August 2003 Archives

While in college I was heavily involved with the campus radio station. I learned to solder and trace wires as an aspiring engineer, I called record labels and requested records as a pseudo music director, handled the design of the first station website, set up our first streaming broadcasts, dealt with licensing issues as General Manager, and produced a music show, a sports show, and a talk show. I really enjoyed my time as a radio lackey and too advantage of all there was to learn.

When I first started as a freshman, I had moved to central Pennsylvania from Southeastern Massachusetts. I had a strong accent full of long a's and dropped r's. My friends used to ask me to say "Pahk tha cah around tha cawnah". In chemistry class I'd talk about the placement of "cahbon mahlecules". With numerous public speaking courses and presentations, as well as the lack of other people who spoke like me I lost my accent. Education will wear off some of the rough edges, but not all of them. I still swear like a mofo.

In my first year of college I was a DJ with an accent as thick as New England Clam Chowda. I wasn't quite sure what to do. Did I work with it? Did I drop it and try to speak normally? During my first few weeks as a DJ I was under review, having my shows taped and critiqued. I was constantly being teased about the awful gyrations in my speech as I vacillated between barely understandable and trying to sound like I had a doctorate. Rereading that last sentence, I think I still have that problem.

In any case with time I found my voice and gained a small following on campus. I moved from on-air jockey to party spinner. I was the DJ for special events of varying importance ranging in location from the college President's house to the gym. At the height of my DJing career I MCed a major pep rally.

In working on this site it occurred to me that I've yet to find my voice as a blogger. It's an important thing to do, a sign of coming into your own. Jeffery Zeldman and John Gruber use their unique styles to critique the industry, educate, and influence. Dave Winer has created a host of enemies using his, but at the same time has accomplished some amazing feats. Charles Johnson has created a community where tens of thousands of people learn about the "others" of the world through his distinct mix of sarcasm, humor, and journalism. Ed Cossette has created a column that brilliantly describes the trials and tribulations of Red Sox nation using Jungean philosophy as counterpoint to the wins, losses, and media whirl-wind of the team. Meg has mixed technology, food, and gardening into a required daily visit.

What is A-list? It's another way of saying that someone has found his or her voice. They've reached a place where they're comfortable with themselves, they know what to share and what to hold back, and they�'re not afraid to be who they are. They understand what it means to produce content for a one to many medium and they do it well. They�re people who have created communities around their thoughts and visions. They know what they're talking about and they freely spread that knowledge with others.

I wrote last week about weblogs and the maturity of the format. I think voice is part of that in some form. I also came across a post I started and never published about increasing your traffic. Voice is tied to that as well. With the advances in technology(technorati), it�s easier to find people saying things you'd like to hear more about. Similarly, the voice of a site can also be expressed in the design and the technologies it employs. If you've found your voice, worry not: the traffic will come. If you haven't, take a second and think about it. It can only make your site better, more engaging, and more fulfilling.

I've decided that I'll start rolling out the new design tonight. Let me know if and when you see problems and I'll try to fix them up. Thanks for your patience.

I recently went and checked out the ninjai site again, and to my surprise I found new episodes had been posted. I was pretty excited, and made sure to watch all of them from the beginning.

I first found ninjai over a year ago. It's an animated series about a young and very skilled warrior. He's not sure who or what he is, and over the seven completed episodes he journeys through the land looking for clues.

What I find most interesting about the series is the evolution in technique. The first episode is obviously inferior to the most recent episodes, but they're all fun to watch. Personally, I'm extremely looking forward to the next episode.

One thing to note is that ninjai has gained in popularity, and therefore has repeatedly run into bandwidth cost issues. Although all of the episodes are currently available with minimal advertising, if history repeats itself the ninjai gang may pull the episodes at some point in the future until they find another way to host them at an affordable price. I hope this doesn't happen, but you should check them out now while you can. What are you waiting for? Get to it!

Jon Udell: Well-formed writing and information routing

Jon Udell writes about the way good semantics have allowed him to get more out of his writing. It's an interesting parallel point to the conversation occuring amonst such heavy-hitters as Kottke, Mark, and Zeldman. The discussion revolves around the correlation (or lack thereof) between valid markup and semantics.

I've always been a supporter of standards, merely because of the extra control things like CSS give us over the design and layout of our pages. Semantic clarity interests me on a geekier level, having seen demonstrations of its worth such as Mark's posts by citation.

If you look at an industry like publishing, it took a long time for standards to develop and solidify. Although we've benefited from the rapid changes in web development, it may take time for us to reach the stability of other media. In my opinion, web development was so easy in the beginning we created a world full of web developers. As the technology has gotten more complex, offering more options and tools, the weaker animals are being weeded out. Meanwhile, it's the cutting edge developers and visionaries such as those linked above who are pushing the boundaries and helping to define this new medium we know as the web.

I'm all for the fact that anyone can publish, but because I use electricity doesn't mean I can service a circuit panel. Maybe a little survival of the fittest is a good idea.

It seems as if clear is a popular topic this week. First me, then Hyatt, and now Meyer. Check out his article for some very useful information about clear and how it works.

A quick update to this post: I got a message from Andy saying that he had received my mail, appreciated my suggestions, and would keep me posted on the results. He could have been mean and nasty and told me to leave him alone, or he could have ignored me completely. He did neither. Instead he wrote me a pleasant email. Thanks Andy.

One of the things that's interesting about this whole blogosphere is that the networks comprising it are small and tight and those who comprise them are interested in their position. You can post on your site and with just a few click throughs you create a trail that allows the person you're writing about to find your comments. It allows for interesting conversations to take place and have a history.

In relation to my sharing knowledge post earlier this week, John Gruber of Daring Fireball talks about helping family and friends pick a computer. Like all of Gruber's work, its an interesting and worth-while read.

twoeye.org: Why Your Site Needs a Favicon
Tony at twoeyes talks about the ways that favicons can improve the usability of tabs. It's a good point, and one that is more and more relevant as the different uses of tabs get less buggy. For instance favicons sometimes get used for the wrong sites in bookmark listing (probably because they're all named favicon.ico). In any case, it's a good point. I've wanted one for my site for a while, just haven't gotten around to putting it together.

Twice I've used that damn contact form, and twice I've not even received an automated response. I admit, my first message was useless, but the second? I sent you the fix for your paying client's site! What's the deal?!?

Over at Modulo26, Andy posted about a recently finished site that he designed for a client. He mentioned that there was one IE display bug left to squash and said he couldn't nail it. I checked it out, and sure enough it seems like a job for the clear:both style.

Now not only does clear:both leap small buildings in a single bound, but it also fixes a large number of CSS layout problems. According to the W3C clear specifies if an element allows floating elements on its sides. What this means is that if you use clear:right, nothing floating will be allowed to the right of the object, forcing floating objects to the bottom of the styled object. In many cases this is needed to cause a background or container class to fully wrap a taller class.

I first learned of this style at A List Apart in the article Practical CSS Layout Techniques by Mark Newhouse. The article is excellent, and the style is an exceptionally important one to be aware of. It has helped Scott, Dave, me, and that baby from the car. When Andy finally gets his message from that seemingly useless contact form it will help him too.

These are the kinds of problems that crop up when working with CSS. They can be solved through a network of developers and designers willing to help each other out. The web provides that network. The web is a wondeful, wonderful thing.

Over at Raster Web Pete talks about how he doesn't get viruses very often and says it might be because his friends use good software. I'd have to add that if he gives suggestions, education, and training to family and friends, that also probably helps. I have friends and family who use crappy software, but by teaching them common sense things (i.e. don't open attachments with extensions such as .vb or .exe) you can make them better netizens.

A quote from a baseball player, but good enough to share with everyone:

"I just want to win. When I play basketball with my kids in the driveway, I try to beat the shit out of them. That's what I am." -- Jeff Kent, Astros second baseman

via::Redbird Nation

I got a comment today from one Ann Marie regarding the quest at davincicode.com. I couldn't answer her at first, as I was completetely unaware that there even was a quest. I quickly took up the challenge and went to check it out. You should too. Then we can talk about it. I made it all the way through to the end, only using the hint button once and looking up the middle of chapter 44 info as I have since given my copy of the book away. Let me know how you make out.

I recently finished reading Ambling into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush by Frank Bruni. I was not impressed.

Bruni is a reporter who followed Bush during his election campaign. Most of Bruni's insight comes from interactions and interviews with Bush during this time. The book is long winded and seems to go no-where. Bruni uses 288 pages to say nice things about Bush and to talk about the fun he had on Bush's campaign plane.

On top of this, Bruni's style and commentary on journalism left me feeling disgusted. He mentions times when one candidate would be asked a question while the other was unable to comment (due to being somewhere else or being busy with something else). The candidate who commented was on the "offensive", the other on the "defensive" (merely because they couldn't asnwer right away). Bruni and the media would turn events like this into a big issue, changing public opinion and affecting the candidates momentums by turning small things into big deals. Bruni claims this is unfortunate and wrong, but does so in such an off-handed way as to make it hard to believe him.

With all of the scandal and problems in politics, the last thing we need is journalists contributing to the circus. This book left me feeling disheartened and upset. Between Bruni's style and the lack of information, it was a waste of time. In short, Bush is a smart and personable man who does much better communicating in small groups as opposed to giving speeches in front of large audiences. He has a wild and sometimes childish sense of humor and a strong sense of family. There's more to him than meets the eye. Now you don't have to waste your time reading Ambling.

In other news, I started reading Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold. I'm enjoying it a lot so far. I'll let you know if I still like it when I'm done.

I few weeks ago (I looked, I can't find a post in my own archives... I suck) I mentioned that I was having trouble with pings in Movable Type timing out. I've since determined that the problem was caused by not emptying out my activity log. Once I did that, build times improved greatly. If your install is having problems, check that out.

Now if I could only make the double trackback pings stop...

If this is the case, and most people are now focused on communicating through weblogs instead of being wowed by their novelty, then perhaps low threshold links are one of the best examples of a mature new weblog realm, focused on discovering new ideas instead of discovering new technology.

Anil has a post over at Sixapart regarding "low threshold links" and what they mean in relation to the maturity of weblogs. It's an interesting read.

Anil says, "We see in mature media like magazines that, though design elements differ and layouts change, standard components like a table of contents and an engaging back page remain fairly consistent."

This is true, however I think it's a poor comparison. Magazines have very little room for innovation compared to weblogs. Sure you have the perfumed advertisement, or the bonus CD, but other than that you're forced to stand on your content alone, created with either words or photos. Weblogs can gain a loyal following by aggregating links to other people's content, or by constantly exploring new layouts, or by creating a new type of metadata. Not only can we improve our content, we can improve our delivery as well as the ancillary components that go along with it. We can work in text or pictures or audio. We can manipulate time and rhythm. Our medium is much more vast than print.

This is evident in the growth of photo blogs. It's evident in the number of services that form connections between blogs. It's beautifully apparent in the way that just when you think weblogs are settling down and we'll improve our current methods instead of creating new ones, moblogging appears. Weblogs are still developing and growing.

I believe maturity is not equal to or required for success. Like software that forks and has a production branch and a development branch, parts of the weblogging puzzle are getting more stable (firmly established) and (I hope) not mature (completed natural growth and development, or a condition of full development).

Maybe the kid in me rebels against the word maturity or maybe it's the fact that mature technologies seem boring and dull. What I do know is that the fast paced growth and excitement of weblogs is what keeps me watching and has me hooked. I hope we can keep "discovering new ideas" and keep "discovering new technology".

Bartleby.com: Great Books Online -- Encyclopedia, Dictionary, Thesaurus and hundreds more

"And so, Bartleby.com—after the humble character of its namesake scrivener, or copyist—publishes the classics of literature, nonfiction, and reference free of charge for the home, classroom, and desktop of each and every Internet participant."

Interaction Architecture Solutions for the Real World: Keyboard vs. The Mouse, pt 1

We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:

• Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
• The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

• Ovidiu has some information regarding the theory that the power outage may have been caused by terrorists. Fox news sources say "Sabotage Cannot Be Ruled Out in Blackout".
• Via Modulo26 I learned about BlogStakes. You could win stuff. Check it out.
• Kevin Millar about having to love the Sox in order to encourage them to win. I believe him and I've stopped talking about wild card positions, I want that damn penant. Bring it Here!

• George Bush has an action figure. Bet that makes him giggle as he falls asleep at night...
• When all you do is make PowerPoints day in and day out, it's easy to run into creative road blocks. Modulo 26 has some excellent ways to break on through.
• Zeldman points to Joe Clark's write up on ISSN numbers. For some reason I thought there was a mandatory fee, but now that I realize there's not, I'll be printing out that application and filling it out.
• Via Asa comes a link to Jesse Ruderman regarding Chrome URLs in Mozilla and Firebird. This allows for neat tricks, such as loading the javascript console into a tab. You do know how to access the javascript console by default, right? Type javascript: into the location bar and hit enter. Only works in Gecko based browsers and NN as far as I know.
• Heh. I know Cory was a goose fan. To punish Cory for his lack of posting, go by his site and post a comment. First one to do it will make the majority of his page disappear.
• Over at Penny-Arcade, there's a discussion about video games and their effects on little kids driven by a recent politcal cartoon claiming that video games turns kids into monsters. I completely agree with Gabe and Tycho. Bad parenting is the problem, not video games. Make sure to read their posts. Definitely worth it.

Let me tell you. I missed you.

Last Monday the server that hosts this site had massive hard drive failure. Tuesday a restore was done. It crashed. Wednesday a restore was done. That restore crashed. At that point tech support determined that the failure was with the server and not just the drives. The server was replaced. A restore was done. The site came back up. MovableType did not.

Due to the fact that this site exists in a virtual hosting environment, there are many configuration issues to deal with after a restore is done. One such issue was modifying the permissions so that I could once again access the directory structure for my site. That happened last night. This morning I was able to login and repair the permissions on my MovableType installation.

Throughout the process Ron at MongoHosting has been as helpful as he could. His fulltime job as a tech was busier than normal due to the power outage and he also had some medical emergencies in his family. Nonetheless, he kept his clients up to date as he got new information and worked as hard as possible to get us back up and running. The same cannot be said for the asshats at RackShack. Theirs is a joke of an operation. Their poor support and assistance lead to lost customers and probably lost sales for MongoHosting. The situation is completely unfair.

In the past I've wondered to myself about why I maintain this site, sometimes unable to figure it out. Given forced separation, though, I felt voiceless. I may not know each and every one of you who ever stops by, but this site of mine is a hobby, and one I enjoy. I've missed you all, and I hope you've been well. I look forward to getting caught up.

• Kottke talks about Googlettes. It's an interesting idea, one with many possibilities. I almost wonder if the buyout of Pyra isn't considered by Google insiders to be a prototype Googlette. Having smaller subsidary type businesses driving the market for the mother company's offerings is a great way to make sure that other people can't grab all of your market share. At the same time, using the mother company's clout and resources to give the smaller ogranizations a leg up on the competition is quite powerful too. All of this goes to show that Google has some very smart and innovative people working for them, and the purchase of Pyra is and was just one of a number of things to keep an eye on.
• Dan Gillmor about Howard Dean's use of the web as a means to organize support for his campaign. An interesting read. If you're not already keeping an eye on Dean, you should be as he's quickly shaping up as a candidate who's going to rock the boat in the upcoming elections.
• Another post by Dave about how Mark Pilgrim is a mean spirited bully. The phrase "It takes one to know one comes to mind" but who am I to criticize without knowing the whole story. All I can say is that from my vantage point, all of this squablling and name calling sheds a very immature and infantile light on weblogs and their supporting technologies. Maybe that's why other vendors aren't showing public involvement. All of the childish squablling is turning their stomachs. Dave, you may have some good points, but my mom always told me that at some point you need to stop keeping score. It seems like you want to take your marbles and go play somewhere else, but at the same time you just can't bring yourself to leave.
• The digital portfolio of Greg Apodaca. Found via Caterina. As Caterina said, the guy is good. He shows digital photos before and after he touched them up. In some cases, things look nothing like they did when he started. Digital imaging: making shit look less shitty.
• Software millionaires spare pro bowling from demise: PBA's image, cash flow change with new owners. "Nowadays, the association encourages antics from bowlers such as Pete Weber, who points to his crotch after throwing a strike." I don't know what his crotch has to do with his strikes. Is this just the reporter misunderstanding the motion for 'suck it'? I'm not sure, but either way it sounds like bowling has met WWF.

Today I realized that any given blogger is much less removed from the A-list than they really think. It's true! I'm telling you!

Pick some people who you know are popular. Do they link to someone who's linked to you? Are you sure you have the right answer?

Someone told me the other day that they read an article that claimed the solution to the Curse Of The Bambino (of course it's supposed to be capitalized) is to trade Bill Mueller and Pedro to the Cubs. I laughed and said "Yeah right, that's crazy." Today I discovered the source of that column was Tony Pierce over at Fox Sports New England as he guest posted for Edward Cossette. Tony Pierce has linked to Cory in the past, who I just so happened to have graduated with and managed to get started blogging. How weird is it that meatspace people are reading the same things I read? Is it possible that they read my stuff and I just don't know it and they've yet to make the connection?

This little blogosphere of ours is pretty tightly tied together, a fact that although I know is true continues to amaze me. Here's to more revelations, friendships, and good blogging.

I finished Stiff by Mary Roach a few weeks ago, but things have been so crazy I haven't had a chance to tell you about it, so here goes:

I really enjoyed this one, but it's definitely not for everyone. The subject matter is definitely hard to stomach, and death is not something many of us are comfortable with. Given that, Roach adds a lot of humor to the topic, while at the same time pointing out all of the ways that cadavers help the living. She definitely covers a lot of territory from forensic study of decay to "medicinal" uses of corpse parts.

If you have a quirky sense of humor and a lot of curiousity, you'll enjoy this book. It made me laugh out loud quite a few times. If you're more conservative, though, you might want to skip this one. It leans slightly towards the voyeuristic and some of Roach's humor is easy to take offense to. It's full of information, though, and enjoyable as a quick and entertaining look into a strange and obscure subject.

The bottom line: you'll need to decide for yourself if you want to check this one out, but personally, I enjoyed it.

So I'm back, and man did I have a good time.

The drive down was awful. Between the rain and the traffic, it took almost eleven hours to reach Baltimore; that's horrendous as it was only supposed to take seven hours to get there. Byt the time we arrived at the hotel we were miserable.

Day two: Saturday. We bought tickets to see the game from the bleachers. Ran into a friend also there for the game who happened to have three tickets for the second deck near the left field foul pole. He traded us (having scored even better tickets for himself). The game was great. One of the people with me was an Orioles fan and while I was cheering for the Red Sox, he was cheering against them. At one point he yelled "Nomar sucks!" It seemed to me that there were more Sox fans at the game than Bird fans, and our section was no different. A woman two rows ahead of us turned around and yelled back "No he doesn't!" Nomar was currently at bat and with his next swing sent one out of the park. The woman jumped up, turned, grabbed her 8x11 crayola marker "Go Red Sox!" sign with both hands and yelled in my friend's face "Nomar doesn't suck! We're number two! Number two! Where are you?!?!" Yes, that's Red Sox nation for you. We're number two, and we're ok with it. Or something.

The Sox ended up losing that game. So sad. However, the game we really showed up for was on Sunday. We started out in the very top deck near the very last row right on the edge, overlooking the pens. I was a magnificent view of the field, even if we were so high up we could see the top of the foul pole.

The game was going well, Sox in the lead, and then we had rain. And more rain. And rain after that. Thunder and lightning caused the first delay, water caused the delays after that. The grounds crew tarped the field four separate times. The first time they were fast. By the fourth time, well, lets just say the pep was out of their wet little Nike sneakers.

During the rain a lot of people left. This made for tons of empty seats. We headed around behind home plate and dried a few off with our asses. The game started up, we saw a few pitches, and then we got kicked out of that section. On of the ushers noticed we were new and told us if we didn't have tickets we couldn't sit there. This was probably the only complaint I had. There were tons of empty seats around us, no one came back with stubs for those seats, and there were only a few thousand fans who stuck out the rain anyway. Come on! With the prices we paid and the fact that we were wet and faithful, you'd think he'd let us stay. Jerk.

We moved down behind the Orioles dugout, right on the field, and watched the Sox hit a few more homers. Then in the ninth the O's almost came back. Almost, but not quite. Just as they lost, the scoreboard showed the Yankees had lost as well. It was a great way to end a long and wet day.

Oriole Park at Camden Yards is an amazingly beautiful stadium, so much though that with no hesitation I'll tell you: I plan on going back. For the most part, the Ushers were personabe and helpful. The stadium is beautiful, with neat featurs like monitors in the stands so fans can see replays. Parking was only ten bucks, could be found right in front of the park, and it took only ten minutes to get back on the highway. Had the Sox won both games I attended, it would have been an absolutely perfect weekend, but even with the loss on Saturday I had a wonderful time. If you ever get the chance to go, don't pass it up. It's very worth it.