Posts in the Speaking Category

Just a quick reminder that the WThRemix competition closes in eleven days.  Here’s your chance to remake the face of the W3C Web site, and maybe win some peer accolades and a few prizes along the way.  I’ll be impressed by any entry that gives the W3C site a bold new look without changing its markup structure at all, personally, but I’m not a judge so impressing me won’t get you anywhere in the competition.

Did I mention that the different thematic choices for adactio.com are really, really impressive when you visit the author’s journal?

I somehow missed the announcement of the winners of AllTheWeb‘s restyling competition, so I’m going to mention now that the contest is over and the winners’ entries publicly available.  There are some really good entries.  I worked (remotely) with one of the runners-up when he was an intern at Netscape last year.  Speaking of which, I hope to have some good (or at least interesting) news in the near future.

I’m off to be a geek or a guru, or maybe even both, at Tri-C’s Western campus tonight, where I’ll talk about (among other things) how CSS can be used to restyle any site, regardless of what the site author has to say about it.  Hope to see you there!

• Restyling Madness! was published on Thursday, February 6th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Speaking categories.
• There have been no replies.

For those curious, Cuyahoga Community College has sent out a press release regarding their “Geeks & Gurus Visual Communication & Design Lecture Series.”  The first session of the series is to take place this Thursday at 7:30pm, and features yours truly.  Check out the release for more details; I’m hoping to make it to the rest of the series as an audience member.  All the other sessions look really interesting.  There is more detailed information available at awdsgn.com.

As I indicated before, this Thursday’s presentation will greatly affect my ability to be at the Web Standards Meetup, unless of course everyone shows up at the talk and we go somewhere afterward.  I definitely plan to make it to the Web Design Meetup next week, though.

• Moving On was published on Monday, February 3rd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been no replies.

The files I used for last Thursday’s presentation are now available on the Speaking page.  The presentation space that COMMUG uses is, in a word, awesome.  Picture a large lounge-type setup with three wall-height projection screens, each of which can be devoted to any of the video input signals.  I was able to set it up so the slides (an OperaShow document running on my Windows laptop) were in the center screen, and the examples (which came off the TiBook) were on the left and right screes.  Beforehand I decided to have some fun; running three fifteen-foot-tall iTunes visualizations of “Block Rockin’ Beats” is a sight to behold.  I felt like a real rock star for a moment there.

In my post last Thursday, I referred to the XHTML 2.0 element nl as meaning “nested list,” when in fact it stands for “navigation list.”  My bad.  I’ve corrected the original entry as well.  It’s another data point in the topic of markup, semantics, and semantic overloading, but not one I’m currently prepared to explore in detail.  Meanwhile, I’ll just increase my Buzzword Rating by saying “Semantic” a lot.  Semantic semantic semantic.

So it looks as though the Northwest Passage will open up in our lifetimes, but I’m sure there’s no such thing as global warming.  After all, the Republican News Cha—er, I mean, Fox News Channel said so.  It’s all just a fantasy of radical environmentalists who don’t have anything better to do, apparently.  Which makes sense, because obviously there isn’t anything else to get upset about, like widespread deformities in amphibians.  Oh wait!  Sorry, the FNC gurus have said that last one is all made up as well.  Too bad nobody told Scientific American before they published an article about an eight-year scientific investigation of amphibian deformations.  Oh, those wacky scientists.  When will they learn that science is only valid if its conclusions agree with certain political agendas?

Which, oddly, reminds me: ever noticed how when a judge rules in a manner favorable to conservatives, it’s hailed as respect for the rule of law, but when the ruling leans to the left, that’s called judicial activism?  Maybe it’s time to turn the terms around, just to see how the right wing likes it.  After all, there’s nothing like extremist apoplexy to brighten one’s day.

• Talking, Correcting, Ranting was published on Monday, January 27th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Politics and Speaking categories.
• There have been no replies.

Just when I thought it was all going to go to smash (and of course it probably will anyway), a tiny sign of sanity has peeked its head out of the murk to give me a moment of hope.  A lawsuit alleging McDonald’s is responsible for two consumers’ obesity has been dismissed.  Oddly enough, suddenly I have a craving for a McDonald’s hamburger.  With fries.  Mmmmm….

Of course, it’s absurd to think that fast food is good for you, and I’m not trying to say that it is.  I worked at a very busy McDonald’s for a couple of years, so I know what goes into that stuff.  It’s not healthy.  I don’t think it’s supposed to be, and in fact the offering of salads and yogurt at McDonald’s still gives me moments of cognitive dissonance.  The whole super-sizing trend isn’t the greatest thing to hit the waistline, either, and it seems to be moving into the home.  But nobody’s forcing us to super-size anything.  We choose to go for the Big Gulp, and Value Pack, the Combo Deal, the what-have-you outsized portion.  We could as easily choose not to go for them, if it were important to us.  In the meantime, people should stop blaming nebulous external forces for everything wrong in their lives.  Personal responsibility may be a neglected art these days, but it’s one well worth reviving.

Speaking of junk-ish food, did you know that if you leave rainbow sprinkles in a vanilla milkshake overnight (in the refrigerator, of course!), they semi-disintegrate into a sort of sandy, crusty consistency?  Neither did I, until lunch today.  And for those wondering why I would be drinking a milkshake in our current weather, the nightly lows are still positive Fahrenheit values, so it’s not all that cold.  Besides, a really good milkshake is worthwhile in any weather, and Dottie’s makes really good milkshakes.  Not quite as good as Tommy’s, perhaps, but still really darned good.

If you’re in the central Ohio area and would like to see some fun stuff done with lightweight markup and creative CSS, remember that I’ll be speaking at the Central Ohio Macromedia User Group meeting tomorrow evening at 7:00pm.  We’ve made sure to leave time for audience questions, so come on down!

• Hold the Pickles was published on Wednesday, January 22nd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Politics and Speaking categories.
• There have been no replies.

For those who have interest in my physical-world activities, I’ve posted updates to the Speaking page.  In two days I’ll be presenting in Columbus, Ohio, and two weeks after that I’ll be speaking here in Cleveland, so you Ohio folks get plenty of opportunities to come heckle!  Details on both talks are now available, and while one of them isn’t free, it’s still pretty darned cheap to get in.  Usually when I present, it’s at some conference that costs you an arm and a leg to attend.  Speaking of which, I’ve filled out the details on my SxSW panel, so if you’re going to be there and want to know more, check it out.

• See Me… Hear Me… was published on Tuesday, January 21st, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been no replies.

The HTML document I used to present at Web Design World last week is now available on the Speaking page.  Note that in Opera 6+ for Windows, you can use the F11 key to turn the file into a slideshow, just as I did to present it at the conference.  Note also that the styles are tuned for a 1024×768 display, but an 800×600 stylesheet is also available in the document.  You can also print it out, and hopefully get more sensible line-breaking than what appeared in the conference proceedings.  If not, feel free to fiddle with the print stylesheet until you do.

I also added a couple of upcoming appearances to the page, both of which are in March of 2003.  There may soon be more to follow, as next year is already shaping up to be a busy one.  If you’re thinking about asking me to speak somewhere, now might be a good time to get in touch.

• WDW Boston Presentation Online was published on Monday, November 25th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been no replies.

In all the head-pounding over learning XSLT last week, I let some things slide by without comment, so I’ll try to cover them all in a single post.  (And remember, if you have an RSS aggregator, you can syndicate these posts via my RSS feed!)

In early November, I’ll be appearing at Meet The Makers New York on a “standards mini-panel” with Jeffrey Zeldman, so I’d better get around to calling Moishe.  There will also be a San Francisco Meet The Makers where my co-worker Arun will be on a panel with Tantek Çelik of Microsoft.  You might be able to score a free VIP ticket to either event if you hurry (and are willing to fill out the questionnaire).

I’ve added more information to the upcoming events on my Speaking page, including promotional codes for events that have them.  I disclose when using a code will make me money, and have been thinking about ways to turn those into community-building exercises.  Maybe I’ll take everyone who used my code(s) to a group dinner, assuming I can come up with a way to verify code use.

Last week, we published a CSS2.1 Quick Reference sidebar tab for Gecko-based browsers, and French translations of the CSS2 and DOM2 sidebar tabs, to the Sidebars area of the DevEdge Toolbox.  I also published a technical note on fixing list-item marker size in the NS6.x series.

Over the weekend, I not only dug into more XSLT (which almost made me pound my head against a wall, again), but I wrote some Javascript bookmarklets to help manage the administration of css-discuss.  It’s been a while since I thought of myself as a programmer, and I certainly am no expert—but it’s been good to stretch those mental muscles again, after so long.  The neural paths needed for exploring and using CSS and structural markup aren’t the same as those needed for programming.  The sense of achievement I felt when I figured out how to do what I wanted to do was a welcome change of pace.

It’s really cold in our house right now, but at least the shaking and banging of workmen dismantling our 82-year-old boiler has stopped.  Kat and I are sort of sad to see the old beast go, but since it had suddenly started leaking enough carbon monoxide to form its own atmospheric system, we don’t exactly regret replacing it.  The replacement boiler is almost ridiculously smaller than our old boiler.  I have trouble believing that it can heat the basement, let alone the whole house.

• Catching Up was published on Monday, October 7th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Speaking, Standards, and Travel categories.
• There have been no replies.

I’ve added upcoming events to my Speaking page, so now all you stalkers can effectively plan ahead.  These join the previously available archive of presentation files from past speaking engagements.

I’m working on some back-end improvements to the site, so there isn’t much else to talk about right now.  The political scene is too depressing to talk about now, so I’m not even going there.  Maybe in a few days I’ll have some cool things to ramble on about.

• Futurespeak was published on Wednesday, October 2nd, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been no replies.