Posts from February 2003

Just a quick reminder that the WThRemix competition closes in eleven days.  Here’s your chance to remake the face of the W3C Web site, and maybe win some peer accolades and a few prizes along the way.  I’ll be impressed by any entry that gives the W3C site a bold new look without changing its markup structure at all, personally, but I’m not a judge so impressing me won’t get you anywhere in the competition.

Did I mention that the different thematic choices for adactio.com are really, really impressive when you visit the author’s journal?

I somehow missed the announcement of the winners of AllTheWeb‘s restyling competition, so I’m going to mention now that the contest is over and the winners’ entries publicly available.  There are some really good entries.  I worked (remotely) with one of the runners-up when he was an intern at Netscape last year.  Speaking of which, I hope to have some good (or at least interesting) news in the near future.

I’m off to be a geek or a guru, or maybe even both, at Tri-C’s Western campus tonight, where I’ll talk about (among other things) how CSS can be used to restyle any site, regardless of what the site author has to say about it.  Hope to see you there!

• Restyling Madness! was published on Thursday, February 6th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Speaking categories.
• There have been no replies.

For those curious, Cuyahoga Community College has sent out a press release regarding their “Geeks & Gurus Visual Communication & Design Lecture Series.”  The first session of the series is to take place this Thursday at 7:30pm, and features yours truly.  Check out the release for more details; I’m hoping to make it to the rest of the series as an audience member.  All the other sessions look really interesting.  There is more detailed information available at awdsgn.com.

As I indicated before, this Thursday’s presentation will greatly affect my ability to be at the Web Standards Meetup, unless of course everyone shows up at the talk and we go somewhere afterward.  I definitely plan to make it to the Web Design Meetup next week, though.

• Moving On was published on Monday, February 3rd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been no replies.

No doubt you’ve already heard that the Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart over Texas during re-entry this morning.  NASA’s Web server is currently offline due to excessive load.  The original CNN report of the problem ends on a horribly tragic note.

I remember when Challenger was lost, 17 years ago this past week.  I was a sophomore in high school, walking from lunch to my first afternoon class with my friend Dave when his father (a teacher at the school) stopped us in the hall and said, “Did you guys hear the Shuttle blew up?”  I didn’t believe him at first; I think the first words out of my mouth were, “Ha ha, very funny,” even though as I uttered them I knew he wasn’t kidding.  It was a reflex action, an emotional spasm, divorced from anything else.

I actually own a copy of the report of the Presidential Commission on the Challenger accident.  I don’t know what that means.

NPR just reported that Colonel Ilan Ramon, the Israeli crew member, was one of the pilots who attacked an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.  There is a tiny, tiny part of me that’s glad that this accident happened at an altitude 200,000 feet instead of a lower altitude, one where people might have asserted it must have been a terrorist missile attack against the Shuttle and its Israeli crew member.  There’s a larger part of me that is dismayed that our world is such that it was one of my first thoughts.

As I watched the video of the multiple debris trails of Columbia slowly etching the Texas sky, I couldn’t help but wonder why America’s national tragedies keep coming on perfectly clear blue mornings.

• Shuttle Down was published on Saturday, February 1st, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.