Thoughts From Eric Archive

That’s right, folks, it’s on.

An Event Apart.  Atlanta.  April.  Alliterative!

We’ve also given a tiny little peek behind the schedule curtain: Seattle, Chicago, and Los Angeles (not necessarily in that order) will be future AEA stops in 2006.  There may be one or two more in addition to that, but we can’t give away all our secrets, now, can we?  Like the actual dates we’ll be in those cities.  Nope, couldn’t possibly give out those.

Okay, the dates aren’t really secrets.  We just don’t know yet.  Scheduling a road show isn’t an exact science.  There’s a lovely and near-continual juggling act with other travel commitments, venue desirability, and venue availability.  The last thing we’d want is to say we’ll be in City A on Date X, and then have to change it later on.  That’s not simply unprofessional—it’s just plain rude.

Of course, if you’d been subscribed to the AEA RSS feed, you’d already know all this.  In fact, you probably are, and do.  Sorry for the redundancy.  Forget I said anything.

Atlanta!  Be there.  Or, you know, be at one of the future shows.  Either way, we look forward to seeing you!

(P.S.  We know that these are all U.S. cities, and there are many of you in Europe who’d like to have the show come there.  We don’t have any non-U.S. plans yet.  Yet.  One day, maybe, but for now we’re going to stick to the country we know.  It makes calculating taxes a lot simpler, plus there aren’t any awkward customs forms to fill out.)

• AEA: Atlanta Bound was published on Friday, January 27th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There have been six replies.

Aw, man!  I was just innocently minding my own business when all of a sudden Jeffrey got meme all over me.  Now I have to go shower.

Four jobs I’ve had

1. McDonald’s grunt—excuse me, “crew member”
2. Customer Support Specialist (a.k.a. computer lab monitor)
3. Hypermedia Systems Manager at CWRU
4. Standards Evangelist for Netscape

Four movies I can watch over and over

1. Aliens
2. The Fifth Element
3. The Killer
4. Monsters, Inc.

Four places I’ve lived

I’ve lived four other places besides.

1. Ware, Massachusetts
2. Bolingbrook, Illinois
3. Lexington, Ohio
4. Cleveland, Ohio

Four TV shows I love enjoy

1. Iron Chef (either current American or original Japanese)
2. Good Eats
3. Beakman’s World
4. Blackadder

Four places I’ve vacationed

1. Churchhill, Manitoba
2. Ragged Point, California
3. Rosarito, Mexico
4. Guilin, China

Four of my favorite dishes

1. Carne asada, medium rare
2. Cedar plank grilled salmon, medium rare
3. Shrimp scampi
4. Notso™ Fries at Yours Truly

Four sites I visit daily

1. Google (but of course)
2. CNN.com
3. New Scientist (not quite daily, but close)
4. meyerweb (to check for comment spam)

Four places I would rather be right now

…so long as my family is with me.

1. Bora Bora
2. Cap d’Antibes, France
3. Santorini Island, Greece
4. U.S. Virgin Islands

Four bloggers I am tagging

1. John Allsopp
2. Ferrett
3. Molly Holzschlag
4. Ethan Marcotte

• Four Things was published on Tuesday, January 24th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been seventeen replies.

So if you were wondering what An Event Apart Philadelphia was like, well, you’ll have to come to a future Event.  There’s really no substitute.  We’re working hard to get some new cities lined up and announced, as was mentioned earlier today, so hopefully that little tease won’t be a tease for much longer.

But in the meantime, you can check out the little video number Ian Corey did for us, linked to from the new AEA Philadelphia page.  It’s almost two minutes long, four megabytes in size, and eight tons of fun (and requires Quicktime 7, given that it uses the spiffy new H.264 codec).  It has Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, and me.  So go check it out!

(Note to the deaf and hard of hearing:  the video is captioned for your viewing pleasure.)

• Scenes From An Event Apart was published on Thursday, January 19th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been six replies.

Excerpt from an IM session that just now concluded:

Molly Holzschlag: you seem to be a bit more organized than I do

Molly Holzschlag: although your office looks a lot like mine :)

Eric Meyer: My data is organized.  My life is not.

• Scenes From An Adium Window was published on Thursday, January 19th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Humor category.
• There have been thirteen replies.

So I’ve been putting off upgrading from Panther to Tiger for quite some time now.  My base reason is that I’ve been really, really busy, but the other reason is that I kept hearing that it wasn’t worth it.  Now, I’m used to the 10.x.0 version of any major OS X release being unstable and the source of many complaints, but it’s up to 10.4.4 now.  That seems like enough time to work out the kinks.

Plus, I have to use Tiger if I want to play with the Mac version of Google Earth.  So there’s that.

Admittedly, I do have Tiger installed on a partition of an external drive, and I’ve played around with it a little bit.  Still, that’s a very far cry from upgrading my laptop’s hard drive from Panther to Tiger.  I know that any major OS upgrade will mean time and energy spent on managing the transition, including re-installing or upgrading some third-party software.  That’s where the “I’ve been busy” thing comes back into play.  It’s a lot easier to take the lazy route: the system I have now works, so why mess with it?  Then again, that same attitude would have kept me in the Classic OS if I’d let it.  At some point, you have to upgrade.

So I put it to the crowd: is Tiger (now) worth taking the plunge?

• The Lazy or the Tiger? was published on Thursday, January 12th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Mac category.
• There have been thirty-eight replies.

Just as a quick update, I’ve done some testing of S5 1.2a1 in the latest version of Opera I have available (which, under OS X, is version 8.51).  I’m happy to report that this copy of Opera has all of the S5 features supported in other browsers.  Incremental display, font scaling, keyboard navigation, and even the notes window are all present and account for.

To use the notes feature, here’s what I do.  Upon loading the base slideshow into Opera, I position the window on my secondary monitor, which is here taking the role of an LCD projector.  Then I hit “n”, causing the notes window to appear on my laptop’s monitor (in the role of the presenter’s machine).  After bringing the slide show window back to the fore, I select “Full Screen” in the “View” menu, and the presentation maximizes itself to the secondary monitor.  As I navigate through the slide show, the notes window stays perfectly synched with the presentation.

There may be better ways to get the notes window on the primary monitor and the presentation on the secondary monitor, but that one worked for me.

I did notice some odd bugs here and there in Opera 8.02, a copy of which I also have hanging around, but nothing that was a show-stopper.  The one that sticks out in my mind was that multi-slide jumping wasn’t cleared out after the jump.  For example, from the first slide I’d type “3 (right arrow)” to skip to slide four.  Hitting the right arrow again jumped me to slide 7, which is wrong.  Opera 8.5 acted as intended, so I’m going to assume that it has something to do with how the JavaScript is written.

If there are problems in Opera 8.5 or Opera 9 that my testing didn’t uncover, let me know.  I’ll fix anything I can—and if there’s anything I can’t, I’ll turn it over to the Opera community to figure out.  Members of that community have already been invaluable in figuring out how to work around bugs in Opera’s CSS handling in order to make the controls available, so I’m confident they’ll be able to handle anything I can’t figure  out.

• Opera and S5 1.2a1 was published on Thursday, January 12th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, S5, and Tools categories.
• There have been three replies.

At the risk of being a bit backward-looking, on 21 December 2005 I was quoted in the article “Year in Review: CSS, Standards, Microformats and Flash“.  (And I wasn’t even the one who talked about microformats, Jon!)  This was the second half of a year-end review by Stephen Bryant; part one, “The Highs and Lows of Web Design in 2005“, is also online and quotes many familiar names.  I was going to blog both at the time, and, well… I forgot.

For historical purposes, here’s the whole block of text from which I was quoted, in response to the question “Generally speaking, did you see much progression in the adoption of Web standards this year? In CSS use? Can you give some specific site examples?”:

As in previous years, 2005 saw standards adopted more slowly than I’d have liked, but faster than in previous years.  I think this was the year when it became self-evident that standards-oriented design is the way to go.  I can’t remember the last time I had to defend the practice, and whenever that was, it wasn’t in 2005.  At this point, it’s basically all over but the training.  I think the biggest gap now is between the people who want to go standards-oriented, and their ability to do so.  That’s not an easy gap to bridge, but I think we’ll get there.

I mean, it’s the point now that desktop applications are using XHTML and CSS to drive their layout.  Just recently I discovered that Adium, a multi-service chat client for OS X, uses XHTML+CSS for its chat windows.  [E]very chat session in Adium is just a single XHTML document that’s dynamically updated.  Which means that you can define your own markup and CSS to create your own chat window theme.  It’s amazingly slick and powerful, and some of the themes are just gorgeous.  There are other programs doing similar things, and I expect the trend to continue.

The new-in-2005 CSS-driven sites that immediately come to mind: Apple, Slashdot, Turner Broadcasting, AlterNet, McAfee… and I’m sure there were hundreds of others I missed.

Hopefully this won’t lose me the bonus points Jeremy awarded me.  C’mon, man—at least I didn’t post my answer to the question “Best books, blogs, design? Best CSS layout?”!

• Before I Forget was published on Monday, January 9th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Interviews and Web categories.
• There have been five replies.

A quick summary of where I’ll be speaking in the coming months, presented as a public service for the seven of you who care about such things.

• In March, I’ll be joining the massive herd of folks headed to Austin, TX, for SXSW Interactive.  I’m currently scheduled to be on two panels, with a third likely but not confirmed.  The ones I already know about are “How to Roll Your Own Web Conference” and “Web Standards and Search Engines”.

  That’s right: no CSS.  For whatever reason, as CSS talks have ramped up at SXSW, I’ve not been part of the trend.  I could play the grizzled veteran and mumble something about letting the kids have their shot at fame and glory, but the truth is that I see SXSW as a place to stretch out.  I talk about CSS everywhere else.  In Austin, I kick out other jams.  Can you dig it?

• In April, I’ll show up at NOTACON right here in sunny Cleveland.  Details are extremely sketchy right now—I don’t even know how many times I’ll be gabbing, let alone what about.  It doesn’t matter, though.  NOTACON is an overclocked monster of a deep-geek weekend, they get fascinating speakers, and the admission price is a steal.  You should be there.

• Come June, I’ll be delivering the keynote address for @media 2006.  It’s a huge honor, really, especially considering the speaker lineup.  All those amazingly smart, talented, and attractive people to pick from, and I was chosen?  Astounding.

  Odds are very high that I’ll be up on stage for another session or two besides the keynote.  It looks like I won’t be onstage for the CSS3 panel, which is probably all to the good: who really needs to see me up there sobbing quietly about the snail’s-pace progress of the more interesting parts of CSS3?  Nobody, that’s who.

Note that there will also be some new Events Apart coming, but we’re not quite ready to take the wraps off the 2006 lineup.  I’ll let you know when we do.

• Keeping Up Appearances was published on Monday, January 9th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been seven replies.