Thoughts From Eric Archive

Television possesses a scary, scary power.

All day today, Carolyn was in a cranky mood, no doubt because yesterday she got her six-month vaccination shots.  As the day wore on, she was less and less amenable to distraction.  We tried feeding her dinner, and that worked for a while, but then she started crying.  We switched to toys, and that was good for a few minutes before the sad face returned.  Kick-and-play seat, no good.  Jumping chair, nothing.  Walking around while bouncing her in my arms kept her to a minimal crank, but stopping for more than a minute caused the crank to escalate fairly rapidly.

So, at last, in desperation, I put her in front of the television and started a Baby Einstein video.  From the moment the TV turned on, she calmed down.  We ran through the DVD twice, and she didn’t so much as fuss.  Even the end credits kept her captivated.  She stayed calm after the television was turned off, nursed, and went quietly to sleep.

This may be in part because it’s roughly the sixth time she’s seen the television on in our house, so there was a certain novelty factor involved.  If anything, this little episode has reinforced and deepened my determination to keep our children’s television exposure to a very bare minimum as they grow up.

• Electron Opiate was published on Friday, June 4th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Culture category.
• There have been twenty-seven replies.

Andrei fired off round two of “Gurus vs. Bloggers”, and good news!  I played on the guru team by proxy, and was defeated by Dave Shea‘s proxy, more or less as I’d hoped I’d have the chance to do after round one was played.  Andrei was nice enough to hem and haw about which one ought to win, but honestly, there wasn’t much contest.  The Zen Garden won two SXSW Web awards including Best In Show, after all, not to mention the awe and respect of Web design folks the world over.  css/edge, at best, earned awe and respect.  In any case, I am honored to have been so thoroughly owned by the man Andrei calls “one of [my] best students.”  Mr. Shea, I bow to you.

In his tongue-in-cheek commentary, Andrei said:

Maybe if Meyer had used orange for CSS Edge, because orange is after all the new black, I would be able to swing the vote the other way.

I don’t know—low-contrast orange doesn’t really seem much better than low-contrast blue, does it?

• Edged Out Of Contention was published on Friday, June 4th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Web categories.
• There have been eight replies.

The previous week’s silence was caused by a trip to visit my father at his new digs in Florida.  His house is really nice, but the weather was not.  Every single day was really, really hot, and humid to boot.  As an official pasty white northern boy, I had a lot of trouble handling it.  Dad’s house is of course air conditioned, but that just made going outside all the worse.  I had to wait until late in the afternoon before I could even go out on his lanai (screened-in patio).

Said lanai was frequently visited by earwigs, Florida’s answer to the silverfish.  Have I mentioned how much I loathe both forms of insect?  I mean, I’m no fan of insects generally, but silverfish and those hairy-centipede-like things we get in Ohio are particularly horrifying.  Earwigs are not much better, in my book.  What’s worse, they had a tendency to get into the house.  I was in the middle of feeding Carolyn breakfast one morning and looked down to see a sizeable earwig on my leg, having just stepped from my sock to my bare flesh, waving its feelers about as if trying to decide where it should attack.  In what I feel was an impressive display of parental fortitude, I managed to refrain from screaming like a panicked little girl.  Instead, I knocked the bug off my leg and then stomped on it five or six times, just to make a point.  Carolyn was fascinated enough by the new game I appeared to be playing that she didn’t complain about the interruption to her breakfast.

Of course, since Dad lives about an hour from Disney World, we took Carolyn on her first trip.  We went to EPCOT.  Why there?  A few reasons:

1. They were having their annual flower exposition, so the grounds were even more beautiful than usual.
2. We figured the crowds would be a lot thinner there than at the Magic Kingdom, an assumption that seemed to be correct.
3. Carolyn’s too young to really appreciate differences between the parks.  We decided to save trips to the Magic Kingdom until she’s old enough to appreciate it more fully.
4. EPCOT is my favorite of the parks at Disney World, especially the international section.

Because we’ll be back to visit Dad with some regularity, we were able to take a more relaxed attitude toward our day at EPCOT.  We’ve done the endurance-test sprint from park to park, packing in as much as possible.  This was a leisurely stroll through the parts of the park that most interested us.  We didn’t get to everything.  That was okay.  Because, as I mentioned, it was really damned hot.  Despite consuming lots of water at meals and while walking around, I think I managed to dehydrate.  That was a problem in China too, and now that I think about it, the weather was very similar.  We pretty much all felt like Carolyn did in ths picture.

We actually got her to drink from the bottle, too, and without choking.  All right, keep your smart comments to yourselves.

One of the most fascinating things about the entire day was watching Carolyn react to everything around her.  To her, everything is of equal interest, and the most routine things can be as entrancing as a once-in-a-lifetime event.  (Not that this is the only time she’ll ever go to Disney—not by a long shot.)  After lunch at the Japanese pavilion, Dad decided to take his granddaughter to see the taiko drummers performing outside.  He held her up to see them better, and she immediately locked her gaze onto a three-year-old girl sitting on the ground about ten feet away.  Carolyn studied this girl as if she held the secret to life itself.  A few minutes later, a small tree came in for the same treatment.

I’ve heard it said that through a baby’s eyes, you can see the world anew.  It sounds wonderful, deep, meaningful.  It sounds like a homily for the ages.  In practice, it’s simply that you get to watch someone with no preconceptions about the world react to everything around her, but that alone is exhilirating and amusing, mystifying and fascinating.  I could spend all day watching her watch the world.  When she’s trying to figure something out, the look of pure, unadulterated concentration is so intense it makes me want to laugh with joy.  I can’t explain why.  It just does.

Later on that same afternoon, Carolyn discovered that in addition to fine books, O’Reilly also produces a great chew toy—I mean hat.

That was shortly before lapsing into a late-afternoon nap.  Kat and I took advantage of the nap to park her with Grandpa and wander through the Moroccan pavilion, which is one of my favorites.  The architecture, rambling byways, and artistry of the pavilion are all top-notch, as you would expect: the Moroccan king sent his personal artists to create the frescoes and other aspects of the pavilion when it was constructed.  The covered bazaar area at the heart of the pavilion is almost like a hidden treasure, cool and generally uncrowded.

After a fine dinner at Les Chefs de France, we headed out of the park.  I snapped a final picture of the Spaceship Earth globe just a few minutes before the evening’s show began.

Carolyn slept practically the whole way back to Dad’s place.  She’d been an amazingly good girl the whole day, considering the heat and level of activity.  I can’t believe how lucky Kat and I are to have such a wonderful daughter.

• Floridian Fun was published on Thursday, June 3rd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Carolyn, Personal, and Travel categories.
• There have been no replies.

As the Complex Spiral Consulting site now says, I’ll be speaking at the University of Iowa Web Camp next week.  In addition to delivering an updated version of “The Standards Payoff” as the keynote address, I’ll also be conducting a two-hour look at converting a table-driven design to CSS-driven presentation.  In this case, I took the President’s Welcome page and reduced the weight of its HTML document by about 72% while dropping the number of associated files it has to load by 75%.  The session will take an in-depth look at how the markup changed and how the CSS works.  If time permits, I’ll also discuss potential improvements to the IT Security Office’s Best Practices page.

So if you’re in the area and want to drop by, go register.  It’s free!

Apologies for the last-minute notice, especially as this is my last public appearance for a little while (although I’ll be doing a number of presentations for clients over the next few months).  I’ve been very busy lately on a number of projects and travelling quite a bit to boot.  Plus it looks like my break from writing may come to a premature end… but more on that once things are finalized.

• Last-Minute News was published on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been no replies.

A week ago, I published an entry that was two parts exploration and one part experimentation.  The experiment was to see how readers commented on a post of that nature, one that was potentially very inflammatory even though was not at all its intent.  The commenting ability is still new for me, and I’m working out how open I want to be about comments.  When I was writing the entry, I had in mind to not permit comments, realizing that it could easily draw a metric ton of flames, accusations, and other sundry ickiness.  At the last minute, I decided that it would be better to open comments and see what happened.  I’m well satisfied with the results, but have now closed comments on the entry (you can still ping it if you want).

I do want to follow up just a bit on some of the comments that were posted.  A few people said or implied that I should have picked a less volatile subject than intimate partner violence (IPV).  That’s just it, though: I didn’t pick the subject with an intent to post.  I was doing my own research, for my own information, and at the end of the process decided I’d share the results rather than just sit on what I’d learned.  Why?  I’ll quote myself:

…I was able to do some in-depth fact checking of my own in less than an hour, using nothing but Google and some well-chosen search terms, and obtain a more accurate picture of the world than I’d had before. I believe that this ability to self-inform is one of the most important and often underappreciated benefits of the Web. If nothing else, I’m glad I went on this particular search because it reminded me that the Web really is something worth fighting for, and that improving the Web is always an effort worth undertaking.

It was an aspect of the Web I’d rediscovered, and thought it was also important to share.  I’ve been doing this stuff for more than a decade now, and when I started my whole goal was to help put information online.  That’s why I wrote the HTML tutorials at CWRU—to make it easier for people to share information about whatever they knew best.  I’ve seen a resurgence of that impulse recently, with people blogging obscure fixes or problems they’ve encountered so Google will pick it up, and it will be there for the next person who needs it.  (See, for example,”Writing For Google” over at Daring Fireball.)  So if I can forget that the Web is an astonishing source of information, and need a reminder, maybe others could use the same reminder.

And why did I share so much detailed information on such a potentially sensitive subject?  I don’t think my points would have had the impact without the details.  That probably sounds like I was trying to use a touchy subject to raise my exposure, but that’s not it at all.  If I’d just posted to say, “I was curious about something and dug up a lot of information about it, and that’s what’s cool about the Web” it wouldn’t have had the same resonance.  Walking through the process and pointing to the sources I quoted established a context for my final points.  It was also the case that I believe I found some useful information about a very important subject, and was able to disseminate it further.

My thanks to everyone who contributed comments, especially those of you who pushed back a bit.  I’ll close with a favorite David Byrne lyric; make of it what you will.

Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don’t do what I want them to

• Self-Referential was published on Wednesday, May 26th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Culture and Web categories.
• There have been no replies.

I was back in the training groove this week, and on Monday morning one of the attendees had to duck out at one of the breaks.  “I have to talk with Brian, who’s consulting for us.”  I must’ve looked blank, because he said, “Brian Foy.  Do you know him?  Works with Randall Schwartz.”

I’ve been reading Brian‘s missives from Iraq on the O’Reilly Network for a year now, and was really psyched to meet him.  As it turned out, we both were planless on Monday night, so I picked him up at his hotel and blundered around the neighborhood until we found a Thai restuarant.  Over appetizers, Brian told me his wife (an opera singer) has been doing her own Web design for a while now, and was getting into CSS.  Then he mentioned buying the O’Reilly CSS book for her, and as he talked about why he’d bought it, I quickly realized that he’d picked it up because it was an O’Reilly book, and recommended.  He literally didn’t know he was having dinner with its author.

After a couple of minutes, I finally told him who’d written the book.  I should probably feel bad about not admitting it right away.  I wasn’t going to say anything here either, but he already blogged it, so… what the heck.

It was very interesting to talk about Iraq with someone who’d been there.  I was able to ask him the question I’ve wanted to have answered for a while: “How does the news coverage compare to what’s really going on over there?”

“It’s horrible,” he said.  “We got CNN and Fox on the Armed Forces Network and they were both just terrible.”  He said that he’d literally been present for things that were being covered on TV by the time he got back to the barracks, and nobody ever accurately represented what had happened.  Not even close, apparently.  Brian made the observation that images are so overwhelming, so powerful, that the story was always driven by whatever footage had been shot.  Not by the actual event in its totality, nor the context.  Just the visual.

It wasn’t surprising to hear that, but it left me saddened and frustrated.

• My Dinner With Brian was published on Tuesday, May 25th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Culture, Politics, and Web categories.
• There has been one reply.

Through a winding chain of links—it was, of all things, the result of an extended surf on the Web, and who does that any more?—I came across Cameron Moll‘s “80/20 and the design blogosphere“, where he listed the 20 people from whom he feels 80% of vital new media design information flows.  I was deeply flattered to be on the list, although I again feel weird about it.  I don’t give out design information, and meyerweb is certainly nowhere near as well-designed as many sites (including Cameron’s).  Heck, I don’t even talk about CSS all that much any more, despite numerous vows (public and personal) to do otherwise.  I suppose all the books and other writings allow me to coast into these lists, and that’s a nice feeling, but I’m starting to seriously ask myself what I’ve done for everyone else lately.

So I’ll throw it open to the crowd: what kind of information, new media design or otherwise, would you like to see from me?  What do you feel would earn me the right to stay in Cameron’s 80/20 list?  Post and ping, or contribute a comment.  Your choice!

(I have to shoot down one potential request now: I’m not going back to browser support charting.  Westciv does a decent job already, and as I wrote a while back on www-style, going any further is a massive undertaking.  And, to be honest, it’s mind-shatteringly dull and incredibly time-consuming.)

• Earning A Spot was published on Monday, May 24th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Web categories.
• There have been twenty-six replies.

Wow.  The weather this afternoon was, in a word, wild.  The same storm front that hit us around 4:00pm is moving into the Baltimore/DC area as I write this.  That’s faster than I could drive there (without serious risk of a seriously expensive speeding ticket, anyway).  We hadn’t checked the news, so our first warning of severe weather was a sharp crack of thunder and a sudden burst of wind thrashing the trees as the western sky darkened.  Then the rain hit—hard.  Less than a minute later, the hail came.  Carolyn had been napping, but the sound of the wind and hail woke her.  As I went up the stairs to her room, I glanced out our north windows and saw that the sky had shifted to a pale green.

That’s never a good sign.

As Kat soothed Carolyn, I went to shut the back door before it let even more rain into the house, and as I shut it the hail suddenly started coming down so hard that I couldn’t see the house behind ours.  The noise of the hail slamming into the back of the house, driven by winds more fierce than I’ve seen in quite some time, was almost deafening.  I shouted for Kat and we headed into the basement, just in case; it felt silly to be doing it when I was pretty sure there was no real danger, but millenia-old instincts to hunker down and protect the family took over.  Ten minutes later, the storm had abated, but the hail was left thick on the ground.  On the back walk, rainwater carved channels through the hailstones, and the flower beds in the front were coated in ice pellets, each one slightly bigger than a BB pellet.

Even after the winds had calmed and the hail stopped, we had rain and frequent, furious lightning.  The rain came down so hard and fast that our street became a minor river, as I’m sure happened to every other street in our area.  Chilly mist wafted off of the hail on the ground as the ice sublimated, making the world seem a little more dreamlike and uncertain.  Across the street, a small group of befuddled gulls[1] sat on a neighbor’s lawn, running away from the spray when a car drove past, the same way I’ve seen gulls run away from waves on an ocean shore.  To end up on our street, they’d been blown several miles from their starting point, most likely the mouth of the Cuyhoga River in downtown Cleveland.

We’re expected to get more strong thunderstorms overnight, thanks to the same system that’s pushing into the Chicago area right now.  Hopefully they won’t be so violent as to necessitate another trip to the basement.

[1] No, it was not a flock of seagulls.  There weren’t enough of them to make a proper flock, if you ask me, and there’s no such thing as seagulls.  They’re gulls, period.

• Stormy Weather was published on Friday, May 21st, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.