We had greek last night and it was good to get back into it… I need to devote lots of time every day to studying and thinking in Greek. Maybe I should start writing these blog posts in Greek. No, probably not.
Category Archives: News
Happy Birthday Mom!
Happy Birthday to my Mom, who turned (insert non-public age here). Even if it came a day early.
Dance Class
Abby had her first dance class today. While she looked cute, she was incredibly cranky mid-way through the class. However, she straightened up when the hand stamps came out. She will be in a ‘holiday recital’ which I will attempt to get on camera and video.
Prepare for excessive cuteness.
Advert Eyes Mint
So I got a CD-ROM in the mail today, it was a beauty, on the outside it had printed in largish letters: “Here’s the ComuServe software you ordered.” However, I did not order any software from CompuServe. In fact, to further disprove their own first statement the address lable says (and this is brilliant), “Current Resident
Or Current Resident”
Yeah! I’m feeling like using this for another coaster. Old or junky CD‘s make great coasters for your home office or a special gift at Christmas, like the teal uni-sex sweater.
Jessica Chopped Her Hand Off
Jessica didn’t really chop her hand off, but she did scream in such a fashion that I thought she had severely injured herself. Or, maybe Abby damaged a part of her body. Nope, that wasn’t it either. Instead a spider was on the couch. Such emergencies call for heroic action like nothing else. I swept in, found said spider (smaller than a quarter) and with a piece of paper-towel (‘The quicker spider upper’) ended the poor creatures life. However, the couch is now safer for the change that was also inhabiting the elongated seat.
Spread Firefox
If you don’t already use FireFox as your browser, may I suggest you try it out? Version 1.o is here and it’s faster, cooler and more secure than Internet Explorer. What I find so neat about FireFox is that it’s free but better quality than most paid browsers (which I include Internet Explorer – Windows is not free). I know I push this browser periodically, but it is so excellent that I like for people to give it a chance, you won’t go back.
Why Did the Jobs Disappear?
So I was reading a bit of an article on lots of Information Technology jobs disappearing. I would like to point out that after the ‘Dot Com’ bust the jobs died because American (and foreign) venture capitalists were morons. We employed people in this country to sit behind desks and play video games as receptionists. You say, “How do you know?” Because I’m married to one of those ex-receptionists. She quit the job because she was so bored with the job. The pay was excellent, like most start-up jobs, but the work being done was horrible. Beer was in the fridge, Pizza was ordered out all of the time and work was not done very well. That is why there are not as many tech jobs. The tech industry had a bowel movement to get rid of the crap and get down to work. Speaking of which, I better get to work to make sure people get quality software in a timely manner.
Photography Interests
I’ve been somewhat fond of photography for some time. My friend Sean has been doing it well for some time professionally, but I’d like to just use it with RandyPeterman.com and the sites that I build. I’ve been looking at this Nikon camera at the recommendation of a friend at church. Any thoughts or ideas?
And because I can, a quote from Paul Simon:
Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, Oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away
Getting Cheap with Apple
I installed iTunes this morning… again. I installed it when it first came out and thought, "This stinks." It’s somewhat better now, but man, it sure is slow. However, I installed it for one reason: Villa-Lobos. That’s the name of a composer that I heard on the radio in Texas that caused me to stop cleaning the apartment and just sit and listen. Of course, as Jessica will tell you, it takes very little to get me to stop working. However, Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5: Aria (Cantilena), is really beautiful and the warm deep cello mixed with the flowing vocal melody is enchanting.
I got cheap with Apple because the song is just over seven minutes long. That’s right, for 99¢ I bought what is three punk songs, two pop songs from the radio or part Pink Floyd’s The Wall 🙂 I had been looking for that song for some time and actually own a recording of Villa-Lobos conducting an orchestra in 1935 but the fidelity is low and so I keep looking for better versions. This version is good and I recommend it. However, after sampling the sample file on Amazon, you will not the price of the CD and choose iTunes, too..
Standards Savings, My Take
Eric Meyer reviews an article about saving money using standards based design Eric’s Archived Thoughts: Standards Savings. One thing that he notes is that end users often see faster pages but smaller companies don’t see a savings in bandwidth (due to flat bandwidth rates). However, I propose another form of savings. Harddrive savings. This site is on a plan that costs me USD $10.00 a month, if I go over my three gigabytes of traffic I pay more. If I go above the thirty megabytes of storage space I have to either pay a fee or upgrade my plan to include more storage. Here’s the thing, if you use a static website with semantic markup you’ll probably have room on a server for a lot more products, press releases and pictures due to ‘skinny’ markup.
Another point to make in this discussion is that you can write semantically marked up pages that are as ‘fat’ as old-style pages. Granted you have to try, but if on a forms page you use the myriad of tags available to you you could find yourself with a heavy page. That said, it is most likely much more accessible. Being accessible, more usable and ready for most user scenarios outweighs any loss in download speed. However, it does bring to mind the need to be careful how you markup your page. It may lead you to choose a select form element rather than radio form elements when the options get long. If you use a label for each radio button you’ll most likely get some pretty bloated code. fieldset, legend and label are all useful for making nice, semantic forms, but they can bloat your page. accesskeys as accessibility helpers (ignoring discussions about what keys should or should not be used) add bytes to pages as well so keep your accesskeys under control.
In summary, you’ll see lots of discussion on both sides (pro or anti-semantic markup camps) about how the side has seen pages that do or do not achieve the claims of the other camp. The practitioner of the art is what makes the art stand out, however, the form of art does not cease to be good if one practitioner fails to execute well.