Posts in the Personal Category

In keeping with last Saturday’s post on audiences, I’ll post today with a question for the audience.  Well, a segment of the audience, anyway.

It looks like I’m about to switch from cable to a satellite TV provider, partly because of economics but also because I’m just sick of propping up my local cable monopoly, a company I disliked from the moment they arrived in town.  (Hint: their headquarters are in Philadelphia.)

I’m interested in HD programming, since I have a massive new HD TV set up in the newly refinished basement, and I know both DirecTV and Dish offer HD packages.  They also both have DVR, in which I have some interest.  I’m looking to get the best combination of both, and to be with a service that will rapidly expand HD offerings as networks switch over in the next year.  Broadband is not an issue, since I have DSL through my other local monopoly and not through a cable modem.

So—which one would you recommend I get, DirecTV or Dish, and why?

• Satellite Choices was published on Saturday, August 20th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been twenty-six replies.

Everything old is new again: Jeff and Doug have been contemplating conference crowd behaviors in the presence of wifi.  It’s been a year or so since the last time this came up, so I guess we were about due.  I’ve certainly noticed the sorts of things they’re describing, and it’s particularly acute at SXSW.

In an unsurprising case of adapting to fit the times, there are those speakers who make use of the available network, opening IRC channels for parallel commentary or inviting instantly messaged questions, as Jeff does.  From the audience side, I’ve made use of the wifi to IM other people at the same conference in order to coordinate later meetings, or even to comment on the presentation in progress to friends in the room.  Typing strikes me as being marginally more polite than whispering, in such a case, though it’s probably rude either way.

There are potential speaker costs from this behavior, as Doug points out.  If the audience is unresponsive due to being absorbed in their work (or for any other reason), it can seriously sap the spaker’s energy, which leads to more audience apathy, thus starting a vicious downward spiral.  On the flip side, an engaged audience can charge up a speaker, creating a powerful positive feedback cycle.  It’s also the case that at some conferences, the only pay the speaker receives is the audience’s response.  Take away that response, and you’re taking away their payment.

Now, I will say that as a speaker, I don’t find wifi junkies terribly disturbing.  From the podium, there’s only a minor difference between people sending e-mail and people taking notes on the talk.  The difference is that the note-takers look up more often, and focus on me when they do.  The wifiheads only look up every now and again, and only do so out of a vague sense of social expectation.  You can read it in their body language: “Uh-oh, it’s been ten minutes since I acted like I was paying attention, so I’ll gaze in the vague direction of the stage while I mentally compose my next e-mail message.”

But this isn’t just about the speaker, as most of the real cost is borne by audience members.  While it’s certainly easier to ignore tapping keyboards than whispers, the fact remains that being surrounded by furious typing is distracting to those who really do want to pay attention to the presentation.  It’s not so much rude to the speaker as it is to other attendees.  When I’m up there on stage, I always focus in on the people who are really paying attention, but they’re often scattered throughout a sea of hunched typers.

So here’s my (hopefully modest) proposal.  Let’s collectively adopt a social convention where the people who want to actually pay attention to the speaker sit near the front of the room, closer to the stage; and those who are more interested in the wifi sit toward the back of the room, which is probably closer to the wireless access point anyway.  So you’ll get a stronger signal, and the folks up front won’t have to deal with the constant clatter of keys.  The speaker can focus on the people who are really interested, and if he’s smart, he’ll also open side channels for the wifiers to use as well so that they become more engaged.  Everyone wins!

I may well put up signs at the door of my next presentation suggesting this to people as they enter the room.  It would be very interesting to see if people followed the suggestion, and how it changed the room dynamic as a result.

• Clickety-Clack, Move On Back was published on Saturday, August 13th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been nine replies.

Remember how, back in July, I ventured across the Atlantic to give two full-day workshops on XHTML and CSS in London?  Well, this November the workshop is crossing the ocean: announcing “Professional CSS XHTML Techniques” this coming November 3rd in Chicago, Illinois.

Ryan Carson, one of the two founders of BD4D, is putting together a heck of a workshop series, as you can see by visiting the Carson Workshops home page.  There you’ll find my workshop listed, as well as seminars from Cal Henderson, Joe Clark, and Molly Holzschlag and Andy Clarke.  So far, they’re all headed to London, but given the past history of Ryan’s efforts, I think it’s a good bet some or all of them will be headed Stateside in the future.

As in London, your registration gets you a copy of the “XHTML / CSS Survival Kit”, a disc containing all kinds of examples, articles, tools, and so forth.  You’ll also get a whole day of high-tempo, practical instruction in CSS-driven design, with plenty of opportunity to pose questions and get answers.  I had a great time in London, and the attendees seemed to have just as good a time.  I’ll be doing an updated version of what I did there, so if you wanted to attend the London event but couldn’t swing the transoceanic airfare—well, here’s your chance to make up for it!

Addendum: you know, I was so excited to tell you that the workshop was going to happen that I completely neglected to mention that registration is already open!  So get yerself on over to the Carson Workshops site, click on through to my seminar, and sign up already!

• Workshopping in Chicago was published on Wednesday, August 10th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the (X)HTML, CSS, and Speaking categories.
• There have been fourteen replies.

Some of you may have tried to comment recently and been hit with a “comments are closed for the time being” error.  That was Gatekeeper, actually, and it was being tripped even by valid responses to the Gatekeeper challenge.  The weird thing is that some people were able to comment, whereas others were not.  I have no idea why this was happening.

The point of this being to say that I’ve updated Gatekeeper to return a more helpful error message, and also believe some changes I made should make gatekeeper less random.  If I’m wrong and you get an error, please use the e-mail link in the error message to send the error to me.  If I’m right and you get no error, then no worries.

If I get a lot of error reports, I’ll hobble or disable Gatekeeper, but I hope it doesn’t come to that.  We’ll see.  In the meantime, my sincere apologies to anyone who got bitten by this bug, and I hope things will be better from here on out.

• Comment Turbulence was published on Saturday, July 30th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Projects and WordPress categories.
• There have been five replies.

Between last night and late this morning, no mail was delivered to any address (mine, Kat’s, anyone else) at meyerweb.com.  This happened because the mail server was so overloaded by the latest joy and sunshine from our bretheren in the mass-mailing industry that it basically died.  Those lovable little spammers—is there anything they can’t ruin?

I’m told that, in theory, any mail that was sent during that period should eventually make its way to us.  However, there’s always a chance that an upstream mail server would decide to drop the mail instead of retry delivery, so there’s no guarantee of its arrival.  If you’ve sent us anything critical in the last 24 hours, you might want to send it again, just to be on the safe side.  If it’s non-critical, better to wait a few days to see if there’s a successful redelivery attempt.

• Mail Turbulence was published on Tuesday, July 26th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There has been one reply.

I’ve updated HYDEsim to include a key explaining the various overpressure effects—it’s at the bottom of the page—as well as to use generally improved code, having discovered the joys of for (var x in y).

I’ve also been pounding my head against the Google Maps API as I try to figure out how to read and set the map type correctly, so I can include the map type in the link parameters.  What’s in the documentation seems wildly different from what I’m getting.  When I query map.getCurrentMapType(), for example, I don’t get a type, I get a whole array of stuff that looks insanely cool and useful but is all apparently undefined and therefore useless.

On an even less happy note, the tool has completely broken in IE/Win.  Given the lack of anything resembling a useful JavaScript console in Explorer, I have no idea what’s happening, or why.  Sorry about that, IE users.  It works fine in Firefox and Safari.  If someone figures out the problem, let me know in a comment.

In the meantime, here are some approximations of a few famous historical high-yield explosions:

• The Tunguska Event of 1906 (nothing’s mapped there, so switch to satellite view)
• The Halifax Explosion of 1917 (courtesy djsunkid); I suspect the location may be off a bit but I couldn’t come up with anything more accurate
• Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, all in 1945

And, just for extra fun, here are two fictional explosions.

• The explosion set off near the end of “True Lies” (and, via the actual Google Maps, here’s the bridge segment the Marines took down)
• The attack on Denver from Tom Clancy’s novel “The Sum Of All Fears”

That last one assumes I got the yield right, which I may not have, since I don’t own the book and haven’t read since it came out in hardcover.  If I remembered incorrectly, let me know what the actual yield was (not the incorrect yield that was first estimated, but the correct one that came later in the book) and I’ll correct the link.  Thanks.

Update: thanks to assistance from some helpful folks and some fun hacking around IE/Win’s flaws, the tool is back to working in IE/Win.  Yay.

• HYDEsim Update was published on Monday, July 25th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Projects and Tools categories.
• There have been eight replies.

Molly asks why we blog.  I don’t know why you blog, but I know why I blog.  Therefore, it’s time to blog about blogging.  (Not nearly so brilliantly as did Shelley, I admit.)

Though I still detest the word “blog”.  I’m not too keen on the chronoillogical order of posting, either, but that’s a whole other barrel of fish.

My journal here is a way of communicating, which is one of the most powerful drives humans possess.  Just about everything I’ve done professionally has had, at its core, the intent of making it easier for people to communicate.  Back at CWRU, for example, I wrote a series of HTML tutorials in order to help lower the barrier to publishing information online.  For me, meyerweb.com started life as a way to connect with readers of my then-forthcoming O’Reilly book, as well as with folks who were already familiar with my work in CSS.  Posts were mostly technical or book-related at first.  Over time, I started to mix more of myself and my personal view of the world into the site.

Like Molly, I’ve gotten negative feedback here and there.  Some people have attacked me for views I’ve expressed; others berated me for wasting their time with non-technical posts; a few even insulted and belittled me for daring to not precisely meet their expectations.  I did eventually set up separate technical and personal syndication feeds, along with a combined feed, although most of the reason I did it was so that my non-technical friends could keep up with the site, not the other way around.  I find it slightly depressing that the technical feed is one of the most popular URLs on the site.  Apparently, many of my readers are only interested in what I can teach them, and not in who I am.

In that light, it might seem foolish to continue putting time and energy into personal posts,  but I am steadfast in my conviction that suppressing the personal side of the site would be far  more foolish.  I can summarize why I believe this with a single incident.

Early this year, I posted a personal entry about communicating with Carolyn via sign language.  Soon after, I got e-mail from a reader—a name many of you would recognize, as it happens—thanking me for that post.

His son, you see, does not speak, and never has.  The son is more than old enough to be verbal, and is in all other ways mentally normal and healthy.  He has simply never started to talk.  It had never occurred to the correspondent that sign language might be an option for communication.  Learning that Kat and I had successfully taught sign language to Carolyn, a child less than half his son’s age, was a revelation for him.  It was, potentially, a truly life-changing moment for his entire family.

That is why I will never stop posting my thoughts, sharing my views, and trying to connect with readers on a personal level.  That is why the occasional complaints or flames that I’m too personal or too facile or too arrogant or too liberal or too whatever just roll off my back, as interesting and injurious to me as last month’s weather report.  And that is why I think the people who only read technical posts, here or on any site, are doing themselves a grave disservice.  They’re closing themselves off to more than they can possibly know.

• Why I Blog was published on Monday, July 25th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been twelve replies.

Wednesday morning, as I stood in line to buy a bagel from a street kiosk on the corner of 39th Street and Lexington Avenue, I observed a pair of policemen with a bomb-sniffing dog who were checking out a pair of propane tanks sitting in a box on the sidewalk.  Standing nearby were two soldiers, one carrying an assault rifle in an alert guard position, his finger laid next to the trigger.  He watched the crowds streaming past with a grim, almost dead expression.  It may have been the heat that oppressed us all was affecting him doubly, in his full camouflage dress and carrying a pack and weapon, a cap upon his head.  It may have been his awareness that if this were a real bomb, he’d be only the fifth of many to die, milliseconds after the policemen, their dog, and his comrade.  He may simply have been bored by yet another false alarm.

Thursday morning, I heard the news from London—another series of explosions, patterned much like the ones that came before, but mercifully less damaging.  I remembered how, while in London six weeks earlier, an abandoned package at the station near Picadilly Circus had triggered a security alert, shutting down the Central Line we were riding at the time and forcing us into the cloud-softened sunlight above.  I wondered how many suicide bombers England could produce.  Later in the day came the news that London police had shot to death a man on the subway.  It seems not so long ago that the stereotype of an English policeman was that his only weapon was to shout, “Stop!  Or I’ll say stop again!”

Friday afternoon, I took a cab to Penn Station and caught the train to Newark Liberty International Airport, where the security lines were surprisingly short.  As I rolled my suitcase through the concourse, the daily tabloids all screamed that random baggage searches were being conducted on New York City’s subway system.

This morning, as Carolyn climbed the stairs of her favorite slide at the local playground, I stood below and struggled to moderate my instinct to protect her from any possible harm, knowing that a few honest scrapes and bruises are a part of growing up—maybe an essential part—and that she would almost certainly get down the slide, smiling in delight, without hurting herself in any way.

But I still ask myself and will ask myself how much pain is too much, and how much protection is too much, every day of her life.

• Security Checks was published on Saturday, July 23rd, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.