Posts in the Personal Category

There has been more detailed information written about yesterday’s events, so it’s worth reading if you still care.  Personally, I thought Dave Shea’s summary was quite amusing.

I indicated yesterday that DevEdge would likely not be updated.  That’s because the standards evangelism team has been disbanded.  Two team members were among those let go, and the rest of us went to different places within AOL.  I’m really not sure what made the difference between those who were axed and those who were not. 

As much as I’m unhappy that we’ve come to this pass, I don’t regret for one second having taken the position of Standards Evangelist.  While it lasted, Netscape funded close to ten full-time and part-time positions whose job was to promote standards, not proprietary technology, and to spread that message as far and wide as possible.  They may well have been doing it for selfish reasons, but that hardly matters.  We were able to inform, educate, and proactively help a lot of sites get better cross-browser behavior by using standards.  In our own way, we helped make things better, and we made a difference.

So here’s to Bob Clary, Marcio Galli, Katsuhiko Momoi, Chris Nalls, Tristan Nitot, Arun Ranganathan, Doron Rosenberg, and Susie Wyshak.  We fought the good fight and created a lot of great material, including information about the redesign of DevEdge itself.

Moving forward, I have to decide what I will do: accept the position into which I was reassigned, turn down the reassignment and look for another position within AOL, or decide to take the severance package and leave AOL altogether.  This isn’t exactly an easy call, partly due to the economy, but also because the importance of standards to AOL is not, at present, clear to me.  Perhaps the message has sunk in and there will be a place for someone like me, and perhaps not.  I hope to find out which over the next week or so.  No matter what, I face some tough choices, but at least I have choices.  I can’t say the same about 50 former co-workers.

Meanwhile, DMX Zone just this morning (my time) published an interview with me, so those interested in such things can click away.  Love that Dark Jedi groove thang!  [insert lightsaber sound effects here]

• Standing At a Crossroads was published on Wednesday, July 16th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, Interviews, and Work categories.
• There have been no replies.

It’s true: Netscape is no longer a viable entity.  I’ll leave it to others to draw conclusions regarding how this move is related to the agreement AOL and Microsoft reached a while back.  Y’all can probably do a much better job of it anyway.

From what I can discern, there will be no more new versions of Netscape; the browser will go into maintenance mode, whatever that means.  More than half the staff was let go today, and Mozilla has been spun off into an independent, non-profit foundation supported by AOL, IBM, Sun, and others.  I have no idea what will happen with netscape.com itself.  DevEdge will cease producing new content, it would seem, which is a shame.  We produced some really good stuff, and had more in the pipeline.  Hopefully that forthcoming material will find another outlet.

For now, I still have a job, although my team’s been split up and sent to different organizations within AOL.  I don’t know yet how this will turn out for me, but I do know that today I’m saddened by the loss.  Yes, Mozilla will go on, but another pioneering force of the Web has just been painfully dimmed.  It’s worth a moment to reflect on where we’ve been… and where we might be headed.

• Moments of Transition was published on Tuesday, July 15th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Work categories.
• There have been no replies.

I’m having one of those moments where I can’t decide whether to laugh or cry.  I checked CNN this morning and noticed the headline “White House: Iraq uranium claim was wrong.”  I must be reading that wrong, I thought, but it turns out that Ari Fleischer admitted today that the whole “Iraq bought a bunch of uranium in Africa” thing was incorrect.  Whoops.  Anyway, in the article, I found this sentence:

A British parliamentary committee concluded that Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government mishandled intelligence material on Iraqi weapons.

The British government was cited by President Bush as having found out about the uranium sale, so that’s how he ended up making an incorrect claim.  Well, it’s more complicated than that, but the article’s there for you to read, so go ahead.

As I finished the article, a sense of morbid curiosity overcame me; I wondered what the Republican News Channel would have to say about all this.  So I went on over, and found no headline relating to the issue at all, two hours after the CNN story was posted.  In fact, the only thing I could find was a “Video” box sited well below the fold, which contained this text:

The British parliament concludes Tony Blair did not doctor evidence to support the war in Iraq

Okay, here’s your mental exercise for the day: devise a scenario in which both these statements can be true.  I came up with one, although since I refused to set up a Fox News user account—I get enough spam exhorting me to buy Ann Coulter books as it is—I can’t watch the video to see if I was right.

It isn’t that news outlets slant their reporting that bothers me.  I just wish they’d be honest about it, so we could take the slant into account.  In times past, newspapers were very open about their ideological leanings.  Yes, many news outlets have a liberal bias, and others have a conservative bias.  That’s fine.  But don’t try to tell me you’re being fair or balanced when clearly neither is true, because frankly, it’s insulting.

• You Say Po-TAY-to… was published on Tuesday, July 8th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
• There have been no replies.

For a long time, I’ve been semi-fascinated by The Mirror Project.  I never submitted anything, though, because my relevant pictures were years old and would need to be scanned, cleaned up, and all that kind of thing.  I was basically being lazy.

But now I have a Canon PowerShot S45, and taking reflective images is a simple matter of having enough memory space and clicking away—and no scanning needed later on.  In the meantime, though, I’ve discovered another limit to my participation in the Project.  I’m not willing to go out and intentionally create images appropriate for the Project: they have to be “found reflections,” as it were.  I’m only interested in reflections that occur in the course of my normal actions, and just in the unusual ones.  I can see myself reflected in a monitor any time the system goes to sleep.  Yawn.  Now that I think about it, perhaps my main interest is in reflections in non-glassy surfaces.

So now I have two entries in the Project, both taken in the last month: Pitcher Picture and Eye See Me.  The latter is the most interesting to me by far, but I didn’t know I’d be taking it when I submitted the first one.

My most recent trips have been eventful, and sometimes stressful, but they’ve had a very beneficial side effect.  For the past few months I’ve been pondering my professional and personal lives, wondering if I’d be better off doing something else or adjusting my balance.  Everything’s been up for consideration: my career, my line of work, my interests, my relationships with friends, my relationship with Kat—everything.  A lot of this springs from turbulence in the wake of my mother’s death, of course.  But thanks to my constantly changing locations and moods, I’ve been able to look at my life from new angles.  In the sharing of ideas and recent personal events, I’ve found a new way to look at myself.  I needed that quite a bit, and will need it even more in the coming weeks and months.

It hasn’t helped me catch up on my e-mail, sadly, but two or three things at a time is all I can handle.

Today, behind the sounds of wind rushing the summer trees and birds chirping, I can hear high-performance race cars in the distance, gearshifting and Doppler shifting with a muted, hyperactive beehive sound.  It takes me back two decades, when I lived with my parents about the same distance from Mid-Ohio that I now live from downtown Cleveland, and we could hear every weekend race echoing over the hills and forests of north central Ohio.  Usually I’d hear them while out in the back yard, weeding Mom’s gardens as part of my weekly chores.  I remember the sun on my back and the insects buzzing around me, entranced by my hair color… the smell of the earth as I ripped weeds out of it, the color of dirt in the afternoon sun, my grouchy mood over having to get mud under my fingernails, which I hate.  And the sound of wind in the trees and annoyingly cheerful avian chirps all around me.

I also remember the time that I and the woman I then loved went to Mid-Ohio to watch a go-kart race.  We knew someone who acted as pit crew and engineering staff for one of the racers, and these were serious vehicles: they ran on high-performance fuel and could exceed highway speeds in a matter of seconds, despite being about a third the size of a regular compact car.  The race went only a few laps before there was an accident.  The driver who lost control was killed, a rare and shocking event even for the other drivers.  The race was cancelled, and we all went home early.

The sound of the go-karts racing wasn’t altogether different than the sounds of stock or performance cars.  It was just louder because for once I was standing next to the track, instead of sitting a few miles away weeding.  Or typing.

• Reflections was published on Friday, July 4th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Since I’ve been known to link to interviews with me in the past, it’s only fair that I give you a chance to participate in an upcoming one.  DMX Zone will be interviewing me in the near future, and you can submit questions to be asked.  If you’ve ever wanted to put me on the spot in public, here’s your chance.  DMX Zone recently published an interview with Jeffrey Zeldman, which I point out not only because it’s interesting but because the graphic they created for it is hilarious.  Not as hilarious as the graphic on Molly’s interview, though.

• Hit Me With Your Best Shot was published on Thursday, July 3rd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Interviews category.
• There have been no replies.

The presentation and example files from TODCON MX in Las Vegas last week are now available via the Talks page.  Thanks and apologies to those who waited; it took me a lot longer than it should have to get these online.

• TODCON MX Talks Available was published on Monday, June 16th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been no replies.

Yesterday, Jeffrey Zeldman was nice enough to point people toward meyerweb’s redesign, and also to say some kind words about yours truly that he’ll probably regret some day.  I know I have already, because when goofy rendering errors were reported in IE6/Win, I kind of felt obligated to do something about them instead of just shrugging and saying, “Eh, not my problem.”  Curse you, El Jefe!  I shall be revenged!

Two days ago, I got an e-mail message that had me falling out of my chair, I was laughing so hard, and I simply can’t resist sharing it with you.  I’ve edited the text a bit for clarity, and the name has been removed to protect—well, the guilty, really.  In a legal sense, I mean.

I’ve spent some time reading and working with several CSS books….  and I have to tell you that Eric Meyer on CSS is the best…. if I want to know how to do something and refer to the pile of books near my left hand, it is the one that most easily produces the answer.

It has one other great advantage over all the others as well:  it is by far the best book to roll a joint on.  Shape, size, thickness, glossiness, flexibility, and color are all excellent and [far] ahead of the competition.

It’s amazing how a well designed book serves all purposes.

Well.  Glad I could help out.

A day or two before that fascinating bit of e-mail arrived, I was standing in clothing store located in a brand-new shopping mall just recently built a couple of miles from our house, when the following lyrics came over the store speakers:

Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone? They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

…and I thought to myself, “Is someone trying to be ironic?”

• We Live To Serve was published on Wednesday, June 11th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, Humor, Redesign, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

Having owned a digital camera for less than two months now, I find myself taking random pictures of interesting patterns, just on the off chance I might use them some day.  Why not?  But the dark side of this activity is the creeping impulse to establish a photo gallery where I can display these abstract patterns and images for all the world to see.

“Go ahead,” my ego whispers, “it will show you’re a Renaissance Man with diverse interests and talents.  People will love it.  You’ll get invited to show stuff in art galleries, just like Josh Davis.  Trust me!”  Meanwhile, the more pessimistic (or, more likely, realistic) portion of my brain sneers, “Yeah, just what the Web needs, another collection of pseudo-pretentious almost-art shots.  Like it hasn’t been done a thousand times before.  Would it kill you to be original for once?  I mean, honestly.”

I don’t know exactly what all this means, but it might mean that one day I’ll add “Gallery” to the navigation links of this site.  If so, please feel free to shake your head in sorrow for me.  Then  invite me to display my stuff in an art gallery.

Late last week, I was writing e-mail to a friend when I realized I’d changed the phrase “I’ll write down some ideas” to “I’ll type up some ideas.”  Now I want to know how, in the long slow evolution of the English language, two such similar activities ended up going in totally opposite directions.

• Images and Words was published on Monday, June 9th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.