"Oh...Why Do You Smell Like A Drunken Sailor..."

The NYT's Chandler Burr takes issue with the artificial strawberry notes, but you can't argue with the packaging. Tattoo has come a long way since the days when people had clandestine visits by New Hampshire tattoo artists arranged by connected friends. There are now tattoo parlors all around my neighborhood in Salem, which fits right in with the local maritime flavor.

"Oh...Why Do You Smell Like A Drunken Sailor..."

Why Blogging Was Invented

I mean really, where would the internet be without access to other folks' pastry-based misfortunes?

Cakewrecks.com

Why Blogging Was Invented

Just Like Amazon, But Cozier...

Recommended by Elge Premeau, Good Reads is like an online bookclub, without the added pressure of being responsible for the baked goods. (Users seem to have a love/hate relationship with "Twilight")

Just Like Amazon, But Cozier...

My laws, these eHow folks are friendly...

All this because I had to join in order to post a simple comment.
(boo hoo)

My laws, these eHow folks are friendly...

Smart Car Test Crash Video

-Seemingly directed from beyond by Sam Peckinpah
view video here (easy download too!)

Smart Car Test Crash Video

Are They Kidding?

So apparently, Bomoms, Boston.com's blog for moms, posted an article called "Does Facebook Make You a Bad Mom?" Talk about a great way to build comment traffic! Suggest to any mother that she may be ignoring her children for 2 seconds while she does something that doesn't revolve 100% around them and sit back and watch the she-wolf come out.

Are They Kidding?

Jennsweb's Table-Top Photo Studio

My sister-in-law gave Chloe a present in this cute little take-out gift box. Serendipitously, I needed an image of a take-out box for a project I've been working on, so I decided to try and get an image I could easily work with in Photoshop. So I grabbed Chloe's easel paper, draped one end over the speaker, positioned the desk lamp and used a sunshield for a bounce card.


There you go, instant table-top photo studio!

Jennsweb's Table-Top Photo Studio

“American designers took the Depression as a call to arms,”

Interesting article in the New York Times about how tough economic times often bring out the best in the design world. Name-checks include Russel Wright and Charles and Ray Eames.

On the nostalgia tip, my dad bought an Eames chair and ottoman like the one pictured above and I learned to walk by holding myself up on the ottoman seat which rotated with me as I staggered around. When my parents separated in the 70's the chair stayed with my mother and sister and I until 1983 when we moved. The movers picked up the chair by the arms, the ball bearings fell out of the base, and my mother just shrugged and told them to put it out on the curb for trash day. Of course, my dad asked about the chair two months later and when I told him it was gone he probably had a mental coronary.

“American designers took the Depression as a call to arms,”

File Under: Wish I'd Had This 2 Years Ago

Good article on Freelance Switch by Susan Johnston about balancing freelance work with a full time job.

Lord knows I tried for about a year. It was only after trying to take care of a hosting issue for my client with a local hosting company that only had tech support during "banker's hours" (?!), that I realized that trying to cram commuting, raising a child, having a 9 hour a day office job and trying to start my own web design business required approximately 36 hours a day instead of the allotted 24. Of course the office job was the time thief, not to mention the time (2.5 hours a day) and $$ ($250 a month) it was costing me. So I started trolling Craig's List and quickly found a job in Salem that was not only "flex-time" but also required graphic/web design skills.

After a brief "honeymoon" (pot-luck lunches! kibbitzing encouraged!), I quickly realized that the term flex-time actually meant, "you can only work the hours we can afford to pay you for" so when my husband told me that the local film industry was in full swing again, I braced myself and went into work to hand in my notice. My co-worker was currently fighting being deported back to Eastern Europe and I knew that both of us vanishing from the office would leave my boss with no one else to answer the phones but her senile, but lovable, golden retriever.

Fortunately, (depending how you look at it) she had already decided that in order to afford the salary of a trainee to replace the soon-to-be-deported tech support/salesperson, she would have to let me go and that was that. I was a (guilt-free!) freelancer again.

It's been almost a year now since that day and while there are days where my husband works 18 hours and I am left at the mercy of a tiny diva-in-training, there are other days where he takes her to some indoors playground for 6 hours followed by a 2 hour grocery-shopping trip and I am free to work with no tiny hands pulling me like the Death Star's tractor beam towards the playdough table. It's not yet the ideal home office situation where I can shut the door and be in my own little Ikea-furnished kingdom, but how many companies let you watch "Oswald" while you work?

Jennsweb fun factoid: Henry the Penguin on "Oswald" is voiced by David Lander of "Laverne and Shirley" fame.

File Under: Wish I'd Had This 2 Years Ago

Say What!?

This is from a Boston.com article entitled "Obama's To-Do List":

Obama advisers say he may review the department's newly approved guidelines that could let the FBI investigate Americans in national security cases without evidence of a crime, based in part on their ethnicity or religion.

Yeah, you might want to take a second look at those guidelines, right after you remove the swastika flag from behind the desk of whatever numbnuts approved said guideline.

This whole transition scenario reminds me of the time I was hired to take over for an obviously overwhelmed temp worker. The first day of my job was spent hauling fistfuls of documents, contracts and invoices out of where they had been crammed helter-skelter in various drawers. It was scary how long it took to recover from the previous employee's incompetence. Hopefully, Obama will have more assistance than I did since, you know, the stakes are a lot higher.

Say What!?

Google and Yahoo decide to go separate ways.

Google has decided to pull out of a deal to partner up with Yahoo on advertising services. First reported in April, there was a tentative agreement to share advertising space on web pages but it has been scrapped basically because people are worried that it will lead to Google becoming the new Microsoft. Unfortunately, now Yahoo is more vulnerable than ever to a takeover by Microsoft itself, so there you go. Sometimes there's such a fine line between celebrating diversity and divide and conquer.

In other news...

Google and Yahoo decide to go separate ways.

Cool Site of the Day

Found via Reddit's link about an eight-armed creature existing before the dinosaurs by about 300 million years. (Ungoliant perhaps?) A clean, colorful and visually appealing site about science news on the Australian news site, abc.net.au proves that Australians got it going on.

Cool Site of the Day

5 Good Knitting Sites and Why They Rock

Whoo! FINALLY getting a chance to post something! It's been a crazy week, what with my husband being out of town, my toddler going for the potty training full throttle (she's even started asking for something to read while she's on the throne OMG) and mucho michegaus with working on some client leads...

But enough about me, here are some sites that I've collected that deal with various aspects of knitting. Some are educational, others are just fun to read. Enjoy!

Knitting Help
Why it rocks: Free knitting videos, a nice modern interface and patterns. Also a photowall which is pretty cool.

Stitchy McYarn Pants
Why it rocks: Even the name of the site cracks me up. When you slip a stitch, go here to get away and find side-splitting examples of day-glo, acrylic knitted beer can hats and other rummage sale flash-backs. (Jennsweb trivia: I went to Mass Art with the blog's author and her sense of humor has sharpened with age like a fine gouda)

Queer Joe's Knitting Blog
Why it rocks: More than just a series of tutorials and odes to cable stitches, Joe blogs about everything from politics, to his impending retirement, to his partner Thaddeus's passion for mushroom foraging.

Fake Sheep Blog
Why it rocks: It's a beautifully designed Wordpress site run by a New Zealand vegan who only knits with non-animal fibers. In New Zealand, which has more sheep than people. 'Nuff said.

Knitty Blog
Why it rocks: This is a great online resource for the initiated, dedicated knitter who wants to keep up with what's new in the world of knitting. Also, patterns galore (some of which actually transcend the "I'm a crafty knitter type!" look) and a link to a cool cafepress store.

That's it for now. Enjoy!

5 Good Knitting Sites and Why They Rock

AAARRRGH!!! moment of the day

Brought to you by Boston's Craig's List

AAARRRGH!!! moment of the day

...and in other news

Rumblings on the BBC website about unconfirmed reports that a US airstrike has hit a village in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan near the Afghan border. Just a little FYI from the British News, because we are too busy navel-gazing over the economy to notice right now.

Note to reader, yes, the economy is a HUGE deal. I just hope we don't screw up our foreign policy credit with the world at the same time. Oh, wait, too late.

...and in other news

Free Printer Service

Found this on CNET this morning. A free online service that lets you enter a URL, select what you want to print and then print ONLY what you want to print. Saves ink AND paper!

Free Printer Service

Axis Flashback!

Maybe it's the random firing of neurons, maybe it's oncoming senility, but for some reason I felt the urge to track down some Trisomie 21 just to see if it was out there. Found a clip on Last FM which you can see here
Feel free to light up a Kretek clove cigarette and blast a fog machine to get the full effect.

Axis Flashback!

Hip Hop Doc Beat Street Break Down!

RRRRRRUP!!!!
I have a half formed memory of watching a documentary about hip hop and graffiti culture around the year 1984 in the basement rec room of one of my church youth group cadre's. We had one of those "get to the kids by reaching out to their youth culture" type leaders and I guess it made an impression on me. Hip hop was a divisive and defining subculture. In the whitey-white suburbs, it caused fist fights at parties when someone slapped a 12 inch of "Beat Street Breakdown" on the turntable. Some kids would start hesitantly bouncing their heads to the beat, someone would start breaking out whatever moves they had picked up from MTV and then some music critic type would charge over to the stereo and start ranting while they ripped the needle off the record. "This isn't real music! RUSH is real music!!! At least they play their own instruments!!!" 2112 ain't bad, but you can't bob your head to it.
Fast forward to Tuesday and Netflix delivered my copy of "Style Wars". I sat there mildly enjoying the contrast between pre-gansta b-boy dialect and tweedy white guy voice over interspersed with classic footage of former mayor of NYC Ed Koch and the odd outraged average citizen when they cut to a gallery opening for a group of graffiti bombers. Suddenly it all came back in a flood, the plaid couch, the youth minister freezing the tape in the vcr to show us some point he wanted to make. An nice Upper West Side art collector's wife described an art critic asking one of the artists what they would do if he painted over his work and to watch her try to impersonate an 18 year old bomber saying "I'd keell you mon." was a defining moment.
Makes a great double feature with "Beat Street" which is kind of an awesome film if you can get past the Filmmaking 101 acting and editing.
Visit this link to donate to the Smithsonian's Hip Hop collection.

Hip Hop Doc Beat Street Break Down!

GOTCHA!

So I keep seeing emails in my inbox purporting to be from Google adwords telling me that I have to "update" my billing information. In fact I saw one tonight that said my site's adwords had been "stoped". Curious, I went to jennsweb's home page and there was the usual text link Adsense ad plain as day. Now even more curious, I Googled "adwords scam" and Boom! This popped up.
I've said it before, and now I'll paraphrase it again. Scammers eat their young.

GOTCHA!

A Good Way to Utilize RSS

Scan job sites for your next gig.

A Good Way to Utilize RSS

Useful article about Linux

Because it's free, you're free, it's secure and it's easy.
Go check it out!

Useful article about Linux

The Answer to Adrian's Question

4 Stories about the resignation of Admiral William J. Fallon, the military commander of US Middle East operations.

Time Magazine

New York Times
Al Jazeera's version

The Intelligence Daily's analysis

The Answer to Adrian's Question

History Lesson Of The Day

A brief history of world conflicts from WWII to Gulf War II enacted with the native cuisine of the countries involved. I think I just learned more watching a bunch of animated cheeseburgers than I did in an entire semester of high school history class.

History Lesson Of The Day

Jennsweb's Excellent SEO Glossary

For anyone who's ever wondered what phrases like "pinging Technorati's rss feed for Diggs" mean.

Delicious: Del.icio.us is at heart, an online service that lets you bookmark pages on the web under a user name. Whenever you save a page's URL, Del.icio.us's user interface asks you to tag the page with keywords. These keyword tags are used to index the page in a searchable database. Entering a keyword such as "design" in a search will reveal all pages tagged with that keyword. The fun comes when you start checking out who else has saved the same page as you have and you are able to browse their collection of links.


Digg: Responsible use of Digg's services is like being your own publicist. Whenever you publish new content on your web site, you should submit the URL of the new information to Digg. There's a few steps to go through, but once your submittal has been checked for its spam factor and approved, the URL you have posted goes into rotation on Digg's site in the category you have chosen it to appear under. Also, if you run a blog and the posts are Digg-enabled, the posts appear in order of most Diggs when someone searches your posts.

Permalinks: If you run a site with Wordpress, you have the option of using Permalinks to make your posts' and pages' titles more visible to search engines. Log into your Wordpress site's dashboard and under Options, choose Permalinks. If they have not been enabled, you will simply need to choose the format option and click Update Permalink Structure. Choosing the Date and Name based option will give transform the url of a Post or Page from http://jennmearswebdesign.com/p=23 into http://jennmearswebdesign.com/2008/03/jennswebs-excellent-SEO-glossary which is much more attractive title to a search engine that happens to be looking for SEO+glossary.


Pingbacks: Pingbacks are a way of knowing when someone has linked to a post on your blog. Imagine that everyone's blog is a little submarine traveling through the vast ocean of the web. The clever submarine operator would want to know when another vessel is in the neighborhood so they make sure that they have enabled their sub with Pingbacks. They can tell when another sub has "pinged" them vice versa.

RSS:Basically, RSS was developed to let websites syndicate their content using XML. If you picture the world wide web as an actual spider web, then imagine that your site is an insect stuck in the web. If it struggles/publishes new rss-enabled content a lot, then search engine "spiders" will notice it much more than an insect just sitting there. Creating an RSS feed for your site makes it a lot more attractive to search engines and they will index you more frequently. Also, if a visitor uses RSS feeds to keep up with sites, they will be much more likely to keep coming back if you make it easier to find out when you have new content.

Search Engine Spider: These are automated scripts developed by search engine companies like Google, Lycos and Yahoo that "crawl" over the web checking for new content. Much like an actual spider, these programs don't exactly have 20/20 vision. They react to things like page titles containing searched-for keywords and frequently updated content, "movement" on the web, if you will.

Technorati: The top ranked content syndication site out there. It's like "Reader's Digest" without the bad cartoons. If you resister your site with them, they will index your content via your post's tags. The indexed tags become part of their database so that when a Technorati user searches for a term like "SEO" your post tagged with "SEO" will show up in the results along with other blogs' posts tagged SEO.

Trackback: A trackback is notification that another blog has linked back to yours. Kind of like a "shout out", it works when both sites have enabled trackbacks. This way, when you publish a post and have enabled the trackback function, blogs that have sent you a trackback "ping" will be displayed in the comments section. And as Oscar Wilde said, "The only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about."

Jennsweb's Excellent SEO Glossary

Excellent Question Adrian

Excellent Question Adrian

Free Stock Photo site of the day

The Stockexpert site is one of that rarest of breeds, a free photo website that is actually free! Well, some of their best photos are only available via their credit system, but it is clearly explained and they tell you right on the 1st pop-up window how much each photo is at each resolution. Having spent the good part of a rainy Saturday afternoon slogging through about 6 stock photo websites, this site was tops for selection, pricing (majority of pay-for-use images $1) and ease of use.

Free Stock Photo site of the day

RSS: a guide to weeding the web

What is RSS and why should I care?

RSS is an acronym for several variations of the same idea. Some people take it to mean Rich Site Summary. Others like the meaning RDF Site Summary, but for the majority of users out there, it stands for Really Simple Syndication. What this all means is that sites that are RSS-enabled make it very easy for readers to check and see if a site has new content that they may want to read. If you find yourself constantly checking particular sites to see if they have anything new, then you'll realize that it saves you a lot of time to be able to track all your favorite sites in one central location rather than having to remember a bunch of URLs.

How do I start?

In order to get started in the world of RSS feeds, you will need to get what is called a news reader. The three main types are down-loadable desktop applications, browser-based programs and web-based programs that you can set up an account with.

Here are some places to look to get started.

down-loadable reader programs


browser based readers


web-based readers

Now, I'll show you a quick and easy example of how I keep track of a few sites via RSS.

I have the Firefox browser, which is the browser of choice for a LOT of designers and developers for reasons that I won't go into here because they are numerous enough to merit their own post. For our purposes today, just take a look at the patch of pink fog in the top right corner.




That little orange chicklet appears next to the URL of any site that Firefox senses is RSS feed-enabled. And since ThirstyPony is a site that is all about SEO, the site's creator has (very wisely) enabled a feed.





Since I am a big SEO geek, I want to keep checking in with TP to see if they have new stuff. So I want to click on the little orange chicklet in order to start subscribing to the site.




(As you can see from the dropdown list, there are several variations on the idea of syndicated feeds. When feeds became widely available around the turn of the century, there was a rush to create the best version and this gave rise to various "forks" in the road to RSS development.)

for extra credit read more here


Once you've chosen your RSS format, Firefox will ask where you would like to store your feed. I chose my bookmarks toolbar.
































So from now on, whenever I want to keep track of what's new on Thirsty Pony, I just go to my bookmarks toolbar in Firefox and hover over the link to bring up the newest items. (now my secret's out. I'm an HP geek too)
















Should my site be RSS enabled?

If you publish new content to your site with any frequency absolutely! To a user that's hip to RSS, it will make your site much more attractive since they will appreciate the fact that you have taken the effort to make your content RSS friendly.

If you want to give it a go, you can get started here

(psst! they also have RSS graphics!)


Is there anything else I should do after my site is RSS enabled?

I recommend using Feedburner to re-publish your feed to a wider audience and Marshall Kirkpatrick has written an excellent article about why.


Can I display other sites' feeds on my site?
It's not a bad idea, if you want to be a good resource for your loyal visitors. (It's considered polite to ask the other sites before you do it though.)

RSS: a guide to weeding the web

We interrupt this blog to bring you an important message from the BBC

While on assignment in Afghanistan with Sebastian Junger for Vanity Fair, Tim Hetherington took this photo of an exhausted US soldier in a bunker in the Korengal Valley. This photo won the World Press Photo of the Year award. There's also a great photo essay linked to the article.

We interrupt this blog to bring you an important message from the BBC

Most Ironic Link of the Week

In an article about how to use advertising on a Wordpress site, someone created a link for Adbrite's service, but left out the "d" in the url. The reader is taken to a "splash page" for a Texas metal finishing company's site that even has one of those waving American flag gifs on its homepage.
Whoopsy!

Most Ironic Link of the Week

Getting Photos into your Google Map

Since I'm currently working on 3 different sites that require working with Google's map feature, I've had a chance to find a few quirks in their map interface. After trying to use their instructions to insert images into a map marker pop up, I found a few workarounds.
This quick tutorial assumes three things: 1) That you have a Google account. 2) That you have a map already created and saved into your "My Maps" on Google. 3) That you have set up a Google Picasa account.

I also recommend using a browsing program that allows you to open up multiple tabs since you will need to click back and forth between tabs.

The Google Picasa/Map method:

Step 1: In your image editing program, create an image that is at least 144 pixels wide.


Save on your computer as a jpg image. Make a note of its measurements in pixels for Step 8.



Step 2: On the web, go to your Google account and on the home page, go to More>Photos. On your Picasa page, select New Album on the right.

Step 3: Upload your jpg image. Then go back to your album and click on the image. After the image loads into its own page, you will see a link entitled "link to this image" in the 4th box down on the right. Click on it.

Step 4: Choose the "HTML to embed in website" option by clicking in the text box. This will highlight the code. Go to the top toolbar in your browser and under Edit click Copy.

Step 5: Now open a new tab in your browser (File>New Tab), and go to your Google homepage again. Click on Maps in the upper left corner of the page. Once that page opens, go to My Maps and select the map that you have created and saved.

Step 6: Once the map you want to work on is loaded into the window on the right, Click on the Edit button. This will enable you to make changes to your map. With your map in Edit mode, click on an area or marker to edit its contents.(see image below for example)


















Step 7: Here's the fun part! Switch to edit HTML and click at the top of the window to place the cursor there. Then, go to the top toolbar again and hit Edit > Paste. This will paste the URL that you copied from your Picasa page. You actually only need part of the pasted code. You will need to find the part that says img src= and delete the code that comes before it.(see the example code below for this and the next step)










Step 8: After you have deleted the a href tag, go to the end of the pasted code and delete the closing tag. (). Then, directly after the URL of the image in the remaining code, but before the closing bracket (>), type: width=(width in pixels)px height=(height in pixels)px. (see image below)



Step 9: Click Save on the left, and then click on the marker or area again. Check to make sure everything is OK by switching to the Rich Text choice in the pop-up window.

If everything looks OK, click Done.
Note: if it doesn't look right at first, make sure the code for the image reads img src="url for image" and then the width and height.

Getting Photos into your Google Map

SEO for Wordpress

Good tips for optimizing a Wordpress powered site and for websites in general.

SEO for Wordpress

Wordpress Advertising-The easy way

It seems like it should be easy enough. Your client wants to put a few ads for local businesses into the sidebar of their site. So you upload an image for the ad into your "images" folder, open up your "sidebar.php" file, find out where you want the ad to show up, write some html and Voila! Hey, wait a minute, there's no image, just the "alt" tag showing through. What up?

After spending some time wading through the Wordpress forums, I found out that I should put a text widget into my sidebar. Okay, simple enough, wait! Now my entire sidebar disappeared!
I took the text1 widget out and tried looking for another solution.

If Wordpress has a weak link, it's the fact that its administrators tend to shunt most of the technical support into the forums arena. Its a nice gesture to let the community solve its own problems and it frees up their time to keep developing, but, as we all know, these online forums run the risk of being rife with misinformation and posters who forget to play nice. Long story short, after much Googling, I found a very simple solution that doesn't involve messy widgets or plugins. (Muchos gracias Lorelle and Wendy!)

Jennsweb recipe for easy Wordpress Ads
(author's note: these are simply advertising text, image and link. Therefore, they don't count clicks, or generate themselves dynamically via keywords. That is a plugin thing.)

Step 1: Create a small rectangular image to use for your ad. Save it at dimensions that will fit into your theme's sidebar. I created the image at the top of this article to be 100 pixels wide by 124 high. For consistency's sake, I save the optimized image in the "images" folder of the theme.

Step 2: Go to your site's Admin panel (dashboard) and choose Write>Post. Just write a quick title in the Title area so you will be able to find it later.

Step 3: Go down to the Upload area and browse to where you saved the image and upload it. Make sure it uploads at the full size.

Step 4: Save the post, but don't publish it.

Step 5: Go to Manage>Uploads to find the image you just uploaded. Click on the image to load its URL into the address bar.

Step 6: Highlight the image's URL and then copy it.

Step 7: Go to Presentation>Theme Editor, and select your sidebar file for editing. Find the place in the code where you would like the ad to appear. For example, I chose a place down at the end, just in front of the closing tag.

Step 8: Type in the HTML for your ad's copy and hyperlink. For the image, type in something like this:



Step 9: Now place your cursor in between the two quotation marks and paste the image's URL there.

Step 10: Click "update file" and then view your site to test the result. You may want to tweak the copy or placement a little, and that should be possible with the theme's stylesheet file.

Wordpress Advertising-The easy way

Cool Internet Explorer simulator

Because there's nothing more frustrating than wasting blood, sweat and tears developing a page that renders beautifully in Firefox and Safari, only to find out that Internet Explorer is treating it like a red-headed step-child.
Thanks to Lifehacker for the link!

Cool Internet Explorer simulator

Ayyiyi! Estos comentarios son tan picantes!

I love it when I go searching for a solution for a client and come across a little online skirmish like this!

Ayyiyi! Estos comentarios son tan picantes!

All you ever wanted to know about Wordpress...

...but didn't even know to ask:

What is it?
It's an online content management tool. That means that you are able to make changes to the site via a web browser.

How does it work?
You have to download Wordpress from the website and then upload it to your hosting server. Once it's on your site, you can upload photos, make web pages that you can edit once they are published, and keep an blog on your site for quick news items or articles or interesting links.

What's so great about that?
Say your company has a new product coming out. If you need to update your site to include information about that product then you might face a costly site re-design. With a tool like Wordpress, however, you would sign into the site, choose to add a page about the new product and your site's links would automatically be updated to reflect the new information.

Is it tricky?
I would only say, if you do not have a clear idea of what you want your site to look like or say or how you would like your information organized, then things can get a little sticky. Once you have that all sorted out, then make sure you kick the tires of your theme a little before you dive into creating the site.

So, do I still need to hire a designer?
That's an excellent question.
I would say that if you feel comfortable using an FTP program, and you know how to access your website's folder on your hosting company's server to copy the Wordpress download there, check out a couple of good books and go for it.
If you want a fully customized site with the right bells and whistles and you would rather it in the hands of someone who will manage all the details while you focus on your actual business, then a designer can be a cost-effective solution.
Simply add up how much time you spend in the forum, divide it by the cost of a cup coffee and multiply it by the square root of itself. If the end result is less than your age in dog years, have fun!

All you ever wanted to know about Wordpress...

How do you say "Allah Akbar" in HTML?

My client wants to have her site available in quite a few languages so I've been working on a dropdown list of links to Google's site translator. Since she realized that if the viewer doesn't want to read the site in English, then they may not recognize the English word for their language, I had to copy and paste that language's name for itself into an HTML list. Both versions of Chinese worked, Greek worked, Japanese, Korean and Russian worked, but Arabic? No dice.
Hmmm....

How do you say "Allah Akbar" in HTML?

Blogs, and the blogging bloggers that blog them

I've been acting like a squirrel on crack with Del.icio.us over the past 2 years. In the course of trying to grow a web design business from something done on the side, when I've got free time on the weekend, through the part time graphic design job with the difference made up with web clients, to taking the plunge into the full time freelance world, every time I researched a different aspect of the web, I would hit Google and bookmark every decent article I could get my hands on.

The following list is the first of (hopefully) many where I share the best of the best on various topics such as Search Engine Optimization, hosting, web technologies and this one, blogging.

1) Detailed article on how to generate income from a blog by Steve Pavlina

2) 10 Free (or cheap) Content Management Systems. A CMS is basically a blog's sophisticated older cousin. This is a quick start in getting a handle on what words like Zope, Apache and Plone mean.

3) Adsense sense and sensibility. Useful tips onhow to use Google's Adsense feature without feeling like a big fat whore.

4) Kustomizing your tangerine candy-flake streamlined blog. Cool tutorials for giving a blog a personalized look by Jennifer Apple.

5) Now Digg this. A short and sweet article on 37 Signal's site about how to get your blog noticed, the right way.

Blogs, and the blogging bloggers that blog them

Spreading the love

I found this great article on how to find new clients. Check it out!
It's been busy, busy around here, but not busy enough in some ways, so I'm hoping to make good use of some of this stuff soon!
Jenn Mears Web Design is going to be completely redesigned for the new year. I've been getting ideas together for a while and now feel good enough about most of them to buckle down and start (re)designing. Tutorials, Jenn's Web Glossary and lot 'o CSS fun!
As my friend Mary would say: "Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

Spreading the love

And Now, For Something Completely Different-

Luther Price, Ladies and Gentlemen. A fellow Mass Art survivor who never fails to make me laugh out loud in the face of tragedy.

And Now, For Something Completely Different-

A Snapshot of the War: Day 1,719

I know I've posted this before, but it bears repeating.
I went to school in the late 80's/early 90's with a girl from Czechoslovakia. She would tell us stories about their news media and how everyone in their neighborhood would strategically take their evening stroll at the same time the State-run news broadcast was on. It was their only way of expressing their frustration with the misinformation that they were being fed. I loved the beautiful simplicity of a gesture like that. It was also illustrated to great effect in that episode of the "Simpsons" when Homer stole the giant donut from Lard Lad and all the advertising icons ran amok and Lisa realized that they would die if everyone ignored them but I digress...
Anyway, I'm wondering if anyone else out there is tired of the Talking Heads running the show about the war telling us that everything is going great and we're making Real Progress Over There. Case in point:
Go check out CNN's story about Robert McNamara( whoops! I mean Gates)visiting Iraq. It's about 4 headlines down in the World section on Cnn.com under the title "Gates Makes Surprise Visit to Iraq". And look! It's accompanied by a photo of a smiling Gates in a helicopter looking all sexy with his headphones on, like he's ready to open up a can of Whup Ass on some insurgents.
OK, so now you've seen the Liberal American Media's version of the story, now go check out the BBC's:
Go ahead, I'll wait...
Love the catchy headline, front and center on the BBC's homepage as of this morning.
"Eight Killed as Gates Visits Iraq". And this is from a country that went into this whole mess right along side us.
It's scary what you notice when you tear yourself away from watching Britney Spears do a year-long legal pratfall isn't it?
Sorry if I wrecked your day, but I'm getting tired from all this walking around the block.

A Snapshot of the War: Day 1,719

Pretty Spam

Yep, it's actually fun to look at; especially after a week of deleting "Jenn, your new penis is here!!!" messages.

Pretty Spam

FUBAR on the BBC

From the home page of the BBC online 3rd link down. If you can find a similar link on CNN's website less than 3 clicks away from the home page, send it to me and I will send you a FUBAR t-shirt from the Salem Army Navy store.

FUBAR on the BBC

Why I do what I do where I do it.

Apparently, American commuters spend about a week out of their year waiting in traffic. I used to be one of them and I'm sitting here thinking "only a week?"
It was my own damn fault. I moved out to Salem so I could avoid paying over 2 grand a month for the privilege of living in a closet. New Englanders love to complain and, being a "regional immigrant", naturally I wanted to blend in. It was becoming a favourite topic of conversation at my husband's family get togethers. "It takes me an hour and a half one way and yesterday there was a fender bender so Route 1 was shut down on both sides..." I started to get sick of always bitching about the same old thing. Also, I would finally reach my desk after another epic journey only to hear my former boss tearing me a new one via voicemail about some task that I hadn't been able to get to after completing the 60 other things he had asked for.
Things finally came to a head on a Wednesday morning when I had gotten up, tried to get a very sleepy and cranky toddler into the car by 7:30, sat in inexplicable traffic for 50 minutes, gotten to my mother in law's, and dropped off Chloe in the midst of a tantrum. As my mother in law said for what felt like the 300th time: "Oh it's too bad you have to work in Boston, I don't know how you deal with the rat race!" I realized that she was right. I knew that I still had a drive to a garage and then the trip on the Orange Line to go before I showed up to a desk that was one giant inbox and an office full of disgruntled, bitter co-workers. When I finally got to my desk about an hour later, I hit Craig's List and started looking.
I kept looking until I saw a job as an Office Manager in Salem. I went to the interview hoping that they would see that I made up with charm what I lacked in actual office and manager experience. My career has been such a non-linear, chaotic crapshoot that I totally ignore trying to show any kind of trajectory and just hope that I can keep the interviewer amused with film set stories.
Unbelievably, my approached worked and seeing that email with a job offer was a great moment. I had decided to check my online account one more time before I rushed out the door and as I read the words "we are pleased to offer you..." while listening to my boss scream at both a vendor and his Outlook inbox at the same time, I could feel perma-grin coming on.
It's been 3 and a half months now and my commute is a 20 minute stroll from my front door. As an added bonus, the Office Manager title was a little bit of a misnomer since they were actually looking for a graphics and web person! I could descend into a bunch of cliches right here but if you have read this far, you deserve better than that. In a nutshell, long commutes suck. They suck for the environment, since it forces millions of people to sit in idling cars for hundreds of hours. They suck for the people in the cars because humans are (for the most part) a fairly mobile and dynamic species and don't like just sitting there unless there's possible nudity or some variety of athletic activity involved. They suck for companies because there are thousands of hours wasted each year over phone calls like "We're on our way for the meeting, but a student tried driving a box truck under Storrow Drive again and it's shut down." So my advice is, don't put up with it because everyone else does. Find something closer to home. Figure out a way to work from home. If those aren't options, take public transportation. The only reason it sucks now is because anyone with sufficient self-esteem to still complain to the MBTA, has either already given up and gone back to their car, or they have opted for the first two solutions.

Why I do what I do where I do it.

Next time, try email.

Front page, top of the fold, of bostonherald.com this morning. Full "Lotto" coverage aside, the Herald knows how to work it sometimes. I miss their old ad campaign: "If you want something sugar coated, buy a doughnut"

Next time, try email.

The Perfect Desktop for Someone I Know

The article is kind of interesting too. If you already know what this is about (and chances are, if you are reading it on Boston.com, you already do), I would recommend going straight to the image gallery if your browser can take it.

The Perfect Desktop for Someone I Know

What I did on my summer vacation

I'm wiping my jaw off from where it touched the floor when it dropped as I noticed the date of my last post. Time flies when you're having fun, but I wasn't having THAT much fun. I had a working vacation and you can view the results here.
I also got a "real" job! I get to actually leave my house and sit at a different computer for a few hours a day. One that doesn't have a keyboard with applesauce on it! How glamorous. I have a fancy title (Communications Manager) and as part of my duties, I got to paint the company's name on the door so it looks like the set of a Sam Spade movie.
Also, I've been learning some geeky stuff that should come in handy soon. After a couple of years of trying to learn out of books, I think I've come up with a good technique:
1) Read the book all the way through quickly to get a general overview of what you're getting into.
2) Try a couple of the projects out.
3) If the chapters have little quizzes, write down the questions on one side of a sheet of notebook paper and the answers on the other side so you can carry a super-condensed version of the book around to look at when you get stuck on a train or something.
4) As you go through, try to come up with your own real-life project and use that as your guide when you go through the book again so you will have something to motivate you.
5) College is over, your loans are (hopefully!) paid off so don't sweat the technique too much. Go out and catch a damn movie once in a while!
(warning, Flash 8 required and there's some loud theme music)

What I did on my summer vacation

Why the IT Guy is always the grumpiest person in the office.

questions Google can’t answer part 1:
why is the IT guy(99.9 times out of 10!) always the crankiest person in the office?

1) You’d be cranky too if you were summoned to someone’s desk at least 5 times a month to help them find a web address in “The Google”
, only to find that they are trying to type the URL into Google’s search bar.

2) People who are paid twice as much as you call you at home to ask you how to use their Blackberry. ("Yeah, it's making this weird chirping sound and the screen keeps lighting up...")

3) Temps that try to download stuff off the web and crash their hard drive.

4) Every office has that one person who’s Significant Other/ BFF sends them every chain e-mail, “cute kitty” video, Flash-based animated card and 20mb photo of someone’s baby possible and clogs up the main drive.

5) There is no such thing as “IT Guy Day” at work so you never get cards or flowers telling you what a “meaningful” contribution you make to the work environment, in fact no one seems to notice what you do unless something doesn’t work.

6) People who bring their 12 year old into the office and let them “play” on the computer. The only thing a 12 year old is interested in is downloading games; big storage-greedy, graphic-heavy games. Whatever happened to checkers?

7) People who try to answer every spam e-mail with a polite “No Thank You” reply message. They don’t understand that e-mail spammers’ feelings won’t be hurt by being ignored because they HAVE no feelings. They eat their young.

8) You have a Master’s Certification for 3 different computer languages and you spend 8 hours a day with people who can’t copy a file onto a disk without Lots Of Help.

9) At least 3 times a week your boss summons you to their office to ask you how to do something and no matter how simple it is, they look at you like you are speaking in tongues over terms like “Control-C”.

10) In fact, most people look at you like you practice some obscure form of witchcraft when you talk about your job. Sometimes you wonder if they secretly want to try dunking you to see if you'll float.

Why the IT Guy is always the grumpiest person in the office.

Awesome! I wish I had @#%$ shot this!

Awesome! I wish I had @#%$ shot this!

Design Time Vs. Reality Time

Design Time is like the reverse of Narnian Time. I’ve come to realize this after trying to complete a site for launch. I’ve sworn off television (Watch “The Office”? No thanks, I’d MUCH rather be re-configuring this CGI script right now.)

Of course, ridding yourself of one addiction usually just means that you’ve substituted something else. In this case it’s been the Harry Potter series. To further add to the fun, my web email has been inaccessible and I hate to work on things in a vacuum. Lately it feels like 5 minutes my time = 2 hours reality time.

Design Time Vs. Reality Time

Follow-up

So this weekend I tried an experiment. Friday night, I stepped away from the 2 sites I'm working on for clients and the big intimidating book on Javascript purchased 2 months ago and picked up the sketchbook, ordered takeout and ignored the piles of laundry while I just relaxed and worked on drawings until it was time to get some sleep. Saturday morning, I got up with Chloe, got breakfast, and found 2 skirts and a cardigan for $37 at Modern Millie's. When I sat back down at the computer later on it felt like I had been on vacation for a couple of weeks and I swear I got more done after taking a break than if I had chained myself to the hard drive.

Follow-up

Finding a Method for the Madness

Working mother+freelance job= lots of stress. I think over the past month I've had an epiphany though. My theory is that stress is actually guilt over not getting some supposedly "urgent" task done. (if you are a client reading this, don't worry, I'm just taking a break from working on your site) So for now it's bye bye "to do" list with color coded bullet points, bye bye in-box piled with ALA and Digital Web Articles waiting to be highlighted and sorted and filed. The new Joseph Cornell exhibit opens tomorrow at the Peabody Essex Museum, Russell Orchards in Ipswich opens for the season, and if there's one thing I've learned over the past few weeks, it's that sitting in front of a blank screen forcing inspiration to strike doesn't work half as well as getting out into the "real" world for a few hours.
I'll see you in the park. Have great weekend!

Finding a Method for the Madness

Synchronicity Strikes Again

So I was watching a recorded episode of "Real Time with Bill Maher" tonight, trying to take my mind off quite a few things. Maher was grilling Bill Moyers about journalistic responsibility. Apparently, buried underneath an avalanche of coverage of the Virginia Tech mass murder was the news that our military has basically given up on training Iraqi troops and advisors are now seriously attempting to explain to President Bush that in fact, he is not wearing any clothes at all. Turns out Bill Moyer was a White House Press Secretary during the Kennedy/Johnson era so there was plenty of cud to chew about the eerie similarities between the Vietnam & Iraq conflicts. In fact, it's now becoming so depressingly similar that I decided that I'd be better off just getting some work done. I went onto the web just to check in, and saw that David Halberstam had been killed in a car crash in California. It's one of those things where one might not personally know the famous name, but a loss is felt anyway. I was working on some film or other that was shooting at Milton Academy a few years ago and ended up spending a long summer afternoon set dressing in the school library. I saw a book that said "The Making of a Quagmire" and something told me to take it down from the shelf. It turned out to be a highly readable account of the Kennedy administration's clumsy overtures to the Diem regime in Vietnam. For a few minutes I considered slipping the book into my set bag and taking it home, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. Some teenaged kid needed to read that book more than I did. I can still remember that war and growing up around its aftershocks and victims. I hope some freshman picked it up that September of 2000 and found it as good a read as I did. A 14 year old in 2000 would be a 21 year old today, probably just getting out of college and hopefully a little more skeptical of presidential foreign policy for having read Halberstam's "Quagmire".

Synchronicity Strikes Again

File this under, "When I get a second..."

A good guide to web apps for small businesses. If only someone could invent a babysitting/diaper changing web app, I'd be all set. Google, did you hear that?

File this under, "When I get a second..."

One Good Link Deserves Another

Via kottke.org's post today about the "low wattage web palette". This guy, Mark Ontkush runs a blog about green computing and designed it with colors that don't require a lot of wattage from your monitor. Worth checking out and cheaper than that 4 pack of 7th Generation toilet paper I just took out a loan for. ;^)

One Good Link Deserves Another

My Virtual Pat on the Back for the Day

I love Web Worker Daily. It keeps me from feeling like "a lonely insignificant speck on a has-been planet orbited by a cold and indifferent sun". There are others out there. Today "best practices for the self-employed" caught my eye and when I checked it out, it was encouraging to see that I've done at least SOME of the stuff they suggest.
Anyway, it's a great site, go check it out.

My Virtual Pat on the Back for the Day

If a twit falls in the forest, will anyone care?

Again, it's been too long since posts but I've actually been working, for actual dough, so at least I'm not going to complain.
To be perfectly truthful, the war in Iraq is getting so much nastier, so much faster, that a lot of things that I would normally post about seem even more trivial than usual. But today I figured "what the hell" and here's a post about something completely trivial for your snacking pleasure.
Just to start off, I love the name "Twitter". It's very descriptive of what the hype is actually all about: an app that allows one to see who's on line right and what they are up to. I'm a "don't knock 'til you try it" type and if it's still around in about 12 years, I'm sure I'll be using to see what Chloe's up to after school. But all that ranting and raving about how awful/amazing it is cracks me up. Let's all take a second shall we? You've just spent about 10 minutes (or 2 hours, it depends) setting up a little page at Twitter. Good for you! Now all of your friends can aquire instant knowledge of every minute of your day. Whether you want to tell the world you are having intestinal issues with your lunch is entirely up to you, but at least if someone really cares they'll know. Maybe your mom. To be fair, there are those of us who are hard at work, trying to find ways to make Twitter-ing actually productive, but it comes across as a similar act to trying to walk a cat on a leash.
Remember when AOL had instant on-line messaging? (The back in the day kind, circa 97) I was on line one day and suddenly this little window popped up, blocking what I was doing. It was my boyfriend's (now husband's)nephew. "Hi Uncle Chris! How are you?" It wouldn't go away until I answered so I yelled over to Chris: "Hey! Your nephew wants to know how you're doing!" "OK!" he yelled back. I typed in "OK" and tried to go about my business. Then another window popped up. "What are you up to?" and so on and so forth ad nauseum. I was having an online conversation with a 10 year old boy and I wasn't even wearing an ankle bracelet.
I guess the beauty of Twitter is that you don't have to answer people back. It's the kind of app that Andy Warhol would have come up with if he hadn't had such an overworked nurse and had taken up software programming. I'll file it under "sounds like fun, but I'm really too busy right now." I think it would be fun though, if you could somehow get some Al Qaeda folks to sign up for it. "AlSaid69, Whassup?" " Heading out to the souk with my bros" "Have a blast! ;^)Json"
So, there you have it, a post about nothing.

If a twit falls in the forest, will anyone care?

I'm sorry I can't do that Dave...

So I had to check out yet another bitchy Oscar's red carpet review. (Priorities you know) And I was right in the middle of a complete takedown of Faye Dunaway and what should pop up but this.

"Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience."

Why does this only happen when I am trying to check out my morning brain candy? It's as if Bill Gates is sitting in his underground bunker somewhere saying "Back to work lazy ass, I see you slacking over there!" And then it has the chutzpah to ask if I want to send an error report. To who? Why? What are "they" going to do about it?

And I know it's not just me.

I'm sorry I can't do that Dave...

Fun With CSS

It says something about how fast the web world moves when I can recall my days at AINE in 2003, listening to my instructor say, "yes, sometimes designers use Cascading Style Sheets for formatting headers, but for now, just use the bold tag". Nowadays, anyone teaching web design would probably be stoned publicly for such heresy, but at the time, we all just innocently nodded our heads and kept plugging away at our page-sized Photoshop documents, slicing the images and placing them into tables to create our projects.

I started to see more and more sites that boasted little windows that looked like Chiclets. Then came the logos and banners that reminded me of the Jellies sandals that I had coveted so much in Jr. High. Before you could say CSS2, the web exploded in a visual extravaganza of Kandy Kolored glossy rounded corners and something that I was rapidly learning about called "suckerfish dropdowns". At the time, I was trying to come up with some sort of business plan for my in utero design shop and after tooling around a couple of times on Google with the term "Salem web designers" I stumbled across Simplebits the "tiny web design studio" run by Dan Cederholm. So I went to the site, loved the deceptively simple looking design and decided to e-mail him. In my newbie frenzy, it came out something like this:

"Hi Dan! I like your site! I am a web designer who's starting out and trying to get a handle on all the new technology that is around. As someone who has been designing for a while, what do you think is the best approach for learning about Web 2.0 development?"

Anyone in their right mind would have sent something like this right into the deleted bin, but either he's unusually patient, or, if he's like anyone else I know who does this kind of work, he was too sleep deprived to know better, but Dan responded with an invitation to join a css discussion list.

Soon my e-mail inbox was displaying messages from people with names like Ingo and Gunlaug who dispensed advice on queries like "Help! My a :hover link doesn't display in IE 6!" and "Why won't my div span float with my 3 column header?". To be honest, most of the time I hadn't the faintest idea what these people were actually talking about and for days at a time I would simply plow through all 17 pages of postings and delete them without reading them. But after a while, I started feeling guilty and dutifully tried to make sense of the various discussion threads. If anything, it was a great way to spy on what other people were doing for web design.

Finally, the inevitable happened and I got hired to re-vamp a local company's web site. It was going to be a challenge. The first time I went to their site and hit View>Source, I freaked out. It had more nested tables than a Chinese import shop. I collected every book I had that even mentioned CSS, invested in Red Bull stock, and went to work. (editor's note: I was going to link to Red Bull's site here, but it requires Flash 9 or it won't work. :^( Accessibility counts people!)

Now I can see what all the fuss is about. Although I don't have any mysterious white lines going through anything, my life is now a constant rhythm of tweak, F5, preview in browser, rinse, repeat. I was really proud when my Home page design finally displayed perfectly in Safari, then slightly nauseous when the two left columns poked up into the navigation in Firefox. My moment of shame came when I tried to shift the side bar div to underneath the content for the "About Us" page and forgot that I was changing it's position in the Home page too. Whoopsy.

The only thing I can compare the process to is this little puzzle that my grandparents used to give me to get me to stop bugging them for cookies. It consisted of a small plastic square with grooved edges. The square contained 15 tiles which, when coaxed into the correct configuration, showed a picture of Deputy Dawg. (Ralph Bakshi, who knew?) I would shift one tile over to the right, then see that it would block the tile I needed on the top, then shift that and it would knock the whole picture out of whack. I would so wrapped up in shifting one tile back and forth, up and down, that it wasn't until I put the damn thing down and went to watch "Wonder Woman" that it would occur to me what the solution might be.

So, long story short, I'm loving the CSS, and it's kind of fun to see the look a client gets on their face when I mention using a suckerfish dropdown.

Fun With CSS

Tragic Synergy

In what can only be some kind of universal confluence of events, Anna Nicole Smith died "suddenly" due to what is likely a drug overdose, on the eve of the nationwide release of "Factory Girl". Both Anna and Edie were beautiful and fragile and surrounded by tragic events in their lives. I never watched Anna's reality show or the various media events where she wobbled through somehow. I only knew her through her Guess and Trimspa ads and Kathy Griffin's take on her appearance on "The New Hollywood Squares". I stumbled across "Edie; An American Biography" when I worked at my hometown library in high school and it's a pretty good read. Like Anna, once you looked beneath Edie's make-up and earrings, there was something kind of scary yet fascinating going on.

Tragic Synergy

Much More Exciting Than One Hand Clapping...

Or much creepier depending on how much of an arachnophobe you are. The sounds of spiders mating, enjoy.

Much More Exciting Than One Hand Clapping...

Movie Review: Monster

This movie kept popping up in my path over the past 3 years. I knew Charlize Theron had won an Academy Award for her role as Aileen Wuornos. I had heard words such as "powerful", and "chilling" used to describe it, but somehow I had always kind of passed it by on the shelf at the library, clicked by it on cable, thinking, "I'm sure it's great and all, but I would really rather watch "The Simpsons" right now." I recalled watching about 1o minutes of it a few months back and the scene in which Theron's character describes having her newborn baby taken away after giving birth in a home for unwed mothers was so depressing that I switched back to the Style network.

Lo and behold, I was flicking through channels on Friday night and it was on IFC again. It was kind of weird, because I quickly realized that I had started watching it again pretty much at the exact point where I had left off the first time. And this time, I couldn't click away. I've recently been undergoing a rebellion against my film school background and was getting some kind of perverse pleasure gorging myself on "Isaac" and "Access Hollywood". Screw you Jonas Mekas! Tara Reid had a botched boob job but she's bravely bouncing back from her downfall. "Clap for her people!" Between that and coming of age in an era where Julia Robert's character in "Pretty Woman" was supposed to be inspiring, I really have an aversion to movies about prostitutes. It's usually either some kind of Lifetime Channel-infused ABC After School Special for grownups about what kinds of horrible things happen to people who don't go to college, or it's some kind of trumped up fairytale about a hooker with a "heart of gold".

That kind of media atmosphere is what makes Theron's character so fascinating to watch. There's a lot of scenes where you can tell that she wants that heart of gold, but deep down she knows that she's really got a heart of battery acid. And thank you, makeup department for turning Ms. Theron into something so much more than that brand of "Hollywood" plain jane like Joan Crawford in "Mildred Pierce". There are quite a few times when she looks so believably wasted and shot-to-hell that I found myself leaning back in my seat. Thank god I didn't see this on the big screen.

And there's a lot more to this film than some overly stylized glossy movie about what Hollywood people think lower middle class Anglo-Saxon Americans act, think and look like. (Tony Scott, I'm looking at you.) Aileen Wuornos' only glamour is the fact that she is so unsettlingly real. She's the woman you've seen sobbing outside a casino at 3am in Las Vegas. She's the one you saw washing her hair in the sink at a truckstop in Montana on your post-college cross country road trip. She's the one arguing with her partner at the bus station until the security guard walks over. She's the woman who kept bugging you and your friends for cigarettes at that seedy motel you stayed at. She's someone everyone has seen out the corner of their eye and kept moving, not wanting to really know or get involved.

It actually turned out to be a pretty good movie which was more than I expected. There was a scene in a lawyer's office when Aileen tries to quit hooking and get "one of them office type jobs" that was hilarious. The lawyer is the first person who actually has the guts to tell Aileen that she is wasting his time and has wasted her life and she verbally lets go with both barrels at him. I started laughing until I realized that I was rooting for a woman who killed seven people. I really like films that do that to me.

Movie Review: Monster

New Year's Resolution: Get 'er done.

So...
I feel like I got a lot done last year (see above), but some things are still being pushed around on my plate like birthday cake at a Weight Watchers' meeting. I got real ambitious a couple of months ago and posted about re-designing my website, it's gonna be great, blah, blah. If you've ever seen that episode of "The Office" where Michael Scott eats the free pretzel with all the toppings, you'll know what I'm talking about; one gets all hepped up about a project, collects all the crap on Del.icio.us that one can find, does a bunch of layouts and sketches and then what? A new client comes along, it's Christmas, your baby starts learning how to walk and she's constantly lurching around the living room like a drunken sailor...
I'm such a victim of our national obsession with time-management and organization that it's not even funny. I'm pretty sure there's a church basement somewhere right now full of people standing up, hands shaking around a cup of coffee saying: "I'm Bob, and I'm a Google Calendar addict" I sit down in front of my monitor everyday with a wad of stickies saying things like: CVS list, lists of books to look for on Amazon, stuff to do on Squidoo, things around the house to organize.
This year is going to be different though. I've sworn off the obsession with writing every little thing down on a sticky note because a) it sometimes takes more time than actually doing the thing itself, and b) I just went through a bunch of paper scraps that I had squirrelled away in a drawer and 85% was stuff that really wasn't that important to do in the first place.
But back to the website redesign, I DID start to work on it and ideas for a timelapse effect animation going on the background of a blog-like index page are starting to congeal. A quick (3-minute!) experiment in using an animated GIF as a background image did work and can be seen here.

New Year's Resolution: Get 'er done.

Right On

Right On

Worst Album Covers of All Time

Wow, they weren't kidding.

Worst Album Covers of All Time

Update on IE7 Drops..

So far it's almost pleasurable. I'm still pretty skittish about visiting boston.com and some sites are loading kind of slow (but what banking site doesn't?). I had to root around for the refresh button too. Loving the tabbed browsing. Not quite the monster I expected.

Update on IE7 Drops..

IE7 Drops on Thursday

-Right onto my desktop. Will it touch down ever so gently like new-fallen snow? Or will it hit like Fatman? My inquiring mind can't wait.
BTW, I'm taking a little informal survey; Has anyone noticed lately that they have a lot of browser issues when they visit Boston.com? It seems like almost every time I sign on using IE6, the browser starts whimpering and cowering like a traumitized puppy. Is anyone else having issues with that site?

IE7 Drops on Thursday

White Trash Blackberry

White Trash Blackberry

Book Report: Collapse, by Jared Diamond

This was a fun book to read in several ways. First of all, the paperback said "COLLAPSE" in big red letters on the front cover. People on the train kept giving me strange little looks, probably because it wasn't a cute little cover with drawings of cocktail glasses and shoes all over it.

Also, it was by the author of "Guns, Germs and Steel" which was a fairly fast read despite being something you could hold open a door with. "Collapse", like "GG&S" is built around a single poignant and pithy question that one of Diamond's students asked in class. "What were people on Easter Island thinking when they cut the last tree down?"

They were probably blaming their government and/or some convenient sub-group of the population. It's a good question though. Diamond broke down every reason he could come up with as to why different societies collapsed at different times in history, and compared societies like Easter Island, Greenland Vikings and Anaisazi to the list. And, much like modern life, it comes down to Location, Location, Location. Try to live too far away from your required resources for living and you won't survive very long. And it pays to play nice with your neighbors too. Erik the Red apparently wasn't and things didn't go so well for his descendants.

But if you tend to spend resources that aren't really there, over-populate your territory and piss off your friends and neighbors, don't come crying when all of a sudden you realize that you can't sustain your societial structure. You should have read this book.

Book Report: Collapse, by Jared Diamond

Shalom Punks!

If you are like me and are of a "certain age", you might remember the perpetual ad that used to run in the Boston Phoenix's classifieds in the late 90's. "Shalom Punks! Boston's only Jew-core band seeks drummer that can keep a kosher beat..." it ran something like that. Now Steven Lee Beeber has come forth with the hypothesis that without Judaism, particularly New York Judaism (or, Jew Cool as the article puts it), there would be no Punk. I can hear Linda Richman in my head right now, "The punk rock revolution was neither punk nor rock. Discuss!"

Shalom Punks!