Thoughts From Eric Archive

Right in the middle of the Iron Chef of Web Design presentations on Wednesday, a calm female voice announced over the public-address system, with quite a bit of volume, that due to a security situation the Moscone Center was to be evacuated.  As it turns out, the entire complex was being evacuated, not just the Moscone West building.  That’s a lot of people to dump on to the sidewalks of San Francisco all at once.  Fortunately, the hotel here has a WiFi network in the lobby, so I could check e-mail after all.

Dreamweaver MX 2004, and the rest of Studio MX 2004, has shipped and is available for download.  If you use Dreamweaver and you’re interested in CSS or stadndards-oriented design, it’s very likely worth the upgrade.  There’s a free 30-day trial, so you can always check it out if you aren’t sure.  You’ll get a chance to work with the templates I contributed and a design firm prettied up.  I spent some time talking with Macromedia folks while in San Francisco and was impressed anew by their interest in doing the right thing when it comes to standards.  These are folks who think about not just today’s Web, but the Web to come, and how they can best help authors get from here to there.  That’s a highly commendable perspective in a tool vendor.

• Released was published on Friday, September 12th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Speaking, and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

I’ve been wandering from place to place in the Mission District of San Francisco all afternoon with Doug and Tantek, searching out open WiFi access points that also have open power outlets.  We were hanging out at Maxfield’s for a while, but then a live jazz band started playing and we couldn’t hear each other talk.    So we moved on, and after snacking on some New York-style pizza (!) have now settled in Muddy Waters on Valencia.  What relevance has any of this?  Not a lot, but it’s a great excuse to post an amusing picture Doug took with his Sony Vaio TR1AP.

Seybold starts tomorrow, which means I get to show up at Moscone West way too early in the morning to register, get oriented, and get ready for the panel “Speaking in Tongues,” which will discuss the wide variety of standards and choosing which is best for you.  Later in the day I’ll present “Bridging the Browser Divide,” a look at the state of standards support.  Tuesday, I’ll do “CSS For Navigation,” a slightly reworked version of “Minimal Markup, Surprising Style” (which provided many of the examples in the Listamatic), and then participating in the closing plenary “Future Vision: The Web and Beyond.”

I’d better get some future vision by then, I guess.  Think the audience will take me any less seriously if I tell them the Web doesn’t really matter because we’re due to be subjugated by the barbarian hordes of Pluto in the next three years?  Think anyone took me seriously in that last sentence?

As much as I like visiting San Francisco and hanging out with such cool people, I can’t help looking forward to my return home.  I fly back home on Thursday, which means that for the third year in a row I’ll start September 11th in the San Francisco area.  At least this year I’ll end it back in Cleveland, unlike the last two.  Contrary to the expectations of some people I’ve talked with, I have no apprehension about flying on Thursday.  I figure if there’s one day of the year that’s safest to fly, it’ll probably be that day.  Besides, I’m done with conference and client stuff Wednesday evening, and I intend to get back to Kat as soon as possible.

• Mission Critical was published on Sunday, September 7th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Travel categories.
• There have been no replies.

I wrapped up the three-day speaking and training session at Los Alamos National Laboratory yesterday, and it seemed to go really well.  This having been my first multi-day training session, I was a little bit nervous that I might have problems with pacing, but everything seemed to come together just fine.  The attendees certainly were positive about the material, and how much they learned.

Now I’m off to Albuquerque to catch a flight to San Francisco (by way of Houston) for Seybold.  I’ve been four days from home, and have another five before I return.  Kat and I talk at least twice a day, and it seems like every conversation begins and ends with, “I miss you.”

• …the Weird Get Going was published on Saturday, September 6th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Speaking, and Travel categories.
• There have been no replies.

It’s been a month since I announced my foray into consulting, and it’s been a busy but rewarding month.  I did of course finally get the official site online, but also put in time working with Macromedia, created a three-day training course for the staff at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and shorter training sessions for two different universities.  Between that and preparing to chair a track (and present twice) at the Seybold-WOW Web Design and Development conference, I wasn’t lacking for things to do.  So much for using my newfound freedom to lounge around eating Cheetos and playing XBox games.

Not that I would anyway, to be honest.  Kat can’t even take me on relaxing vacations in tropical venues, because after two or three days of not doing anything productive, my head implodes.

Someone let me know that Containing Floats hit #9 on Popdex as well as Blogdex, so thanks to all you linkers out there!  Y’all are the greatest.

Since we’re mentioning the greatest, we went to see “Weird Al” Yankovic play the Taste of Cleveland festival.  I say “the greatest” not because I think he’s the greatest musician of all time, but because I completely agree with what a friend of mine said about him:  he’s out there working it every night like it’s the only show he’ll do all year.  That’s professionalism at its finest, and I respect that no end.  Al always makes it a fun show, a high-energy show, and the only way you can leave disappointed is if you’re a humorless sourpuss in the first place.  In which case, what the hell were you doing at a Weird Al show?

And now that “weird” has come up, you might remember I mentioned that I’d received time-traveler spam a while back.  Wired has the whole story behind that spam, and as you might expect it’s a bit odd.  I feel so special to have scooped Wired… especially since I inadvertently fooled them three and a half years back.

• When the Going Gets Weird… was published on Monday, September 1st, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Consulting and Culture categories.
• There have been no replies.

Much to my delight, Containing Floats hit Blogdex, just above a story about Al Franken (when I looked, anyway).  It also tied for 29th with the Ars Technica Macintosh browser smackdown, which I was further delighted to see used the complexspiral demo as one of its evaluation criteria.  Thus we come spiralling back to where we started.

Congratulations to Jeffrey Zeldman and Doug Bowman on their new project with Apple!  Doug explains that they’ll be giving Apple strategic guidance toward better using Web standards, which is wonderful thing for me to hear at this stage—it’s another indication that there is indeed a demand for the kinds of services I’m offering through Complex Spiral.  I’ve very little doubt that the demand exists, but reinforcing evidence is never a bad thing.

Speaking of Apple, I like OS X a whole lot better now, but not because I’ve gotten used to it.  Instead, I’ve gotten it used to me, with help from Robb Timlin.  He wrote the freeware tool Classic Window Management, the installation of which instantly eliminated about 85% of my frustration with OS X.  Now the Finder acts the way I think it should: when I click on the desktop, all the Finder windows come to the front instead of staying hidden behind whatever application I was just using.  In other words, now OS X acts like a Mac, not a Windows machine.  That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout.

I also recently upgraded my computing experience by finally ditching the Apple hockey-puck mouse in favor of a Logitech MX700 cordless optical mouse.  Between the freedom to mouse anywhere on my desk and the application-specific programmable buttons, I’m a happy guy.  I also picked up an MX500—same mouse, except with a cord.  I was going to use the MX700 on the TiBook so that I could use a mouse on flights and not have to fight with a mouse cord.  It was the perfect plan until I realized the plan involved using a radio transmitter on a commercial airliner.

Oops.

• Spiralling Apples and Mice was published on Thursday, August 28th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Consulting, Mac, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

It’s up, running, and official: Complex Spiral Consulting finally has a Web site.  So far I have up recent news and upcoming events, information about the services I’m offering, ways to contact me, and a publications area that contains a new article: Containing Floats.  If you’re having trouble getting elements to stretch around floats, this article is for you.  Anticipate more such articles in the future, as well as the addition of information on just what I’ve been doing in the past month, and for whom.

Also today, Macromedia announced the impending release of Studio MX 2004, including a major new version of Dreamweaver MX.  I’m happy to say that the CSS support in this new Dreamweaver is pretty darned good, and it comes with a number of CSS-driven templates already installed.  I provided the layout skeletons to Macromedia, and then helped make sure the markup and layout were acceptable once a design firm made the layouts look pretty.  And hey, who are those mugs being quoted in the Dreamweaver MX press release?

There’s also a new layout for the Macromedia Web site, and it uses some relatively sophisticated CSS to create the layout.  I did some CSS optimization and upgrade work for the site, running in parallel with the Dreamweaver MX input I was providing.

• Multiple Launches was published on Monday, August 25th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Consulting, CSS, and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

The weeklong break is over.  Now I start a weekend break.  Meanwhile, a few things that flitted across my radar while I was away:

• Please, for the love of all that’s holy, patch your Windows boxes!  Like Zeldman and Kurtz, I too have had an e-mail address filled into forged e-mail headers, and been hit with bounces galore.  Hopefully this will all soon become a lesser problem with a change in server, but still—patch those leaky systems!  Now!
• Some interesting quotes from and commentary on Weaving the Web.
• Thanks to a post by Mark Pilgrim, “‘Considered Harmful’ Essays Considered Harmful” is getting some traffic.  This amuses me.
• Hell yeah.  I’m behind George 100% on pretty much every point he makes, and I’ll just add that we’re a major airline hub so finding reasonably priced flights to just about anywhere is a snap.  ‘Nuff said.

That’s it for the moment, but I hope to have a new site and some new content to share with you on Monday.

• Ketchup was published on Saturday, August 23rd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Cleveland, Standards, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

Everyone complains about Jakob Neilsen’s site design, but nobody ever does anything about it—until now.  Bob Sawyer has announced a “redesign useit.com” contest that’s being held with the blessing of Dr. Neilsen himself.  Dare we call it Designer’s Eye For the Usable Guy?  The contest closes at the end of October, so you have some time to really do a great job.

The trends described in the Time article “Believe It, Or Not” bother me quite a bit.  The last paragraph in particular seems chilling to me.  I’ve no objection to religion, as long as it isn’t being shoved in my face, and frankly I think more people could use a strong moral/ethical core.  It’s the decline in intellectualism and critical thinking, and the view that one can’t be moral without a belief in God, that trouble me deeply.  I can say with absolute certainty the latter is patently false, unless one defines morality to be solely derived from religious teachings, in which case either the term needs to be expanded or we need to ask a different question.  For example: “Is it necessary to believe in God to be an ethical person?  A good person?”

As I looked at this and the last several entries, I see that most of my recent posting has been personal in nature.  The CSS has fallen more or less by the wayside, which also bothers me.  I’m going to take a week off and think about the balance or technical content versus personal commentary, and how I want this site to evolve as I move forward with the consulting business.

• Grand Designs was published on Saturday, August 16th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Culture categories.
• There have been no replies.