Posts in the Personal Category

Yesterday morning I got a completely unexpected, and not at all pleasant, telephone call informing me that someone I knew back when I worked for CWRU had quite unexpectedly died a few days ago.  I also became responsible for passing word on to some people I know who also knew the deceased, including Kat’s brother Neil (who’d already heard).  In Neil’s case, he’d really lost a friend.  For me, a former co-worker with whom I’d been friendly had died.  It isn’t nearly the same thing.

So Jim Nauer, who’d also known the deceased, and I went to the calling hours last night.  I went for a number of reasons: I’d known him, I’d known several of his friends, and I had Neil’s condolences to pass on to those who were left behind.  I also went with a tinge of fear, because it would be the first memorial service I’d attended since Mom died in April, and I wasn’t sure how I might react.

As it turns out, I focused on the people who were grieving more deeply, who really needed the support, and did my best to express my sympathies without dwelling overmuch on the situation.  Because, as I’ve discovered in the past six months, in the face of a loss so great, all you can really say is, “I’m sorry.”  And the only real response is, “Thank you.”  Anything else said beyond those two things is an awkward attempt to better express everything we’re feeling at those moments—but in the end, it comes down to expression of sorrow, and acknowledgment of that expression.

I found myself thinking that I would never be able to talk with this person again, never hear them laugh, and I remembered that the same thoughts came to me at Mom’s memorial service.  The feeling of a vast gulf suddenly discovered was hard to shake.  My mind kept trying to reject the situation, to decide that nobody had died—they’d just stepped out for a little while, and would one day be back.  I wanted to deny the finality of what had happened, and kept having to force myself to face it.

In a way, it’s almost impossible to reconcile the person who was with the absence that is.  We keep trying to escape into delusions of temporary separation.  But that way lies anger toward the absent party, since if they could come back, then their continued absence must mean that they don’t want to come back.  It also becomes impossible to move on, because you keep waiting for them to end their own exile.

I’ve had occasion to wonder if perhaps one of the great comforts of religion is that it gives you someone to blame, and then someone to forgive, for the death of a loved one.

• Parting Thoughts was published on Tuesday, November 11th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

I’ll return to the Longhorn/XAML thing when we know more, hopefully tomorrow, from Microsoft itself.  In the meantime, I have two more license plate sightings to share, because that’s the kind of thing I do.  The first was another shade of purple: AA65EA.  I realize all the standard Ohio plates that correspond to hex colors will be varying shades of purple.  They’re still rare enough to merit my attention.  I keep hoping I’ll see a web-safe license plate, but that’s a fairly long shot.

As for the second plate, it was J CHRIST.  Turns out the Big J drives a black Pontiac Grand Am GT.  Who knew?

• Licensious was published on Sunday, October 26th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Off the road again: I’m back from User Interface 8, where a good time was (once more) had by all.  Especially me.  I don’t know exactly how I ended up with good-looking women in my lap so often, but I don’t think I’ll complain about it too much.  I have a huge collection of pictures that cry out to be shared, and a huge lack of time to assemble a gallery.  I could use iPhoto’s export-to-Web function, except I hate it.  I’ll have to dig up one of those cleaner plug-ins I’ve been hearing about and give it a whirl.

To catch up things that happened while I was away:

• A List Apart is back.  That in itself is cause for celebration, even if my article “Going To Print” no longer makes sense in the new template.  However, the real news from where I sit is the publication of “Sliding Doors of CSS” by the always brilliant and readable Douglas Bowman.  Check out the presentation, HTML source, and text-zooming robustness of this demonstration page from the article, and then read the article if you’re impressed—as I suspect you will be.  I’m seriously thinking about publishing a followup article to “Rounding Tab Corners” using Doug’s Sliding Doors technique, and comparing it to the techniques presented in the the original article.  Some have said that Doug built on my article, but that’s not true.  He came up with his approach independently, and if anything I’ll be building on his ideas, not the other way around.
• Russ Weakley published the Floatutorial, which “takes you through the basics of floating elements such as images, drop caps, next and back buttons, image galleries, inline lists and multi-column layouts.”  It does this with a simple yet powerful step-by-step approach that reminds me a bit of Eric Meyer on CSS, except it’s much more concise.  The Floatutorial joins the Listutorial in Russ’ oeuvre.
• The House of CSS (not to be confused with the House of Style) opened its doors, and the crowd went wild.  I like it.  Sure, it’s a whole lot of structural hacking to achieve a purely visual effect, but so what?  I didn’t think of it, and neither did you.  Or if you did, you didn’t bother to assemble it.  Chris Hester did, and he deserves recognition for the creativity and skills it took to do so.
• Apparently Microsoft’s recently started admitting that Longhorn will launch in 2006, as I predicted a few weeks ago.  A few people wrote to ask if I’m always so prescient.  The truth is, it didn’t take an oracle, a guru, or a clairvoyant to figure out that Longhorn was likely to be delayed by a year or more.  As I’ve been known to say every so often, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.
• In a possibly related move, Microsoft has apparently decided to save time by releasing their critical-flaw fixes in groups, or what I’m going to start calling “patch batches.”  You know what to do, right?

For no apparent reason, I’ve had the song “Rhinestone Cowboy” stuck in my head all day.  Even a potent cocktail dosage of Ministry, Joe Boyd Vigil, Crystal Method, The Prodigy, and DJ Z-Trip has failed to dislodge it.  I’m starting to think that a power drill is my only hope.

• Roundup was published on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Speaking, and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

I often wonder how much effort goes into picking the music played in public spaces.  Do the people who assemble these societal soundtracks just pick their favorites, or a random assortment of whatever they can find, or is there an enormous amount of thought and effort and psychological analysis put into the selection?

And if there is, in fact, a lot of thought put into the process, then who in the name of Bob thought it was a good idea to have the song “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” played through the speakers at the Cleveland airport?  And then, half an hour later, “Sunday Bloody Sunday”—on a Sunday?

I thought it was hilarious, but there are those who are already so stressed about flying that they’d probably verge on having a coronary.

• Musical Merriment was published on Monday, October 13th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Today I received my first Complex Spiral paycheck.  Yay!  I’ve done several paying jobs by now, and more are underway, but this is the first check to actually show up for deposit.  Let that be a lesson to those of you who might be thinking about striking out on your own: if you can’t cover all of the expenses you’ll incur between leaving your old job and the point two months after you finish your first project at the new job, you can’t afford it.

Yesterday, the mail brought to me a package from New Zealand.  It contained a copy of the Digital Life episode on Web standards.  That was especially fascinating since this morning an article on standards support (and the limits thereof in Internet Exporer) was published on c|net quoting me, Zeldman, and others.  With Explorer’s development at an apparent end, it’s becoming a heavier and heavier millstone around the necks of designers.  Let’s assume that there are no advances in Microsoft’s Web standards support between now and Longhorn.  That’s close to three more years of the millstone getting heavier.  By then, we’ll all have serious back problems.

(Yes, I can count: Microsoft’s Longhorn launch date of 2005 says to me it’ll actually launch in 2006.  I’m just drawing a historical inference here.)

Of course, the whole Eolas situation probably doesn’t have the Microsoft folks in a benevolent frame of mind regarding standards.  If they just abandoned the public Web and moved everything into a closed, proprietary sandbox of some kind, they might be able to avoid these sorts of problems altogether.  That’s exactly what I expect them to do in Longhorn, and the expectation worries me.  If the whole world moves into the sandbox—and let’s face it, in an e-commerce sense, IE/Win is the whole world—what reason would there be to pay any more attention to the Web?

We might say hey, fine, let’s get Microsoft and its partners the hell off the Web so we can go back to developing it the right way; let’s take back the neighborhood.  That would make about as much sense as rooting for Flash to be the technology used on every Web site in existence.  When one company owns the medium, everyone else loses.  Thus far, the Web has been a community asset, with no one company calling the shots.  How can we make sure that situation continues past the next few years?

• Checks and Balances was published on Thursday, October 9th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Consulting and CSS categories.
• There have been no replies.

So it turns out OCLC might not be acting quite as poorly as first appeared, but instead acting in a ‘rational’ way given the parameters of an irrational system.  In their press release (currently available only on their News and Events page, so no permanent URL here) on the subject of suing the Library Hotel, they state:

…trademark law imposes affirmative obligations on trademark owners to protect their trademarks, or risk losing all rights in those marks through legal abandonment. We felt that abandoning our rights in the Dewey trademarks was an unacceptable result for the OCLC membership. OCLC attempted to avoid litigation by repeatedly requesting attribution of our ownership of the Dewey marks from The Library Hotel. They have refused to do so. Unfortunately, that refusal left us with no other recourse than to file a legal complaint.

It is true that trademark law imposes such obligations.  It’s long been the case that failure to defend a trademark is taken to mean relinquishment of any rights to preserve said trademark.  That’s the irrational part, in my opinion, but I suppose if we somehow fixed that then a lot of copyright lawyers would be out of work, and we can’t have that, now can we?

It may also be the case that a commonly used term can retain legal protection without having to sue everyone just to defend it.  If I’m remembering correctly, LucasFilm helped establish that precedent at some point, when a judge ruled that a protected entity that had sufficiently permeated the mainstream (read: every major Star Wars character) didn’t have to be continually defended in order to preserve its protected status.  Or something along those lines.  I don’t know if the Dewey Decimal system qualifies as having permeated the mainstream, but it probably should.  Then again, I occupied offices in university libraries for most of a decade, so my view might be skewed.

Of course, we don’t know what kind of attribution OCLC requested, and how the Library Hotel refused OCLC’s requests; either one or both of them could have been wholly unreasonable in their communications.  Regardless, it makes no sense to me that OCLC should be compelled (in a legal sense) to file a lawsuit for an enormous amount of money in this situation.  Does the Creative Commons offer a way out of this kind of situation?  Could it, with some enhancements?  It might be worth investigating.

It was also brought to my attention that the phrase “poisoning the community well” may have connotations of which I was previously unaware.  According to Informal Logical Fallacies, I was very close to using the term for a type of logically fallacious argument that is “an attempt to preclude discussion by attacking the credibility of an opponent.”  I merely meant “acting in a way contrary to the community interest.”  No attacks on anyone’s credibility were intended.  I just hope the term isn’t trademarked, because I’d really hate to end up in court over it.

• The Well Defended was published on Sunday, September 28th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
• There have been no replies.

An interesting idea: Pixy’s fast no-preload rollovers, which I first heard about in a presentation at Seybold.  It seems to me there’s one potential drawback in this method, which is that it requires that your links be an exact size, or at least never be taller than a certain size.  Since I spend a lot of time thinking about techniques that will work well even if the text is scaled up 300% or more, this “drawback” is probably more of a concern to me than to the rest of you.  I don’t mean to denigrate what Petr has done—it’s a clever technique, and has a great deal to commend it, including reduced server load.

So, Eolas.  Their claims of inventing plug-ins or applets or whatever put me in mind of a similar yet much dorkier situation surrounding the new movie Underworld, summarized rather well by the guys at Penny Arcade, as usual.  Of course, Microsoft itself patented style sheets back in the late Nineties, so it’s not like they’ve never been down that road themselves.  I’ll freely admit that Microsoft never did anything with said patent, and that puts them a step above Eolas in the trudge toward something resembling the faintest shadow of a moral high ground.

One of the reasons I’ve not gotten too worked up about all this is I still have this idiotic faith that reason will, eventually, prevail.  The British Telecom “patent” on hyperlinks came to nothing, so far as I can tell.  Whether this was due to a court throwing out the claim, or the collective will of the Web ignoring it outright, I’m not sure, but that’s sort of the point: it was never a big deal.  I keep thinking whatever process got us there will similarly operate in the Eolas case.  I can’t do much about it either way.  Hey, maybe Eolas did patent the process of whatever it is they claim to have invented years after other people had already done it.  Great.  As soon as I secure a patent for my novel method of representing complex information using only the integers one and zero, I am so going to clean up in the courts.  (Hat tip: Chris Lilley, ca. 1999.)

Of course, we also have ISO and OCLC poisoning the community well in different but still deeply distasteful ways, so maybe I should reconsider my faith in reason winning the day.  Is it time to pull out the term “morons” yet?  How about “scummy bastards?”  Somebody let me know.  Meanwhile, I generally find relief from goofy humor and mind games (of the good sort), so let’s try some of that on for size, shall we?

Davezilla shares a semi-coherent translation on a snack-food packet (for more such goodness, please to enjoy the site of Engrish).  I’m reminded of one of my favorite business cards of all time; it came from a fortune cookie factory in San Francisco’s Chinatown.  This card stated, in bold red capital letters near to bursting with pride, “WE SPECIALIZE TO MAKE ALL OCCASIONAL COOKIES.”  Sadly, this glorious bit of prose no longer graces the new cards they now hand out, which instead inform us that they are happy to offer novelty adult cookies.  I sometimes wonder if that simply means that the fortunes come with the words “in bed” already printed at the end of the phrase.

The page I’m about to point to is best viewed with a fairly wide browser window, because it’s peppered with some very wide images, but “The latest works” is very much worth visiting if you’re fascinated by optical illusions.  I’m always intrigued by examples of the brain percieving motion where there is none, and sometimes wonder if this capacity is in some weird way the neurological basis for conspiracism.  Note that not all the examples may work for you; only about half to two-thirds did for me.  But the ones that did… wow.  I expect it’s the closest I’ll ever come to being a synaesthetic.

• Dynamic Mental Static was published on Friday, September 26th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Humor, and Politics categories.
• There have been no replies.

The second Complex Spiral article is now on-line: “Rounding Tab Corners.”  The scheduling of this article was dictated by a promise I made at Seybold last week during the “CSS For Navigation” talk.  I’d been planning to write it later on, but due to interest in the audience I decided to move up publication.

A few days back I badgered you, as you may recall; now, thanks to Jeffrey, I am here to bring you the joys of Histology-World and its Relentless Flash Splash Screen, which is the whole point of linking to it.  By the end of the intro, as you’re redirected to the site’s home page, you may well ask yourself, as I did: “What the hell is histology?”  The site is fairly adamant about not admitting to anything, so I looked it up.  I think I can say with absolute confidence that if there’s one subject that really cries out for a lengthy, overblown Flash intro, histology most definitely isn’t it.

• Round and Round was published on Wednesday, September 17th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.