April is the Cruelest Month

April is the cruelest month. And Thomas Sterns Eliot did not know the half of it.

April to me, means interruption, inefficiency and indecision. Alone in the calendar, it represents a brief period where events and circumstances conspire to keep me and almost everyone in my circle from getting things done or being particularly happy.

March may come in like a lamb and go out like a lion, but April comes in like a psychotic and then… just stays. You never know out how to dress, in April. The daily high temperature can reach well into the 70°s, but the overnight lows can dip down into the 20° range, too. So how do you dress for work in the morning—especially if you walk or bike to work? When can anyone know that it is safe to pack away the parka in the closet and the ice scrapers in the trunk? Shorts and mittens? Sign me up.

You know nobody expects anything serious from April right from the start. April First is celebrated as April Fool's Day for a reason, I'm sure.

April is when our income tax returns must be filed. I generally try to arrange my affairs in such a way as to be able to file sooner, but there have been years when I waited for official W-this or 10-that forms before I could file, which is always frustrating because those are the years, inevitably, when we are due a refund. The news isn't all bad though, because it does force us to take a good, hard look at our financial situation at least once every year and that cannot be a bad thing.

Still, it would be nice if they didn't print right on the damned booklet that it was going to take you thirty-seven hours and twenty minutes to fill out all of the necessary forms. I have heard all manner of alternatives over the years, proposals guaranteed to save us all time and money and, of course, make taxes fairer, which always manages to save their proponents some huge bag of cash while shifting the burden on to someone else. Just as I don't see how those rapid-voiced disclaimers, or how filling a TV screen with tiny 8pt type describing side-effects for one second should be legal, I don't see how a nation can compel its citizens to give up so much time while accounting for how much money they should pay in. There are, alternatives. You can pay someone a bag of money to fill out all of the forms for you. Or you can purchase a program for your computer which will ask "In plain English!" questions about your finances and populate the correct forms with the correct numbers. It all seems like too much, to me.

And at work, we are dealing with our annual performance evaluations. Here's a good three-weeks of e-mails, phone calls, meetings, navel-gazing and self-reflection, tempering conceit and self-delusion with plausible deniability and revisionist history. All of those hours that could have been spent spell-checking web pages, teaching people the secrets of Dreamweaver, learning JavaScript or user-testing some new interface design get spent instead on What I Did Last Summer essays, wrestling with the software and ultimately the heartbreak of finding out that the thing you did the best, the thing that mattered the most to you all year, the thing you think you did Nine- or Ten-work on, garners only a Two from someone a pay grade or three above you who would have to fill out a form if you got full marks.

I had a car crash in an April, and lost a sweetie in another. I had a marriage and a business both end in different Aprils. My father died during an April, too. It seems to me that there are just entirely too many opportunities to not get things done during the thirty days that April hath. Every month is filled with meetings, with telephone calls and e-mails and deadlines and all of the challenges and expectations that family and business life bring. But April seems to go out of its way to make sure that you come out of it in almost worse shape than you went in.

It's getting better, though. This year, at least, we turned the clocks ahead an hour in March, instead of waiting for April, moving that confusion and frustration ahead a month. I just hope we aren't making room for something else to come along and fill the void. Another April is coming, friends. All we can do is hold our noses (not to the grindstone—no meaningful work will be expected, remember?—just hold them) and try to get through it.

Vacate The Premises!

How much can you get done in a day? A week? What amount of output is "average" or "outstanding" or even "acceptable" today? How do you even quantify the work? Is there a quick and easy way to measure what you "got done" today? Finally, what can you do to increase your output, you know, without really increasing your effort?

An entire industry answers questions like this, today. You can go to any bookstore and choose from dozens of business, management and personal development titles, to say nothing of Dreamweaver, XHTML and database books. I'll just answer, as the old mapmakers used to say "Here Lies Danger." Be careful, because there is much advice out there, and not all of it is good.

Can you measure a Web designer's output by the number of pages they create? I'm not sure. I have built fairly elaborate pages and placed content in them that would require several minutes for most people to read, in only a few minutes of my time. And I have labored long and hard on pages where seemingly nothing changed for days, as I worked out database calls, string comparisons and output styling. Well, how about lines of output, then? Is there some number above which you are a "good" Web programmer, but below which you are in line for a job that requires you to wear a name tag or a paper hat? I don't know the answer to that one, either.

I once worked for a man who did measure output that way. A Web page was 325 lines on Tuesday, and 400 lines on Friday, so I had only accomplished 75 lines over three days, to him. That figure, of course, was net. It didn't account for two hundred lines I had actually written, then discarded as they led me down another blind alley. It also did not reflect efficiencies in using the language's tools to do more with fewer lines. I will admit I may have placed a carriage return here or there within the markup of a page, just to generate the necessary line count improvement. Hey, if more lines was all he needed, I felt I owed it to him, my wife and VISA to provide it for him.

It's easy to think that if you can do six units of something an hour, one every ten minutes, then you can increase your output by coming in five minutes early, staying late five minutes at lunch, coming back from lunch five minutes early and staying late another five minutes at the end of the day. There's another twenty minutes, and so there's another two units, right?

Not quite, because not every thing that can be counted, counts; and not every thing that counts can be counted. Life is a lot more fluid than multiplication and division.

At some point on your personal journey to maximum productivity, or even optimum productivity, you will burn out. You will reach a place where additional time given to a task actually reduces output. There is a measurable improvement in people's ability to concentrate and work, if they just get up and walk around for a while every couple of hours. Get up, go and get a drink, step outside and see what the weather is like and then return to your task. So say the efficiency experts.

There are dangers here, too, though. This is about the time I run into my Director or Coordinator. So in their experience Mark isn't always someone doing heroic work hand-crafting Web pages and hammering out usability errors and validation troubles… he's the guy in the hallway. So be careful when you take your little productivity hike.

And at intervals, it is good to get completely away. We Americans are awful about using vacation leave we accumulate every year as part of our compensation. That's like walking away and leaving money on the table—and it doesn't help us to either produce more, or to produce better.

With that in mind, I plan to take next week off, do a little travel and see some family. There's nothing wrong with me today that a little baby-drool on the shoulder won't fix.

Take it easy, huh?

Forecast Schmorecast: Microsoft Does The Right Thing

Just as with weather forecasts, sometimes technology forecasts go bad. In this case, I am pretty happy with the way things have turned out. It's going to get cloudy, and maybe it will rain here and there, but this will pass, eventually. The skies will clear, in time.

♪♫"The sun will come out, tomorrow"♫♪.

To recap, the browser wars of the 1990s brought a renewed focus on Web Standards and that brought out the shortcomings of Microsoft's long-dormant Internet Explorer. For years, Web designers and developers worked around issues with IE in order to get pages that looked right in that specific browser, and a tremendous number of sites and pages were built in this way. Under pressure from standards groups and a host of prominent Web gurus, Microsoft finally released Internet Explorer 7 which fixed a number of errors, but broke a huge number of Web pages. The problem was with the way IE had "always" interpreted pages, and how developers had worked around those issues.

You can go to a bookstore and buy a five year old HTML book that said if you type in "that" you will get a page that looks like "this". And it would, but not in Internet Explorer. Microsoft's new browser was better than IE6, in a technical sense. It was truer to the way the W3C said markup should work, and it was more like the best browsers in the world. But IE7 was only an incremental improvement, and it caused any number of problems as it encountered pages with various hacks and tricks and work-arounds. Microsoft now had religion, but if IE7 wrecked the Web, what would happen when a newer, better and even more standards-compliant IE8 was unleashed on an unsuspecting planet?

Back on February 20th, I wrote about Microsoft's proposed solution. They floated the idea of a fix that involved opting-in for better performance. Now, and forever more, developers would have to include a specific, almost-proprietary and otherwise-unnecessary <meta> tag in their pages in order for IE8 to use all of it's new and improved rendering skills. No books available today teach this method. No classes taught today teach this method. There would be a dozen years of material and tradition out there with no reference to this at all. But, if you knew about it, and if you included this <meta> tag, it would trigger the improved, higher-fidelity rendering performance everyone craves.

Well, apparently all of that is out, now. Microsoft will release a new Web browser the way everyone always has. It will include by default improved support for both markup and CSS and, yes, it will play Hell with pages designed with IE4's, IE5's and IE6's flaws in mind. We went through much the same agony with Netscape's Navigator, which stayed at version 4 for many years longer than welcome.

So how does this affect us? Well, we can be thankful the result is almost not at all. There are very few areas where we have hacked pages to act in ways they were not meant to. I am sure these things will be taken into account in the next design and templates. The news for us is mostly good, as pages will appear more alike in Opera, Safari, Firefox and (wait for it…) Internet Explorer. This is as it should be. ABC doesn't check how Grey's Anatomy looks in Panasonic and Sony and Toshiba televisions. Why should we have to jump through so many hoops testing in half a dozen browsers because someone made a mistake a dozen years ago and decided to go their own way for several years?

There is going to be some noise for a while. The situation has been likened to Microsoft ripping-off the Band-Aid™ instead of peeling it off. But that just means we are that much closer to the day when all of this is unnecessary.

April showers bring May flowers, we were taught as children. We may have a few more bumps in the road as I layer on ever more metaphors, but things are improving and one day we will look back at this time and laugh. There may be a little rain, now, but there won't be the storm I was worried about. Wear your galoshes and try to enjoy it.