Category: Misc

Biking across campus the other night I saw a bright beam bobbing toward me at a nice clip. As it approached it lit up the dark University path like bluish alien daylight. Turned out to be a light attached to the helmet of a bicyclist. My puny old Cat Eye is barely bright enough to help cars see me coming, certainly doesn’t light up no roadway. I wanted a halogen coal miner’s riding light like that fellow’s.

A couple days later at Hank and Frank’s to have some quick chain work done and checked out the high-end lights. They had the very light in stock — $400 — more than most people spend on an entire bicycle. But hell, it’s bright as a bluish alien day, right?

Yesterday rushing home to watch Miles as Amy went off to teach, hit a hard bump and the Cat Eye went flying, busted into a bunch of pieces.

Tonight coming out of the grocery store, saw a guy who had a plastic flashlight roped to his handlebars with a bungie cord. He didn’t spend no $400.

You see my dilemma.

No, this does not mean I am going to buy a $400 headlamp.

I am fortunate that the “Shut Up and Code” mantra does not affect my current job (much). I actually am consulted in most technology decisions, and implementations often follow my recommendations. But I’ve seen this at more than one organization:

The “shut up and code” philosophy is nothing new — I’ve seen it since becoming a developer in 1984. The “shut up and code” philosophy dictates that the IT manager first asks developers for input into what tools they will use, then disregards all that advice in favor of advice from one of his golf buddies.

At Paula’s birthday last night, two-year-old Emerson was showing me his new selection of toy tools (can’t wait till Miles is old enough to dig on a toy electric jigsaw – toys today are awesome) and we were exploring the capabilities of the pliers. After I took his socks off with them I asked if I could pull out his new teeth with the pliers. He squealed with delight and said over and over again “Take my teef out with pliers!”

Lucky neighborhood, I guess… at around 10:45 pm Friday night Amy and I heard a loud crashing and grinding sound, followed by an engine revving high. Came outside to find two pickup trucks on their sides across the street from us. In the GMC a man was struggling to get out. Me and two other bystanders helped him out of the passenger door (which was on top), I asked if he was OK (he was) and went inside to ask Amy to call 911. When I came back out, bystanders said he took off running toward Telegraph.

Oakland PD arrived in minutes and I gave a statement to an officer who did NOT believe the vehicle was stolen. Even for joyriding, he said it would be very rare to steal a rasty old pickup like that. Stolen joyride vehicles are almost always upscale. If the car was not stolen, the driver may be easier to track down.

The only way I can figure the two trucks ended up this way is if the GMC actually drove up the side of the Toyota at angle, pitching himself up and over as if rolling off a highway median.

So let’s see… there was the pickup that plowed into the side of the house farther down on 66th a couple-three years ago. The ramming of Cecilia and Mark’s car a bit ago. The similar incident outside of Sudi’s house a bit later. And now this.

Neighbors: If you must leave the house at night, wear helmet and pads. At this point, I think you have a better chance of being run over by a wilder than you do of being mugged.

And we’re going to raise our kid here? Right.

Just attended a demo of Macromedia’s new product Contribute, which is designed to provide an easy way for non-web-staff people to add to or modify content on a web site. This could potentially be very useful to me at work where staff and faculty have a lot of plain content to get online – this could relieve a lot of the burden of tedious, repetitive conversion of text data into simple pages.

It does a lot of things very well, e.g. lets you drag a Word doc right into a template body and have its contents cleanly formatted and inserted into the template (rather than dealing with the rat’s nest of spaghetti that Word generates on HTML output). Allows for restriction of users to given directories. Lets you force no FONT tags, force users to title their documents, etc. Upload is virtually transparent.

On the other hand, it’s tricky to imagine how something like this could integrate with a fuller Content Management System, where content would be stored in a database and which would provide lots of other benefits but probably wouldn’t offer WYSIWYG editing, etc.

Oddly, there is no server component to the system – it all runs with keys that are sent to the user and interact with the desktop app to restrict access as specified by the administrator. Kind of weird to think of running security that way, but I can’t actually think of a hole in the system — it’s just weird.

Hmmmm… will have to ponder this one. I’m very shy of proprietary solutions, trying to do everything open source here, but damn, this is a good product for what it is.

CSS Joy: When the fun wears off, you’re left with a big pain in the nooners trying to make multiple browsers happy. Ultimately had to dig out and boot up a Win box at home — something I haven’t done for close to a year — just to test Explorer/Mac vs. Explorer/Win and to see just where and when that right-nav DIV tag blows up on the Win side. I think I’ve got it smoothed out about as smooth as it’s going to get. If you’re using Explorer and don’t see the right nav, try resizing the window a few pixels – as you can see, the problem is no longer related to content width being incorrectly totalled, but a redraw issue in Explorer.

Have been so busy at work I left this rendering bug hanging in public for more than 24 hours, painful. But no choice. Tomorrow will be worse – haven’t been this stressed at work since before personalStudio launched at Adamation. Literally all coming down at once.

Amazing how subtly different behaviors can have profound ripple effects through a site. Dan (in comments) described my dive into table-free CSS here as a “damn the torpedoes” approach, and that’s pretty accurate. CSS is a both a minefield and a cornucopia. Cross-browser testing becomes even more important than with straight HTML. But in the end, there’s so much good about it that the pain is totally worth it. Time has come to go all CSS. Someone’s got to be first on the dancefloor.

Dan is totally right : I can’t settle on a design because it makes the public happy – please don’t let the polls make you think this is a democracy – it ain’t. I just like taking pulse… and testing polling software. Click on.

Open house at the J-School today, prospective students swirling. Days like this, with all the enthusiasm, I am reminded why I wanted to come here.

Day was wrapped up with screening of some of the documentaries made in the TV/News departments over the past couple of years, one of which was “Switch on Bhutan” – Bhutan is a tiny country tucked into the Himalayas. A few years ago, its government decided to allow TV and Internet into the country, making it the last country on earth to get TV. A J-School student went there to document the schizophrenic process of TV’s introduction to the last virgin culture on earth. Whole families would greet cable installers with parties and tea. The one and only cable company received endless calls wanting them to account for the strange shows. Why are these grown men beating each other up without mercy? — explaining WWF to them was a challenge. But within 6 months, children were making play wrestling belts out of cardboard, honoring their new heroes. Old ladies complained that TV was so fun to watch they would forget their religious duty, forget to count prayer beads. Beautifully shot.

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Music: Dreamt Of By Armadillos :: Noize1