Posts in the Personal Category

By current standards, the winter storm we’ve just weathered was pretty severe: two feet of snow blanketed our local environs in the course of 24 hours, give or take.  I put a few pictures up on Flickr, for those who’d like to see some of the aftereffects.  The broad nature of the storm meant that everyone got about the same snowfalls; lake effect seemed to play a minor or nonexistent role.

I’ve heard some people are comparing this storm to the Blizzard of ’77, and a few with a slightly better sense of proportion have recalled the storm that hit the area in November of 1996.  Both strike me as rather specious comparisons.  The ’77 storm was near to epic in scope and intensity, dropping four or five feet and stranding a whole lot of travelers.  My paternal grandparents had dropped by to visit the day before it started and ended up staying several days longer than they’d planned; the snow on our roofed patio was three or four feet deep, and many drifts throughout our area were a dozen feet or more tall.  For 1996, we had four or five days of constantly falling dense, wet snow, and tornadoes and thunderstorms to boot.  This week’s storm mostly dumped the light fluffy snow you can clear away with a broom, assuming it’s not too deep.

The truth is that this week’s storm wouldn’t have been very remarkable twenty years ago.  It might have been one of the heaviest individual falls of a given season, and certainly would have caused some problems, but it wouldn’t have triggered historical comparisons.  I remember days with ambient air temperatures of -20°F (-29°C) and stiff winds, which drove the effective temperature down to -50°F (-45°C) or lower.  I remember snow feet thick on the ground which stayed on for weeks.  I remember tunneling through roadside snowbanks and building elaborate snowforts with the neighbor kids, snowy bus stops, sledding parties and ice skating.

Yeah, yeah, okay: “when I was your age…”.  That’s not actually my point.  What I’m trying to say is that for last couple of decades, we’ve had some very mild winters, and it made us complacent.  I don’t own boots, because it’s literally been years since I needed them.  I had cause to regret that as I cleared snow from our walks in my regular shoes.  Thankfully, we do have access to a snow blower, so I didn’t have to shovel, but that didn’t stop the snow from getting into my shoes.  Oh, that’s a cold feeling.

I stayed far away from any conventional media yesterday, mostly to spare myself the histrionics of local news forecasters and avoid the depressingly repetitive comment, “I guess so much for global warming, haw haw haw!”.  There’s only so much moronity I can stomach in a day.  Instead, we all stayed home (Carolyn’s preschool and Kat’s office both being closed, along with nearly everything else in the city) and played games, read books, and went outside for short periods to make snow angels, get cold-rosy cheeks, and eat a few mittenfuls of snow.  Then we came back in to sip hot drinks in front of the fireplace.

People sometimes ask me why I stay in Cleveland when I could find work no matter where I moved.  In response, I can only point out my window to the drifts of snow sparkling in today’s clear-sky sun and the bare brown trees that will, in a month or two, begin to bud green shoots and tiny flowers; the same trees that will be silhouetted against a lightning-torn sky and will roar as autumn winds rip through their branches and brilliant leaves.

While that is not the only reason I stay, I need no other.

• Winter Drifts was published on Thursday, February 15th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Cleveland and History categories.
• There have been thirteen replies.

The rate of registrations for An Event Apart Boston has been, in my eyes and the eyes of our greatly experienced Event Manager, nothing short of stunning.  I generally look deeply askance at exhortations to “hurry before they’re all gone” or claims that “time is running out”, but they’re kind of warranted here.

That’s not because we only have ten seats left or anything, no; but we have sold a solid majority of the available seats in the 25 calendar days registration has been open.  And we already know of a bunch more people who are planning to register just as soon as they can get all their institutional ducks lined up.

At the current rate of registration, we’ll most likely have sold all the available seats before the early bird deadline arrives on February 26th.  My current projections say we’ll sell out on February 28th, but of course there’s no guarantee expressed or implied by that statement.  Space could dry up faster or slower than I currently predict, especially since I didn’t take the expected last-minute early bird registration rush into account with that prediction.  I’ll be sort of interested to see how far off I was, when the time comes.

So, yeah, the show is filling up fast.  So is the special room rate we negotiated with the hotel.  If you’re interested, then, you know… better hurry before they’re all gone.

• AEA Boston Going Fast was published on Monday, February 5th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the An Event Apart and Speaking categories.
• There have been no replies.

Among all the other stuff this past week, I let something slip off the radar: an interview with me over at the Lunartics blog.  The interview was conducted via e-mail by Amy Armitage, who I briefly met last year at the Webmaster Jam Session in Dallas.  It’s not your usual “why is CSS important” kind of interview; Amy likes to keep things fun while still covering serious questions.  It’s definitely worth a read.

It also scoops news of a development I’ve never gotten around to mentioning: in October 2006, I was inducted as a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.  It’s a pretty incredible honor, given that it’s an invitation-only body of 500 members including “David Bowie, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, Internet inventor and Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vinton Cerf, ‘Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening, Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser, and fashion designer Max Azria”.  The fact that my name appears on the same list as those people is jaw-dropping enough.  To me, it wasn’t the most stunning part by a long mile.

I’ll admit, though I’d heard of The Webbys, I assumed the IADAS was one of those name-collector groups, like those “Who’s Who in America” books where you pay to be listed.  Instead, I found that the IADAS levies no membership fees, and I was deeply surprised and pleased to discover that they invite people based on their actual qualifications.  How do I know?  Because my welcoming letter didn’t praise my web design work.  Instead, it cited my “dedication to promoting Web standards”, my “international recognition on the topics of HTML and CSS”, and proclaims that I’ve “helped inform excellence and efficiency on the Web”.

Yes, the text string “HTML and CSS” was actually in the letter.

It’s a little difficult to express how important this recognition is to me.  See, most of the time, I’m introduced and perceived as an influential web designer, which is frankly insulting to actual web designers everywhere.  If you aren’t reading this post via RSS, look around.  Does this look like influential web design?  Hell no.  At best, we can call meyerweb’s design minimalist and maybe—maybe—possessed of a certain elegance.  And it only took me five years and ripping off ideas from Khoi Vinh to get here!

But I’ve never claimed to be a designer.  I think the perception that I am one arises because I get linked to from people who really are designers.  I’ve always claimed to be a communicator.  I’m someone who’s done his best to explain, promote, and advance the technologies that let designers do their work.  I’ve invested tons of time and effort into making good web design easier without sacrificing clean and semantic markup.  I wouldn’t say that work is done by any stretch, but there’s been a lot of progress.  Sometimes I forget just how much.

And so, to be invited to join the IADAS not for what I’m usually thought to be, but actually for who I am—it’s an indescribable feeling.  A fantastically good one, certainly!  But not one I could describe no matter how many words I threw at the problem.

It’s a delicious irony, and I do so love my irony:  my powers of communication fail me when I wish to express my feelings over being honored for my communicating, over all those years, my love of the web and my passion for getting it right and the inner workings of how to make that happen.

But I can at least say this:

Thank you.  Thank you for coming to read my posts, for reading my books and articles, for listening to me speak.  Thank you for being the other end of the conversation.  Thank you for being open to what I have to say, and for responding with your insights and perspectives, all of which have changed me in untold ways.  Thank you for making everything I’ve done and said and written about the web worth far more than what I put into it.

Thank you for making this honor possible.

• I’d Like To Thank The Academy… was published on Saturday, February 3rd, 2007.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Interviews, Personal, Standards, and Web categories.
• There have been eight replies.

In case you’re one of the people who’s been following the Twitter stuff, and you’re on OS X, then kindly allow me to direct your attention to Twitterific 1.1.  Despite its paltry 0.1 increase in version number, it’s acquired some great new features.

The most wonderful addition, in my opinion, is a preference setting that lets you make the window act modal, or not, as you prefer.  Having set my copy to “act as normal window”, at least half my problems with Twitterific were abolished.  They’ve also changed the auto-hide behavior so that it will auto-hide a short interval after popping up, whereas before it would only auto-hide after a manual refresh (at least, that’s how my copy behaved).  This makes it a lot easier to ignore in the background, since it won’t behanging around until you bring it to the foreground.  Perhaps this is a side effect of it acting like a normal window.  Regardless, it’s welcome.  In addition, I like the ability to define a hotkey to bring up the Twitterrific window and the “launch when I login” option.

They’ve also added a post character counter, so you know how close you are to hitting the tweet cap.  That’s nice to see, though as I understand it, the number of characters permitted for a post is dependent on the number of characters in your username.  Twitterific just gives you a flat 141 characters—which, given the basic nature of Twitter, seems like it really ought to be more than enough.

Now, if it just let me define my own background-foreground colors and made it easier to replace the alert sound, I’d regard it as being pretty much perfect.  (Yes, I can dig into the package contents and replace the alert sound, but I’d rather there was a preference setting so that I don’t have to futz around inside the package every time I update the software.)

Oh, and if you’re a Twitterific user, you absolutely want to add Twitterific as a friend, since they use that channel to tweet release announcements and tips on using Twitterific.  If I’d had them added to my Twitter account, I wouldn’t have had to post about my frustration over trying to change usernames—they’d tweeted the answer the day before I posted here—and could have thus been spared the shame of broadcasting to the world my ignorance of the proper spelling of “terrific”.  Though I suppose in that case, I’d still be ignorant, so maybe it’s better I posted after all.

Well, either way, if you’re using Twitterific 1.0 or an OS X user interested in using Twitter, check out the new version.

• Twitterific 1.1 was published on Sunday, January 28th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Web categories.
• There have been four replies.

Having just spent the better part of an hour working my way through various phone trees and listening to a metric crapload of insipid hold music, I realized that there’s a huge product opportunity just waiting for someone to exploit.  I don’t have the engineering skills to describe it for a patent, let alone make one, so I’m going to toss this into the public sphere in the hopes that somebody takes it and runs with it.  If you become a multi-zillionaire off this idea, then bully for you!  I hope you’ll remember me when that time comes with a nice cushy spot in your web division or at least a bunch of stock options, but if not, at least the world will be a slightly better place thanks to the two of us.

What I want is an office phone that’s also a iPod dock.  It would charge the iPod when docked, and also be able to play through the speakerphone, handset, or headset.  And here’s the really useful part: it mutes the incoming signal when there’s hold music and plays the iPod.  When it detects a human voice, it pauses the iPod and passes the incoming signal through.  If the hold music comes back, it goes back to blocking the incoming music and plays its own.

In other words, it would let me define my own hold music, rather than have to tolerate what someone else thinks is soothing.  I would pay an exorbitant premium for that product, and there’s no way I’m the only one.  So somebody get right on that, would you?

• Hold Music Substitution was published on Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been twenty-two replies.

After a couple of months of fairly determined avoidance, I finally joined Twitter a week ago.  I’m already thinking about leaving.  Have been for the last six days, in fact.

There are two easily-explained reasons why I want to just walk away.  The first is that in order to have a public comment stream and also be able to share more private messages with my friends, I have to have two accounts.  If I could post friends-only messages to an otherwise public account, then I’d only need one account.

And why would I use a public commentary service for private information?  Because it is a very good way of keeping my friends informed of where I am, where I’ll be headed next, what’s happening in my family life, and so on.  That’s not public information, to my mind.  Using Twitter is a lot easier than setting up a private blog to distribute the same information.  (Side note: if you had a friendship request with me declined, this is why.  No, I don’t hate you.)

The second reason is that I don’t have a way to filter out people who are swamping my Twitter stream.  Yes, I’m very glad that you have so much to say, but you’re burying the other people who are just as interesting but not quite so loquacious, obsessive, or just plain bored.  In my current short list of friends, I have two that are, um, extra-expressive.  (Both women, in fact.  No comment?)  I want these people to remain friends so they can get my updates, infrequent though they may be.  I also want to see what the rest of my friends and followed are saying.  How to resolve it?

Sadly, “leave” only filters their stuff out of phone and IM updates, neither of which I use.  It doesn’t take them out of the RSS feed nor the web view, both of which I use.  Is the solution to de-friend them and let them just follow me?  Sure, for the public account.  For the private personal-info account, that solution fails; they’ll stop getting my updates.  I just wish there was a way to say “this person is my friend, but I’d only like to get updates from them through the following services”.  That way I could set the chatterers to show up in the web view and nothing else, thus restoring some sense of balance and diversity to my RSS feed and thus to Twitterific.

Then there’s the bonus reason I want to throw the whole thing into my bit-bucket:  the way people are using Twitter right now, it’s rapidly becoming the most inefficient and unusable version of IRC ever.  Look, people, if you want to chat, then get a chat room.  You know?

I know, Twitter is new and growing.  Feature sets and social conventions are still in flux and expected to evolve.  Personally, I feel like there’s the kernel of a really good service in there, only not quite the one they’re offering.  I’m not saying Twitter is useless or somehow wrong: it clearly provides something that some people want, and it does what it does fairly well.  I just have the sense that there’s a similar service with a different focus that would provide something that some other people want, myself among them.  Anyone else feel the same way?

• The Twitters was published on Sunday, January 21st, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Web categories.
• There have been thirty-seven replies.

We climbed out from Cleveland, rising above snowy muted fields and west-edge suburbs, bound for San Francisco.  As the ascent continued, the plane striving beyond personal electronics altitude, the whiteness below thinned out, fading to the dull brown of winter.  By the time we passed out of the cloud cover streaming off the lake, the snow had disappeared completely.

From the middle of Ohio to the middle of Indiana, there was no snow to be seen.  It was then that we started to see curved and blurry regions of snow, a light smear of frosting spread southeast from the shores of Lake Michigan.  Just beyond Chicago, the ground began to turn pale again, shading back from brown to white.  By the time we reached Iowa, winter had taken over; floes of ice were visible in rivers and lakes.

Viewed from five miles aloft, the only thing that saved the landscape from taking on an Arctic primality was the roads, houses, and sketches of field boundaries.  Even at that, I was reminded of flying above Greenland.  There was a faint feeling of another Ice Age, of a chill not entirely attributable to the air handling in the plane’s cabin nor the thin air screaming just beyond the plastic window.

The snow did not release its grip on the land until we reached Nevada.

In San Francisco, the locals complained insistently about the cold.

• Arctic Flight was published on Thursday, January 18th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Travel category.
• There have been three replies.

You know you have a great piece of luggage when the TSA guy rooting through it at the security checkpoint asks where he can get one.

As it turns out, we have four great pieces of luggage, all from Briggs & Riley.  I’d never heard of them either, at least not before walking into a luggage store this past October.  However, if you’re someone who travels a lot, or even someone who appreciates real quality in a product, then you need to hear about Briggs & Riley.

Let me start off with the coolest part: their lifetime unconditional repair guarantee.  If your luggage breaks or is otherwise damaged for any reason whatsoever, including damage caused by airline handling, Briggs & Riley will fix it for free.  Why?  Because they use that failure information to improve future models.  They take the cost of fixing a sold product as an investment in real-world research.  That’s smart, and had me ready to like them from the start.

That said, I shudder to imagine the forces that could damage one of these cases enough to require repair.  They’re tough, solid bags.  They cost quite a bit more than the stuff you can get on sale at Target or Kauffman’s, but they’re worth it.  They’d be worth it even if the warranty was time-limited.

For checked bags, we got two expandable cases.  These have two heavy-duty expansion rails on the inside of the case which can increase its depth by almost 20%.  They’re two-position mechanisms that lock into place, so you don’t have to worry about the suitcase self-expanding or -compressing.  On the flip side, the rails that contain the pull handle, the one that slides up or down, are on the outside of the case.  That gives you more interior room.  They’ve also got serious rubber tires, not cheap plastic rollers.  Like I said, these are solid cases.

They’re also exceptionally well thought-out.  Every detail quietly announces attention to and consideration for the end-user.  The piece that really sold me is the Executive Traveler.  It has three compartments: one for suits, complete with a hang-bag; a slightly deeper clothing compartment; and sandwiched between them, a slot for the laptop briefcase that comes with the bag.  On the outside are two zippered compartments with a lot of pockets, and on the other side, between the handle rails, is a zippered pocket that would easily accept a bottle of water, if you could bring that sort of incredibly dangerous substance through security these days.  Not to worry: it makes a fantastic place to put a book, an iPod, and some compact headphones.

The Executive Traveler is sized to be carry-on luggage, and has enough space for a five-day trip with a suit or two, if you’re efficient with your packing and don’t take along a second pair of shoes.  (If you do pack a pair, then you can probably still get three days of clothes in there, including suit.)  What else?

• Inside one of the outer zippered compartments, there’s a heavy metal clip on the end of an elastic strap, which is perfect for clipping on your car keys for easy access when you get back home.

• At the center of one edge, there’s a zippered compartment built into the case that has an intense orange interior.  It’s meant for travel documents, and it’s bigger than it first seems.  It can take a collection of passports and boarding passes, keeping them right where they’re easy to slip out and back in.  The orange interior provides contrast when you’re rooting around in there, and it also makes it really obvious when you’ve forgotten to zip it shut.

• There are bunches of elastic straps in the clothing compartments to keep things in place.  For the center briefcase compartment, there are elastic stretching membranes that let you open it pretty wide while holding things together.

• It comes with a hangable compact toiletry kit that holds more than it seems like it should.

• Any place there’s a snap, one half of the snap is mounted on a loop of fabric and the other half is mounted on a small tongue of fabric.  This lets you slide your finger through the loop, put your thumb over the tongue, and press the two together.  Snap!

And then there’s the computer briefcase, which is good enough to have become my default.  It’s wide enough to accept a 17″ laptop, with a padded interior on the laptop compartment.  It’s slim, with leather handles that can be pushed in so they’re flush with the case sides.  There are a goodly number of pockets and so on in the front compartment.  It also has a flap on the back with an open top and a zipper across the bottom.  If you zip it shut, it’s an extra exterior pocket.  If you open the zipper, the whole thing slips over the retractable handles on the main case—or any Briggs & Riley case’s handles.

Here’s the kicker: remember the padded laptop compartment?  The padding is a little bit wooly, in a way; not scratchy, but a little fuzzy.  The case comes with two small padded brackets that go around the edges of the laptop.  Good enough, right?  Oh no.  It gets better.  These brackets have Velcro on their exteriors, so they grab onto the compartment’s padding and don’t let go.  They become static, padded holders for the laptop—and thanks to their Velcro, you can reposition them if you change laptop sizes.  For extra bonus points, when positioned to hold my 15″ Mac to one side of the compartment, there’s just enough space left over to hold a regular-size mouse, a small digital camera, or any number of other goodies.

You’d think it would be really hard to get them in, and you’d be right, except Briggs & Riley ships them with heavy cardstock sleeves.  You put the sleeves over the brackets, place the brackets where you want them without any trouble, and slip out the sleeves.  The compartment sides press against the brackets, the Velcro latches onto the padding, and you’re done.  Sheer genius.

This might seem like a bit too much love for a travel case, but trust me, it’s just the start.  I could go on at least twice as long.  Frequent travelers already know why I’m so over the moon about these suitcases, and are probably wondering where they can get their own.  Even infrequent travelers should bear Briggs & Riley in mind the next time they’re in the market for luggage.  The high quality and lifetime unconditional warranty make them more than a worthwhile investment, and they’re sturdy enough that you don’t have to be too concerned about the fate of your stuff.  I mean, sure, you still have to worry about TSA folks opening your luggage, but with these cases, at least you know they’ll be impressed when they do so.

• A Case Of Love was published on Monday, January 15th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Travel category.
• There has been one reply.