Posts from April 2008

Five Years

Published 15 years, 11 months past

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.


Crafting Ourselves

Published 15 years, 11 months past

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.


Time and Motion

Published 15 years, 11 months past

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?


Full Disclosure

Published 15 years, 11 months past
WARNING: This person omits alt text from images (Happy April Fool's Day from The Web Standards Project.)

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