Posts in the Personal Category

Note: e-mail delivery has resumed. Yay!  Now I can go back to deleting mountains of spam.  If you were holding off sending me mail, there’s no reason to wait any longer.

Kat and I were driving to the other side of town today when we passed a car with the license plate “IB COOL.”  My immediate reaction was: “If you have a vanity plate stating ‘IB COOL,’ I can just about guarantee that you aren’t.  At all.”  Then we noticed this plate was affixed to a Buick Reatta.  I smugly rested my case.

The whole thing put me in mind of another recent license-plate incident.  A few days ago, I spotted a car with the plate “ZARGON.”  The plate bracket stated “Lord Zargon” across the top, and “Terror is my business” across the bottom.  I thought to myself, That takes some guts.

I don’t know what it is with me and license plates.  Sometimes they even make me see colors.  You’d think I’d have more important things to do on the road than look at license plates, like maybe watch out for other cars or traffic signals.  It seems almost like I’m stalking through traffic on a hunt for a license plate unlike any I’ve ever seen, something new and fascinating and life-altering.  I don’t know what that looks like, I can’t know until I see it, and then I’ll know.  It’s like license-plate hunting is in my blood, where I can’t get it out and I can’t resist the call.

In case you’re wondering, no, I don’t own a magnetic harpoon system.  Yet.

• Platelets was published on Sunday, August 3rd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Note: I’m having e-mail troubles.  I can currently send mail, but I can’t receive it.  I don’t know if the mail server is accepting messages or not, but if you get a bounce, please wait a day or two before sending again.  If you don’t get a bounce, assume the message will eventually reach me, and that I’ll respond as soon as I can.  The hope, of course, is that this will only be a temporary glitch.

Two days after announcing I’m available for hire, too.  Hey, timing is everything!

Jesse Ruderman has created a nifty little game using JavaScript.  What’s particularly clever about it is that he’s only using a single image, and (with CSS) is shifting that image in the background of each tile to show the appropriate section.

Thanks to Modulo 26, I now have a whole bunch of kanji representations of my name.  I kind of like them.  How does your name look?

• Out On The Tiles was published on Saturday, August 2nd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.

Yesterday’s announcement has generated a fair bit of attention, which is certainly a good thing for a new startup.  My deepest thanks to everyone who wrote words of support and congratulations, through all the e-mail and many a weblog.  Your collective enthusiasm has definitely made today one of the best in months, and eased my mind quite a bit about the step I’ve taken.  And those of you who got in touch regarding contracting my services get extra-special thanks!  (What are the rest of you waiting for?)

I mentioned that one of my clients is “a major and highly respected name in the industry,” and I’m proud to say that client is Macromedia.  My work is actually in two different areas, both of which relate to CSS, and I’m looking forward to talking about the projects in more detail once they’ve been completed.  For now, let me just say that Macromedia is serious about using CSS well, and in doing the right thing.

I’m hoping that this weekend I’ll get the consulting site material together and ready for launch—I don’t even have a design yet.  What I may do is use a variant of a meyerweb theme as a first look and then, like Zeldman did earlier this year, redesign in public, commenting on my choices and techniques as I go.  I don’t know if a business site has ever done exactly that kind of a redesign before, and it seems like it would be an interesting experiment.  To be honest, I may chicken out and just jump from one design to another instead of evolving it over time, rather than experiment with a business site.  We’ll see what kind of feedback I get on the idea.

Speaking of feedback, I need to pass along some tidbits readers sent in response to my discussion of governments and open standards:

• Bob Sawyer wrote to say he’s created a discussion forums for Webmasters at the fledgling Built For The Future, which looks like it could be just the kind of resource people need.
• Felix Ingram sent in a link to a fascinating Wired article on standardization and its distinctly political nature.
• Rob Lifford pointed out the Texas Governors’ site is accessible, and even has a dedicated statement about the use of W3C standards.  That jostled my memory and I remembered that the City and Borough of Juneau, Alaska‘s site did something similar a while back.
• Paul Martin speculated that, until recently, standards use and accessibility have been almost entirely the concern of hand-coders, the people who know the nuts and bolts that make a page work.  If that’s so, then the WaSP was absolutely right to concentrate on getting tool vendors to clean up the markup they generate.

I’m going to take the weekend to concentrate on responding to e-mail, doing some writing, and fleshing out the new site, and should be back bright and early Monday morning to regale you with more random stuff.  Enjoy your weekend!

• Feedback was published on Friday, August 1st, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Consulting, CSS, and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

Today is my last day at AOL Time Warner.  In the end, my interests weren’t compatible with the positions available in the post-Netscape environment, so I decided to leave.  I won’t have any free time, though:  I’m proud to announce that I’m firing up my own consulting business!  I’ll be concentrating on the following:

• Advising clients on best practices in standards-oriented design
• Guidance through standards conversion projects
• CSS and HTML optimization for improved site performance
• Hands-on training in CSS and design techniques for groups of any size
• Help resolving design compatibility problems

As you can probably tell from the above points, I’ll be taking my passion for intelligently using Web standards and applying that passion to my work with clients.  More detailed information should be on the way soon, but the work I’m already doing has me too busy to set up the consulting site.  Here’s a sample of what’s on my plate:

• I’m working with a major and highly respected name in the industry on optimizing their site’s CSS and providing guidance for their future plans.
• I’ll be doing three days of CSS training at a major research facility in early September.
• Also in September, I’ll be chairing a conference track at Seybold San Francisco, one of the largest and oldest technical conferences in the United States.  In addition to the chair duties, I’ll also be delivering two presentations and sitting on two panels.
• This November, I’ll be in Las Vegas co-presenting a developer-centric CSS class at COMDEX.  The other presenter for this session will be Molly Holzschlag.

I have some other projects simmering as well, but that will do for a quick glimpse into this new venture.  Hopefully I’ll find some time in the next week to get the consulting site up and running.  In the meantime, if you’re interested in my services, please feel free to get in touch with me via my meyerweb e-mail address.  (And please, make the subject line really painfully obvious so I don’t accidentally throw your message away with all the spam I get!)

I may not be working for Netscape any more, but I’m still incredibly proud of the work done in my two-plus years there.  It was an honor and a joy to be a part of our team.  I wish the people still at AOLTW continued success in their fight to promote standards both inside and outside the company, and I truly hope we’ll have a chance to work together again in the future.

• Close One Door, Open Another was published on Thursday, July 31st, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Consulting, Personal, and Speaking categories.
• There have been no replies.

I wish I were in Seattle right now, hanging out with all the cool folks speaking at Web Design World.  Oh well, I guess one can’t be at every conference.  I also wish the WDW site didn’t use points to size their fonts, since that makes the text painfully tiny in some browsers, including one I use fairly often.  Oh well, I guess you can’t expect good Web design from every Web design conference’s Web site.

Hey, wait a minute.

Although I may not be in Seattle this year, I will be in Cambridge, MA this October for User Interface 8, and have added a note to that effect to my Speaking page.  On the latter page, you’ll find a registration code you can use to get a nice discount at UI8, and incidentally add a small bonus to my bank account.  We both come out ahead—what’s not to like?

I’ll also be at Seybold in early September, but I don’t have the details ready just yet.  Check back in a few days if you’re interested.

• Distant Speeches was published on Monday, July 28th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been no replies.

I’ve made the big time: Internet gossip columns!  Okay, not really, but Opera Journal has just run a short piece about my ruminations over possibly moving to another country.  On the theme of moving elsewhere, CNN recently ran an article about Americans who are heading for Canada.  I do hope these folks do a little more research before making the move; nowhere is as perfect as it first seems—no, not even Canada.  Anyway, having that article come so closely on the heels of my recent posts makes for a weird feeling, like the universe somehow centers on me.  Which I’m pretty darned sure it doesn’t.  Personally, I wouldn’t want it to; as someone I know used to say, “The problem with solipsism is that it makes me responsible for all the idiocy in the world.”

[Aside: I’d just like to point out that the markup for the word “me” in the previous sentence is <em>me</em>.  Maybe MC Frontalot could use that as a (much) nerdier version of Eminem’s name, as a parody or something.]

To come back to something vaguely related to having my potential moves discussed in public, I had a very interesting conversation with my father Sunday at the anniversary porch party Kat and I threw.  Among discussions of my job situation and the prospect of striking out on my own, and how that might work in a fiscal sense, he said to me, “Back when you were in high school, you told your mother and me that you wanted to be a recognized name one day.  I don’t remember if you had a specific plan in mind, but it’s something your mother and I talked about a couple of times in recent years, how you’d worked toward that goal and achieved it.”

This took me completely by surprise; I don’t remember ever having said that, nor that it had been a goal of mine.  I always felt like I’d lucked into whatever fame I have.  Granted, I worked hard to reach my current position, but I was lucky to be in the right places at the right times, and to have opportunities that could be developed into advancement.  But now I wonder if the idea of being a “known name” lurked in the back of my head for years, and subconsciously guided me toward the place I now find myself.  I also wonder if, at any time before a couple of years ago, I knew why it was important to me.

• Being Noticed was published on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Five years ago today, standing under a tree before a small gathering of family and friends in her parent’s front yard, Kat and I vowed to make each other laugh at least once a day.  On that sunny Long Island morning, we promised to listen to each other, to hold each other, and to support each other through everything that life would bring our way.

Mom once told me that she’d never seen me as happy as I was that day.

• Silver and Wood was published on Saturday, July 19th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Apparently I’m a desirable emigrant.  In response to yesterday’s comment-in-passing that Kat and I had been kicking around the idea of moving to another country, I’ve had three people write encouraging me to emigrate to Canada, and one other person recommend the United Kingdom.  The Canada people actually make a pretty good case, since apparently there’s a plan afoot for Canada to make the Turks and Caicos Islands their eleventh province.  That sounds pretty sweet, even if I would have to spend the whole year encased in zinc oxide.

Personally, I’ve always liked Toronto as a city.  Their weather isn’t significantly different than what we experience here in Cleveland, plus I know a number of very cool folks who already live there.  I can’t comment on places in the UK, since I’ve never actually been there (although I hope to fix that within the next year or so).  For the record, the country we had in mind was Norway.  I also gave some thought to the Bahamas, but then we’re back to the prospect of me resembling a lobster on a semi-continual basis.

There’ve been a whole lot of XHTML-and-CSS redesigns announced in the past ten days, and I’ve been remiss in pointing them out.  Here’s a list of the ones I noticed: The Open Championship, Quark, Message Digital Design Ltd., Phish.com, Lawrence, Kansas Weather, Adaptive Path, and Inc.com.  There were some others, I think, but the URLs seem to have escaped me.

On that last one, Dan talks a bit about the particulars of the Inc. redesign, and Doug points out that the markup size reduction for Inc.com’s redesign was just about the same as that for the redesigns of Adaptive Path and Wired News.  I’ll add that it’s very close to the markup size reduction seen when ESPN.com redesigned.  So yes, Doug’s absolutely right: there’s a trend here.  Old-school table-and-spacer designs can be visually recreated using lean, structural markup and CSS, and the process cuts page size by about half.  Some sites will see less savings, but some will see more.  As an example, my off-the-cuff guess (having peeked at the source of a typical page) is that eBay could drop its page weight by 66% or so.  They could probably reduce their annual outgoing bandwidth by several petabytes.  Tell you what, eBay: I’ll show you how to do it and do it right, and you can pay me five percent of your savings over the next five years.  Deal?

• Moving and Shaping was published on Friday, July 18th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.