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!

Zune On, Zune In, Zune Out

Zune, meet Edsel. Edsel, Zune.

Zune On, Zune In, Zune Out

40ish Mutant Retired Ninjas...

Just in case you were wondering what Rainn Wilson is doing RIGHT THIS SECOND.

By the way, I had no idea until today that his dad is Robert Anton Wilson.

40ish Mutant Retired Ninjas...

The World According To...

This is pretty cool. It's different maps of the world with various countries and/or continents sized according to statistics instead of landmass. Think of it as a global homunculus.
(author's note: the preceding link is rated PG)

The World According To...

Just In Time For The Holidays...Web 3.0

Just what I wanted, another reason to make me feel out-of-touch. Stay tuned, because I will bet you a Wii station that the same people blogging right now about how over-hyped Web 3.0 is, will be the same ones running around in 3 months ranting about how cool it is and don't you have it yet? Loser has to watch "It's A Wonderful Life" 5 times in a row.

Just In Time For The Holidays...Web 3.0

Girls Vs. Girls

Gene swap makes boy flies fight like girl flies. Makes girl flies fight with lots of crotch grabbing and screaming things like “C'mon! You want some of this!!?”

Girls Vs. Girls

Renovation Time

Now that I've downloaded my umpteenth Web 2.0/blog/cms/wordpress created site, I'm finally ready to drink the Kool Aid and try making a go at using Wordpress to give my sites a thorough re-design. N. Design's beautiful home page was the final feather, nail, pick your analogy.

So far, I've gotten as far as some pen sketches on a few post-it notes, a ton of downloaded instructions from Word Press's link-happy site and a "standby page" with a little orange-jellybellied spider icon that I created in about 20 minutes last night (see above). Unfortunately, it will cost slightly more to host a php-enabled version of a couple of sites on Doteasy, but hopefully I'll make it up in increased income.

I've decided that until jennmearswebdesign.com has its own blog activated, I'll try to give updates here. For today, my mission is to determine if it's possible to use an animated GIF as my template's background. I have a series of design steps on the site, in the PROCESS link, that I would like to animate together in one illustration and place in the header of the new design.

Renovation Time