Posts in the Personal Category

You’ve probably already seen the Gurus vs. Bloggers matchup over at Design By Fire; I quite enjoyed it, and not just because it’s funny.  I found it to be gratifying because I took a close look at the designs, and I think there’s very little doubt about it.  meyerweb’s design just screams “guru,” don’t you think?  (David Robarts does.)  I’m kind of hoping that I get into a future round of the matchup, so I can by completely demolished by the likes of Dave Shea or Doug Bowman.

Of course, I can always counter with cute pictures of Carolyn. She’s suffering through another cold, but that doesn’t seem to prevent her from being just too adorable for words.  Now, I know it isn’t the right finger, but I still can’t help thinking, “One billion dollars!”

For some reason, Kat and I like the show $40 A Day, where host Rachael Ray visits a different city each week and goes through a full day without spending more than $40 on all her meals.  One of this past weekend’s episodes had her visiting Cleveland, calling it “one of the most underrated cities in America.”  Kat and I found it fascinating to watch, getting an outsider’s perspective on the city.  We don’t have the time or space for me to enumerate everything great about this city.  Nonetheless, it was still interesting to hear words of praise from a visitor, even one hosting a show that does what are basically puff pieces about the visited cities.

It didn’t hurt that two of the three restaurants she visited were the always-excellent Tommy’s (where the waiter shown on-camera is one of those guys who’s been there forever) and Trattoria Roman Gardens down in Little Italy, not to mention spent some time at the West Side Market.  I thought the show could have done with a few less “___ ROCKS!” jokes—okay, we get it, the only song the rest of the country associates with us is “Cleveland Rocks.”  Thank you.  It’s time to move on.

Of course, I suppose I might be tired of the whole “rocks” thing because it’s a lot like having people always tell you the sky is blue.  After a while, it gets to be a little bit wearying to keep being repetitively told something you already know.

• Guru By Design? was published on Sunday, April 11th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Carolyn, Cleveland, and CSS categories.
• There have been no replies.

I got word yesterday that More Eric Meyer on CSS has already come back from the printers, so it ought to be available within a week or so.  Woo hoo!  I’ve put up a companion site with the table of contents; the project files will be online soon.  And yes—that really is the cover.

Speaking of books, the second edition of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide is now available pretty much everywhere.  Over at Amazon, its sales rank has been hovering around 200 for a couple of weeks now, so that’s pretty cool.  I’ve heard from a few readers who already have their copies, and some errata reports have started to come in.  Joy!  It’s always frustrating to finish a book, because I know that the errors that got missed will immediately be spotted by all the readers.  No matter how hard we tried, some errors are going to slip through.  The perfectionist in me quails at that knowledge.

But then, releasing a new book does afford me the chance to be amused by reader reviews.  Here’s one that had me chuckling:

i understand the basics of css already, i just needed something to outline the syntax and concepts in css2 and then just function as a reference. this book did neither, and i’ve found it to be a complete waste.

Yeah, I guess you probably would.  Say it with me, sparky: “Definitive Guide.”  Not “Reference.”  It’s not an outline, and wasn’t when the first edition came out.  If you need a reference with a quick outline, you could always try the CSS2.0 Programmer’s Reference, which has, of all things, an outline of the syntax and concepts of CSS2 and provides a full property reference.  Amazing.

I know you aren’t supposed to judge a book by its cover, but sometimes you can get a little guidance from its title.

Anyone who reads Italian might be interested in an interview with me conducted by Marco Trevisan.  For those who don’t do as the Romans do, the English version should be available in the near future.

Update: Gini‘s sister is doing better, although she was evicted from the hospital even though still suffering a lot of pain.  Ferrett tells me that it looks like some of meyerweb’s readers did contribute to the support fund, and again, Kat and I both thank you for reaching out.

• It’s On Every Channel! was published on Friday, April 9th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, Interviews, Personal, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

Two of our greatest friends in the Cleveland area (and in our lives in general) are the oddly-named Gini and Ferrett.  They’ve been with us through every triumph and tragedy of the last year; they made the trip to Mansfield for Mom’s memorial service, and also happened to be the first to lay eyes on Carolyn the night she came home.  We’ve come to know that they’ll be there for us when we need them, and have tried to be the same for them.

Gini’s little sister could use a big heap of help.  She’s in danger of dying from unknown causes, and her family is in danger of losing their home while the insurance company plays dice with her life.  Even if you aren’t able or inclined to donate money to help somebody you’ve never met, your thoughts and prayers will be very much appreciated.

I would say that I can’t imagine what Gini is going through right now, except that’s not really true.  I know what it’s like to have a younger sibling who is in danger of dying from a disease that nobody is sure can be cured, to have a family member lying in the hospital while phone calls are made, while worried voices say things like “we don’t know if she’ll make it” and “the next few days will tell the tale.”  I know what it’s like to get a phone call that’s traveled half the continent, distant and blurred, to tell me that someone I love is terribly ill.  It’s a horrible, desolate feeling.

If you can help, please do.  Kat and I both thank you.

• A Charitable Request was published on Saturday, April 3rd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

April Fools Day has rolled ’round again, and already the confusion is thick in the air.  Doug and Dave have swapped faces for a day (or perhaps longer), much as newspaper comic artists often do.  The WaSP reports that the use of standards has hitherto unsuspected benefits, and Nature is reporting that stronger trade winds have changed the planet’s rotation enough that today should be 2 April, not 1 April.  Global warming is blamed.

Then there are the edge cases.  Google’s announcement of Gmail has now been reported by CNN, The New York Times, c|net, Wired, and more.  It sure seems like an April Fools Day joke on Google’s part, just like Pigeonrank, but heck, it could be real.  Here’s the thing: just because it got reported by major media outlets doesn’t make it true.

I found this out back at the very beginning of 2000.  You all probably remember the Y2K noise leading up to that point; there were reports that vendors had to certify pencils as Y2K compliant in order to sell them.  It got pretty silly.  In the middle of it all, as we went through month after month of analysis and certification of the systems at CWRU, one of the DMS gang said something like, “Are we sure that Aurora [the CWRU Web server] won’t suddenly think it’s January 1900?”  The response was, “I sure hope not, because then it would insist on using a telegraph to connect to the Internet.”  We started riffing on that idea, kicking around what the page design would look like, what kind of news would be there, turn-of-the-century pictures that should show up, and so on.

So we did it.  My co-worker Pam and I went down to the University Archives and found a number of photos that were of the right era and that were clearly allowed to be used (many of them had no known author and so would not pass into the public domain until 2020), and scanned them in.  I created a wood-grain design for the home page, including a modified badge that proclaimed us the “Yahoo! Most Wired College 1899” site.  We had two places  on the page where the year was listed, and I had to deliberately introduce Y2K bugs in order to make them say “January 1, 1900” on that day.  We set up a cron job to roll the old-timey graphics into place at the stroke of midnight on 1 January 2000, and went off to party.

By eight o’clock on the morning of the first, we had several dozen e-mails in the server contact inbox.  They were about evenly divided into people congratulating us on having a sense of humor, and people insulting us for being so stupid as to have suffered a visible Y2K bug on our public Web server.  (I’d like to think that at least some of those were tongue-in-cheek.)  By the end of the day, Wired had reported it as a real Y2K bug, even quoting our message apologizing that the server “believes that it is January of 1900,” and the next day the story was printed more or less verbatim in The Washington Post.  We ended up issuing a press release about it, and the joke design, which was intended to stay in place for a couple of weeks, lasted 33 hours before the administration said, “Yeah, uh-huh, very funny.  Get rid of it.”

As I write this entry, I have no idea if Gmail is an April Fools joke or not.  (Okay, that’s not true.  I have some idea that it’s a joke, but I’m not certain.)  In a way, it’s kind of irrelevant.  The whole situation has simply reminded me that those in the news media can be as easily duped as the rest of us, and that’s something worth remembering in the current political climate.

• F-F-F-F-Foolin’ was published on Thursday, April 1st, 2004.
• It was assigned to the History and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.

As I write this entry, Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition is #3 on Amazon’s Computers & Internet Bestsellers list, and the book itself has a sales rank of 144.  Sweeeet.

• Leaping Fish was published on Monday, March 29th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

It’s been quite a weekend, and the fun started on Friday.  That morning, we drove down to Mansfield to have lunch with my father, sister, and an aunt and uncle who were up from Cincinnati to visit.  The afternoon was spent with our tax guy, so Carolyn is now known as “Daddy’s Little Deduction.”  For dinner, exhausted by the travel and looking to celebrate both getting our taxes out of the way and the arrival of my author’s copies of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition (which means y’all should be getting your copies any day now!), we decided to head over to Matsu and have some sushi. Carolyn sat with each of us in turn, and I’m not sure but I think she was eyeing my escolar nigiri with some interest.  She had fun fiddling with chopsticks, anyway.

Saturday morning, we attended a memorial service for the father (and grandfather) of a family we’ve become close to over the last few years.  They helped us plant fifty daffodils in our front-yard flower beds last fall in honor of Mom—they’re sprouting, and I hope to get some pictures soon—and their pre-teen daughter has already been a babysitter for Carolyn.  Since we had a baby on our hands, we sat in the far back pew and listened to the music and testimonials.  The sanctuary of the Baptist church is beautiful, with sweeping stone arches and wonderful stained glass windows, just like you remember from medieval-romance movies.  It was hard to keep from reflecting on death, as opposed to life, especially since we’d never really known the deceased; he’d had Alzheimer’s ever since we met them.

When his teenaged grandson delivered a eulogy, I looked down at Carolyn and couldn’t help whispering an apology for the day that I leave her forever.  I hope that day doesn’t come for a long, long time, but it won’t be put off forever.  I hope that when that day does come, she’ll be able to smile through the tears, warmed by memories of love and laughter.

As I looked back up, I recalled the recent Papal statement that it’s immoral to let die a person who’s in a vegetative state.  We already know he opposes voluntary euthanasia, along with capital punishment and of course abortion.  Basically, the Pope opposes any premature exit of this life, no matter if it’s an imposed exit or not.  Which forces me to wonder: what does he know about death that the rest of us don’t?  And why is he working so hard to make sure that people avoid it for as long as possible, even when they’ve become mental vegetables?

That same evening, my college friends Bruce and Laura, visiting from out of town, dropped by to see Carolyn and introduce us to their son Dennis, who was born just three days before Carolyn.  They’re currently located in Boise, Idaho, which they find to be interesting despite the political climate.  They were telling us about the “clean movie” video stores that are fairly popular in their area.  These are places that take movies and edit out the “naughty bits” so you can watch a movie without having to see or hear anything that might offend you.  (Unless of course unauthorized alterations of an artistic work offend you, in which case you’re pretty much out of luck.)  We were wondering whether these places would carry The Passion of the Christ at all, and if so, how much of it would be left.  Bruce said he’d guarantee that they’d carry it intact.  While I was over at the Catholic World News site, I saw a banner ad for CleanFilms, and as it happens they list The Passion… as an upcoming movie.  I’m almost tempted to sign up for the free trial service just to get their copy of the movie and see how long it ends up being.

• Run Time Errors was published on Sunday, March 28th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Carolyn, Culture, and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.

My original plan for today was to talk about weblogs and how they (don’t) work, but I’m having trouble forming coherent thoughts, so I’m going to put that off for a couple of days.  Besides, when I saw this picture of Simon Willison‘s desktop, my brain crashed and had to be rebooted—which makes it less stable than OS X, actually.

Instead, I have a personal reaction to a journal entry (spotted via theferrett) that described brightening a waitress’ night.  It takes a small amount of back story, so bear with me just a moment.

In early 2001, my maternal grandfather died of prostate cancer.  His wife had died years earlier, and so the money he had left was passed on to his four children, Mom obviously being one of them.  She had various ideas about what to do with it; her father had recommended that the inherited money be used for philanthropic purposes.  Although this was completely in keeping with what Mom would have done anyway, she was notoriously cautious about spending money—a trait I picked up from her—and so it sat in a bank account while she pondered her options.

Then, at the end of the same year, she was diagnosed with cancer of her own and told she had perhaps eigthteen months to live.  Caution was no longer a viable strategy.

The vast bulk of the money was set aside for donation to a single worthy cause of her choosing, but that’s a story for another time.  What she did with the rest was spread around “random acts of kindness.”  It so happened that she’d always had a dream, of sorts, that one day she’d have enough money to become a big tipper.  We never did talk about why, and maybe she wouldn’t have known, but I’ve always thought it was an effect of growing up poor in what was effectively a Depression-era family in the late 1940’s.  Whatever the reason, she’d always wanted to be flush enough to leave large tips when she dined.

Now she had some money and not much time to spend it, so she lived her dream.  When she went out for dinner, she’d give the server the usual 15% to 20%, and then add a twenty dollar bill on top of that.  If the check was for a small amount, as when she went out for coffee and the server brought a check for $4.95, she’d just put down a twenty and leave.  She usually didn’t say anything about it, she just did it, feeling good to have done it and feeling good to have made someone else’s day a little better.  And the service had to be really, really bad for her to forego an act of kindness.  This continued until the week before her death; the last place I know of her doing it was the late, lamented Dottie’s Diner, where we all went for lunch after the doctor told her that her chemotherapy options had run out.

She had some servers run after her, a few coming out to the parking lot, to tell her about her ‘mistake’ and try to give it back.  I think she was secretly pleased to meet someone that honest, even though she was uncomfortable telling them there was no mistake in person and receiving thanks.  Some of them burst into tears, or came close to it, and that made her really uncomfortable.

As I was writing this entry, I told Kat I was having trouble expressing what I wanted to say, and was thinking about deleting it completely.  She listened to what I was writing about and said, “Oh!  I performed a random act today!”  She’d gone out to lunch with a friend.  “The waitress ran after me to tell me I’d made a mistake, and when I told her it was for her, she hugged me.  I could feel your Mom smiling.”

• Tipping Points was published on Wednesday, March 24th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

I can’t, or more likely don’t want to, believe that there are still six and a half months to go before the U.S. presidential election is held.  My usual approach to such election years is to tune out everything until early in the actual year in which the election is held; I steadfastly refuse to pay attention in calendar years before that one (so I wasn’t paying attention to the campaigning that happened in 2003).  I take a surface reading of the situation as the party conventions approach, and between conventions and election, I dig into the positions of the two candidates, tolerating the flying mud in the process.

At least, that’s the usual plan.  This year, though, the race is basically settled and the muck is already thick in the air.  Is Kerry more or less of a flip-flopper than Bush?  Which candidate has the better or worse economic plan?  Who will be a better or worse leader in the “war on terror?”  Who can tell?  If I believed everything each side said about the other, I’d probably conclude that my clear duty as a patriot was to practice my sharpshooting and plan to attend both party conventions.  Or else flee the country.

Not that the latter idea hasn’t already occurred to some who are being made to feel a lot less welcome these days.  (Thanks for the pointer, Phil.)  I wonder: would gays be willing to give up the right to marry if conservatives gave up the right to divorce?  ‘Cause most of those leading the fight for “family values” have had more than one family, and apparently believe so deeply in the “sanctity of marriage” that they’ve gone back for more sanctity, if you catch my drift.  I’ve also sometimes wondered if women would give up the right to abortion if those opposed to abortion would give up the right to reproduce.  It seems like a place to start negotiating, anyway.

The media, as usual, isn’t helping in the slightest.  Know how much Bush’s plan to go to Mars will cost?  No, you don’t.  The trillion-dollar figure we’ve heard so often is about as accurate as Percival Lowell’s maps of Martian canals, and based on math that makes about as much sense as planning to cut deficits by raising spending while reducing revenue.  So while getting to Mars certainly won’t be cheap, we’ve all been handed a thoroughly false picture of just how not-cheap it might be.  What else is getting lost in the shouting?

I do have to wonder how many times we’re going to see former Bush administration officials claim that the priorities there are or were sorely off kilter, and then have those still in the administration dismiss the critics as partisan, wrong, irresponsible, mentally deficient, or (more usually) all of the above.  (See: Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neill, et. al.)  I mean, sure, every boss has former employees that don’t like him, but there does seem to be sort of a trend emerging.  When it’s paired with the recent statements by current and former IAEA officials, the brow does furrow with a bit of concern.  But hey, the IAEA site uses valid XHTML and CSS for layout!  So that’s cool!

Should I be worried that the valid IAEA site seems like cause for celebration?

Probably.

I do feel oddly proud that I suspected it was a validating, tableless site the instant I laid eyes on it, and my diagnosis favelets simply confirmed that impression.  It’s an odd thing to get a feel for the underlying nature of a page just by looking at it.  If only I could translate that skill to evaluating investment opportunities.

• Crosswinds was published on Monday, March 22nd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Culture and Politics categories.
• There have been no replies.