Just Flew In From LA…

By Evan — — News

…and boy are my arms tired! Zing!1

Err, anyway. So on the flight back from Los Angeles I sat next to a rather large man. We chatted about Sports Night and 802.11b versus 802.11g, but things got a bit more interesting when I asked whether he had been in LA on vacation or business. “Business,” the man said. What kind of business? Turned out he had been a delegate at this weekend’s California Republican convention. At that point I had to ask, “So who do you like, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Tom McClintock?” Turns out he was a McClintock fan. McClintock is a “good man” who “knows what he’s talking about,” while Schwarzenegger is “way too liberal.” Hmmm. Perhaps my seatmate was, like me, unimpressed by Schwarzenegger’s platitudes about solving the state budget problem by “auditing the books and cutting waste.” After all, if you’re campaigning to yank an official from office because of his bad policy decisions, at the very least you ought to have some concrete plans on what you’d like, do differently and stuff.

I should point out that a good friend of mine has told me that I’m totally wrong about this and that concrete plans are for suckers. The argument goes like this: since everyone in the race is going to lie like hell about what they’re going to do in office, you might as well base your vote on personality alone. Pick someone who’s tough. Someone who will shake up the status quo. Send a message. Kick ass and take names! The counterargument is that media personalities are manufactured just like anything else, and that when it comes to divining a candidate’s true personality, you might as well try phrenology over press clippings. I suppose my friend and I are both back at square one.

So the key question these days is: will the Republicans split their vote and end up losing to Cruz Bustamante? One likely scenario is that Cruz Bustamante will win, but the total of the votes for McClintock and Schwarzenegger will exceed Bustamante’s. And thus we Democrats will be able to feel smug about fending off a Republican takeover, and the Republicans will be able to feel smug about how they would have won if not for that blockhead [McClintock|Schwarzenegger] staying in the race. (Of course the latter reasoning conveniently ignores the fact that VM + VS is almost certainly greater than V(M+S), but hey, minor detail.) Anyway, I asked my seatmate if he was worried about this vote-splitting problem. He admitted that yes, he was, although he was hoping that Schwarzenegger would drop out. Heh. That seems unlikely — Schwarzenegger strikes me as, if nothing else, a ferocious competitor. Then again, I can’t be sure… I haven’t examined the bumps on his head.

1. Okay, so that wasn’t a tech writer joke. Nor was it much of a joke at all. Hey man — it’s my journal, back off.

But Seriously, Folks

By Evan — — Tech

Dana Whitaker: I don’t think you’re cute. I don’t think you’re funny. I don’t think you’re smart. And sometimes… I don’t think you’re very nice.

Casey McCall [anguished]: You don’t think I’m funny?

It has recently come to my attention that there is an alarming shortage of technical writer jokes. Lord knows there’s plenty of engineer jokes and programmer jokes. It’s easy to find physics jokes. Yahoo has an entire category devoted just to silly chemistry songs (including Tom Lehrer’s 1959 opus, The Elements). There are firefighter jokes. Plumber jokes. Social worker jokes. Need accountant jokes? I got your accountant jokes right here. Want actuary jokes? Head on over to actuarialjokes.com.

But there are precious few technical writer jokes. After exhaustive research on the subject,1 I only found a handful:

In short, the jokes are not exactly thick on the ground. So are we technical writers just not funny? My colleague at work disagrees. “I think everyone just knows that we are simply Not To Be Made Fun Of.”3 Well, that makes me feel better. In any case, if you have any more technical writer jokes, please feel free to send them my way. I’m not exactly going to rush out and register “techwriterjokes.com”, but it’d be nice to see some evidence that there’s more out there. We can at least beat the accountants, for crying out loud.

1. I.e. a cursory Google search.

2. Except for this one. Q: How many psychotherapists does it take to change a lightbulb? A: One, but it has to really want to change. Hee hee!

3. Note the skillful closure of the sentence with a preposition. This dangerous grammatical construction is for trained professionals only. Laypersons, do not attempt this at home.

Mirror, Mirror

By Evan — — SF

Had I crossed into a parallel universe?

The first bizarre experience was when I called Blue Cross to cancel my individual health coverage. While contracting, I had been paying for the absolute cheapest health care package I could — the kind of package that basically only covers catastrophic events. Blue Cross has some fancy name and number for this package, but they should really call it the “Be a good son and pay us some money so that you won’t bankrupt your parents should (God forbid) you come down with a horrible degenerative disease” package.

Anywaaay, I called Blue Cross, got through right away (whoa!) and asked to cancel my policy. The lady told me that A) I had to fax in that request, and B) the billing date had passed for the month, and so I was still on the hook for one more month’s payment. Bummer. I thanked her and hung up, annoyed with myself for waiting too many days. Then two minutes later, the phone rings. “Hello, sir?” Although I had given up, she had gone to the effort to ask her supervisor about this. It turned out that if I faxed in the request that day, it would arrive in time to cancel for the month. Woo! Yay Blue Cross customer service department!

The second bizarre experience was when I called the IRS with some questions about whether I needed to pay estimated tax for some contract work earlier this year. To my amazement, I got through right away (again, whoa!) and ended up speaking with an IRS customer service rep for about 20 minutes. We went through some options, crunched some numbers,1 and in the end I knew exactly how to proceed. I guess there’s something to be said for calling the IRS in September rather than April, but still — yay IRS customer service department!

At this point I was becoming convinced that I had stepped into some sort of parallel universe where everything is turned upside down. Could Evil be Good? Could Good be Evil? Could violating a business contract have actual consequences in the real world?2 But then on Friday night I met up with Pat, Sam, and Mike in downtown Campbell, and none of them were wearing evil parallel-universe goatees. Whew. For a second there, I was getting worried.

1. I realize I’m a little quirky in that I actually like crunching numbers.

2. Nah.

Son of Bulletproof XHTML

By Evan — — Web

I’m pleased to announce that I am the latest guest columnist for A Second Voice, Dave Shea’s collection of articles on standards, markup, accessibility, and more.

For those of you who don’t follow such things (hi Mom!), Dave is the caretaker of the CSS Zen Garden, which has quickly become the repository for elegant and modern website design techniques. For this reason, I’m deeply honored that Dave tapped me to write this piece,1 which grew out of an earlier discussion with Dave and Jacques on creating Bulletproof XHTML. I should note that the previous Second Voice article by Ian Lloyd discusses the importance of promoting web standards out in the workplace, while my article discusses the practical difficulties and considerations in maintaining compliance with these standards. I think the two articles bookend each other nicely, although I get the feeling that Ian is playing Good Cop and I’m playing Bad Cop. Well, we’ll see how this plays out.

1. Particularly considering what a horrible green eyesore my site is. At first I worried that I was going to ruin Dave’s rep as a designer just by association. But then I got over it.

Cursed Frogurt

By Evan — — Miscellany

Jacques has a nifty new feature on his sidebar that serves up a random “Bushism” every hour (taken from the master list at Slate.com). Whoa, I thought. Is Slate serving up an RSS feed of Bushisms? Did Jacques build some sort of custom HTML scraper tool in his copious free time? The truth was a bit more mundane — Jacques simply pasted all the quotes in a local flat file. Heck, even I coulda written a script to handle that. Says Jacques: “My motto is, ‘Low-tech solutions for a low-tech presidency.'” Heh.

In Other News: my blogmother M’ris has done got herself her first house!

That’s good!

The house is in faraway Minnesota.

That’s bad.

The house is really nice, though, and they’re very happy with it.

That’s good!

But the house was almost taken away at the last minute by Steve the Accursed Mortgage Being.

That’s bad.

They replaced Steve with Pam the New Mortgage Being.

…

That’s good.

Can I go now?

Opportunities

By Evan — — Miscellany

First Jason Kottke. Then Dave Shea. Then fwammo! — a whole ‘mess of articles on XHTML, semantics, and standards. Note to self: if one had anything to say on this general subject — say, for example, something on the absolute necessity of “bulletproofing” one’s XHTML — now would be an excellent time to write it up and get it posted in a prominent place. Hmmm.

In other news, my baby sister has tripped off to college. I think I’m feeling a small taste of what my parents must be feeling. We’re supposed to be excited for her and all, this is a wonderful opportunity for her, but…

The good news is that baby sis and I finally got to see Ferris Bueller’s Day Off together. When I learned she hadn’t seen it yet, I was horrified — this would have to be rectified immediately. I was a bit worried that the movie wouldn’t translate very well across half a generation, but thank goodness, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off stood the test of time.1 We were both crying with laughter at the “Star Wars” flying-car scene — she seeing it for the first time, me for the sixth or seventh at least. Fabulous stuff. Somehow Ferris manages to be a great teen movie without resorting to endless bodily fluid jokes. (I suppose there was a vomit joke or two in there, but it was electronically-faked vomit, which is forgivable.)

Anyway, because I’m feeling bummed, I thought I’d post something I read a few days ago that cheered me up immensely. The following is from the transcript of last week’s live chat with Carolyn Hax, the Washington Post’s advice columnist. Hax rocks, but her regular readers (the “peanuts”) sometimes rock harder.

The Twilight Zone: My father has cancer and I need to go home to help my mother take care of him. Since my parents are being bankrupted by medical bills, and I’m a non-profit grunt, my father’s (wealthy) mother offered to pay for my plane fare. She sent the check last week and then calls me up last night (she has never called me before in my life) to accuse me of inflating the cost of the tickets to get more money out of her. I’m mortified that she would even ask. So my questions are: I know that your job entails a lot of head-banging and I was wondering what materials you would recommend: walls, wooden posts or metal poles? And when she dies and I get my inheritence, should I blow it all on something frivolous, or donate it all to a Jewish charity (she hates the fact that my father married a Jew and my brother and I are Jewish)?

Carolyn Hax: Answer: Yes, people really are that awful. I’m sorry. Any chance you can afford to send her check back, or pay her back for the ticket? Even if it takes you years of monthly installments, the satisfaction might be worth it.

Hax handles several more questions in the chat, and then…

Re: Twilight Zone: I’m the CFO of a small Jewish charity in Rockville. How soon is Grandma expected to be of blessed memory?

Carolyn Hax: I love my job.

1. With a few exceptions — for example, Sloane’s fringed leather jacket did not stand the test of time.

Nobody Beats Up My Little Brother But Me

By Evan — — Web

Deep within the comments of Dave Shea’s recent post on browser dependencies, Jeff Croft summarizes his design methodology. It’s so excellent that I’m going to go right ahead and reprint the thing:

In practice, I often find myself doing a bit of an “outside-in” thing. Since my University job forces me to make sites look reasonable in Netscape 4.7x, I have a general design process that looks something like this:

  1. Mark up content in XHTML. Test in Lynx to esure proper flow and such.
  2. Link to a basic stylesheet that Netscape 4 will see.
  3. Write styles for basic (NN4) stylesheet. Typically, this is fonts, colors, and not much else.
  4. @import an advanced stylesheet, for modern browsers.
  5. Write styles for advanced stylesheet, taking full advantage of as much CSS as possible, not really caring whether it works in “mid-level” browser such as IE5 or IE6. At this point, I’m just getting it to look perfect in Safari/Mozilla/Other near-perfect browser.
  6. Revert to a mid-level browser (usually IE5 and IE6) and tweak styles to satisfy them.

Right on, Jeff. Methodical and comprehensive.

I can also sympathize with Jeff and the requirements of his University job. After all, for three-and-a-half years, I had to target Netscape 4.7 as my organization’s primary browser. I was waiting for years for the company to switch to Netscape 6… then Netscape 6.2… then Netscape 7… but it never happened. Be with me here, people. Feel my pain.

So these days I’m of two minds when I hear people ganging up on poor old Netscape 4. On the one hand, Netscape 4 deserves to be bashed. It is truly a lousy piece of software in all respects: standards compliance, rendering speed, user interface, system resources consumed, you name it.1 On the other hand, most of the people doing the bashing don’t really know the horror. Sure, they’ve thrown up their hands in disgust at its CSS bugs.2 Who hasn’t? But have they fought with it for hours? Have they tried to scroll through a styled table with hundreds of cells on an old UltraSparc? Have they had to explain to users that disabling JavaScript also secretly disables style sheets (even though the two options are separate checkboxes that sit right next to each other)? In short, have they bled?

I dunno. I know it’s perverse, but sometimes I feel like I should defend battered, dying old Netscape 4 from the general population. Journeymen! Dilettantes! Feh. If anyone has the right to bash Netscape 4, it ought to be me.

1. The one area where Netscape 4 made signficant strides was stability. Early Netscape 4 was horribly crashy, but as we moved up through Netscape 4.71, 4.72, etc., it actually became fairly stable. Go figure.

2. Incidentally, Netscape 4 sorta kinda understands the float property. So with some tweaking, you can produce primitive tableless sites that display (imperfectly) in Netscape 4. This very site is only one example.

3. Regarding the title of this entry: I don’t actually have a little brother, and I wouldn’t beat him up if I did. It’s just an expression.

Friend Of A Friend

By Evan — — Culture

I’d like to take this opportunity to offer a hearty congratulations to Mike McGee. Earlier this month Mike did all his fellow South Bay Areans proud by winning the National Poetry Slam Championship. That’s right — the reigning Poetry Slam champ is from San Jose. Not San Francisco, not Los Angeles, New York, or Chicago, but San Jose. I just can’t believe that I had to read about it in the local free paper as opposed to hearing it from Sam directly.

Not that I can blame Sam for this. It’s not like he didn’t try. “Hey Evan — Mike is performing up in The City tonight — want to come?” “Nah, I’m tired, and The City is way too far.” “Hey Evan — Mike is performing in San Jose tonight.” “Nah, I’m seeing a movie.” Excuse after excuse. Truth is, I’ve never cared much for slam poetry. I had long ago placed slam poetry in a box labelled “Not-Art”, along with Anguished Teenage Poetry and Jonathan Franzen novels. And so I figured that even someone with Mike McGee’s quicksilver brilliance wasn’t worth getting off my duff to go see. It never occurred to me that he might actually be good. As in, really good. What an unsupportive jerk I was. Sigh.

The Road to Digital Nirvana

By Evan — — Tech

We have all these Devices. We buy these Devices because we think they’ll make our lives a little better or easier; at the very least, we hope that they won’t make our lives worse. And we expect that at some point, the Devices that we cobble together will just work — they won’t crash, they’ll do what we tell them to do, and they’ll communicate with each other seamlessly.

I’m not sure what Digital Nirvana is, but I’ll know it when I see it.

And although it’s a process of trial-and-error, I think I’m headed in the right direction. For example, not so long ago I had a computer that crashed every two or three days. Now I have a computer that has been running almost continuously for the last year and a half, with only two crashes. This is Progress. Other steps are smaller in scope but still important. DragThing. NetNewsWire. A decent web host. Flexible weblog software. The list goes on and on.

Of course, sometimes I make mistakes. For example, a couple of months ago I bought an old Palm VII for twenty bucks at a local garage sale. The guy was a pretty serious geek, judging from the used books he was selling. We bonded. He threw in two serial cradles, a keyboard, and a classy black leather case. Clapped me on the back. “Go forth, young man.” Well, maybe I added that last part. Anyway, I was stoked. I took my very first PDA home and spent an hour going through all the functions, learning Graffiti, generally having a ball. Then I discovered that the only way to sync the Palm with my desktop would be to get a serial-to-USB converter, and that said converters would cost more than I spent for the PDA in the first place. “Huh,” I said. Since then, the Palm VII has sat in my Big Drawer of Extra Cables and Electronic Detritus, safe and sound in its classy black leather case.

Then there was the time I decided that I was tired of writing journal entries in Moveable Type’s tiny little browser textbox, and it was time to find a more elegant interface. So I downloaded a well-known weblog editing tool for OS X and fired it up. I hadn’t configured my site info yet, but I figured what the hell — let’s see what this bad boy can do! I pressed the Connect button, expecting to see some sort of pop-up (“No default blog available. Please enter your URL, name, and password…”). Instead, the program went into a frenzy of trying to access… nothing, apparently, and froze up. Annoyed, I killed the application process and started over. I entered my blog info like a good little user and tried again. Success! At this point, I was afraid to create a new post, so I pulled up a recent entry instead. To my horror, the entry appeared with the whitespace horribly mangled, along with a number of strange tags after each newline “<Unknown Escape>“. Whoa! I don’t know about you, but I consider conversion of newline characters between Linux and Mac OS X to be a solvable problem. Something I sorta kinda expect my weblog editing software to take care of automatically. Now I was really annoyed, and worried that I might overwrite my old entry with a bunch of invalid crud. So I went to close the window, only to suddenly notice that the standard red “close window” button had been inexplicably disabled. Huh?? Sigh. Command-Q, drag folder to Trash.

My latest project: Entering the Wireless World. I’ll admit, it is a bit ambitious of me to set up a wireless hub. My desktop does fine and dandy while wired, and so really only my laptop would benefit. A wireless network of One is not so impressive. But hey, I like to plan ahead.

Fire In Her Wake

By Evan — — Miscellany

Via Jacques Distler, I ran across this lovely article about gem-quality artificial diamonds. According to the article, the DeBeers cartel is pretty freaked out.

In Antwerp, Van Royen tells me of another threat. There’s a rumor of a new, experimental method for growing gem-quality diamonds. The process – chemical vapor deposition – has been used for more than a decade to cover relatively large surfaces with microscopic diamond crystals. The technique transforms carbon into a plasma, which then precipitates onto a substrate as diamond. The problem with the technology has always been that no one could figure out how to grow a single crystal using the method. At least until now, Van Royen says. Apollo Diamond, a shadowy company in Boston, is rumored to be sitting on a single-crystal breakthrough. If true, it represents a new challenge to the industry, since CVD diamonds could conceivably be grown in large bricks that, when cut and polished, would be indistinguishable from natural diamonds. “But nobody has seen them in Antwerp,” Van Royen says. “So we don’t even know if they are for real.”

I take a transparent 35-millimeter film canister from my pocket and put it on the table. Two small diamonds are cushioned on cotton balls inside. “Believe me,” I say, “they’re for real.”

Longtime readers of this journal1 might recall that I’ve been concerned about diamonds for a while now. I’ve wanted nothing to do with the unscrupulous DeBeers cartel and their nasty “conflict diamonds”. In fact, I had pretty much given up on the idea of engagement rings altogether until M’ris pointed out that you need something to brand your spouse as property. But what, then? M’ris suggested tattoos. I thought that a tattoo might be too subtle, but M’ris replied that the tattoo would simply need to be across the forehead and read, “TAKEN”. Problem solved!

Speaking of M’ris, I now have proof that the officially silly California recall is entirely her fault. When she was in Minnesota, Jesse Ventura was elected governor. Now that she’s in California, we get this recall circus. Coincidence??? I think not, and neither does her old friend Scott. Now, sure — you nitpickers are saying, “Evan, aren’t you coming a little unhinged? That doesn’t exactly constitute proof, old boy.” Well, then, consider this: I’ve done a little2 linguistic research and just as I suspected, in her native Norsk tongue “Marissa Kristine Gritter” translates as “The all-powerful warrior woman who, because of her endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from gubernatorial debacle to gubernatorial debacle leaving fire in her wake.” I dunno, seems awfully suspicious to me.

1. I.e. Marissa, my sister, my brother-in-law, and Mom.

2. Obviously very little.