That’s *my* kid!
Posted on March 25, 2004
Filed Under Kids | 3 Comments
Remember those pipe cleaner art projects you used to make in elementary school? I remember making stick figures & flowers when I was about Emily’s age.
Today, Emily made pipe cleaner art in her after school class. No stick figure or flower for her. My Kindergartner took a white pipe cleaner. She looped it around on one end and stuck a blue bead on the other. Then she took the loop and put it over her ear so the bead was pointed towards her mouth and called a “Bluetooth!” as in a bluetooth headset (just like Daddy’s). 
Top 10 Things
Posted on March 25, 2004
Filed Under Design | Leave a Comment
“Top 10 Things I Never Learned in Design School”
“This”:http://www.designobserver.com/archives/000121.html is so true.
I particularly like this one:
bq. Start with what you know; then remove the unknowns.
In design this means “draw what you know.” Start by putting down what you already know and already understand. If you are designing a chair, for example, you know that humans are of predictable height. The seat height, the angle of repose, and the loading requirements can at least be approximated. So draw them. Most students panic when faced with something they do not know and cannot control. Forget about it. Begin at the beginning. Then work on each unknown, solving and removing them one at a time. It is the most important rule of design. In Zen it is expressed as “Be where you are.” It works.
It does.
The value of education
Posted on March 21, 2004
Filed Under Life | 7 Comments
We had lunch at Sbarro today. I purchased a salad and a drink and the cashier, who looked to be about 17-19 years old said “$6.07 please.” I handed him the $20 in my hand. He asked if I had the exact change since they didn’t have any singles in the drawer. When I said that I didn’t have anything else, he said he’d have to give me back a few dollars in quarters and he rang it through. As he was saying this, I found a $1 bill in the corner of my wallet. I handed him that along with a quarter. He stared at me blankly. “Give me $15.18″ I said. He still looked panicked, and said “But I already finished the transaction, I have to give you back $13.93″ because that’s what the computer read-out said when he entered “$20.00″ as the amount tendered. This guy would rather count out nearly $4 in coin than trust me that 21.25 minus 6.07 equals 15.18 because he didn’t have the cognitive tools to confirm this for himself.
So, I ask you, is this a sad commentary on the state of education in this country or our over-reliance on technology? Or as Eric answered, both?
Why weblog software?
Posted on March 21, 2004
Filed Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment
John Gruber, in talking about his thought process behind the new Markdown plug-in he wrote, “explains”:http://daringfireball.net/2004/03/dive_into_markdown why so-called nerds will use blogging software even though they are perfectly capable of hand-coding a frequently updated website:
bq. The answer is convenience and flexibility. Weblog software takes away an inordinate amount of the monotony involved with updating a web site. I must profess — I personally didn’t figure this out until 2002, a few months before I launched Daring Fireball. The fact that I was capable of hand-coding an entire web site — and in fact considered hand-coding easy — blinded me to the fact that it involved an awful lot of repetitive monkey work.
He’s exactly right. I have no fear whatsoever of ugly, naked HTML and CSS. But for the first time ever I have a truly dynamic website (and by “dynamic” I hope you understand that I’m not talking about whether the pages are static HTML or PHP) and the traffic is starting to reflect that. Why? Because before if I had something to say I had to go through so many repetitive, boring tasks to get the pages updated that most of the time it wasn’t worth the effort. My portfolio and non-blog sections of this site are suffering from this neglect now as a matter of fact ( “recently updated”:http://www.momathome.com/viewfromhome/archivesnew/graphicweb_design/updated_portfolio.html ) and therefore my site redesign will move my portfolio to its own “blog” for frequent updating/editing. Now, using “ecto”:http://www.kung-foo.tv/ecto/ or any web browser on any platform I can quickly get my content online and let scripts & back-end magic handle the presentation and dull stuff. Right now I’m typing this through my browser on my PC because that’s where I read the article I’m commenting on. Most posts are through ecto. I may even post from my Mom’s house or a computer at the public library. I don’t have to be concerned about what editors are there or what I can use to log in to my server via FTP to upload revised pages. All I need is my MT username and password and something to say. This is extremely cool.
He then goes into a whole explanation of why “Markdown”:http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ is needed, but I haven’t figured out why I should use Markdown over my text formatter of choice, Textile. Textile is the very first thing I install on any MovableType system. I want to teach someone how to log in to their website and edit/upload a post. Do I want to give them a crash course in HTML or just give them a link to the “Textile formatting cheat sheet”:http://www.bradchoate.com/mt/docs/mtmanual_textile2.html that’s so much easier to understand for a newbie compared to HTML. Easier to explain ==”What they want the world to see”:http://www.wherelinkgoes.com or *this is bold* _this is italic_== No worries about whether or not the fact that they forgot a closing tag breaks the page. He says that Markdown created entries preview more like the final version but I looked at the sample code and I don’t see much difference between that and Textile other than the fact that the syntax is different. Writing “in” Textile is already second nature to me so I don’t want to learn something new that does the same thing, but for weblog editors it’s nice to see that there are options. Options are good.
*Update:* “Michael Tsai”:http://mjtsai.com/blog/2004/03/19/markdown_10b3.html explains why Markdown is different/better than Textile in a lot more detail. It makes sense in a “not all of it makes sense to someone who has a design degree and no programming training whatsoever” sort of way.
TypeKey? No, I don’t think so
Posted on March 20, 2004
Filed Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment
MovableType 3.0 is coming, and included with that will be TypeKey. It’s a *centralized* comment registration system. Maybe it was just me, but when I heard comment registration was coming in MovableType 3.0, I thought it would be a MySQL-type solution so we could authorize commenters for our own site(s). Like some others, I’m disappointed that it’s a centralized system and I will say right now that I have no intention of enabling TypeKey when I upgrade to MovableType 3.0. I wasn’t planning on comment registration for this site anyway.
I won’t require registration for all the reasons well-expressed on this page, (also follow the comments/trackbacks) plus the simple fact that I like that a visitor can spontaneously decide to comment without jumping through hoops or leaving a trail. It’s *my* website, if I don’t like what they have to say I can just delete the comment. Not that I will, or that I have, but I can. Ah, power. 
My volume of comments (about 350 or so on over 500 entries) doesn’t warrant anything complicated. Very small stuff.
The very thing that excited me about MovableType in the first place, compared to Blogger, was the lack of a centralized system. I could tweak the install to my liking, and dump the rest. I could add in features developed by others. I’ve installed MovableType now on 6 different servers for different sites and no two look the same in structure or presentation. I like that.
It doesn’t make MovableType evil (comparing it to the Patriot Act is a bit strong), just not exactly what I signed up for. Reminds me of Apple, actually. It’s not wrong that the focus is on digital lifestyle and music, it’s just not what I came in looking for.
