Wednesday, December 16, 2009

The Talking

Communication is a strange and wondrous thing. I’m amazed at the ways it works and the ways it fails. Some days, I’m amazed it works at all. We seem to have a handle on the basics, but it’s when we stray from some accepted vocabulary that we start to have trouble. Idiomatic speech is interesting--a guy can talk about a hot car and another guy can talk about a cool car and they’re both talking about the same car.

My first holiday dinner with my wife’s family amazed me. All of the sisters talking at once, saying “Oh! Remember that time…?” “With the…?” “No, the other time.” “Oh, at the place with…?” “Yeah!”

It kind of untidied my understanding of discourse, and what I knew of subjects and predicates and adverbs and so on. These people were sparking-off ideas and sending memories around the table without any of that stuff. I still marvel at it, twenty years on, every time all of the sisters get together.

Every group seems to develop its own language. That’s probably be one of the definitions of Group. Surfers have difficulty talking with networking geeks, who can’t understand musicians who can’t discuss Big Ideas with MBA types. All of us born here in the Big PX. All of us products of the public schools system. All of us, nominally, speaking English.

I was in conversation with a friend a few weeks ago when we were interrupted by someone with a Web problem. This happens to me a lot. Everyone in my little corner of the world knows I am The Web Guy, wise in the ways of HTML, Dreamweaver and so on. He had a problem with a .pdf file he was trying to get into a Web page. But he wanted to be seen as a cut above the great unwashed. He told me he was trying to hook it up on the page, inline.

Constant Lurker will know there are two types of HTML tags that display elements in the body of any page; block-level tags, and inline tags. Block level tags include headers and paragraphs, which start new lines and extend from sea-to-shining-sea across the entire available area, or across the entire restricted area if a page has been divided into, say, columns. Inline tags affect only a subset of the entire block. <em> turns on emphasis for some fraction of the greater paragraph. Link text is set off by <a> tags, anchor tags, but it’s very rare that an entire paragraph is clickable text.

Now, stir into this the idea that we have recently added a class for anchor tags that displays the Adobe Acrobat icon after a clickable link to a .pdf file, and confusion starts. As we have just covered, Anchor Tags are inline tags. “You mean you want the pdf link inline, with the new little icon?” “Uh, yeah” comes the reply. So I (quickly) showed him how to create an anchor tag that pointed not to a Web page, but to a .pdf file, and how to indicate this to the page visitor by means of this new application-pdf class in the style sheet for anchor tags. Kewl, right?

“No, I wanted it to display inline”.

“It is inline. All anchor tags are inline.”

What he wanted, it turned out, was a way to turn the information on the .pdf file into something someone would see when they came to that page. I suggested he make a screenshot of the .pdf, trim it a little with Photoshop, and put that up. “But then they wouldn’t be able to select parts of the text, right?” Right.

It was never made clear to me why the information was a .pdf in the first place, but eventually we got him hooked up.

I ended up showing him Dreamweaver’s Table wizard, and how to create a table with as many rows and columns as he needed, and then transcribed the .pdf information into the various cells, matching as best I could the fonts and colors used, and so forth.

It ended up being about an hour’s job, instead of about three minutes. But it could have gone much better if he hadn’t insisted on using the word inline the way he did.

Imagine how life must be at the UN, huh?

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

The Healthy

If you seek Web-osity this week, look elsewhere. I’m all about the health, today. Just a couple of hours ago, my wife and I were in the presence of an orthopedic surgeon, as he said the words nobody wants to hear, “You’ll likely have this the rest of your life”.

There was no comfort in him saying this to Kathie, and not me. We are in this together, after all. This was almost as much my ankle, as hers. There is a high degree of finality to this one, I fear. We could continue to work out in some fashion and lose weight. That would help. It would take a great deal of strain off of her ankle, which has basically been ground down to sawdust. But it won’t get better. We are used to seeing and hearing that kind of resolution, generally just before the last commercial. And every week someone has built an artificial chin or elbow or something and we see reporters talking with folks in lab coats while wounded vets relearn walking skills in the background. But there will be no new ankle.

Twenty years ago, Kathie used to walk nearly everywhere. She lived close to her job, and walked there-and-back every day, sometimes twice a day if she came home for lunch. I used to catch her on one or another trip from time to time, with a stately gait full of poise and posture, generally with a hat.

In the early-middle ‘90s, Kathie fell in the bathroom of a motel. We had gone to Omaha, to go to the zoo and see the big new exhibit of the day. She slipped coming out of the shower and was never the same. We had an HMO back then, and they were famous for not wanting to see you unless you were bloody or on fire. They told her it was “a bad sprain” and gave her some pain killers. Over time she became almost accustomed to it and would only occasionally bring it up. They would nod and say that yeah, oftentimes those bad sprains heal slower than a broken bone. We motored on.

And over time, she slowed down. She lost that poise and precision, the dignity and the grace in her stride. We stopped walking downtown to dinner and movies and attractions, which was once one of the drawing cards of our apartment. Over time we both started gaining weight, which only makes matters worse. They told us today that forces and stresses in the feet are routinely three to four times our body weight, so every pound meant three or four in the sneakers. Things got worse.

The spiral continued for several years and honestly, I stopped hearing the little grunts and complaints getting into and out of chairs and cars after a while. But in the last year it has gotten much worse and we found ourselves finally thinking of taking the New Home money and using it to get a car she could get into and out of easier.

I really enjoy this time of year, from the standpoint of measuring progress on goals. This year we joined a health club when it finally became obvious even to us that we were out of control. But it became easy to skip going when every time we went it hurt. Now she’s looking at mostly swimming for a while, and we both wonder about the stairs at home.

This isn’t a death sentence. There isn’t any cornball homily stitched above our sofa about how we are living with devastated joint pain instead of dying from it. We have a lot of years ahead of us, and most of them promise to be good ones. But this is probably the day we changed from being “the kids” to being Old People. It should be noted that this is way different from being grown ups.

Neither of us have had anything like this in our lives, before. You get a cold on the third, it’s better by the seventh of the month. You wake up with a headache, it’s usually gone by the afternoon. I have seasonal allergies, but I have some really good days in July and November and March. Even Kathie’s diabetes is controlled through medication, and we have seen any number of stories of people who lost weight and became active enough that they needed no medication whatsoever. But this is the first thing either of us have had that will never go away.

I don’t know what the future brings, but I suspect there’ll be more salads in it.