Thoughts From Eric Archive

My whole life, I’ve had very sharp vision both near and far, so I’ve never had to wear glasses or contacts.  Recently I’d noticed a degradation of the acuity in my left eye, particularly when looking at intense light sources, so this morning I went to an eye doctor for the first time in two decades.  She told me I need glasses—probably have needed them for years, but only now has it gotten to the point that I noticed a problem.  Kat and I have to go pick out frames.  I’m taking Kat along because she’s the one who has to look at me, so I may as well pick frames that she finds attractive (ahem).

This is a weird moment for me.  I realize the vast majority of you are wondering why this is worthy of note, because you’ve been wearing glasses since you were teenagers or six years old or in utero or something.  But to go from vision estimated at 20/10 to needing corrective lenses is something of a shock.  I suppose I always knew that my vision couldn’t stay sharp my whole life, but knowing and living are of course always different.  This seems like a little warning sign on the highway of life that says “Decline ahead: trucks use lower gear.”  It’s a little teeny intimation that youth won’t last, that life will eventually come shuddering to a halt.

Am I reading too much into needing glasses?  Yes.  That’s usually how it is when I experience a change in the pattern of my life: I reflect a little more deeply on life itself, and how the seemingly permanent things never are.

On the other hand, now I’ll be able to use that whole “intellectual college professor” look to do well with the ladies.  Or could if I weren’t married.

• Sharpening My Focus was published on Monday, December 9th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

After having outgrown the resources of its current home, css-discuss is moving to a new site, hopefully for the last time.  You can now find it at www.css-discuss.org (or .com), where a paltry few pages of information about the list accompany the subscribe interface.  The site is really just a front end for the list, but since it was moving to its own domain anyway, I figured what the heck, let’s put up some pages.  I heard this whole Web thing is all the rage with the kids, you know?

This change of address would not have been possible without the incredibly generous support of evolt.org, which is donating the server space, technical support, and bandwidth needed to keep a 50-messages-a-day list going out to its 2,000-plus subscribers.  I feel good about this, because evolt has long been an organization I admire, and also because they have experience running high-volume mailing lists.

The move to the new list should be complete by Monday.  Hopefully I catch up with my personal e-mail shortly thereafter.  I’m only about two weeks behind at the moment, although responses to mail about my latest book and css/edge are unfortunately further behind than that.  That’s the danger of dumping things into folders… you tend to ignore them once they’re out of the Inbox.  Or I do, at any rate.

• Moving On was published on Friday, December 6th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been no replies.

The World Wide Web Consortium‘s Web site has been redesigned, although visually it looks almost the same as before.  The change is that they’ve dropped tables-for-layout and are instead using CSS to set up the three columns and style the content.  It’s nice to see them trying to live up to the motto “Leading the Web to its Full Potential…” or, at the very least, finally catching up with the present.

It turns out they’re using a design approach I personally dislike, where all three columns are floated left (leaving none of them fully in the normal flow), but it’s not an inherently bad approach.  I just prefer other ways of achieving the same effect… but, as David Powers once pointed out to me, CSS is a lot like Perl in that it often embodies the spirit of TMTOWTDI—that is, there’s more than one way to do it.  That may be one of the reasons I find CSS so compelling, even though its open-endedness makes it a bit harder to learn.

• Catching Up was published on Thursday, December 5th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Redesign and W3C categories.
• There have been no replies.

Things are relatively quiet for the first time in several weeks.  Outside, there’s close to a foot of powdery snow covering everything, which was fairly easy to clean off the driveway—it’s light enough that I used a push-broom instead of a shovel.  Inside, Kat and I have been enjoying hot cider in front of our fireplace and reconnecting with each other after all the stress of the last few weeks.  Occasionally I play with Gravity, the household cat.  It’s a markedly more peaceful mode of living, and I’m enjoying it while I can, because it won’t last.

It seems like there were things I was going to post, really cool stuff, but it all got buried while I was off at conferences, memorial services, and so forth.  I did notice that Tantek has redesigned his weblog, and the new look was broken in Mozilla for a few hours.  It’s fixed now, but I wonder if that was due to him working around browser bugs, or just tightening up his CSS?  Knowing Tantek, it could very easily be either one.  Regardless, it’s a very interesting design; very paperish.

I’d dig through my e-mail for more stuff, but the fireplace is softly calling my name, and I hate to disappoint anything that could theoretically burn down my house.

• Digging Out was published on Wednesday, December 4th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Redesign categories.
• 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.

As I work my way through an enormous backlog of e-mail, I found a message from last month telling me about a utility called pngslice.  Apparently J.J. Green‘s girlfriend was really impressed by the Ragged Float demo but didn’t want to spend her time slicing stuff up in Photoshop.  So, in the manner of good boyfriends everywhere, J.J. stepped up to help out by writing a Unix utility and then released it to the world.  Better than flowers, I tell you.

Ooh la la: “Faites bonne impression avec les CSS,” a translation of “Going to Print.”  Thanks to Stephanie Booth and Samuel Latchman for helping my work get en Français!

• Slice ‘n’ Dice was published on Saturday, November 23rd, 2002.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

In her Web Design World keynote on Wednesday morning, Kelly Goto introduced us all to a “bored genius” and her thoroughly fascinating projects.  Some of my favorites are The BullRide, RealTime / Interface to the Future, Neologues: Bang Interface, Stump, and TreeLogic.

In the past 40 days, I’ve been to three conferences and five cities, two of them twice.  Last night I returned from Boston, and so far as I know I don’t have to board another plane until 2003.  Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy visiting other places (although the actual traveling isn’t such a thrill) and I love having the chance to see my friends and colleagues at conferences.  It’s just that the last six weeks were a little intense, and I’m glad to have a chance to slow down and relax at home.

I had a fascinating experience last night as we approached Cleveland.  As the plane was descending through a layer of dense snow on its final approach to Hopkins, the plane was struck by lightning.  Okay, I know, the bolt actually jumped from the plane to the air, but still.  Thank God planes are still basically steel tubes with wings.  After all, if you’re going to fling yourself around the sky, you may as well do it in a great big Faraday cage.

• Homecoming was published on Friday, November 22nd, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Travel categories.
• There have been no replies.

Every time I look at the image currently topping that topped zeldman.com for the past two weeks, I see Ruth lying in a West Palm Beach hospital room.  Outside the sun shines brutally hot (by our pallid northern standards) in the last weekend of October and we know that we’ll never see her again.  My brother-in-law and I each promise her a dance at the next family gathering, and the lie doesn’t even seem cruel to me.  We are all certain that she’ll be dead soon, but the stubborn spark of hope and the thought that we can offer her a pleasant illusion to obscure the looming end seems like a blessing.

Atop her 10 November entry, Molly has a quote from Frank Lloyd Wright: “The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes.”  I wonder if Ruth would have agreed.  I wonder if I’ll agree, decades from now.  For now, I keep hearing the last line from the movie Seven: “Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part.”

• Imagery was published on Friday, November 15th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.