’s expansion is actually slowing down, given that the closer things are (and therefore the more recent they are), the less quickly they’re receding, whereas the really distant (and therefore much, much older) galaxies were receding more quickly back then?

I’ve no doubt this has been explained one way or another by people way smarter than me, but some Googling yielded no decent results—just about everything I came up with challenged the Hubble constant on various and sundry grounds, not all of them sensical (at least to me). Nothing I found addressed this specifically. Though I figure the explanation is straightforward enough, I don’t seem to be using the right search terms to find it. Anyone got any help for me here?

In just under a couple of weeks, the fifth annual NOTACON will be held right here in beautiful Cleveland, Ohio. You’re going, I know; you’re super-über-cool like that, and you don’t need to be reminded of your coolness. But I’d like to mention the show here for posterity, so that our descendants will know just how completely they missed out.

Notacon straddles, like a Colossus built entirely out of recycled motherboards, backtech chips, and loops of soldering wire, the middle ground between regular conferences and BarCamps (though Notacon predates BarCamp by a couple of years). It’s not free to attend, but it is very inexpensive. What it lacks in slick advertising and corporate sponsors, it makes up ten times over in raw, unfiltered geekiness and fascinating material. This is the kind of event where presenters will hold forth on the depths of digital security, the physics of wireless networking, homebrew chip architecture, the coolness of HyperCard, online society dynamics, and more. There’s a running contest called Anything but Ethernet, where you get bonus points for having one of the links in your network architecture incorporate barbed wire.

Yeah. It’s like that.

The speakers will be as wildly diverse as the audience. The lead engineer for the C64 Direct-to-TV (a C64 in a joystick!); the man behind The Daily WTF; some of the folks putting out 2600 magazine; the woman behind CrochetMe.com; and many more. I’ll be there as well, talking about the bleeding edge of CSS and web design, ripping apart some recent projects of mine at top speed while discussing where I think we’ll be in three years. Plus Drew Curtis of FARK fame will be back, as he always is, this year sponsoring a FARK party. The mind fairly boggles. Boggles!

As you’re no doubt gathering by now, it’s hard to describe Notacon in a quick, concise summary—and that’s a big part of what makes it so awesome. For my contemporaries: see you there! To you future historians: okay, you missed out, but drop everything right now to find out when the next one is and I’ll see you there!

As dinner came to a close, Carolyn asked if she could have yogurt for dessert.

“Sure, sweetie,” I said. “What flavor do you want?”

“Banana.”

“Okay, sure. Go ahead and get a cup from the refrigerator.”

“Banana cake!” She started giggling.

“Wait, I thought you wanted banana yogurt. We don’t have any cake.”

“I know,” she said as she walked into the kitchen, “but I want some banana cake.” Judging from her tone, this was the most painfully obvious fact in the world.

“Um, okay.”

She came back to the table, yogurt cup in hand, and started wrenching back the foil top. With the way clear, she picked up her London cabbie spoon—a gift we brought back from one of our rare trips away from her—and splunked it in.

“This is banana cake,” she said gleefully.

“Wow, you got banana cake? Cool. It’s pretty handy that it comes in a yogurt cup like that!”

She leaned toward me and said, conspiratorially, “I’m just pretending it’s banana cake, but it’s really banana yogurt.”

“Ah, got it.”

“Banana cake!” she chortled once more.

I looked across the table at Kat and said, grimly: “The cake is a lie.”

For those of you using Microsoft Expression Web, a free pre-release trial version of CSS Sculptor for Expression Web was announced by the WebAssist folks on Wednesday at MIX08. So now you don’t have to put up with those snooty Dreamweaver users throwing you the mëtäl hörns every chance they get—throw ‘em right back! Røck!

If you’re curious about CSS Sculptor, I posted in some detail about it when it was first released in August 2007, and there’s of course plenty of enthusiastic copy about it on the WebAssist site.

One thing that’s different about the Expression version as compared to the Dreamweaver version is that it doesn’t have an “Apply” button to apply the input CSS ito the preview window. Instead, changes are instantly reflected in the little preview. It’ll be interesting to see how users react to that, since it could mean that the previewed design shatters as the CSS is updated, and then snaps back together upon further changes. Is that good or bad tool usability? Hard to say; it could scare people into undoing the shatter-change and never pushing forward, but it could also help users more quickly gain a deeper understanding of CSS by seeing how things come apart and then go back together. I guess we’ll find out!

As we drove from preschool to dance class, a gentle snowfall blurred the more distant houses and cars like a thin fog. Jack Johnson was quietly serenading us when up ahead, without warning, two white-tailed deer appeared from a treeline on the right and darted into the street, their hooves skidding slightly on the slick pavement.

“Oh, look, sweetie! Do you see the deer?”

“Deer!? Where?” I could hear her leaning out of her booster seat to peer through the front windshield. Within moments, the does made it off the pavement and bounded across the half-shoveled sidewalk to vanish into the subdivision. Brake lights winked off and cars sped up to reclaim the precious, precious seconds lost to this sudden intrusion of nature into late-afternoon suburban routines.

“Did you see them?”

“Yeah”, she said distantly, still craning to look. “Where did they go, Daddy?”

“They ran between those two houses”, I said, gesturing toward the driver’s side window as we passed the spot.

“Do they live there in those houses?”

“No, sweetie, deer live in the woods.”

“Then what are they doing in between the houses?”

“They’re probably looking for food in people’s yards.”

Silence fell for a moment. I spared a half-glance toward the back seat and caught a glimpse of her in my peripheral vision, a half-formed vision of intense concentration. In my head, I quickly ran through everything I knew about deer from my years of rural living, preparing for the expected questions about what deer eat and when they sleep and where their houses were.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“Why did the deer cross the road?”