I need glasses, now.

Pardon me if you caught this on the Emergency blog, this morning. Nobody was more surprised than me, believe me.

The men in my family have all worn glasses since about the age of thirty-five. I have an uncle who started when he was in college. My dad checked-in during his middle thirties. It's just an expected thing. We all pretty much keep our hair and lose our eyesight, I guess. I wonder if that's a choice anyone would make.

As a pilot, I had my eyes checked every two years. "Read the bottom of the chart, Mister Hiatt. As far down as you can go, please." "Chicago Eye Chart Company, Chicago Illinois, Six-Owe-Six…" "That'll be fine, thanks."

Curiously, while I have always been able to read the chart, I have always had terrible luck with the little machine they make you look into when you get your drivers' license renewed. At intervals, I have found myself staring at the pilot chart on Monday and into the driver's exam machine on Wednesday of the same week. I would pass with flying eyes and be told I needed glasses to drive. When I would protest, some kindly old manager-type would give me an envelope to cover one eye and ask me to read one of the driver safety posters on the other wall. Having done that, I was good to go for another four years on the road.

I never figured out whether I should be worried or grateful or how I should interpret all of this. But consider all of this, the next time you watch an airplane fly over, or someone headed toward you at sixty miles per hour.

One doctor told me that I'm probably getting caught up on the glare of the various lenses and mirrors. That minor scratches or dust is what I'm picking up on inside the machine, and that's why I can spot traffic at my ten o'clock and six thousand feet, but not tell which pair of lines is darker in the machine. I don't know, but I don't trust 'em.

Which brings us to glasses. I now wear glasses. As I sat in the chair, trying not to be distracted by the dust and scratches in the various headgear and eye-calibrators of my first real eye exam in years, at one point the doctor pulled the whole thing away from my face and showed me. "Here's what you're currently seeing" and replaced it all, with "…and here's what it could be". I was convinced.


But I know myself well enough to know that I needed an all-or-nothing, all-in-one solution. If I had to carry around driving glasses and reading glasses and sunglasses it would just increase the chances that I would at some point have the wrong pair. So, I got no-line bifocals, with the automatic tinting when you go outside. I get distracted by seeing the edge of the lens, so I got Aviator -style frames, with a little bigger lenses that give me more glass to look through.

I think I wish now that I hadn't gotten the no-line bifocals. My problem is that I'm not yet smart enough to know where and how to look at things. If I had a little line there, etching out a window of close readability, I think I might be better off, today. As it is, they tell me the more I wear my new glasses, the faster I will get used to them. I put in about six hours that first day, and another twelve or fifteen the next. It's been at least eight hours every day, since.

It still feels weird. It's scary looking down at the ground I'm about to walk on and seeing it move away from me. Stairs are an issue. But I'll get it, eventually. For now it's difficult to work facing the computer screen and knowing I have only some percentage around where I'm focusing that I can actually see clearly, quickly fading away as I move up or down, left or right of that mark.

Funny how we adapt to our changing realities, isn't it? People think they could never save ten percent, then they end up taking a ten percent pay cut and… getting along fine, more or less. Things change, circumstances change, technologies change and realities change.

Hey, maybe all of this head-turning counts as exercise, huh?

Memorial Day

Ah, Memorial Day. The first big holiday guaranteed to be held in Spring, and celebrated from sea to shining sea with tire sales, and two-for-one deals on ice cream. But not at my house.

At my house, the two military holidays, Veteran's Day and Memorial Day, were always a little more reverential than knocking fifty bucks off the price of a washer. My mother and father were both Marines. My dad went to war for this country three times. At various times, he was responsible for recruiting, for training and for supplying the Marine Corps. I think about that a lot. If I screw up a Web page, and don't properly close a <table>, nothing really serious happens. Most browsers today will (correctly) assume that it should have closed after the last <tr> was closed. It's no big deal. I don't hear from my boss either way. I don't get spanked for not closing the table and I don't get a parade when I do. But my dad went to work every day at the kind of job, like being a doctor or an airline pilot, where everything matters.

If you pick some kid off of the street and fill him full of ideas and sign him up for a job where he loses a foot and can't sleep nights, you are in some way responsible. If it is your job to teach this kid, in only twelve weeks, how not to lose a foot, and he does it anyway, then you in some way are responsible. It may come about because you were distracted, tired, or because you were more interested in becoming his friend than in training him. And if your unit needs bullets, batteries or bandages and none are available, you have let them down, too, possibly with disastrous results. You cannot turn this kind of thinking off at the end of the day, can you? Or just walk away from it after twenty years? Maybe that is why Marines may stop getting paid, but they never, ever, stop being Marines.

Thanks to my dad's service, I can now save thirty, forty and even fifty percent on home furnishings this week. Not a bad deal, huh? At least I got my dad back. A whole lot of Marine families were not so lucky.

There are more than fifty-eight thousand, two hundred and fifty names on The Wall, the Viet Nam Veteran's Memorial, in Washington, DC. The oldest was sixty-three (and you thought mowing the lawn was hard work at your age—try going to war in your sixties). The youngest was only fifteen. When I was fifteen, "bravery" and "courage" meant trying to touch a boob. A Marine named Bullock was only fifteen when he lost his life in service to his country. There are similar stories representing similar sacrifice in every war and in every military engagement that this country has ever been involved in.

Dads and brothers and friends and sweet hearts don't come home. Ball games go unvisited, lakes and streams go unfished. Kids learn to ride bikes and how to shave from other people. Someone else meets them as they graduate or get married and says "I am proud of you." Old cars go unrestored. Back porches go unpainted. Gardens go unplanted. But those kinds of things go unreported in the news, which focuses on simple, innocent, generic numbers. Three were killed, yesterday. Two, today.

It's okay to enjoy the nice weather. It's okay to take the family on a picnic, this weekend. It's even okay to save money on a new iPod, this week. Just pause for a moment and remember the men and women who bought and paid for this day off with their lives. And remember all of those empty chairs, at dining rooms and recital halls and schools and churches. The men and women who should be sitting there aren't buying tires this week at any price. The least we can do is to remember them, once a year.

Tables Are Bad, M'Kay?

Tables Aren't Bad.

Somehow, in the Cliff's Notes version of the great InterWeb Revolution of 2001, the story has been reduced to "All you need to know is that Tables are Bad, now". I am not sure how or why this became the take-away from the uprising, but it's something that gets back to me three or five times a year, it seems.

Don Novello's character, Father Guido Sarducci used to have a Five Minute University where he taught everything that a college graduate knew five years after graduation, in only five minutes. Want a Business degree? "Buy low, sell high". Want an Economics degree? "Suppy and Demand". Somehow, we've become a culture that worships the summary blurb more than the total package. I fervently pray this has so far escaped the fields of Aviation and Medicine.

"Oh? I thought Tables were bad?" seems to be offered up more than any other piece of failed conventional wisdom about the Web, the last several years. It comes up more often than "You should be able to get to anything you need in three clicks". It comes up more often than "browsers don't support CSS well enough to really depend on it". It comes up more often than "everybody uses Internet Explorer".

Tables aren't bad. Using Tables for layout is bad.

Tables came into the world to save us all from using non-breaking spaces to line-up our data into rows and columns. As you (may/should) know, Web browsers have been trained to ignore multiple spaces and represent them as just a single space. This plays Hell with those of us who learned to type in the Olden Days, who were told to always end our sentences with a period and two spaces. The online alternative, then, was the non-breaking space, &nbsp; or &#160;.

Non-breaking spaces, well, don't "break". If you string thirty of them together, you will get thirty spaces. Using the regular space-bar character, you would get only one. And this was fine(ish) for the first few years of the Web. But a system like this breaks down if you increase or decrease font sizes past a certain limit. And it takes more time to fill out a page, as you are actually having to download the spaces rather than the next data item in the row. [Space] [Space] [Space] [Space] [Space]Not good, huh?

And so Tables were released upon a grateful Web. Now we could corral various data and line it up into grids like we were used to seeing in so many reports and schedules and other printed materials. And because we could change the fonts, colors and background colors in Tables, just as we could with other HTML elements, some very artful Tables sometimes were the result.

But the commercial end of the Web was heating up about this time, too. And those people are famously, ruthlessly, unaccountably creative. Once they learned you could put anything into a Table, they did. Form elements were more easily aligned inside Table cells. Placing images inside Table cells meant you could precisely control where and how they appeared, and that quickly became The Way Things Were Done. Probably it had to happen, and eventually it did: At some point someone put a Table inside a Table. Jesus wept.

It wasn't that the Designers of the day were ignorant of Tables' original purpose. It wasn't that they did not care about the drawbacks of using Tables. It wasn't that they were jerks. It was just that Tables were all we had, back then. If you wanted a Web page that looked like your corporate stationery, you had to lay it out in a Table.

Today we are not bound by the limits of Tables. The border attribute of Tables can be set to "0" or "1" or some other number, giving you no border, or a one-pixel border, etc. But using CSS, we can style each individual side of the Table, and have different values for the border of the Table itself, and the borders of the Table Data cells, Table Rows, etc. But CSS provides even more freedom by letting you break out of using Tables to just place images "over here" and navigation "over there". It's an important improvement.

But that doesn't mean that Tables are bad. If you are representing tabular data, they are still and always the best choice. A listing of classroom schedules would contain a class name, "ECON101", and the professor's name, "Wilson" and the days of the week the class is taught, "MWF" and the time, "1:00pm-1:50pm" and where, "214 CBA" and how many credit hours the class is worth, "3". Placing this kind of information in a paragraph, one time, is hard to understand, but packing all of the information into a paragraph would be horribly confusing.

ECON101, Wilson, MWF 1:00pm-1:50pm, 214 CBA, 3. ECON102, Harlow, TTh 10:00am-11:50am, 235 CBA, 3. ECON201, Wilson, MWF 10:00am-10:50am, 214 CBA, 3. ECON211, Barnett, MWF 9:00am-10:50am, 311 CBA, 3.

*Whew!*

You could style that wad into rows and columns, but they would be very fragile and would easily break if the user adjusted their font size.

Much better to see it all in the rows and columns we are all so comfortable with.

Please keep scrolling, to see the real table. Blogger is acting up on me again and for some reason is adding a huge amount of space between here and the table:

ECON101	Wilson	MWF	1:00pm-1:50pm	214 CBA	3
ECON102	Harlow	TTh	10:00am-11:50am	235 CBA	3
ECON201	Wilson	MWF	10:00am-10:50am	214 CBA	3
ECON211	Barnett	MWF	9:00am-10:50am	311 CBA	3

Much nicer, right? It's what we are used to. It's what we are expecting. It's the right tool for the job. If you have tabular data, use Tables.

By the way, a special tip of the hat to Blogger, for not allowing me to clean up all of the room between the here-comes-a-real-table text and the table itself. Nice work, guys.

The Lightbulb Moment

I have the best job on campus.

The groundskeepers get to work outside this week, with all of the flowering going on. That's great. But they'll also be out there in eight months when it's snowing from left-to-right.

The coaches make a Bag-O'-Money™ every year, but they spend their days in aromatic locker rooms and their futures depend upon things like whether young Jeremy got a good night's sleep last night. Still, they get damned good parking.

A lot of the teachers are enthusiastic and seem like they are still deeply into whatever subject it is they teach. But there are a few you just know are just putting in time, now. They've been beaten down by The System and are just a little too cynical about it all. They like their jobs, but they don't love them any more.

But me? I build web pages about half the time and teach people how to build pages the other half.

Building, for me, includes researching new and new-to-me technologies, like JavaScript, and maintaining pages I "finished" years ago. There are a few meetings every month, and there isn't a lot of pressure to cure cancer or anything.

The rest of the time, I'm teaching people what I do, what's important to me and how to build better pages.

This part would include classroom time, for sure. But also a good deal of telephone support, some e-mails and even a few walk-ups from time to time. And every encounter brings with it the chance that it may end in what I call the Lightbulb Moment.


Cartoonists have for years indicated a sudden burst of inspiration, a clear thought, a new idea, by means of a lightbulb going off over someone's head. I live for that. It's something that nobody can ever take away from you. They might plow your parking space into a new dormitory, or cut your budget so you're reusing Post-It notes, but they can't make you un-learn Tables. I love that. Someone toddled into my workshop on HTML and they came away with something.

I learned almost all of what I started with from Molly Holzschlag. We'd meet, about a dozen of us, on Saturday mornings in a specific chat room. She from Tucson, Arizona, and me here in Lincoln. She'd patiently sketch out the framework of a good Web page, and we'd all make notes and try it on our own. She has gone on to write an entire bookshelf of Web design, HTML, XHTML and CSS books. She speaks at conferences all over the world and one of my little pleasures is keeping up with her—not to say stalking—as she makes her way around the globe.

I hope that someone from one of my classes picks this all up and takes it forward. I love writing to Molly after a particularly lightbulby day.

How many seeds are in an Apple, Molly?
And how many Apples are in a seed?

What started with her and me and a 56kbps modem stretches now to the Chemistry department, or Engineering, or Computer Science, or Administration—all over the whole campus, really.

And every few days, someone Gets It. They come into the classroom tentatively, as if they're not even sure if this is where they should be. And after an hour of furrowed brows and maybe a few questions, suddenly their face and their whole demeanor changes. You can almost see the lightbulb, floating above them.

I have six people scheduled for my Introduction to Dreamweaver workshop this afternoon. Someone is going to Get It, today, and another Web angel will get his wings. I can't wait.

I have the best job on campus.