MAKE: Blog: DIY Refrigerator workbench

Awesome! Use an old fridge as a workbench. Love it! Recycle when you can.

Over the past week, I’ve changed our (work’s) 5 year-old tabbed menu into a css, javascriptless, wonder. The new boss has a good grasp of CSS, but I kinda shocked him when I showed what all I could do by handcoding. Took me most of a day, but instead of 12 graphics, we’re down to 4. 88k to 3k.

I’ve also been going through a vendor’s code, more and more, as I keep finding code that disgusts me. Again, the new site will be tableless and (according to them) all web standards. So my question today was, “with all of this talk about standards, why do we have javascript rendering images and text?”. So, like I did with the menu mentioned above, I tore into their little widget and recreated it with more accessible version of javascript and css. I seriously, feel more sure of myself, as I work with these huge company’s coders and see how much CSS knowledge most of these people use just through Dreamweaver. I have a strong feeling, that if I just opened up the code-side, they would be absolutely lost.

The Sacred Cow Tipping redesign is still upcoming. I have some ideas based on what I showed off about three weeks ago. More based on what I’m doing at work…although I’m on Movable Type and not Teamsite. I’m also looking at redesigning the personal site and even keeping a tiny blog over there for more design-y things….don’t know yet.

I’m doing a bit of blog consulting and wish I could do this full-time. I can’t really be anything but vague about it, but it’s an interesting project. It won’t be “mine” but it will be nice laying the groundwork for someone to have a killer blog. I’m still hashing out details, but it’s nice being an old-school blogger who no one knows. Being on the C-List (hell D-List) has it’s advantages.

I’m still trying to find “my place”. A mindset or a grouping of thoughts. But I have so little time to think about anything but work, that off time is just veg time. I miss music, don’t know if I actually want to play again, honestly. I’m just so burned out on that aspect of it. I’d almost consider being a manager for a band or an artist. I’m *that* much of an asshole and might be actually good in that role.

Ok, enough of this ramblings…..

I think a lot of people can identify with some of the lyrics in this beautiful song. While it’s not just it’s beauty it is the meaning.

We all see certain paths that we wonder about. We wonder if we should go down that path to which we’re expected or the one of chance and change. We look back and see when we made our own path, that intersects with one of the other paths, like a city block. We make our choices, then we travel down and look back in the rear-view mirror and can see what we left behind.

Sometimes life is painful. The feelings of loss, abandonment, and sadness. Other times, it’s wonderful! It’s beautiful! Even the mundane can bring wonder. There is no fault in looking back, seeing the vision in the rear-view mirror. We can look and wonder about what could have been or what was. We just need to make sure to not hit the car in front of us.

I honestly wish that the browser team at Microsoft would import some developers from some of the Mozilla branches. Get some of the K-Meleon guys to contribute. Get some of the Camino team too. But, don’t use Mozilla to build. Get these people on your team to show you how to think outside of the Scoobleesque Microsofty talk and build something that the world will love. Honestly, someone needs to rattle the Mozilla cage a bit, just to keep them on their toes.

Three Websites to work on…
I’m working on Drumblog and EvD’s new project and if time allows, I might look at some updates here.

Two computers…
I’m going to play around with Linux for the first time in a few years, maybe even setup a desktop for me. I also have a client’s machine that needs an update.

The purchasing of new business clothes…
Of course, I can’t wear jeans at the new place, so I have to purchase some pants. I’ve lost about twenty pounds in the time that I had worked in printing, so my old dress pants don’t fit..

Recording with the band…
We’re working with a semi-new line up and it’s just me and the singer/songwriter left. We’ve started to work with a new guitarist, who I’ve known for years. He’s also producing and we’re trying to see if we can mesh what we’ve created and arranged to his ideas.

MySpace….
I’ve become a little addicted to MySpace, it seems like everyone will eventually be on there. I suspect that we’ll eventually have to vote for Tom as a government official or perhaps we’ll actually find Jimmy Hoffa on someone’s profile.

My very first girlfriend from high school just signed up and that blows my mind. She’s 35 and until I started getting more involved, I only thought it was the haunt of tweens, teens and young adults. I’m connecting with *lots* of people from my past. I’m finding kids who I mentored during my camp counselor days in the late 80’s early 90’s and most are married with kids and are in their mid/late-20’s….shit I feel old.

I have some work people in my friends list, some music people, some school people, and just close friends….well aside from having Margaret Cho in there.

{I’m Totally Gonna Get Laid On This Humanitarian Mission To Uganda | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source} – “In less than 72 hours, I’ll be touching down in Kampala, on my way to the shores of Lake Victoria, aka poontang heaven.”

I think I was in a band with this dude.

I’m in big trouble, aren’t I?

{Boing Boing: Peanuts kids in realistic comic} – “OK, now this is just plain weird. In 1957, Charles Schulz seems to have given The Des Moines Register and Tribune permission to publish an eight-page comic in which Charlie Brown and Lucy fall out of a comic strip and into the arms of some unspecified dude who proceeds to give them a tour of the Register’s offices and printing plant. At the end of this visit, drawn in a sort of modified Soviet realism style, the kids are taken back to their strip by a Register paper boy.”

I really dig this old comic about the printing process. If you were to do something like this now it would be more along the lines of, “Here is where we layout the paper’s pages. We open up InDesign and create the spread, then we bring in graphics and send it through Prinergy to the platesetter.” The thought of going back to a physical collection of photographs is almost nauseating. The same way with thinking someone actually use to carve out a plate. It’s amazing how it’s changed.

Now, we have terabytes of photographs…for where I work, we take sample photos with a 20mp camera. We scan in swatches on a very nice and expensive scanner. We design layouts on computers and our workflows send it to a platesetter. The few times humans get to touch something, is when plates come out or when proofreaders get a proof or the designers print out a proof.

Our plates are 1-bit tiffs that get sent to a server and onto a platesetter. Lasers now carve the plates…although it’s really more just scraping off a coating now.

Again, look at that comic and think about how a lot of that process has been replaced by Illustrator, Photoshop, Quark, InDesign, etc. Look at it and realize what a manual job that musta been and how it’s really a dying art. I often tell some of the designers here, that even though I’m 32, I remember when “cut & paste” was actually cutting and pasting paper. I can see that the next generation will reminisce about when Flash only worked on computers and not on a refrigerator. They’ll have no clue about Y2k, only PSP.

Looks like a great little resource