Since I’m going to be arriving in London a week from today, I wandered over to the Professional CSS / XHTML Techniques Workshop site to see how things were going. I discovered that there are only three seats left for the Friday session, Saturday having sold out long ago. So if you’ve been hesitating, might be best to overcome that hesitation in a timely fashion. I’m just sayin’.
Dear Democratic Party:
I have a few suggestions on how you might improve your relationship with centrists who would like to support you. Well, all right, it’s really all about how to improve your relationship with me.
The primary rule is this: stop annoying me.
You might wonder which of your policies, pronouncements, or other points of politicking have triggered this reaction. In all honesty, none of them; from what little attention I’ve paid to political debate in America, you’re batting about even with the Republicans, though I tend to give you a slight edge due to my internal biases. No, what’s raised my ire is the one-two punch of clueless marketing you served me today.
The first one was a fund-raising letter sent to me by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. It’s nice to know that Mrs. Clinton is interested in involving her constituents in the political process, at least as far as their wallets go. Slight problem: Mrs. Clinton is not my senator. She doesn’t even represent a single person in my state, as I live in Ohio, not New York.
Of course I realize this was a national campaign, not a matter of local politics. That being the case, though, the name on the envelope should have been that of your national party chairman, Dr. Howard Dean. If he’s not popular enough to be attached to such an effort, then you need a new chair.
The follow-up fumble was a telephone call I got early this evening which also exhorted me to donate to the cause. Now, part of the reason I get these calls is that, as a political entity, you’re free to ignore the Do Not Call list. Both parties took shameless advantage of this oh-so-convenient exception last fall, as I observed at the time, but since the election you’d both pretty much shut up, thankfully. The other part of the reason is that I gave a small donation to a chilly, rain-soaked young woman who rang our doorbell one evening. At the time, I did it because I was marginally less opposed to your Presidential candidate than I was to his opponent, and because I can be a sucker for young idealists caught in the rain. What I didn’t reckon, though I should have, was that it would put me on the “contact this guy a lot” list.
Where “a lot” isn’t usually more than twice a month, I admit, but still.
Anyway, your telemarketing temp launched into her spiel, which was nicely written, but I decided to inform her that I wasn’t interested since the last time I’d made a donation, it had gotten me onto a bunch of mailing lists. Her response was that what actually happens is when you go out on the Internet and use search engines, they hang onto that information.
So here’s my last tip, which comes in two parts. It goes like this. If you’re going to give your marketdroids some kind of response for complaints like mine, try to make sure that it’s:
If you haven’t written a response for that kind of complaint, then you should at least instruct your temps that ad-libbing their own bogus responses isn’t kosher. Tell them to try a little sympathy and understanding—and, even better, have them tell prospects that their name won’t be put on every liberal-leaning mailing list in the universe!
Although please only have them tell people that if it’s actually true. Leave the lying to the politicians.
Anyway, that’s it in a nutshell. Remember that I’m only saying all this because I care. Good luck.
Sincerely,
Eric
P.S. to the Republicans: stop looking so smug, because you know damned well you’d be doing the same stuff if I’d given you any money. In fact, last year you sent me two surveys soliciting my opinions as a representative of “a select group of Republicans” in my area. Leaving aside the pathetically transparent lie it represented (that you were only contacting a few select people in every area, as opposed to sending one to everyone you could find), it was at best insultingly biased to anyone who possesses more than an milligram of functioning brain cells.
You’re no better than the Democrats; in many ways, you’re a lot worse, and I occasionally toy with the idea of donating some small amount just to see how awful your subsequent mailings and phone calls would get. You know, do a comparison with what the Democrats are sending me. But honestly? I’d really rather not hear from either of you until you learn to behave like adults.
Our Man Stan recently posed these questions:
…first, what would you do if you needed to make a parallel change in careers? Meaning, same industry, different role; like moving from waiter to cook in a restaurant. Second, what if you had to make a perpendicular jump and get out of your industry all together? Meaning, different industry, different role; like moving from rodeo clown to encyclopedia salesman.
The first question is actually a little tougher to answer, because the answer depends on what you consider to be “the same industry”. If we’re talking the web industry, I’d probably move to project coordination, since at this point I think I have a pretty good handle on all the technical pieces. If we’re talking the computer-programming/human-computer system industry, I’d love to get into virtual-scene modeling and CAVE systems. If we’re talking the general technology field, I would definitely love a chance to work in the field of self-organizing microsensor networks (I’ve written about that before).
Were I to switch fields entirely, I think I’d become a meteorologist; weather systems have long fascinated me, and I did consider that career path at one point in my life. Failing meteorology, it wouldn’t be much of a radical shift to be a climatologist, which seem a lot like being a meteorologist except in terms of the geographical and temporal scales of study. Besides, both fields do a lot of computer-based simulation, so my existing skills wouldn’t be completely useless.
I do have to admit that both are practical choices: they’re fields in which I could very likely get a job. Those would be in contrast to my absolute top choice, which is to be an astronaut. That was always my dream as a youngster. I can still hope that the orbital tourism industry will get up to speed just fast enough for me to make it up there before I’m too old to survive the trip… but reality has a way of squashing those sorts of dreams.
How about you? What would you do?
I was passed a musical baton by Nick Finck, while everyone else getting the same baton ignored me. Losers. (With the last-minute exception of Meryl, who passed one to me just as I was preparing to post.)
8.74 gigabytes, comprised of 1,885 songs that would take 5 days, 16 hours, 8 minutes and 22 seconds to play through.
“Decksanddrumsandrockandroll” by The Propellerheads. The last CD bought on my behalf, as a birthday gift, was a set of the 1963 von Karajan / Berlin Philharmonic recordings of Beethoven’s Symphonies.
As I post this message, it’s “When the Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin from “Led Zeppelin IV”. This might be interpreted as support for Mike Davidson‘s opinion of the Zep, except that I don’t agree with it.
I’ll take the latter.
Bonus addendum piece: the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, “Allegretto”. It’s haunting, moving, inexpressably sad and triumphant. It doesn’t hold emotional meaning for me the way the other songs I listed do, but it has emotional effects that are unlike almost any other piece of music I know.
I’d have pointed to more web designer types, but they’d pretty much all been batoned already.
So there you have it: a little break from semanticity. Now all we need is a music-categorization microformat, and I could merge the two.
A partial braindump from WWW2005. I’ll get to the professional stuff in another post.
A staggering majority of the personal vehicles on the streets in the Chiba and Tokyo areas are black, white, and varying shades of gray. Even dark blue is a rare sighting, and forest green seemed to be Right Out. There were, however, the occasional splashes of color, like red sports cars and yellow Beetles. Were those the rebels of Japanese society? I don’t know. I just know that any time I turned to look at the cars, it was a very monochromatic affair.
On a related note, I did see three Hummers—all in very dark colors, by the way—and two of them had those thin tires that the street kids love so much. Because, after all, nothing screams “please lower my gas mileage” quite so much as a Hummer.
(I wish I were rich enough to buy a Hummer and have it completely painted with a “My Little Pony” theme, complete with stuffed ponies on the dashboard and an all-pink shaggy carpet interior. That would be totally bumpin’.)
The Japanese are really, really serious about their fresh seafood.
Tim Bray says I’ve been one of his heroes for the longest time. Whoa. Tim Bray said that. I mean, Tim’s long been one of my heroes. Mutual heroism? Whatever. I remember hanging around him like a fanboi at WWW7 while he talked to someone else about stuff I’m not smart enough to understand. When I finally got a chance to introduce myself, he had to leave as he was already running late. Despite my feeling like a rube for imposing on him when he was clearly intensely busy, I still walked away from it thinking, I got to shake Tim Bray’s hand.
Before you start to project too much creepiness into this little scenario, be assured that I did not (then or ever) resolve to leave my shaking hand unwashed.
I did manage to get into Tokyo on Sunday, tagging along with Rohit Khare and his wife to meet up with their friend John in the Ueno area. We had lunch at an unagi place, and after they all left I took a river ferry toward the bay. A thunderstorm rolled through the city as we sailed, shrouding the buildings and the radio tower where Mothra cocooned. After disembarking at a transfer point, I watched a rainbow form over the river, with the far edge of the Rainbow Bridge as a backdrop.
Later the same evening, making my way back toward my hotel, I was standing in a JR Shinbashi station looking for the Yamanote line to Nippori, where I would catch the Skyliner to Narita Airport. Frowning, I peered at various maps as I searched for some sort of indication that I was even in the right station. As I leaned in close to one, a voice to my right said, “Oh, hey, Eric”.
My head snapped around and I found that I was standing next to Richard Ishida of the W3C, who I’d met just a few days before, and who was studying the map trying to find the line that would get him to Keio University. When I told him what I was looking for, he pointed me toward the right line.
I still believe that the universe is an essentially random place, but it’s days like that when I completely understand why many people believe that there are no coincidences, that everything happens in a time and a place for a reason, when I come closest to knowing why they believe in angels.
On the flight back to the United States, there was a dim glow on the horizon that I thought might be the Aurora Borealis. The last time I saw the lights, I was seven or eight and my parents woke me up at three in the morning so I could see them. The memory is dim with so many years gone and the sleep that filled my eyes that night, but what I do remember has always stayed with me.
The glow turned out to be the ‘top’ edge of the terminator, something I have never seen before. I wonder what of it I will remember, thirty years from now.
Last fall, Tantek and I presented a poster at HT04. To get it to the conference in one piece and to avoid having to lug it across the country, I created a PDF of the poster and sent it off to the Kinko’s web site. It was printed for me by the Kinko’s closest to the conference. All I had to do was send them a digital file, and 2,150 miles later I retrieved the physical output.
As I did so, I thought: This is really amazing. This is what’s so great about being connected.
A few months later, Kat upgraded her car, and the new one came with XM digital radio. We started receiving music from geosynchronous orbit, a digital signal broadcast from 22,600 miles above the equator and deciphered by the short, stubby antenna on the car’s roof. On a drive to visit relatives, we listened to the same station for the entire four-hour drive there, and again for the return drive.
As we did so, I thought: This is incredible. This is a great example of the benefits of connecting everything.
I was wrong in both cases.
This morning, I stood in a hotel room in Chiba, Japan and saw my wife and daughter on the television. Back home in Cleveland, they saw me on a computer monitor. We talked to each other, waved hello, got caught up on recent events. I watched as Carolyn ran around my office, heard her say “mama”, and agreed with her when she signed “telephone” while she watched my image. I stuck my tongue out to make a silly face, and six thousand miles away, my daughter laughed with delight at my antics.
A few minutes after we’d finished the chat, with the glow of home and family still warm upon me, I thought: This is why we connected everything in the first place.
Just as I prepare to leave for WWW2005 in Japan, John Allsopp has announced the details for Web Essentials05 in Sydney this September. Everyone’s fave Molly kicks things off with a keynote, and there will be some great speakers: Tantek Çelik, Jeff Veen, Kelly Goto, Derek Featherstone, Douglas Bowman, Russ Weakley, Cameron Adams, John Allsopp himself, and more.
Oh, and me. I’ll be there, too. You can get all the details at the WE05 web site. I heard great things about WE04, so I’m really looking forward to WE05. Hopefully I’ll see you there! It’ll be a fair dinkum, and very likely truly bonzer, no worries.
Did I use any of those colloquialisms correctly?
I just talked with Ryan, organizer of the XHTML and CSS Workshop happening in London on Saturday, 4 June 2005, and he says there are only a few seats left—there were but seven when he contacted me on Friday, but for all I know it’s fewer now (and no doubt it is if you’re reading this post in the archives, instead of when it was first published).
Thanks to the very strong registration numbers, Ryan is seriously considering adding another day. If that happens, it will mean the Saturday session is all sold out, so if you want to attend that day, you’d better get your reservation in quickly. We’ll spend the day learning about the ins and outs of standards-based design, as well as chewing over attendee questions and generally having fun while we learn a ton. And don’t forget about the exclusive Survival Kit CD-ROM that all attendees will receive.
All in all, a good time is in the offing, and it’s yours… but only if you grab a seat.
Update | 22 Apr 05: the Saturday session has sold out, and the Friday session has been scheduled. Registration is open!