More short bits
Posted on August 31, 2004
Filed Under Misc. | Leave a Comment
* Rome wasn’t built in a day, but “this”:http://www.elpforboe.com website was. I’m doing the graphic design for the local Democrats running for the Board of Education. I designed a logo and palm cards for them. We talked about putting together a website, so I registered the domain and put it on the cards. The cards were picked up from the printer today, ready to start handing out at a big community church fair tonight. Around 11 am, I realized that we never put content on the site! Yikes! I considered throwing a “coming soon” graphic up there but then decided to actually build something. Four hours later, and using the content from the palm cards and viola! “a 10 page website.”:http://www.elpforboe.com Simple, but I like it and more important, the client(s) like it.
* I have fallen in love with “Fireworks MX 2004.”:http://www.macromedia.com/fireworks I don’t use it for the HTML or Javascript. I lay out the look & feel of the page and then slice out the images as I need them for the site, using the Fireworks “comp” as my guide for size & spacing. I know I can let Fireworks do the coding, but I prefer to write my XHTML and CSS in Dreamweaver from scratch. I may tweak the design here and there, but my finished pages usually look 95% like they do in Fireworks. Need to change an image? No problem, just go back to the original PNG of the entire page, change the one little part and then Export the images again. The MX 2004 version handles graphics from Illustrator & Photoshop CS very well (compared to MX, which required me to save AI files down to version 8 first). I’ve also noticed that Fireworks makes much smaller JPEGs with better quality settings. I can take a 200×200 photo and get it under 8K with 80-90% quality while in ImageReady, the quality starts degrading in the same photo as soon as it gets under 12K.
* I’m not in love with the new “iMac,”:http://www.apple.com/imac visually. It’s too hard-edged for my tastes. This isn’t the cute little machine that’s going to mimic the Pixar lamp and say “Hi!” Then again, I don’t like looking at my PowerMac G5 that much either. But I sure like what it does and that’s what counts. Hard to believe I’ve had my happy air grille for almost a year now.
* I’ve been using “LaunchBar”:http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/ for what feels like forever now. It was one of the first OS X applications I purchased (that and Watson). But I think I’m switching from LaunchBar to “QuickSilver.”:http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/22549 LaunchBar 4 is nice, but I’m just not using all its bells and whistles to warrant paying an upgrade fee. QuickSilver is somewhere between LaunchBar 3 and 4, and it’s free. Purdy, too. At this point in my life, free is very good.
* Wow, 3rd grade is serious. Today was the second day of school and Laini came home with a page of math, 10 vocabulary words to write in sentences, 20 minutes of reading and a paragraph to write. I’m thrilled that she not only got a great teacher, but she’s with most of her classmates from last year. The sweetest group of children. There isn’t a bully or troublemaker in the bunch. Some have been with Laini since Kindergarten and they seem to “get” her (she’s quirky, to say the least). Her desk is kind of close to the door, which I know won’t last long. Last year she started the year in the middle of the pack and each time I visited the class, Laini was sitting closer and closer to the teacher. By the end of the year she was inches away. You’d be hard pressed to find a 8 year-old that distracts easier than my girl. We’ve already written it into her IEP (Special Education document) that she’ll get to take the CMTs next year in a separate, quiet room (The CMTs are *the* standardized test in CT).
* Listened to the Republican Convention last night (Eric had it on in the den while I was working here). Couldn’t tell one speaker from the other. All that kept going through my head was the phrase, “don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.” 
GMail Beta with the emphasis on BETA
Posted on August 28, 2004
Filed Under Internet & Technology | 11 Comments
Well this is annoying. I got a GMail account on Wednesday (3 days ago), played with it for a little while and liked it. So I transferred all my mailing list traffic to the account. Took me quite some time that afternoon to find the “subscribe” address or web page and deal with the auto confirmations and the like for the 10 or so lists that I’m on. Was nice to take the traffic out of the momathome.com domain and leave Outlook just for the email that is addressed directly to me from friends, family & clients.
This afternoon around 1:30 pm I login and see:
bq.. We’re currently performing some unexpected maintenance on your account. While we can’t predict exactly how long it will take, we’re working as quickly as we can to restore access to your email–apologies for the inconvenience.
If you have questions, please contact us at gmail-maintenance@google.com.
p. Forget for a moment the irony of telling someone to send an email to find out why they can’t use their email. I guess you have to assume that everyone has access to another email client. A few hours later, still the same message so I send an email to the address supplied and I instantly get this auto reply:
bq.. Your Gmail account has been disabled due to a technical issue. Our engineers are working diligently to find a solution so that you can regain access to your account. Unfortunately, we cannot offer an exact timeframe of when your account will be re-enabled. Please try logging in to your Gmail account again in a few days. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and we thank you for your patience during our limited test of Gmail. Sincerely, The Gmail Team
p. I certainly hope the “GMail Team” is more effective than the “Momathome Team” that keeps telling me that my email is over quota. Don’t you just love that “limited test of GMail” as in “you accepted an invite to a closed beta test so don’t complain too loudly that it’s messed up.”
I know it’s a beta. I get that. But “…try logging in to your GMail account again in a few days” irks me. IN A FEW DAYS?!?! That’s it? That’s the explanation? How about offering me a new account in the meantime, for starters? I know from posting to the GMail-Users list (by logging in directly through the “Google Groups”:http://www.googlegroups.com page) that not everyone is affected and I don’t know if it’s just me, me and 10 other or me and a thousand others. Isn’t it a little late in the beta for this?
I’m a little paranoid about access to my email. I want to know where it is at all times. I originally got momathome.com as a domain just so I could take email out of my ISP’s hands. If my email is down for more than 30 minutes, I can write to my host and get a personal reply back in less than 10 minutes explaining the issue and even that only happened once in the 18 months I’ve been with this web host. Worst comes to worst and the host was consistently unreliable, I could find another host and be in business in less than 24 hours. Therefore, I know right now that while GMail is cool for “casual” email the odds are slim that I will ever trust it for more than that.
At least an email I just sent to my GMail account didn’t bounce, so I don’t have to worry (for now) that I’ll be removed from the lists for bouncing while the traffic piles up. I’m just not in the mood to go through the subscribe routine again. At least the majority of the groups I subscribe to have online archives or posting so I can skim traffic of the groups I actively participate.
Update: This morning, the account is back up. 
Core food list? Not here, sorry
Posted on August 26, 2004
Filed Under Life | 3 Comments
I already mentioned this in a comment on another entry, but I think it deserves to be stated separately. Judging by the increased traffic to this site from folks who “Googled”:http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=mozclient&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=weight+watchers+core+plan their way to my site, there may an expectation that one can get the details of the new “Weight Watchers”:http://www.weightwatchers.com food plan here. Sorry, no can do. The plan *is* online…can’t help that. I won’t post the core food list here or link to sites that have it. I’m more than happy to talk about the Turnaround program and why/how it works…I won’t post details that someone can use to do the food plan on their own. Why? For two reasons:
# Would an Adobe employee be doing him/herself any good by posting the full version of Photoshop on their site? Same thing here. Weight Watchers gets people to walk into the centers and join. Those people pay money. Weight Watchers does well. I work more. You do the math.
# The motto of Weight Watchers from years ago still stands: “Some talking, some listening, and a program that works” (that’s pretty close if not an exact quote). Becoming a member, making the commitment to weigh yourself and be accountable while changing the way you think about food is a huge part of the program. Even more important than the food plan itself. I think people who just download the details of the food plan without everything else that goes into the program are doing themselves a disservice, and I’d probably say that whether I was an employee or not.
Awesome book on web standards
Posted on August 26, 2004
Filed Under Design | Leave a Comment
Do you ever read something and realize that you were about to throw everything you knew before out the window? Over a year ago, I read Eric Meyer’s Eric Meyer on CSS just around the same time that I read Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards and I knew that I would never look at laying out a web page the same again. I couldn’t build a website the old way now if I tried.
A few days ago I picked up Dan Cederholm’s Web Standards Solutions and I’m hearing the same music cueing up. In case you’re not a web standards zealot, Dan Cederholm was behind many well-known standards sites including “Fast Company”:http://www.fastcompany.com and “ESPN.”:http://www.espn.com It is the perfect follow-up to Zeldman’s book. Zeldman takes a lot of pages charting the ground for web standards. Cederholm doesn’t have to waste any time convincing the reader regarding web standards. He assumes that you’re already sold, you know your IDs from your classes and you’re reading his book to go a level deeper and do it better. I’m only about 60 pages in (yes, I’m reading this one cover-to-cover) and I already had a few “Ah ha! Now I get it!” moments that made the book well worth buying. The sites I code are all valid XHTML/CSS already, but there’s always room for improvement where you can make the code leaner, cleaner and more accessible.
Sad Marriott ad
Posted on August 26, 2004
Filed Under Macintosh | 5 Comments
I was flipping through the current issue of “Wired”:http://www.wired.com magazine when I saw this ad for “Marriott”:http/www.marriott.com Residence Inn:
I love that it depicts a professional woman. I love that she’s using her Apple iBook and iSight to stay in touch back with her man and we are to presume that they’re finishing their chess game as if there was no miles between them.
But look closer at her screen:
What’s sadder? The fact that she’s away from her loved one and has to play chess over a webcam, or that she’s currently staring at a picture of her guy in Photoshop instead of using that iSight to talk to him?
Note to ad agency: it’s not difficult to fake an iChat interface…but at least have the model hit “tab” on the iBook so you can get rid of the Photoshop menubar and toolbars before shooting the picture!
