Category Archives: Ideas (blog)

bug babble.

It wouldn’t be home if it was calm.

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Got home from Seattle veeeeeery late Thursday. By mid Friday my cousins had arrived from England. Friday night we grabbed some dinner and slept well.

This morning didn’t go nearly as smoothly. Almost immediately after waking up, Chance started coughing & reverse-sneezing.

Since the dogs were boarded Thursday night, a cough was good for an immediate trip to the vet for the boy. the diagnosis is, well, a cough — could be a virus, could be kennel cough (for which he got his booster a month ago, so that’s doubtful), could be canine influenza. We were told to expect that he’d get worse before he gets better, and given a prescription for a decongestant in case it gets bad over the weekend. Oh, and we can assume if Chance has it, Kaylee does too.

On the other hand, Chance has been coughing less and less throughout the course of the day, he’s alert, eating fine, and driving me crazy because he’s constantly got to be in my lap. So I’m not panicking yet.

The afternoon settled out with some chores and a nap, and then a big family dinner at my parents’ place, lots of stories, and lots of laughter.

Now we’re home again. My cousins have crashed for the night, and Nighthawk and I are watching the DVR of the Phillies game.

Tomorrow is more time with family and some shopping. I don’t go back to work until the cousins head back to England, so I’m taking time recharging, and I’ll be home more than usual, which is convenient for keeping an eye on the dogs.

So, you know, the usual calm weekend at home.

A fresh cut

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If you’ve been spared my babble on twitter and facebook, you might’ve somehow missed the fact that I’ve been in Seattle all week learning at An Event Apart.

And y’all know what that means: I’m hacking the site again.

If you’re using Safari or Firefox, you might notice the header and certain aspects of the page design have changed. That’s all done in HTML 5 and CSS 3 — though there’s a lot more to do before the page would align with the current standards. Amazingly, the page now aligns with the way I pictured the header looking when I first started this design a few years ago.

If you’re using Internet Explorer, the page just got more boring looking. Sorry, but IE doesn’t support the new standards yet. (Though if you’re one of the ones on IE 8 tiny bits and pieces are working. And if you’re one of the 20% of my visitors below IE 8 we need to talk anyway, because dude, your browser is a security hazard. The other 80% of the folks here have gotten with the program, and it’s your turn.)

Anyway, everything still works on IE, just doesn’t look quite as fancy as it used to. On the other hand, since I just stripped a bunch of pretty darned large images out of my CSS (and shortened it), and cleaned up the sidebar and some other stuff, hey, you might actually see a performance boost out of it, even if the page did get more boring, and most people are willing to make that trade-off.

If you see anything whacko, snap a screenshot and send it to me at [my nickame] [at symbol] [my nickname dot com]. Or leave a comment. Whatever :)

Ow my brain.

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I think the best way to qualify what I just woke up from was a “defrag dream” (thank you Jo for finally giving them a name), partially because it was a weird “will it blend?” of work, the conference, family, and hell, anything else my brain could come up with, and partially because after two awesome awesome awesome days of An Event Apart: Seattle, I have a hell of a lot to defrag.

I’d tell you about the dream, but I can’t remember it because of the end of the dream. And it’s really the end of the dream I’m writing about because I want to know if this happens to anyone else.

Last night, I went to a rockin’ party, where I didn’t drink (only relevant because we’re talking about brain behavior), came back to the hotel, watched about a half hour or so of SportsCenter while surfing twitter and catching up on my email, and fell asleep.

I woke back up, got into bed, and turn on the music I usually sleep to. (Look up Dan Gibson’s Solitudes on your music store of choice. No relation, btw.). I don’t remember setting an alarm.

Normally, that would be a massive error on my part. I regularly sleep through my alarms at home, which is why I set three of them when it’s something important.

As an added bonus, I neglected to actually plug the phone into the charger. It was down to below 45% charge when I went to bed, and I was playing music at the time. It had no shot of living to morning.

So I’m asleep, and I’m dreaming all kinds of crazy shit about trying to get something work-related redesigned using css3 on my iPhone while waiting on the tarmac of the plane back to Philly, except the plane won’t take off because the runway is packed with people who got off their planes to go to the IA Summit and decided to just sit down in the middle of the runway to eat lunch… there were many dogs involved, something about us actually being in Japan, I was being followed, a few bits were animated, the plane has hotel furniture in it… see? Defrag dream.

Anyway, the phone in the hallway of the hotel (which was somehow in the plane) (and which looks really cool, I’ll try to grab a pic shortly) starts ringing. I know it’s my sister, in that it’s-a-dream-you’re-psychic way, so even though I’m in a hallway of a hotel inside an airplane in Japan, I answer it.

Here’s where it gets weird.

(Don’t give me that look.)

The voice on the other end sounds like a hairy monster. Pick a male muppet not voiced by Frank Oz, make him sound gruff, turn him into a faceless scary thing (that’s only about 2 feet tall). He screams about four words at me. When I say screams, I mean THIS BIT OF THE DREAM WAS 10 TIMES LOUDER THAN THE REST and I didn’t even know dreams had volume controls. I can’t understand any of the 4 words because they’re cut off like bad cellphone connections.

Instantly, I wake up. And it’s the exact time my first alarm would’ve gone off, if I’d set it, on the iPhone that’s dead anyway.

So here’s my theory: Rational Brain and Emotional Brain are working together to clean the house, and Emotional Brain (which by the way is better at cleaning) is in charge. Neither of them is watching the clock, but Rational Brain slipped Dinosaur Brain $20 and a bottle of Bacardi Mojito earlier to make sure we get up on time, because it knows we’re in trouble. Dinosaur Brain is very good at keeping time, so when the alarm needs to go off, it cuts in Matrix-style and violently disrupts the dream with extreme loudness. But since it’s Dinosaur Brain, it can’t talk to me in words, so Emotional Brian translates the entire mess into the next closest thing: a bad signal from AT&T.

Thoughts?

More stuff, mostly on games

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The color grading virus that is teal and orange or – why all movies you watch look the same. Once I started seeing this I couldn’t not-see it anymore. Now it’s your problem too.

More on games (I’m into games. Have I mentioned that?)

(…and while we’re on the subject, I’m done playing Oblivion for a while. You can apply that “for a while” to mean “how long I played Oblivion” or “how long I’m done”. As in, “I played 341 hours of Oblivion, so I think I’m OK with not playing again for a very long time.” Loved it loved it loved it. Did not want it to end. But also, when playing a sandbox game one finds that, since there’s no end, there’s no sense of closure. So it’s hard to walk away. Still, I think I found a clean breakpoint. Anyway…)

Speaking of everything else, this is a conversation I have much more frequently than every month or so and not just about restaurant websites.

Link roundup and vacation

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So, where’ve I been at?

I’ve been working. And working. And working. And designing and architecting and wireframing and learning about design and thinking about user problems and dreaming about user problems and wireframing and designing and learning – oh God the learning – my brain has melted out my ears a dozen times already.

This results in a few things:

1. I am exhausted.
2. I want to learn even more.
3. I want to get the hell away from everyone and everything that says I have to learn faster so I can produce faster so they can have the results faster, because it’s leading straight back to 1.
4. I am a grouchy grouchy bitch when 1, 2, and 3 interact.
5. I finish the project.

Because #5 happened at approximately 3:24 this afternoon, when the handoff meeting wrapped, I can actually think and breathe for the first time in weeks.

What happens now?

Well, tomorrow we play board games.

Saturday, we go to a baseball game.

Sunday I fly to Seattle.

Sometime between Sunday and Thursday I have a thousand new things poured into my ears, resulting in more brain melt. If my expectations are met, I’m also killed in a combination earthquake/tsunami, since it’ll be my first time on the left coast, and I’ll be feet away from the Pacific.

Assuming, as my family keeps doing, that last bit is inaccurate, I’ll then fly home Thursday.

That’s when I get to party with family from Thursday to the following Wednesday. There will likely be even more learning and thinking, but of a wholly different kind than I have experienced in months.

Two weeks from today, I’ll go back to work, a different person than I am right now.

***
My twitter favorites feed is in the thousands again. Time to clean out some links.

Speaking of wrong…

A short but good essay on the recent student loan reform bill that passed.

A great commercial for Axe.

Researchers discover a possible new human group with DNA from a bone — making us more than just Neanderthal and Modern Human.

A school in England is making education easier for teenagers by moving the school day’s start back to 10am. Maaaaan, if I’d had this I’d be brilliant by now.

Fear and Loathing in Farmville is an article written by a game designer who attended the GDC and summarized how “social gaming” is changing game design, in many cases for the worse.

These are very important instructions. They are also a good reason to study math.

Speaking of studying, game design, and long talks, here’s one about using video games to save the world:

…

More as I continue to clean out my Twitter favorites.

Maybe if i start writing them down they’ll go away.

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I dreamed that I had ordered a louisville slugger online directly from the company (why I don’t know) with my choice of paint colors (it’s blasphemy to paint a louisville slugger btw). it was going to be a personal piece of memorabilia so it was important that it was perfect. And I was going to use it to play backyard baseball and maybe join a league, so it was important that the bat worked.

When it arrived it was badly warped. And by warped I mean it was carved out of the elbow of a tree branch. When you held it out to bunt, the end of it pointed at the pitcher. The end appeared to be a drawer knob screwed on & wrapped with electrical tape. I’ve seen stick bats that were more game-legal than this thing. I could’ve carved a bat myself for less than the $629.50 I’d paid for this one. (I have no idea why mybrain picked that price, or why I remember it.)

So I hopped in my car and drove to the factory, which for some reason wasn’t in Kentucky. it was in Lancaster county, PA. There I asked for a replacement and got handed a bat so old the black paint was flaking off. Plus, I suspect it was a modified chair rail because it wasn’t shaped like a bat. Oh, and it was warped too, just not as badly.

I asked for my money back & was told i could only get $200 back, but not in real money. I was given 4 options: gift certificates to township plays, gift certificates to township chicken barbeques, eBay rattan chair cushions, and a SEPTA pass only good to take the train home (thus stranding my car in Lancaster). The township GCs were only good in the township where you live, and the nasty woman who wouldn’t give me my money back wouldn’t listen when I said my township doesn’t do plays or chicken barbecues.

A moment on the decor in this dream. picture what your house would look like if all the walls were wooden paneling. now, take your floors out and replace them with stained cement. Replace your windows with ones that are two sizes smaller, and don’t open. Replace all your doors with ones that don’t quite close because all the door frames are warped, the walls are off plumb, there isn’t a square corner in the joint. This is especially evident if you use the bathroom, because the door won’t stay closed & looks rift out into the kitchen. Cover everything with soot. Throw out everything you own & replace it with $250 in furniture picked up at a yard sale in 1970. That’s what the bat factory in Lancaster’s main office looked like.

By now I had concluded this was not a legitimate Louisville Slugger.

As I was shaking the woman by the lapels demanding to know why I couldn’t have my money back (they’d spent it remodeling & redecorating) my boss’s boss intervened and convinced me to go get some dinner & go home.

He took us (suddenly Nighthawk was there) to a cafeteria-style buffet, which was built the same way as the bat factory. The food was mostly Italian, deli, or items-wrapped-in-crescent-dough, but everything was at least 5 hours old. I ended up with two sodas, a rock hard crescent mini-weenie, an egg roll made of crescent dough, and some cranberry goat cheese.

I don’t remember anything after that, but the dream kept going. I think I’m more tired now than when I went to bed.