tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79700980630009740562024-03-21T16:57:33.745-05:00Mark's BlogMark Hiatt taught HTML, Dreamweaver, the UNLcms, and other technologies, at the University of Nebraska-LincolnMarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.comBlogger151125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-29659406810822849412012-03-08T13:02:00.002-06:002012-03-08T13:02:24.833-06:00The SearchingLooking for work was a real adventure.<br />
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A common theme over the last half of my life has been people talking about Things Sure Aren't What They Used To Be. I've heard this applied to music, fashion, dating trends, cars, Interstate travel and now that it's been around long enough, even technology. Here's my story.<br />
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The first time I went looking for a job, I was nine, or ten. Dad was away fighting a war, mom was at home fighting to keep the house, the car and dog (and me, presumably). I was unhappy with going to her for my walkin' around money. I figured I'd get out there and sell myself to the highest bidder, and build my fortune by sweeping out back rooms, folding-up empty boxes, stacking palettes or something like that. I walked up and down Norfolk Avenue, stopping in dime stores and shoe stores and even the women's clothing stores, asking to see the manager. The manager of Hested's was the nicest. He sat me down in the back, in his cluttered little office, and explained that he didn't really have anything, right now. But he really admired my initiative. Still, there were laws about this kind of thing and he suggested I might have to wait six or seven years for something to open up. Maybe I would be better off washing cars, mowing lawns or babysitting, he told me. Why, a kid in his neighborhood seemed to be making good money picking up the land mines left by neighborhood dogs. But I couldn't, by law, get a real job, yet. I ran home and cried. I would be poor the rest of my life.<br />
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My first job was working for ninety cents per hour at the Double-KK restaurant, washing dishes. I knew a couple of waitresses there and someone put in a good word for me. It wasn't a lot of money, but I worked hard to keep everyone happy and only broke one glass the whole time I was there.<br />
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One evening, my dad and I were at the mall, getting haircuts. Across the mall was a music store with a selection of guitars. Since I was going to be a guitar star, this interested me, and we walked over there, while waiting for our chairs to open up. The owner was behind the counter, frantically ringing-up sales of 8-Track tapes and 45rpm records and a few albums. There were people wandering through his selection of organs and pianos, and a few standing near the in-car stereo display and fiddling with the knobs of the home units, too. Dad and I waited for several minutes at the guitars, while he finished. I was explaining to dad how the pickup was like a little microphone and all of the noise came out of this little plug, down here and so on, when he guy finally came up to us, breathlessly asking "How may I help you?"<br />
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I said, "Well, we came in here looking at guitars, but now it occurs to me that you might need some extra help, behind the counter". He looked at the customers for pianos, car stereos and home stereos, kind of winked at dad and asked me when I could start. I told him two weeks and he asked me if $1.25 was good enough? I told him it sounded great and we shook hands. I got a thirty-eight percent raise and a job selling music, just for asking. Kewl!<br />
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That's how it went, for me. Walk straight in, look the guy (or gal) in the eye, give 'em a firm handshake and make the deal. That's not how it's done, now.<br />
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Today, everything is on computer, of course. This is fine, if you have everything you need in the proper format and all of the necessary key words and so on. But if your situation is the least bit unusual, or unconventional, it's a hard system to work.<br />
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In the case of the really big employers, you need to have an account on file, first. Before you can even apply for a job, you have to fill out form after form, attesting to this and that, explaining how much you know about these and those, telling of where you've been and when and for how long and all of the rest. Once you're in the machine, then you can apply for jobs with the click of a button.<br />
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Now, that part I really like. Instead of having to get dressed-up, shave, put on a tie and drive downtown to meet with the manager who has only seven minutes before her next meeting and can't tell you anything, anyway, you can now apply for a job in your undies, at 10:30 at night, as kind of an afterthought on your way back to the TV from the fridge. But it has its drawbacks, too.<br />
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I've seen ads that look like little portraits of me. "We're seeking a fat guy, with Web experience and a whole lot of patience and charm, to teach our employees how to do stuff on their computers that we need done." Hey! That's me! I fire off an application, but a day or two later comes an automated reply saying I didn't meet the qualifications, somehow, or that there were better, fatter candidates out there and they went with one of those. Quite often, I don't even get an interview. These are the most unnerving because there's no way you can argue or explain. The process is over. Thanks for playing, here's a copy of our Home Game. A firm handshake doesn't amount to much, any more.<br />
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I went to the So You've Been Fired seminar. It was actually quite good. Some folks from the Department of Labor (Dad's old haunt) were there, some from University HR, and about half of us who had been shot on 11/9th. We spent several minutes catching up. Who had been let go. Who had already found a job, and where, and so on. They told us not to lose hope. They told us this was one of the worst job markets anyone had seen since the recession of the early-middle 1970s and early 1980s. They told us our benefits would run out in three months. That sounded like a generous amount, to me, and it still does and I'm supremely happy to have worked for an outfit that did that. I know a lot of places where you're escorted to the door and... that's just it. I'd continue to get paid and insured and retired for the next three months while I scrambled to look for something else. Okay, great. But they made a big deal out "three months" as if they thought we'd all need it or something. I'd worked with these people for years and they're among the finest I've seen anywhere. Certainly he, and she and even me wouldn't still be looking in March?<br />
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It felt really good to apply for that first job. Now, instead of unemployment happening to me, I was happening to it! I practiced looking the computer monitor square in the middle and firmly clicking on the mouse, "Apply". One-two-three... and the next morning came my first rejection. And I was elated! I knew this wasn't really personal. I just didn't have all of the right glyphs on the right electronic page for them. They knew <b>nothing </b>about me, personally. So that made it all a numbers game. And if it was my fate to need 47 rejection slips before I found my first "We'll take you!" then I already had one! Let's go!<br />
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But it quickly got old. I'd get up, like they said at the seminar. I'd continue to shave, like they said. I'd even continue to get dressed, like they said. But nothing I did seemed to help. Everyone was on their own timetable and running their own little kingdom where they got to set the rules. I'm a terrific trainer, but I don't have a degree. Some places wanted one but would settle for someone with a lot of experience. Others wanted all kinds of education and certification and only wanted to pay burger-flipper money. It was weird. There were a few jobs out there that I would be terrific at, though, and I applied for those. Then I applied for the ones I'd be good at and then a few that, well, I could do.<br />
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Within a few days, I was getting calls for interviews. These of course bring their own challenges. But I'd always been good, one-on-one. I wasn't worried. Then came the rejection slips: two, three, five. And I still hadn't heard from this one or that one, yet.<br />
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Finally, I got a telephone screening interview. And then a Come Meet The Troops interview and then a Come Meet The Brass interview and... finally... an offer!<br />
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Sort of.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-19101089018744543102012-03-01T15:48:00.002-06:002012-03-01T15:48:22.920-06:00So. As I Was Saying....So, yeah. I got RIF'd.<br /><br />All-in-all, it was a very well done thing, inasmuch as one never seems to enjoy the efforts everyone puts into an enterprise such as this.<br />
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I'd come to work that morning fat, dumb and happy, secure in the knowledge that my boss had told me we didn't expect any layoffs in the current year, just maybe a little less travel, a few fewer computer upgrades and maybe not quite so much software. Okay, fine. I could live with that. Apple was on campus that day, giving a dog-and-pony show about the iPad and how it figured into the modern classroom. I figured I'd pack mine along and attend.<br />
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So there I was, listening to the Apple guys talk about how far and wide the iPad had spread in the education market, and how we were going to learn a whole bunch of new and interesting ways to use them in the years ahead, when I noticed out of the corner of my eye, my boss's boss was standing in the doorway. She waved. I waved and nodded. I went back to hearing about iPads in the classroom. A moment or so later, I looked back and she was still there, only this time she was gesturing kind of emphatically. It's about twenty minutes to 10:00am, now. I pointed at myself and she nodded and signaled she wanted me to come to the door. And so, I did.<br />
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She told me that <i>her </i>boss wanted to see me this morning. And not at my desk, or in his office, but right next door. And not at 11:00am or 11:30, but at 10:15am. You know me well enough to know my first question was "Okay, but what's this all about?"<br />
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"I think you'd better hear it from him" was her reply.<br />
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I let out an audible groan and she reached out and squeezed my elbow a little and said, "You'll be alright" but she turned away right away and left. After fifteen years, you can kind of get a read on people, you know? I could feel my face flush, and my ears filled with a high pitched whine like standing on the airport flight line next to a jet, or being in the next room while someone runs the vacuum cleaner next door. I texted my wife, "Honey, I'm going to be fired in twenty-three minutes" and made my way back to my seat at the Apple presentation.<br />
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She was great, she really was. Very supportive. At the appointed time, I gathered up my stuff and went next door. And there, on entering, was the CIO and the department HR person, both looking grim. I took the seat in front of them at the table. "As you know, the economy hasn't been doing well, lately. The rest was like Charlie Brown's teacher, really. "Wha-whaaah wha-whaah-waaah". Sign here, and here, and here. We stood and shook hands again, and I was led into the next room, where the University HR guy was ready with the "So, You've Been Fired" packet of valuable resources. Answers to questions about insurance and unused vacation and all of the rest, plus a page on an upcoming "So, You've Been Fired" seminar I'd be sure to want to attend. He led me across the hall to another University HR person who explained I was to go straight home, now, and not back to my desk. I was to make arrangements with my boss to come in and get my stuff after hours. I called my wife and she met me out in front of the union and drove me home. We'd worried, talked, planned and joked about this day off and on for a dozen years. It was finally here.<br />
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I did a lot of crying. It was frustrating. I thought I had done everything right. My boss's boss, the woman who signaled me to come to hear about the appointment, cannot name three things in fifteen years that I didn't volunteer for. Whenever she needed someone, I was there. New students need to have buildings pointed out to them? I was there. The computer store was having a big sale and needed to get a bunch of stuff to the Union? I was there. We need a second voice for an Abbott and Costello <i>Who's On First?</i> skit about the Windows Start button? I was there. I was also there for her whenever I thought it was important that she be in the loop. I finished a task and checked my home page to find a story about "a light plane" that had crashed into the World Trade Center. I refreshed the screen, only to find the story replaced with one that said <b><i>two </i></b>planes had crashed into the towers and I thought to myself, "You know? If I was the boss, I'd want to know about something like this." So, I got up and walked to her office and told her, "The nation is under attack. Go to CNN.com".<br /><br />Some years later, her boss was killed in an auto accident on a snowy morning on his way to work. We had a big meeting with the staff to discuss the ramifications of this and then we were excused, while she dealt with her managers. She started, as we filed out, saying that no decision had yet been made on who would fill in, in the interim. It might be her, it might be one of a few others. When I got back upstairs, I got the official e-mail announcing the interim replacement, and knowing she hadn't seen it, and knowing she was in a room full of managers who needed details, I printed off a copy and walked it back down stairs to the meeting room and handed it to her.<br />
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I was always doing stuff like that. When I'd happen upon a kid staring blankly at a sheet of paper and holding it up to a building and turning around and looking over his shoulder for another building, I'd walk up and ask, "How lost are you?" We'd usually have a pretty good laugh and I could figure out which "Hall" he needed and send him on his way. Did that with parents, too, from out of town, driving slowly down an otherwise busy street. I tried to learn the names of everyone in our building, if not everyone in our department. I learned their names, and a little about them, by the dozens. When new people were hired, I walked them around introduced them around because I knew everybody.<br />
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The Internet and the Web weren't going anywhere. And we were in the middle of a push to change the way we did all of our Web pages, and I made sure I was the guy who taught everyone how to do that. I'd been the one who taught them HTML, CSS, Dreamweaver and the Templates, and I would be the one to guide them through the wilderness to the CMS promised land. But I would not get there with them. I was sad, I was frustrated, I was angry. I went through all of the Kubler-Ross Stages of Grief. There's no <i>way </i>this includes me-it <i>has </i>to be a mistake. Those fuggers! Hey-maybe they'd let me come back half-time, or work as a contract employee? I'll never find a job as good as that one, again. And finally I started looking for work.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-23231584974049825182011-09-21T10:08:00.001-05:002011-09-21T10:09:05.989-05:00Disruptive Tech, AgainI had a couple of people come up to me after the page about disruptive technologies and offer up their own examples. Mine were more personal–I have a box of once-expensive cables to hook up peripherals I no longer own to computers I no longer own, either. But all you have to do is look around to see other examples.<br />
The United States Postal Service is in trouble. This was one of Ben Franklin's ideas, for crying out loud, but its usefulness may be coming to an end. My mother loves to talk of a time when she could count on twice-a-day service. As she put it, you could invite someone to dinner that night in the morning mail, and receive word back that afternoon that they were planning on attending. Pretty cool, huh? And this cost a nickel or less.<br />
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But it was a time before e-mail. It was a time before "everyone" had a telephone, too. It was the only way we had to do these kinds of things, so it's the way things worked. And generations depended on a system like this. It was a part of their daily life that I suspect went largely unexamined and unquestioned. Of course we people handling paper and bringing it to our homes. How do you communicate with faraway others?<br />
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In hindsight, mistakes are always more easily seen. Geeze, maybe first class postage did get kind of out of hand there at the end. Maybe second class postage and third class postage should have been more spendy—that would have cut down on the tonnage of catalogs and sales flyers and saved a forest or two, perhaps. With less "Junk Mail" clogging the system, there would have been less wear-and-tear on all of the equipment, including the letter carriers.<br />
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Maybe having to go to a box down the street, instead of to your very own door makes "The Mail" a little less personal and a little less precious. It was a matter of architecture. The Mail was so dependable, so ordinary and so necessary that we put little slots in front doors to keep from having to open a door and retrieve the daily delivery. In an age of increasing precision and accuracy (thanks in large part to computers), can we accept something like approximate mail delivery? A nickel used to bring a handwritten note from your grandmother from Ohio all of the way to your very own front door. Now, fifty cents gets your electric bill only as close as your neighbor's driveway? Really? That's the best we can do?<br />
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Netflix put a serious hurt on the mom-and-pop video rental business, and on local cable-TV and satellite franchises. Now, Netflix itself is in danger of becoming redundant as various concerns struggle with the problems of squirting movies and TV shows into our homes. It may be that the electronic side of their business, the "Net" part, eventually takes over everything. Or it may be that someone else will get it right, or get it righter, or offer it cheaper. Maybe one day we'll all watch TV piecemeal via some kind of a super-service like Apple's iTunes. I love HBO, but don't care much for boxing, so if I can get all of HBO's movies and original programming for $9 instead of the $12 my cable company charges, I'll probably go that route.<br />
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Economics plays a role in these decisions, but ultimately it seems like the best technologies eventually make it, in a survival-of-the-fittest kind of way. If your costs are lower this way than that, or if speeds are faster here than there or if your technology is massively cheaper than someone else's, then you're going to win. If not, then there doesn't seem to be much that you can do, except try to hang on. <br />
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In the 1980s we heard magical stories of wizards working on ways to get data from the same wire that gave us Skin-a-max. It was hugely expensive at the time, and not particularly fast by today's standards, but everyone saw it coming. Same with DSL on the phone lines. Where once we had <i>two</i> phone lines, so we could be online and still order pizza at the same time, now you can carry on all kinds of up- and downloading activity while, well, ordering pizza.<br />
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There are a lot of dial-up plans available, offering cheap internet access. But time is money, here, too. I know a lot of cheap people, but I don't know anyone with dial-up internet, any more.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-84098311634503634602011-09-07T13:23:00.001-05:002011-09-07T13:26:35.366-05:00Who is In Charge?<p>Who's In Charge, Here?</p>
<p>It's not always clear. And the results of uncertainty are sometimes terrible.</p>
<p>Consider for a moment, the case of the Royal Mail Ship TITANIC. The pride of the White Star Line, the ocean liner famously met her fate on the flat-calm moonless morning of April 15th, 1912. Back then, trans-oceanic travel was a severely big deal. Rich clientele would book passage with favorite ships and also with favorite captains. White Star badgered Captain EJ Smith away from retirement for one last turn of the wheel, aboard the giant steamship's maiden voyage.</p>
<p>This was fine, as far as it went. But leading lights of White Star would also share the journey, including Joseph (J Bruce) Ismay, the chairman of the line. These gentlemen had different goals for the journey than perhaps those of Captain Smith.</p>
<p>Flash ahead to that last evening, the weather reports and ice reports and wouldn't it be grand to arrive early in New York and surprise all of the newspapers? It would be easier to sell tickets for a grand ship like TITANIC if it could be seen as opulent <i>and</i> fast, though speed was never a design consideration. A more prudent option may have been to throttle back while traversing the icy area, or to take a more southerly route. Or at least to post more lookouts, and make sure they had the proper optics for their duty.</p>
<p>The White Star brass knew Captain Smith was experienced. They knew he would not place their new ship at undue risk. But while Smith was the boss of the boat, his boss was also aboard. And his boss would like to get to New York ahead of expectation. Smith knew his authority was unchallenged—he was doing this last run as a favor and there was nothing White Star could do to harm him or his retirement. And Ismay knew Smith wouldn't run the ship any faster than was prudent, given prevailing conditions.</p>
<p>The upshot of the whole thing is the majestic ship pointed at a dark mass and unable to steer clear of it without brushing against it for half the length of the ship, popping rivets and bending panels allowing water in. They say that given the weight of the water needed and the time it took, the "Gash" the press talked about amounted to just twelve square feet, spread out over hundreds of feet of the ship's length. A pantry door left open to the sea 2' by 6' for a couple of hours and it was all over.</p>
<p>More recently, consider the case of young Jessica Dubroff. Jessica was only seven years old, in 1996, when she was attempting to become "the youngest person to cross the country in an airplane". This was in its entirety a media stunt. To be a student pilot, you have to be at least sixteen years old. Jessica was not. So Jessica was in no way the pilot, or even a pilot aboard the airplane. For the trip to be legal, though, someone would have to be a pilot, and for Jessica to have any legitimate place, that someone would have to be a certified flight instructor. Enter Joe Reid. For all government and insurance purposes, Reid would be pilot in command for the entire trip. Reid was fifty-two years old, a stockbroker, and the registered owner of the Cessna used for the "record". Her father would also accompany her on the trip.</p>
<p>There had been a few kids who rode along on flights like this over the years. Nobody remembers because they weren't really records, but still, the trend was younger and younger children. Jessica's trip was designed for media coverage. ABC even gave her a camera to record her journey. She was given several minutes of national TV news coverage, appeared in hundreds of newspapers and magazines and some huge percentage of the country was at least somewhat aware of the little girl that they thought was trying to set a record by flying across the country.</p>
<p>The left California with a big farewell. They traveled west-to-east and finished up the day on TV again. It was all very scripted. Look at how far she's come! What a challenge, yadda-yadda-yadda. A fifty-two year old pilot had flown from Half Moon Bay to Cheyenne, with a little girl at his side, her dad in the back, and somehow it was news.</p>
<p>The next morning the three of them went to the airport. Forecast weather had arrived—a big storm. Normally, pilots wait out weather like this, but it was highly localized over the neighborhood and they had a media schedule to adhere to. They had to be in Lincoln, Nebraska, in time for interviews and editing and getting the taped piece to NewYork for the evening news. So while airliners waited for the weather to clear, Reid took off, nearly a hundred pounds overweight.</p>
<p>They took off, and bobbled under, into and out of clouds as they swung around to the east, going slower and slower. Finally, the aircraft stalled and crashed in someone's front yard. But here again, who was in charge?</p>
<p>Technically, legally, it was Reid. But Reid was being paid as an instructor and/or a charter pilot. And he was being paid by the guy in the back seat, who may or may not have known how dangerous their situation really was. Dad might have thought, people drive through this kind of weather all the time, right? So, let's go. We've got reporters to meet. And if it gets too bad, we can always come back and wait it out. And he's thinking Reid is an experienced pilot and he wouldn't get us into anything he couldn't get us out of.</p>
<p>And Reid is thinking we have to make time, we have to make time. And it's not really-really bad. Let's go up and take a look—it's a small storm and we'll probably be out of it before we have the chance to make too many mistakes, anyway. And little Jessica likely had no idea at all the risks involved.</p>
<p>There are hundreds of sayings in Aviation. Little homilies and platitudes we use to remember important lessons. One of my favorite's says "Pilots who crash in bad weather are almost always buried on nice days". There is no wait that's too long, too inconvenient, when it comes to flying and weather.</p>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-63613378499676496422011-09-02T10:09:00.000-05:002011-09-02T10:10:04.940-05:00Bah-Dee-Yah!The great wheel has turned, again. It is now September, the month of Back To School and the month of Football and the month of cooler and drier. It's the month of my birthday and the month when everyone is on the lookout for that first Christmas signage in stores. It's the month of long sleeved shirts and the first sweaters of the season. The soundtrack is the Indigo Girls' <em><a href="http://tinyurl.com/AllThatWeLetIn" title="Links to CD at Amazon.com">All That We Let In</a></em>. It is the month in which we say "Bah-Dee-Yah!"
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<br />It's a good time to take a quick look back, and see if anything is gaining on you. We have a third of a year left. If there are things you were supposed to get done you have 120 days, the work of which is easier than if it were only ninety, or thirty.
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<br />Going back the other way, 240 days ago my world was much different. Since then, I have given up teaching HTML and Dreamweaver and Templates, pretty much. From here on out, it will be the UNL installation of Drupal, the UNLcms. I'll also pick up a few other technologies. We've recently put in a new "clicker" system for the classroom. And we are about to switch e-mail systems. There will probably be some opportunities for me, there.
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<br />Oh, there'll be much to do with the UNLcms. I've done a bunch of short videos, explaining how to log in, how to create a basic page, how to add images and so on. But I have also scheduled eighteen classes in thirteen weeks, for those who want the hands-on experience, or just want to spend a couple of hours with me. And I suspect that in short order I will be working on a more intermediate course, and an advanced session, too. And then maybe a Best Practices or a Quick Tips session. So there is lots to do.
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<br />But yeah, things have changed. Maybe now I don't want to be championing Dreamweaver and HTML and CSS books in my recommendations over there on the right. Maybe I can donate some of the technical books in my library, both here at work and at home.
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<br />I was lucky to be born into a service family. My mother and my father were both Marines. We got transferred around a lot, when I was a little guy. I saw the whole country on 25¢ gasoline. September wasn't always such a great time for me, as no matter where I went or what I did, I was always The New Guy. One year I went off to school in new blue jeans, and the kids wanted to know if I was poor. The next year, clear across the country, I started school in dressier pants and all of the kids wanted to know if I was rich! But I have lived on both coasts, in the middle and seen the rest and I can tell you this much: I love it, here. When I was a SysOp for GE and Microsoft and when I was a freelance writer, I could have lived anywhere I had a telephone and a daily FedEx route. I chose to live here. There is nothing in life so great as an eastern Nebraska autumn.
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<br />So now let's take a moment and cross off a few things from our ToDo lists. And sure, let's add back a couple of the things we've been meaning to do, but haven't quite gotten around to, yet.
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<br />I'm going to commit to passing the Math Placement Exam, and getting back into school, again. I need to get a downspout replaced, a driveway settled and start saving in earnest for a new roof. I'm going to learn all I can about iClickers and Microsoft 365. And continue to learn about Drupal and the UNLcms. I want to learn more about <em>teaching</em>. I would like to do a better job of that, too. And I hope to be able to take a break from it all now and again, and enjoy a nice drive in the country—maybe take my Sweetie to Nebraska City for the apples in a few weeks. Maybe go into Omaha for some comedy. Maybe this is finally the time I decide to do something serious about my weight.
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<br />Yesterday, I received a plaque from work, in appreciation of fifteen years of dedicated service. It does not seem like fifteen years, to me. Seven? Eight? Ten, maybe? Sure. But not fifteen. I'm looking forward to a few more turns of the wheel, ahead.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-10565335803182921132011-08-08T13:18:00.000-05:002011-08-08T13:30:29.054-05:00Disruptive TechnologiesWe bought a home a year ago and are still moving in. Still wading through the boxes. But every box we open and deal with is its own little triumph Many recent boxes have me thinking about how disruptive technology is.
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<br />I've been in this game for years. My first wife managed a RadioShack store when the TRS80 was big news. I had a friend who built his own computer from HeathKit.
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<br />As a mainframe computer operator, I used to chat with kids in Europe over a precursor to the modern internet. We'd discuss politics, movies and Formula One autoracing. We sent e-mail to one another. We joined lists of like-minded fans of various movies, computers and technologies. I was on one for Macintosh programmers, for a while. Every day I'd get a digest of all the tips and troubles people had discovered, all over the world, learning to program Macs.
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<br />I wanted two things out of owning a computer: I wanted to hook up with people who were earning a living writing, and I wanted access to stock market information. I had no idea what I was looking for, in particular. I just knew if I could download a years' worth of trading data, it might be useful, somehow, in predicting what prices would be tomorrow. The GEnie Writers' RoundTable turned out to be far more valuable, leading to a freelance writing career that spanned almost fifteen years, and an online career that spanned more than a dozen.
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<br />I don't remember my first electronic mail. I'm pretty sure it was at HDR in Omaha, running a Control Data CYBER 170. I do remember thinking it was pretty cool, though. Press a button here and *Whoosh!* your thoughts spilled out on someone else's screen a mile or more away. Flash ahead thirty years and the post office is running all kinds of modeling simulations that all point to closing post offices, restricting mail delivery to only part of the week, or both.
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<br />I found an old tax return, last week. I'd paid seventeen dollars to have it prepared. Then, somewhere along the way, I started doing it myself on my Macintosh. I prepared and filed our taxes every year for years, until we bought this house. I have copies of all of those returns printed out and sleeping in file cabinets somewhere. I also have copies on floppy disks I cannot read. I don't have a computer that uses 3½″ floppies any more. My tax program, MacInTax, was sold to Intuit somewhere in the middle, there. I switched to Windows computers for a while, and TurboTax, then switched back to the H&R Block program because I was mad at Intuit by then. I can't read any of them, now. And I don't know anyone who could help with that, either.
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<br />I have fabulous boxes perfectly designed to store 3½″ floppies, and CD-ROMs, too. Interlocking, heavy-duty plastic drawers and really nice little wooden rolltop boxes. I mean I had a ton of these, back in the day, and apparently I thought this was how we would keep and store data forever, or something.
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<br />I have boxes of incredibly complex hardware. How do you hook up a Macintosh printer to a Windows computer, or vice-versa? I've got a pig-tail, somewhere, I'm sure, with the right plug at both ends. Some of these come with stories.
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<br />I have nothing to connect these to. I have no hardware that requires or even accepts SCSI, now. I have dozens of cables to hook up alternatives to travel Macs in the era before the Macintosh Portable shipped. I bought a Toshiba T-1000SE laptop and Microsoft Works, as close as I could get to the Macintosh experience. I had a terrific translation program I did a review on (and kept) that would translate between five or six MS-DOS and Windows programs and four or five Mac versions of word processors, spreadsheets and several other formats. Now it's just spaghetti. Colored wires in a box. Lots of colored wires in lots of boxes.
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<br />I remember thinking when I bought most of them that this would be the last thing I would need, for a while. As if I actually thought I was through spending technodollars.
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<br />Well, before the Next Big Thing arrives, I need to throw this (now) crap away and get the boxes out of my life. Right now, I need the room more than I need the stories and the wires.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-30377445379885956272011-07-01T11:49:00.000-05:002011-07-01T11:50:11.377-05:00Just Like in the Brochure…I am so proud of our crew of WebFolk at UNL. Today is our first day in the Big-10 and to celebrate, we shined-up our Template design again. This was much more of an evolutionary change than we have seen previously.<br /> <br />Up to now, changes have been incredibly minor after really radical updates. Most people don't even notice the difference between how the page looked a month ago and how it looks today, and then every three years or so it gets really updated.<br /> <br />The change this time was an update to our navigation.<br /> <br />Navigation on UNL Web pages has been a challenge. We started with just a column of links, for years. The design updated, but the page itself was just a column of links. Then we went with the "UNL Today" model, where things started changing every day, and sometimes several times per day. That was when people really started paying attention to the page, as you can imagine. And that was when the navigation changed to an horizontal orientation.<br /> <br />This served us well until politics and technology caught up with us. And then we rolled out an ingenious biplane horizontal navigation scheme that was a wonder to behold. It was Hell to try to teach, because it was hard to understand, but yeah, depending upon where your mouse <em>had</em> been in the upper deck, you saw other links in the area just below it. Worked in all browsers and was really an inspired bit of programming on someone's part. But, it was very hard to teach people how to deal with navigation that changed like that. And it wasn't a proud moment in accessibility, either. So when the template changed again, the navigation waterfalled down the left side of the page, in what became the first column. When navigation ended, we had a brief word from our sponsor—a rotating image of postage-stamp -sized news or local-interest pieces. And then came the related links.<br /> <br />This was much easier to teach, and much easier to use. Since the page itself scrolled vertically, you could literally have as many menu options as you wanted or needed, and, sadly, there were a few sites that went that route. But there were also sites that didn't have a great many links and those sites looked… odd.<br /> <br />You had, at the top, navigation in the first column and then text and images that you really wanted on the right. But if you had scrolled down a ways and run out of navigation, alerts and related links, you had this huge area of white space in that first column. Images that cried-out to be displayed full-width were constrained within those other columns that were open to editing by the developer. The navigation had to move, again.<br /> <br />We ended up with it on top of the page. Now, it was up and out of the way of all of the content, and the use of digital cameras and HD-video went up dramatically. But the way we'd implemented it was kind of clunky. For most people, navigation is a modal operation. That is, while they are "navigating" they aren't really concerned with anything else. So all of the links went into a giant shelf that popped-down when it was needed. How did we know it was needed? It detected that you had moved your mouse over any of the navigation links in the navigation block. Kewl. Except that we had quite a few pages where you needed to log in (above the nav) and then needed to work with data in forms on the page (below the nav). Crossing the navigation revealed… all of the linkage. We fine-tuned it a little by putting in a timer so that it didn't reveal all of the links unless you had actually stopped moving your mouse for a little more than half a second and that improved things, but it was still kind of clunky.<br /> <br />Last night, the school joined the Big-10 conference, and we celebrated by rolling out a New&Improved navigation. The links themselves were marked-up in countless pages, so we couldn't change that. All we could do was adjust the Cascading StyleSheet and the behavior it used on the navigation area. And that change rolled out last night.<br /> <br />And it went almost perfectly. I have received, as of lunch on the first day, exactly <strong>one</strong> telephone call about it, and no e-mails. It was fairly easy to walk the user through fixing the problems she was having, having mostly to do with page validation, after all. The whole thing was surprisingly pain-free.<br /> <br />And all it took was a little careful attention to the rules. Huh! Who'd a thunk it?Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-21640693286354002802011-06-27T14:55:00.002-05:002011-06-27T15:01:59.990-05:00Rules Shouldn't Get In The WayRules is rules. I appreciate that we would all be nowhere if there weren't any rules. But sometimes rules get in the way of doing meaningful work, and that's when someone, somewhere, should step up instead of just going along because "things have always been this way".<br /><br />This week, I've been dealing with rules that don't make sense, and with people lying to me about them.<br /> <br />I have been a long time customer of Time-Warner Cable, here in Lincoln. I used to say that my cable-TV money was some of the best money I spent every month. For about the price of a single evening out, I got incredible news and entertainment pumped into my home, without problems. Then they went digital. Lincoln was their beta test site for the new software and we had troubles with the tuner, the connection, and several other issues. And then we moved.<br /> <br />At the new house, we had Time-Warner come in and set things up. They messed up initially, not delivering a HDTV box when said we were switching from old-TV to HDTV, but after that, things ran pretty well. Occasionally there would be a catch or a hiccup in a DVR'd selection, but for the most part things ran fine. We had two boxes, for upstairs and downstairs TVs, two DVRs, a couple of the tiers they insist they have to offer and a couple of remotes, plus high-speed internet. It all worked much better than in our old apartment and I thought we'd put all of the trouble behind us.<br /> <br />At a local street fair, Time-Warner Cable of Lincoln had a booth, and Paul was glad to meet us and ask us if we had service. I announced that we did, we had two boxes of digital HDTV, with DVR and a couple of tiers and HBO and Showtime, plus their RoadRunner internet. His cohort gave us a couple of free Movie On Demand coupons and Paul asked why we didn't have our telephone bundled, too? He went on to explain that for a limited time, he could tune us up with telephone, TV, DVR, remotes, tiers AND internet for about $120 a month. I was interested, because we'd been paying about $185, without the telephone. In fact, we'd just gotten a $175 telephone bill. He was now offering to bundle everything together for less than we paid for <em>either</em> the phone or the TVs and internet. Sweet! "Why wouldn't a guy go along with a deal like that?" I asked, rhetorically, setting up an appointment with Paul.<br /> <br />A couple of days later, he was at our door with a contract. Two years. Yadda-yadda-yadda, $120-something dollars, with taxes and fees and so on it was still comfortably less than we had been paying to either the phone company or to Time-Warner Cable, before. So we were in! He called in and got an appointment to have the guy come out on Wednesday, the 29th.<br /> <br />The next day, Kathie and I each took the afternoon of Wednesday the 29th off as vacation.<br /> <br />Saturday, we got a call from the Time-Warner cable installation technician. He said they could not switch service over until a lock on our account had been lifted. He said to call Windstream and ask them to un-lock our account. And this I did, this morning.<br /> <br />Now, the Time-Warner Cable guy did not say that we would not get our service installed on Wednesday. He did not say that, because of this problem we would have to go back into the queue for another appointment. He did not even say that we should call back to confirm the release of the lock on the old landline account. As far as I knew, everything was still on track for him to come out on Wednesday and install our new telephone service. But I decided to make sure, and so I called Time-Warner Cable in Lincoln to let them know the lock would indeed be lifted by the time of the scheduled appointment.<br /> <br />I was comforted, after negotiating their silly voicemail system, with the news that I had an appointment already scheduled, for Wednesday, the 29th. Was this the appointment I was calling about? Sure! I pressed various keys at various times and eventually got to talk to Sarah. Sarah was happy I was joining the ranks of the Time-Warner Cable telephone customers and happy that my lock had been lifted, but regretfully informed me that it would take another week to get my service switched over. This was just a minute and a half after the robot told me I had an appointment scheduled for Wednesday the 29th.<br /> <br />"Oh, no", I said. "We have an appointment for Wednesday. My wife and I have both taken off of work to be here for the guy". But Sarah would not be moved. No, July the 6th was the soonest they could get there. Why? "It takes a week to get the information from Windstream to the installers". But the information is already winding its way to the installers—in fact, one called me on Saturday and knew everything about me and the job coming up, including the lock on the Windstream account. "Right. Those locks take a week to get lifted" said Sarah. "I was promised it was to be lifted by 7pm <em>tonight</em> I told her.<br /> <br />"Oh. Uh. Hmmm. Did they give you a confirmation number?" It sounded like she had me, there. Uh, no, they did not.<br /> <br />We hung up and I called Windstream back. They gave me the confirmation again that the lock would be lifted by 7pm tonight. And they gave me a confirmation number: C73032. I called Time-Warner Cable in Lincoln back and, once again, was told by the robot that I had an appointment scheduled for Wednesday, the 29th in the afternoon. Was this the appointment I was calling about?" It sure was. Back with a live serviceperson again, I waited for Sarah to finish a call and proudly gave her my new confirmation number. "Okay, so let's set this up then for the afternoon of... July 6th?" "Uh, no. It's already scheduled for the afternoon of the 29th—I just heard about it again on the way back in here." She wouldn't let go of the whole "It takes seven days" thing. Finally I asked to speak with her supervisor. I was put on hold, listening to Muzak and drumming my fingers while, I was sure, she prepped her boss about the unreasonable *&^%$#@! who wanted his phone installed on Wednesday.<br /> <br />A short time later, a sleepy-voiced Tom picked up the phone and asked what the problem was. I explained. We'd had a lock put on our phone service back in the 1980s to prevent people from switching our long distance service. We'd met Paul at Celebrate Lincoln and he convinced us to bundle telephone service with our TV and internet. A technician called Saturday, saying he couldn't make the switch without the lock being lifted. He didn't say the whole deal was off. He didn't say we would have to reschedule. He said call Windstream and have the lock lifted and this we did. I said that I had an appointment for Wednesday afternoon and had already taken vacation to be there for the guy. He said, "Yeah, that's going to take seven days". I asked why? He said they had to confirm the lock was gone and it took Windstream about a week to do those. I told him the Windstream rep told me it would be done by 7pm. Uh, it takes us a while to get the paperwork to the installers, too. The installers already have the paperwork.<br /> <br />Well, we would need a new appointment. Now he just said "That's just the way things are". Well, what happens to my old appointment? Who is going to get their phone on Wednesday the 29th, now that we're not? He didn't know. Why can't we get our old appointment back? If it's still in the system, then that time can't have been free'd up. Who better to lay claim to a newly-free'd appointment time than the people who were supposed to have it to begin with?<br /> <br />Tom sighed, heavily (always appreciated, from a customer service standpoint). He then told me, and this is the kicker: He told me that the earliest time he could get us was now Thursday, the 30th. He wanted me to take another half-day off, <em>the very next day</em> after our already-scheduled appointment, to have the agreed-upon work done. Suddenly, magically, wonderfully, no more seven-day waiting period. He was moving us straight to the head of the line, almost. Because he and I both knew that nobody was in our old appointment time, yet.<br /> <br />I pointed out that I had never been to Macy's. Never even to their Web site. But I could go online and order a freezer and it would be at my door by 10am the next morning and we don't even have a Macy's in town. It being, after all, 2011. He said yeah, but this was different. I said I wasn't after anything other than the deal I'd signed-up for.<br /> <br />I was so pissed-off at Time-Warner Cable of Lincoln that I told him to forget the whole damned thing. The longer I thought about this, the more convinced I was that what we really needed was to drop everything and sign up for the Quit Cable deal offered through Windstream. If we got fewer channels, so be it. We're fat and we spend too much time watching TV, anyway.<br /> <br />Twenty-five or thirty years of goodwill, shot to Hell. All because I wanted to confirm the work would be done on Wednesday, even though nobody had asked me to do that. And when he finally caved, he only caved as far as getting it all done the day after our appointment. It turns out it <em>doesn't</em> take seven days, after all.<br /> <br />I hate stupid rules. I hate being lied to. And I really don't care much for Time-Warner Cable of Lincoln, either. I have Wednesday the 29th off. If a guy does not come and switch our telephone service over, as agreed upon, I'll let our city councilman, Jonathan Cook, know about one more citizen who wants to see some competition for our local Cable-TV dollar. And I hope I have the strength to start quitting Time-Warner Cable.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-46414684693414521602011-05-11T10:51:00.001-05:002011-05-11T10:51:35.952-05:00It's the end of the World…as we know it.<br /> <br />First, the Earth cooled. Then the dinosaurs came. Then Man. And then Gutenberg and then newspapers, advertising and, finally the Web.<br /> <br />And we built Web pages. Each page featured a navigation area, a part of the page devoted to getting us to other pages. And headers and footers. And content, even with images. And it was pretty good.<br /> <br />And browsers got better. And access got cheaper. And standards got more rigid and more and more people got online to check this out. Fortunes were made. Not by me, or anybody you know, but fortunes <em>were</em> made. And lost.<br /> <br />And then there were internet appliances all over. You could call up Web pages on your cell phone, on a tablet, from your game system or your <em>car</em>. That InterWeb thing was well and truly taking over. And responding to all of these changes, the developers of Dreamweaver did their best to keep up. Bugs were fixed. Features were added, massaged and deleted over the years.<br /> <br />Templating was added. Code hints. Invalid markup was highlighted. There were improvements to both the Design View and the Code View. Various workspace layouts were developed, and you could even make your own. Dreamweaver became, not just a great way to build Web pages, but Web <em>sites</em> as site management features were added. But still, the focus was on the pages and sites—not the content.<br /> <br />It's a subtle but important difference. People don't buy nails because they own hammers. They buy nails because they have two things they want to be joined together. Last year, Lowe's sold a skillion drill bits. Not because people wanted drill bits, but <em><strong>because they wanted holes</strong></em>. And that's how we ended up looking at a new CMS—a Content Management System.<br /> <br />We are past the point where it should take an army of skilled technicians to post a simple memo online. We shouldn't have to depend upon a few high priests of technology to get material uploaded. The democratization of the Web is nigh. We can use the technology to make itself easier. That leads us to the UNLcms.<br /> <br />Using Drupal, and the Dreamweaver Template model, we can create pages at the push of a button. We can carve up the content area with columns. We can insert images and make links and do a great job of building compliant pages without spending an inordinate amount of time and money (the same thing, often) learning an interfacing program. We needed the program because HTML and CSS was hard. But then the program became hard, too. Templates helped, but there's never been anything really easy about any of this.<br /> <br />Now we can build pages with a Web browser. We're not even tied to a single computer. We can add administrative users to cover vacations and delete them when they return. Right now, today, it doesn't do as much as Dreamweaver and the Templates but it's catching up, fast. I have seen it improve every week for more than a year, now. I look at it sort of like a parent watching a baby learn to roll over, and then sit up, and thinking of a day when the kid will be riding a bike and going off to school and choosing a career and so on. I don't really see the program as it is now—I see what it is becoming, what's possible.<br /> <br />And I love what I see, now.<br /> <br />There's a scene in the movie <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfL7STmWZ1c" title="Links to YouTube video of Danny DeVito Speech in 'Other Peoples Money'"><em>Other People's Money</em></a> where Danny deVito talks about buggy whips, and how technology has made entire industries redundant. We don't teach people how to shoe horses, any more. We don't teach folks how to operate slide rules as much as we did just a generation ago. That's what we're up against, here.<br /> <br />I can talk about the differences between Dreamweaver and the UNLcms for a couple of hours. Document-centric modeling, updating Web pages from cell phones, not just Macintosh and Windows PCs. But the biggest difference I see between Dreamweaver and the UNLcms is that the UNLcms has a future.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-68718924906730160672011-05-04T10:05:00.002-05:002011-05-04T10:05:51.836-05:00Happy Birthday, Dad!For the last few years, I've tried to teach myself to say "This used to be my dad's birthday". I'm done with that, now. This is the day my dad was born, regardless of whether or not he's still here. Dad was a countdown baby, "Five... Four... Three... Two..." (5/4/1932). He would have been seventy-nine years old, today.<br /> <br />I thought I was a pretty normal kid, growing up. Dad would, from time to time, try to teach me some goofy lesson about patriotism, about getting involved in my community, about civic responsibility. I was much more interested in trying to learn the opening solo of "Reelin' In The Years" and how to convince girls to go with me out to the airport. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's good to vote. It's also good to drive a new Camaro. Yesterday was Election Day here in Lincoln. Dad would have been proud of me, for voting.<br /> <br />The way I have dealt with the grief over dad's death is probably a measure of how important he was to me in life. I had no idea. Everyone else who lost a father seemed to be coping so much better so much quicker. I am still about nineteen seconds away from crying—sobbing—if I'm not careful. Friends I grew up with were back at work within a few days, continuing their educations, their careers, their families, their plans. I seemed to hit a wall there, for a long time.<br /> <br />I still have moments. The phone will ring and, for no reason at all, I find myself thinking, "Oh, that'll be Dad! I have to tell him about…". I find myself at Sears, looking at a long row of lawn mowers and thinking to myself, "What in Hell do I know about lawn mowers? I should talk to dad about…". I drive a 1995 Honda with 160,000 miles on it, and sleep under a roof with twenty years on it. How do I decide which one to replace, first? And how do I pay for it? And what do I do about the other one? Dad would know.<br /> <br />House advice, career advice, car advice, fashion advice. How to deal with family and friends and church obligations. How to get a dog. When I was twelve or fifteen, I didn't want any advice. Now, I would give anything to have him lecture me for just an hour.<br /> <br />When I was very small, Dad was super-human. He was a young, fit, Marine. He drove a sports car and had a wife and a dog and a house and… me. As I got older, he became more real. There was a time Dad was never wrong about anything. There was a time when he knew more about everything than I did. But gradually, he became less a Super man and more just a regular guy. We developed different interests. He loved to go fishing. I loved learning the guitar. I liked The Association and The Monkees, he liked Johnny Cash and Floyd Cramer. I found myself depending upon him less and less, as is the natural order of these things.<br /> <br />I feel cheated, somehow. It's funny. I've said this before, but I was much better prepared to lose him when he went to VietNam. Twice. When he came back, he became just "Dad" and on some level it's like I expected he would be with me forever. In VietNam, dad had occasion to ride around in helicopters and transport planes that were used to apply Agent Orange, to defoliate the jungle and make trails and personnel easier to find. They would go out on a spraying mission and come back, take the tanks and booms off of the aircraft, and then Dad would get in and fly to some other base with a bunch of mail, groceries and other supplies. They'd put all of that stuff back on and go back out spraying again and then send one of them back out to get him. He developed a lung condition. He died at seventy-three. He would probably be dead by now, if it weren't for that. But it's still hard. Somehow, I don't see it as an extra thirty-five years. I see it as a lost four, or five, or seven.<br /> <br />Dad would tell me it's fine to honor fallen heroes, but that it's up to us to make our own lives. Dad would tell me to get my nose back inside a Drupal book, because a whole lot of people are going to be depending upon me to know this stuff, soon. Dad would, as usual, be right. So I'm going to spend the rest of this day reading-up on Drupal, in his honor.<br /> <br />Happy birthday, Dad.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-67028475580108898502011-04-20T09:12:00.003-05:002011-04-20T09:16:21.374-05:00A Death in the FamilyThe tide may be going out on the Desktop Computer, folks. They are bringing back the old <a href="http://www.CommodoreUSA.net/CUSA_C64.aspx" title="Links to Commodore">Commodore 64</a>. When people start longing for the nostalgia of a bygone era with slow computers, bad graphics and lousy sound, you have to make a pretty compelling case to get people to turn loose of $1500 or so for a new state-of-the-art appliance that is becoming less and less a part of everyone's life. And nobody, not even Apple, seems to be able to do that, now.<br /> <br />I blame the cell phone industry. Whoever it was that first included a little calculator in their cell phone sent us down this path and today we are awash in mobile alternatives to the big, clunky, desktop computer. If a cell phone can do more than just connect you to the pizza delivery guy, if you can do math on it, then why hand over a bag of cash for a desktop computer to do those things? So the value of a desktop computer is decremented by whatever value you assign to the little calculator app. Add in calendaring, Web browsing and Angry Birds, and why would anyone want a desktop computer? Why, indeed.<br /> <br />Flash ahead a few years and desktop computers haven't changed, much. Oh, they're faster. They're always faster. And they have a little more memory than the last one you bought, sure. But when you're at your word processor, trying to decide whether to use "Start" or "Initiate" you aren't taxing your processor. You could make that decision comfortably with an old '286 or a MacPlus. Screens are nicer, bigger and with richer colors, but the screen on my six year old iMac is big, with nice color, too. And it still boots up, every day.<br /> <br />I can browse the Web (to some extent), on my iPhone. I can browse the Web on my iPad, too. I can get my e-mail on either machine. I can do my banking with either one, too. In fact, as far as day-to-day activity goes, I can do everything I would ever want, except take a day off, with my mobile devices (The software vendor behind the accounting for vacation and sick leave here does not work with the best standards-compliant software.).<br /> <br />Today's Apple iPhone, iPad and their contemporaries from other manufacturers can be loaded up with a month's worth of music, video, books, magazines, movies, television programming and podcasts. You can get the weather, including radar imaging for your location, which of course the hardware already knows about, probably. Press a button and find the nearest shoe store, or coffee house. Check in with friends on Facebook. With content management systems like Drupal, you can even work on Web pages with severely clever features, using only a Web browser.<br /> <br />The value proposition is weakening on the desktop. I'll need one to run my income taxes, next year. It is nice to see photographs in big, wide-screen detail and I do enjoy an hour or two of Civilization now and again. But I could see the "Home computer" becoming little more than a wireless router in many homes, practically unseen. A Mac Mini, up in some closet, somewhere, constantly monitoring the temperature, turning off unused household lights, keeping track of how old the milk is in the fridge, and watching out for and snagging old episodes of TV shows to record for later viewing.<br /> <br />The guy that built that first wheel really started something. We can't get enough Wheels. The guy that built the first telegraph started something, too, but now even Western Union is just a money-transfer store. Fewer and fewer homes have land-line telephones these days—there's a machine that came and went in about a century and a half. Could it be that the desktop PCs time was only half a century or so?<br /> <br />We'll see.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-68977701381401223762011-04-13T09:13:00.002-05:002011-04-13T09:14:35.349-05:00Spring CleaningIt's fashionable to engage in the restoration of our various environments at home, at work and even in our cars, this time of year. We are encouraged to clean this and shine that and throw those away. Massive benefits accrue to those who do, including the Finding Of Lost Stuff and the Efficiencies of Not Searching for Things. People report fewer headaches, reduced lethargy and even lottery winnings after this cleaning is done.<br /> <br />Nobody talks about our computers.<br /> <br />If you have had your computer for more than a month, it is probably full of junk. If you have visited more than a dozen Web sites or ever upgraded software, your computer is almost certainly a museum of abandoned files. <br /> <br />This is a good time to go through your computer and see what can be tossed. Every computer manufacturer includes stuff you never use and never will and many publishers do, too.<br /> <br />If you are running NumberCruncher v5 you can be reasonably certain throwing away updaters for NumberCruncher v3.2 and v4 won't hurt you or your computer. It's popular now to send e-mails with links to little stubs of software that then go and get the real item, and start things working. I tend to keep these e-mails, but throw away the little stubs, which are easy for me to find because I always download everything to my Desktop folder. If you're unsure, it is probably a better idea to leave a file where it is and lose the small amount of space it is claiming, than to delete the file and discover it really was necessary, somehow.<br /> <br />I have a Macintosh, and a lot of this stuff is just simpler and easier on a Mac than on other computers, but the general theory is the same. If you install, say, Office, and you know you won't ever be using some component of it, you can reclaim a lot of disk space and make finding things in the future much easier if you can uninstall it or delete it. I don't have much need for Microsoft Messenger, for example. I don't remember being asked about it during installation, but it landed in my Applications folder, briefly. I am pretty much an AIM guy, and rely less and less on that.<br /> <br />Those little stubs of programs? They often mount virtual disk resources used to update or upgrade software. Once you have updated everything, you can un-mount the disk and throw it away. There are any number of <span style="font-family: Courier, 'Courier New', monospace; font-weight: bold;">README.txt</span> or <span style="font-family: Courier, 'Courier New', monospace; font-weight: bold;">LICENSE.txt</span> files on a typical hard drive. Trust me. Nobody from Adobe is ever going to knock on your door and ask to see your computer. You can nuke those, too.<br /> <br />As a Web guy, I am constantly building low-feature pages to test this or that concept. If I'm building a page with complicated navigation, for instance, it can be frustrating and distracting to build the navigation in a "real" page with content and so on. I will very often create a new, blank page, save it as <span style="font-family: Courier, 'Courier New', monospace; font-weight: bold;">bogus.html</span> or something like that, then start hammering away on the nav. When I get the navigation working, I just copy or clip it out of the "bogus" page and paste it into a real page. That leaves me with, over the course of a year, potentially dozens of Web pages named <span style="font-family: Courier, 'Courier New', monospace; font-weight: bold;">bogus.html</span>, in all of the directories I work in. These take up time and space—and if you work in a Dreamweaver environment, they take up space at least twice, locally on your own computer and remotely, on the Web server.<br /> <br />I have also abandoned whole programs. You know, at one time I thought maybe I would take the time to sit down and learn DigitSlinger. But it turns out I'm more of a NumberCruncher guy, working in a definite NumberCruncher environment. The folks who report to me and the folks I report to are all NumberCruncher users. Why do I want to spend the time and effort to learn new commands and keyboard shortcuts and various Save As… methods to get meaningful reports that everyone can use? It's easier to just join the crowd and put those hours (and dollars) to better use.<br /> <br />So, throw open the actual windows, and take a long, deep breath of pollen, and let's clean up our computers, this week. But first: Remember to make a complete backup of everything, Just In Case.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-48373046695491790652011-03-29T14:49:00.000-05:002011-03-29T14:50:13.514-05:00You Can't Always Get What You WantAnd sometimes, you are better for it.<br /> <br />Do you remember "Datsun" cars? They are called "Nissan" now, but in the early days they were not convinced they were going to be successful. In fact, there is evidence to support the theory that the whole USA beachhead was put in place to bring shame and disgrace to a Nissan executive, Yutaka Katayama, to force him out of the company.<br /> <br />Let's put a minimal framework in place. Let's get the bare minimum of service and support. And let's call the whole operation "Datsun" so when we get our act together and go back to the American market in a few years, nobody will have a bad taste in their mouth over the name of the company. The idea was that in several years they would bring all new models, and new executives and a new will to succeed to the market. Few would associate Datsun with Nissan and 'Mister K' would have long since resigned, in disgrace.<br /> <br />Well, it didn't turn out that way. Datsun hit the USA at a time when people were ready for such cars. Our family had one and loved it—a little 510 sedan. Mom liked it because she could see every corner from the driver's seat, it handled well, got terrific gas mileage and didn't break down.<br /> <br />Mister K put in an order for little trucks. Nissan balked, but eventually sent some over. Mister K chided the factory and told them that he wanted the next batch to have carpeting, radios and other sedan-like "luxury" features. The factory wrote back and told Mister K he was nuts. The people in southern California were misusing their little trucks! These were working vehicles, not family transport! But Mister K had launched the little truck craze and Nissan had to swallow hard and work harder to get back out in front of it all, again. One by one, Mister K went from success to success and by the late 1970s, the cars started to be badged "Datsun by Nissan" and a short while later, the Datsun name, with all of its goodwill, was gone.<br /> <br />Sometimes things don't work out the way we have them planned. And that's not always bad. Sometimes it's terrific. Mister K retired a hero to Nissan and to thousands of American fans.<br /> <br />I had a situation like this, this last. Up until today, my training consisted of booking a classroom and making a dozen or so seats available. Folks juggle their schedules so they have a Tuesday morning free, or a late Wednesday afternoon, or whatever it works out to be, and they travel from wherever they work on campus to the classroom. We wait patiently for a few minutes for any last-minute stragglers who might be struggling with parking or walking all of the way to the West coast of UNL. And then we begin a face-to-face, hands-on training that walks people through the subject. There are opportunities to ask (a few) questions. For the most part, we spend the next two hours listening to me rattle on about whatever the subject is, then waiting for one or two of the students to complete an exercise before moving on.<br /> <br />I thought maybe, in the twenty-first century, there might be a better way to learn this. So I set about the task of building a bunch of videos. These each explained how to do one or two things, on more of a "molecular" level. I literally made videos explaining how to log into the system, and how to log out. There's one on how to edit the page footer. Click on the link and How To Edit The Footer is all you learn. The whole thing takes just a moment or two.<br /> <br />So, from the comfort and convenience of your own office or cubicle, you could learn only as much as you cared. As much as you had time for. As much as you wanted to learn, today. You could come back tomorrow and watch the same videos, or pick new ones. So there would be no waiting for two weeks until training you wanted was offered again. There would be no need to clear the decks of any other engagements and meetings on that day, so you would be able to commit a couple of hours or more to getting over here and going through it all.<br /> <br />I thought I would get the Nobel Training Prize for coming up with that. And I actually have gotten good feedback from it, and suggestions for more little movies. But there are a lot of people who need to actually sit and do something, to learn it. Some people can read something and they know it. Others can hear something and they absorb it best that way. Others have to actually do it, for something to sink in.<br /> <br />I had made no provision for those folks. I'm working on stand-up training, now. Things don't always work out the way we would like for them to. But sometimes, the result is even better than we had originally imagined.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-77678869654629149092011-02-23T08:35:00.001-06:002011-02-23T08:35:58.562-06:00Visit Your Own SiteWhen was the last time you visited your own Web site?<br /> <br />I don't mean when was the last time you updated a page, checked it over to make sure it validated and everything was spelled correctly. I mean when was the last time you came to your Web presence the way one of your own users might—especially a new user?<br /> <br />It's a good practice, and it probably should be done several times a year, but at least once per year would be an improvement for many of us. Do you have pages up that explain how your organization is planning to overcome any <span style="Year-2000; A problem when '00' is greater than '98'.">Y2K</span> issues? Do you have directories filled with How To Use The Exciting New 2003 Version of the E-Mail Software? There is an awful lot of junk, online.<br /> <br />Cleaning it out will help you in several ways. First, it will make maintaining the rest of your site easier, because you won't have to wade through all of the distractions to find things you really want. Secondly, neither will your users. Looking things over and deleting the old stuff makes moving and updating your site structure much easier and that could be real important, real fast, if your site is one that is moving to the new UNL CMS project. Why convert a bunch of pages that are outdated and in the way, anyway?<br /> <br />Some of this is born of inertia. Some of it is just bad habit. In the Olden Days, I would often build a new, simple page with <em>only</em> the element I was working on present. That is, if I was trying to hammer out a new navigation scheme, or tweaking a table of data, I would build a Web page that contained <em>only</em> the new navigation, or <em>only</em> the new table. It was easier to me, it was less distracting. I would grind away at whatever it was and when things were working I would clip out just the relevant markup and paste it into the real page, and move on. Often as not, I would leave that stub, that experimental page, up on the server where it was unnoticed, unlinked and unloved. When I first stumbled across this method, I would name the page <em>new</em> -whatever the real page was. So, <span style="font-family: Courier, 'Courier New', monospace;">index.html</span> became <span style="font-family: Courier, 'Courier New', monospace;">newindex.html</span>. But some time later, I would find it really difficult to delete some of these stubby pages. What if I had linked to one of them, somewhere? About that time, I started naming these experimental pages <span style="font-family: Courier, 'Courier New', monospace;">bogus.html</span> or <span style="font-family: Courier, 'Courier New', monospace;">trashthis.html</span>. But even then, not all of them got deleted, I'm sure.<br /> <br />Web pages are simple text files, of course. Even the biggest are pretty small in the context of modern computing. But images are another thing. I stumbled upon a directory the other day that held about seven different versions of essentially the same image. One was 800x600 pixels. The next was slightly smaller, the next was the same smaller size, but saved at a lower quality, so the colors weren't as vibrant and the file size was much smaller. The rest were all variations on that theme—suck out some more color and trim the edges. This was really wasteful because image files (and movies) can be huge. Some folks do a better job at all of this than others, of course. But I'd bet that the average Web site may hold as much as 20% junk.<br /> <br />Take a look at your Web site. Look in front and behind the curtain. That is, tour your site with a Web browser and make note of links that are broken, links to pages announcing "News" that is now really History. Look for ways you can clean up the content on the page, as well. And then take a look at the file structure of your site. Look for unlinked files, duplicate files (especially images) and Things You Can Do WithOut.<br /> <br />When the time comes to update your site in any meaningful way, you'll be glad to have to do the work on fewer pages and files.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-49516135492671193202011-02-16T10:10:00.001-06:002011-02-16T10:10:27.164-06:00PrioritiesThey tell you, "If your house needs painting, and it's on fire, put the fire out, first". And this is supposed to teach you how to prioritize things. Folks nod and stroke their chins and move on as if they've just learned something.<br /> <br />I have a problem with this kind of thing. I always have. In Clason's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon_%28book%29" title="Links to Wikipedia on TRMiB"><em>The Richest Man in Babylon</em></a> there is a story of a kid who saved his money all year and gave it to a friend who would travel to far-off lands and buy jewels. The guy brought back a few chips of colored glass and the kid lost his money. A few pages later, another guy is stuck outside the walls of the city at night, when a shepherd approaches him and makes a fast deal to sell his flock, which nobody can see because it's so dark. It sounds like a lot of sheep, there are sheep-noises coming from over here and over there and the shepherd seems like a nice enough guy and so the kid makes the deal. When the sun rises, he marches the herd into the city and sells the whole lot at a tremendous profit. I have never been able to figure out what we're supposed to learn from this. The first deal could easily have gone well and the second could easily have yielded five or ten widely spaced, noisy sheep.<br /> <br />At home, we're fresh back from the Home Show, with hundreds of vendors vying for our tiny fistfuls of dollars. What to do? We just bought the damned house last summer, and now we're thinking of changing things? Here's something: It's wearing it's third roof, and this one is nearing the end of its life. The water heater is giving up before the second shower is done. But we wish the bathroom was a little more up to date. We wish it had a dishwasher. We wish the driveway and the patio didn't drain into the basement. We wish the hardwood floors were a little fresher. There are unpleasantries in the yard. I am scared to death I will write a check to have something done, then immediately discover we now <strong><em>need</em></strong> a new water heater, or that new roof. Or something else we weren't even really aware of. It happens.<br /> <br />Prioritizing work is a gift. There are some things you just can't quantify. It's the old "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts" deal working again. Lately, I've been working on creating little videos, tiny little movies showing how to do simple little <em>molecular</em> tasks. Instead of coming to a two-hour session with me going over forty-'leven things the new software can do, you can now download as much or as little help as you need. There's a movie showing how to log into the system. If you have questions about how to log in, they are answered here. Nothing else is, but you will definitely learn how to log in. There's a How To Log Off video, too.<br /> <br />It's been difficult at times, because the system I'm teaching is growing and evolving, at the same time. So it's like trying to a hit a moving target. Sometimes I have found myself half way through an issue, only to find that the developers are tuning-up that part of the machine and things won't work Friday the way they did when I made the movie on Tuesday. At other times, I've stumbled upon things that don't quite work as advertised, only to be met with "Oh yeah, that doesn't work, yet" from the crew. Maybe it'll be done in a week, maybe it'll take a month. Maybe it won't be available until Version 2.00. There is definitely an air of plate-spinning at work, here.<br /> <br />But I am confident that this way is going to be a better tool. Sure, it's hard to schedule a training session that runs two hours and is only offered two or three times per month. And what do you do until that day and time rolls around? But everyone has two or three minutes in their day they could use to learn how to build tables in their pages. And why should they have to wade through twenty minutes of working with images, when all they really want to learn is how to build tables?<br /> <br />Some day this summer I'll look back on all of this and laugh.<br /> <br />Or, cry.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-9307194702172186942011-02-09T15:29:00.000-06:002011-02-09T15:30:17.067-06:00Technology Often... Works.Technology is great, except when it stops working.<br /> <br />I've had some experience with this, recently. It's been an interesting exercise in deductive reasoning, and deduct-from-your-checking-account spending.<br /> <br />At work, I connect to the Internet via a network. The speeds are unbelievable, usually. Since I moved to this office last summer, I have had no problems with my MacBook Pro, hooked up to an Apple LED Cinema Display, so it mostly acts as a desktop computer. But I can un-hook a couple of cables and pack it off to meetings quickly and easily. While I'm there, I depend upon Apple's AirPort WiFi to connect to the UNL WiFi network. And again, since I got this machine I have never had any trouble doing so.<br /> <br />Last week, something changed. My hardwired Ethernet wasn't working at all. Now, you might think, as I did, that, absent any wired networking, the WiFi would take over and I'd still be "online" but at a slightly lower speed. But that wasn't the case. When I unplug everything and take the machine to a meeting, WiFi works. But as long as it was cabled-up, it thought the wire ought to take care of things.<br /> <br />I did, too.<br /> <br />It took <em>at least</em> six people and six days to fix this problem. Along the way I was comforted, some, by the knowledge that it wasn't just me that was having the problem. Also, along the way, I discovered a bunch of things I was supposed to have done last summer never got quite finished. I had moved the money-accounting paperwork from my old cubicle to my new office. But I had not moved the network-accounting paperwork over. There were other issues, too.<br /> <br />At home, we awoke Tuesday morning to no Internet. Ours comes through our cable-TV folks, and the machinery was all downstairs. So, I went downstairs and turned everything off, then turned it all back on, one unit at a time... First the cable modem... then the AirPort WiFi hub, then I came back upstairs and started the iMac. This is usually all we've needed to do, but no matter how many times I did it, nothing ever seemed to improve. The telephone guy said he could "see" my cable modem and he could see that it could see the AirPort machinery.<br /> <br />Some weeks back, I'd purchased an Apple TimeCapsule backup machine and it featured Apple's AirPort wireless, too. I bought it so I could literally plug it in anywhere, but if you do the math, it can function as a base station, too. So, over the weekend, I plugged it in (upstairs, this time) and tuned it up to act like WiFi as well as backup. That solved my problem and so now I have Internet at home and at work, just like a month ago.<br /> <br />But it was an awkward week or so, there. It amazes me, how quickly new technology becomes necessary, and how difficult it is, to back down to previous technology. What was state-of-the-art just a few years ago, is barely workable, today. I have no idea where I might even buy a modem, today, if it came to that. I'm glad it didn't.<br /> <br />I saw a news story this week saying there is one, <strong><em>one</em></strong> new car available today as a 2011 model, that comes with a Cassette interface in the radio. Kind of ironically, at least it seems to me, it's a new Lexus. The times they are a changin', huh? One day there will be an even better/cheaper/faster way to network our machinery. And one day we will celebrate, with a sense of nostalgia, the last album to be released on CD.<br /> <br />From the Time Marches On desk: Today is my mother's birthday. This morning, my sister Amy stood, with her store-bought foot. What a present for mom, but mom couldn't quite enjoy it because she was in the emergency room. They've put her in a room at least for overnight, and we'll know more tomorrow, probably. But the wheel keeps turning.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-19050157167073063312011-01-31T14:33:00.000-06:002011-01-31T14:34:02.811-06:00Not-So New YearSo, how's that whole New Year thing working out for you?<br /> <br />Mine hasn't been so good.<br /> <br />I'm preparing a series of training videos that explain how to use the new Content Management System we are going to be rolling out, soon. I've got a couple dozen done so far, showing how to log in and how to log out. How to create a page and how to delete one. How to edit your page navigation and the various page elements like footers and related links and so on.<br /> <br />The thing is, in order to explain how any of this works, I have to know, myself. So, I'm busy learning the In's and Out's of this new beast, while at the same time keeping an eye on how to distill some of this new-found knowledge in two- and three-minute chunks.<br /> <br />I haven't done anything like this, before. The closest was my radio career, when, after my air shift was done I had to report to Production, and spend however much time was needed to create any new commercials that needed to be done. But even then, I never had to synchronize my audio with anyone's video, before. Play a few records, put them away, walk down the hall and speak glowingly for thirty seconds exactly about Johnson Lawn and Garden. Boom-boom... Boom!<br /> <br />This has been a whole lot of fun, and I think it will eventually be a really good way to pick up how this all works. Instead of having to juggle your schedule to find two hours to come and listen to me talk about it, you can get started right away, catching the how to log on/how to log off series and working your way from there. Later on, if you can't remember how to edit page footers, you don't need to schedule another two-hour session and wait for a week or two... you can just revisit the little movie about page footers and get on with things. Over time, I expect our initial two dozen or thirty movies to expand into three-dozen, or four-dozen or even more. Each one devoted to just a single, molecular aspect of how the greater system works.<br /> <br />I'm learning all kinds of things, this semester. I'm learning a lot about home ownership. This morning, I took the garbage out. Three steps from the garage, I was just hanging on, until the giant receptacle made it down hill to the sidewalk. I wrestled it over into the grassy/snowy area between the curb and the sidewalk and turned around. Two steps later, I was doing one of those cartoon motions where I'm okay from the belt up, but from there down everything is just a blur. I fell onto (mostly) my left hand and wrist. I spent a few minutes there on the ice, in front of maybe thirty cars, trucks and minivans and at least one StarTran bus, when an older gentleman approached on the sidewalk coming from the west.<br /> <br />He had seen me fall and immediately turned north on 38th Street and parked, got out and walked back to make sure I was alright! By the time he got to my house, I was up in a newborn-colt sort of way and making my way up the yard, walking on the traction-rich front lawn. He escorted me back up to the little sidewalk connecting the driveway to the front door. There, he turned, bade me farewell and encouraged me to be more careful.<br /> <br />This old man stopped on his way to work to help me get up and make sure I wasn't hurt. What a sweetheart, right?<br /> <br />I spent about an hour worrying if I'd ever play guitar again, the left hand being rather important in that endeavor, and wondering I'd broken anything. The whole thing took about as long and felt about as bad as when I'd broken my foot, on Hallowe'en. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. Hmm... that's going to be—Boom! There I am, flat on the ground, and in front of traffic again, too.<br /> <br />At work, I've spent most of the last week restarting my computer. I can maintain a network connection for only between three and twenty minutes. It's like a giant arm goes across the entire network every, say, twenty minutes, pulling errant networkers offline. If I happen to come on right after it passes, I can get fifteen or twenty minutes of work done, and saved and uploaded. If not, well, so far today alone I have restarted sixteen times, and it's only 2:30pm.<br /> <br />How's your New Year, so far?Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-25772727448971765792011-01-12T16:44:00.003-06:002011-01-12T16:52:20.936-06:00The NamingOkay, something has to be done about product names in this country. It's getting out of hand. Maybe toward the end here we'll tie this into Web pages, somehow, but even if not, this is important.<br /> <br />When I was a kid, names meant something. You could focus your attention on a Mustang or a Nova and everyone knew what you meant. But we have so many names today that don't mean anything, or mean the wrong things, or mean something different than what's actually going on. It's stupid, it's wasteful and it <em>has</em> to be hurting our general productivity in some way.<br /> <br />Consider the iMac. The iMac is a model of Macintosh. And the Macintosh is a line of computers from Apple. But here's the thing, it's been more than twenty years since Apple offered a computer <em>other</em> than the Macintosh. In the 1980s, if you told someone you were buying "an Apple computer" they didn't know if you were getting an Apple II, a Lisa or a Macintosh. Apple was GM. Apple II and Lisa were Oldsmobile and Pontiac. Macintosh was Chevrolet. Within the Macintosh line there were several models. Macintosh II, Mac SE/30, Macintosh LC/II, etc., roughly corresponding to Camaro, Impala and Malibu, let's say. But today, every computer Apple builds is a Macintosh. So is it helpful, or necessary, to have to indicate Apple Macintosh iMac? Apple themselves noticed less and less of their income comes from Macintosh, in an era of telephones and iTunes and so on. They thought it over and dropped "Computer" from their name. Apple Computer is now just "Apple". It's a start.<br /> <br />A lot of model designations don't mean anything, any more. Again, there was a day when your grandpa could say he was going to buy a new Chevy and everyone knew what kind of car he would have in his driveway. When more and more models were developed, Chevelles and Corvairs and so on, you had to add those names to the first to convey the complete idea.<br /> <br />So it wasn't just a Cadillac, any more. It was a Cadillac El Dorado. But then these designations were fractured, as various trim levels were developed. This wasn't so bad at first. A full-sized Chevrolet could be a Biscayne, an Impala or a Caprice. So now we're up to three names to adequately describe the product. Pontiac Firebird TransAm. And then it all went to Hell.<br /> <br />This morning, on the way to work, I followed a Pontiac. On one side of the trunk lid it said "G6". On the other side, it said "GT". Well, which is it? What does "LE" mean to, say, <em>anyone?</em> And how does it differ from "GLE" or "SE" or "SEL"? And why should anyone care if your car has a V6 or a V8 engine, a 5-speed or an automatic transmission? Sport-tuned suspension? Is there a badge that indicates you bought too much of a radio, too? These started out innocently enough. European brands added "i" to model names to indicate fuel injection, but who is doing the bragging, here, BMW or the new car owner? In the Mercedes-Benz family, "SL" meant <em>Sports Light</em>. But American brands applied these letters to cars that weighed 5000 pounds.<br /> <br />Then marketers noticed something about those numbers and letters. People didn't bond with them the way they did real names.<br /> <br />And, as if it was a Good Thing, the alphabet started to appear all over. The focus wasn't on the minutia any more, it was back on the brand, where the marketers wanted it. You weren't supposed to love a DeVille, you were supposed to love a Cadillac. So today, Cadillac sells CTS and DTS and STS vehicles. Conjure up any images for you? Me, neither.<br /> <br />It's at work at Acura, too. Fancy a new TSX or ZDX or MDX or RDX in your driveway? Uh, no. I miss the old Acura Legend, Integra and Vigor. I knew what those were. This year, the Lincoln catalog is just as confusing. MKZ, MKS, MKX, MKT? I got nothin'.<br /> <br />Adam allegedly spent a while naming all of the animals. Despite similarities and differences, Africa and India both got "Elephant" while one has big ears and the other doesn't. We don't have a Elephant GL and an Elephant GLE.<br /> <br />I guess we can be glad of that.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-59822547353717920182011-01-05T09:44:00.002-06:002011-01-05T09:46:44.816-06:00The New Start<p style="border: 1px solid blue; padding: .5em;">First things, first. I hope everyone will take a moment or two and update their <span style="font-family: Courier, 'Courier New', monospace; font-weight: bold; font-size: 1.1em;" >footer.html</span> documents to reflect the new year for copyright dates (and no, I still haven't done all of mine).</p><br /> <br />It happens every year.<br /> <br />I spend the first week of every year steeped in awe and wonder and just full of the sheer <em>possibilities</em> every new year affords. It's like being a school kid and heading off for that first day with all of those clean, empty pages in my notebooks. I could write stories in those pages. I could do homework. I could sketch out some new idea for a submarine or a jet fighter. I could write a tentative love letter to The Little Red-Haired Girl. I could do <em>any</em>thing.<br /> <br />Of course, the reality is a little less lofty. But here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, version 1.1, I think it's still a Good Idea to spend a few calories at the beginning and ending of any arbitrary period of time and decide what you expect out of it. Think about what actually got done. Think about the difference between the expectation and the reality. And to wonder a little about how to improve the situation in the next arbitrary time period, whether it's a day, a week, a month or a year.<br /> <br />Years ago, I learned HTML. And when HTML v3.2 gelled, I picked up on the changes, there. HTML v4.01 was a snap for me. And I remember thinking I could spend a few dollars and a few calories working-up JavaScript or I could work on Cascading StyleSheets and choosing CSS, because it seemed like everyone was saying JavaScript was on the way out. And for years, I was right. JavaScript was on its way to becoming Web Latin, our first popular "dead" language. And then AJAX happened. And then JQuery happened. And now I'm behind the curve, again. For the last several years, I have vowed that this next one would be the one where I, finally, learned JavaScript. I wouldn't put any money on a bet like that for 2011, though. It may happen, but I think my focus will be more on HTML5 and Adobe's CS5 suite and Drupal, with a smattering of iPad thrown in there, too.<br /> <br />Folks made fun of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld when he said "…as we know, there are <em>known</em> knowns; there are some things we know we know. We also know there are known <em>unknowns;</em> that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also <em>unknown</em> unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know." But if you parse it out, he was right.<br /> <br />And so this year, I want to focus on the things I know I do not know. Drupal and HTML5 both have a beginning and an end. You can start at <a> and learn all of the tags and how to use them and when you get done, you will have learned all of the unknowns in HTML5. Same with Drupal. That's not to say you'll know everything about how the pieces work together, or all of the best practices and theories behind the best deployment—everyone knows the alphabet, but not everyone can write like Stephen King or Tom Clancy. But you will have a good, complete foundation and you can work from there.<br /> <br />So what about you? What are you working on, this year?Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-5741391442927613752010-11-24T10:21:00.001-06:002010-11-24T10:21:19.189-06:00ThanksgivingThe fastest growing hobby in this country is Being Offended. I know people who spend two or three hours a day looking for things to be pissed off about, now. And with the rise of the Internet, the offended now have access to what we call Community, other like-minded and similarly offended folks who reinforce the idea that Something Must Be Done, as opposed to cautioning one another to Just Get Over It.<br /> <br />The result of the joining of the offended with one another is the backlash. How <em>dare</em> you [enjoy/participate/celebrate] this, that or the other thing, knowing how many [indigenous peoples/innocent animals/children/others] were [exploited/killed/cheated/inconvenienced] in the name of this holiday.<br /> <br />I'm done with that.<br /> <br />Christopher Columbus was on his way to India when he bumped into us. That's why my father's family are called Indians today, when they have lived their entire lives in South Dakota and Nebraska. Sure, Columbus brought the pox and VD and all manner of other ills, and took whatever he wanted to take back. But realistically, I don't see how anyone can make it right, now and why spend all of those calories being worked-up about something nobody can change anyway?<br /> <br />Flash ahead a hundred and twenty-eight years, and the Pilgrims also came aground here. This story has been washed clean of just about all of its truth in the nearly four hundred years since, but I have to admit I like the myth better. The idea that the first Thanksgiving was a feast, that it was the Pilgrims who invited the Indians to join them, that everyone was all clean and shiny in their buckled shoes. Maybe after four hundred years you get a pass. I don't know.<br /> <br />I just don't have much patience with people who sit in the back of the room at the party and say things like, "You know, the millennium doesn't <em>really</em> start tonight..." or "You know, the Pilgrims would have starved if the Indians hadn't shared that day..." or "You know, this used to be a Pagan holiday..."<br /> <br />I come from a place a little different from most people, I'm sure. Peter Mayer said it all for me in his song, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfLI1l_Pda4" title="Links to YouTube Video of Peter Mayer singing Holy Now">Holy Now</a>. I'm not happy giving thanks on only a single day every year, and maybe particularly not this day, but I understand an awful lot of people are too busy to even notice, and so for them having a holiday is probably a good idea. Let's all step back, count our blessings and take a deep breath. And besides, there's turkey and dressing and football and tires at 40% off and we have to rest up for Black Friday shopping.<br /> <br />I am thankful. I have great friends, and great family (except for one guy). I have a great home and a great job and I get to share all of this with my favorite wife. Yeah, I fell and broke my foot on Hallowe'en, but it could have been so much worse.<br /> <br />I have a lot of nice things, and I have a lot of good-enough things. I don't drive a Mercedes, but I have a Honda that has never let me down. I don't have the latest iMac, or iPod or iPhone, but the iMac, iPod and iPhone I do have has been mine for years and still does <em>everything</em> I need to do, online and in the home. I have a lot of nice things, nice guitars, favorite books and big TVs. I have my dad's tools. Our house isn't a palace, but we're not palatial people. We're two-bedroom, brick, people, with attached garages and fireplaces. It's not great but it's good enough, for us. I'm thankful.<br /> <br />I sometimes feel like I swim upstream against technology. About the time I get comfortable with something, history shows it goes away. I was a master of RedRyder and White Knight, telecomm software for the Macintosh, back in the 1980s and 1990s. I knew my way around the XMODEM, YMODEM and ZMODEM file transfer protocols, and the whole "AT" command set for Hayes modems. All of that came and went in the span of about a dozen years.<br /> <br />But I'm thankful I work in a field where every day is subtly different. I'm not working on the same things in the same way I did a decade ago. I'm always mindful that three months from now, six months from now, things are going to be different. And even though this is often scary to me, I'm thankful just the same.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-24563210258645026912010-11-11T08:50:00.001-06:002010-11-11T08:54:57.946-06:00Veteran's DayVeteran's Day. From the end of World War One, the only war with enough conceit to bill itself as The Great War. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. We were at war. Tick, tick, tick, we were at peace. The first of the autumnal holidays, celebrated from sea to shining sea with savings on washing machines and wide screen HDTVs. But not at my house.<br /><br />At my house, the two military holidays, Veteran's Day and Memorial Day, have always been a little more reverential than knocking fifty bucks off the price of a stereo. 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 often. 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 isn't a 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 an airline pilot or a doctor, where everything matters.<br /> <br />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.<br /> <br />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.<br /> <br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />There are more than fifty-eight thousand, two hundred and fifty names on The Wall, the VietNam Veteran's Memorial, in Washington, DC. That's just for one war. 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, "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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />It's okay to enjoy the last of the nice weather. It's okay to take the family out to dinner, 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 service, and 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.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-76178727723272757472010-11-03T08:16:00.001-05:002010-11-03T08:18:58.117-05:00It's Like a DrugThere is magic in being able to transfer an emotion or a feeling from one person to another.<br /> <br />You're toddling along, thinking about the Big Report due on Thursday, and then you hear That Song. Instantly, you are at the Eighth and Ninth Grade Dance, trying to screw up the courage to ask Doreen to dance this next fast song, because that would mean you'll both be hot and tired (and already on the dance floor) when the band, whose set list you have figured out, will be following this one with a slow song. And you really, really want to slow dance with Doreen. You haven't visited that memory in years but it's recalled instantly with the opening bars of a piece of music from years ago. Close your eyes and you can smell Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific.<br /> <br />You're walking along, feeling kind of grumbly, because the boss didn't like your report. Suddenly a new Smart Car cruises up to the crosswalk and you cannot help but return it's smile. The way the headlights and fenders and grill are all designed, it is a car that just always looks happy. Many current Mazdas are the same. You just can't help but smile, seeing one.<br /> <br />You open up the pages of a newspaper, and there among the doom and despair and tragedy are the comics. Oh, that Dilbert, and his pointy-haired boss. How about that dog, that cat, those kids, huh? Then you read Doonesbury and discover that B.D., an entirely fictional character you have never actually met and never will, who joined the National Guard and was shipped off to war in Iraq, has lost a leg in that war. He's being stretchered back to the hospital by buddies from his unit, who encourage him, saying "Not your time, bro!" and "Not today!" And you shed a tiny little tear for a man that lives only in another man's imagination, but who has been a part of your life for twenty-five or thirty years.<br /> <br />I grew up learning to read with Sally, Dick and Jane. I "met" them in first grade, they helped me a lot and then we went on vacation. When we came back in the fall for second grade, everyone was a little taller, a little more developed, <em>including</em> Sally, Dick and Jane. When we were told at the end of second grade that we would not use that series of textbooks next year, I cried for the loss of my friends.<br /> <br />You click on a Web site link and are whisked away to that site, and before you even read anything posted there, you already feel the juices flowing. You are alive with the possibilities of the things you are about to read and see. Just responding to the colors and shapes.<br /> <br />The very best of this seems to come when describing a sense without being able to actually use it. Think of a music review, or a food, wine or cigar review. How do you explain to someone, in words, how a guitar sounds? You have to lean hard on words most people don't see every day. It's resonant. It's got a deep, rich middle with very bright highs. The wine has a finish of chocolate. The cigar has a flavor of leather and spices.<br /> <br />There's a little neuron deep in your brain that knows what happy is and one right next to it that knows what sad is and one nearby that understands how gramma's cooking tasted. And at any given moment, a sight, a sound, a smell can tickle one of those guys in very powerful ways. When Miranda Lambert sings "under that live oak, my favorite dog is buried in the yard" it conjures up hours of stories for anyone whose ever loved a dog and lost it.<br /> <br />I have always been fascinated by this. Good music, good art, good design is in many ways like a drug. You are pointed in one direction, you encounter this new input and it deflects you in some way. You're happier or sadder, more confident and inspired or hungrier. Someone has hand carried a feeling, an emotion, from across time and space and plugged it into your brain. You may tap your feet, or chuckle or whatever but the point is that it affects you in some way.<br /> <br />People who can do that consistently are richly rewarded in our culture. Singers, songwriters, chefs, actors and Jony Ive, CBE. I wish I could do it, too. I wish I was good at it.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-13867603744146447452010-10-27T08:19:00.003-05:002010-10-27T08:32:05.893-05:00Is It Cold In Here, or Is It Just Me?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5B4aCFatjR_-edXvtZUqEJl8LFBm9Liq7b1_5rlLMfBVIdAm8_KO28lIdOZiUXepF32Agi3gflv8mZGzQaAFJlI-nEkTmRPee4LUAFvQAoQXdbvax2B0UQIKqiqvoBUvzKhM9Cr7o0bx6/s1600/gaps.gif"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 185px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5B4aCFatjR_-edXvtZUqEJl8LFBm9Liq7b1_5rlLMfBVIdAm8_KO28lIdOZiUXepF32Agi3gflv8mZGzQaAFJlI-nEkTmRPee4LUAFvQAoQXdbvax2B0UQIKqiqvoBUvzKhM9Cr7o0bx6/s320/gaps.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5532715358127452850" /></a><br />If you were scheduled for surgery a couple of weeks ago, or if you're a Chilean miner, you may have missed the whole story. A skillion-dollar retail chain decided what they needed to do was update their tired old logo.<br /> <br />Sounds like someone ascended to a new position, doesn't it? Everything was fine, and then Jerry was elevated to Grand High Communications Pooh-Baah. And how are you going to keep a job like that, if you can't point to something You Have Done? So the gears were engaged that resulted in a new, hip, groovy logo for the Gap. This kind of thing happens fairly often in Biddness, and it scares me.<br /> <br />I took a Marketing class a couple of years ago and it was full of these kinds of misadventures. Volkswagen, sixty years of dependable, economical, modest transportation, a <em>brand</em> that clearly communicated its products. Someone sitting in the Big Chair there decided they would move up-market to take on mighty Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi. They brought to market a Volkswagen that cost as much as two. These are much prized on the used-car market, today. The original 2004 sold modestly, but you have to give these things a chance. After 2006, it was clear that people who wanted to spend Mercedes money on cars wanted… Mercedes. You cannot today buy a new Volkswagen Phaeton.<br /> <br />The New Coke story was interesting. Pepsi was kicking their hiney on TV urging people to "Take the Pepsi Challenge!" Most people who did found they preferred the taste of Pepsi to the taste of Coke. They were buying Coke more out of habit. So, Coke developed a formula that tasted great a paper cup mouthful at a time. In test after test, it beat Pepsi <em>and it beat Coca-Cola</em>. But in 12oz quantities it was almost awful. Coke beat a hasty retreat from the formula after weeks, in those pre-internet days.<br /> <br />So it made me wonder about Marketing. How valid a field of study is it, if you can get so much so wrong? It's hard to imagine Coke or Gap or Volkswagen really deciding to change a logo, to enter a new market or to burn down the secret recipe that had brought it so much success on a whim. There <em>must</em> have been studies, there <em>must</em> have been spreadsheets that comforted people and led them to believe that what they were doing was A Good Thing.<br /> <br />Sure, there may have been problems with the methodology. Our most-recent Web site was tested in several settings, including an audience of tractor buyers and quilt judgers at the state fair, and a great hue and cry went up when some percentage could not locate the huge "Enroll Now!" button at the top of the screen, which led to the enrollment Web page, of course. The case they made was that we were losing enrollment, I guess. Based on the actions of their parents, college kids were thought to be unable to figure out how to sign-up and sign-on and become future alumni and send Large Checks to the school for years to come. I was mildly worried, at first. And then I remembered: Enrollment was up, this year and last. Hmm….<br /> <br />Gap had a box that identified the store and the clothing, everywhere except on the radio. A darkish medium-blue field, square, with all capitals spelling G A P in the center, in a tall, skinny, serifed font ( Spire Regular ) cast in white. Beautiful? Maybe not, but certainly elegant.<br /> <br />As things happened, the Gap folks backed down almost immediately, and abandoned the Helvetica capital-G, lower-cased a and p, dark against an indistinct white background, with an odd smudge of dark blue gradient offset behind and above the p. <a href="http://www.HelveticaFilm.com/" title="Links to Documentary Film on Helvetica Typeface">Helvetica</a> is great for signage, and there was a wonderful movie about it a few years ago. But it's not the visible face of the Gap.<br /> <br />But shouldn't someone have known this? Shouldn't someone have stopped them?Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-34594142717452861622010-10-20T10:42:00.001-05:002010-10-20T10:42:52.169-05:00It Won't Always Be Like This"It won't always be like it is, now". That's what a teacher once told me was the First Rule of Money. He said you could apply this to any area of study with a dollar sign in front of it. Business, finance, economics, investing. It didn't matter. The first thing you have to know is that it won't always be like it is, now.<br /> <br />This was some comfort to me, because things at the time were pretty awful. Unemployment was up. Inflation was up. The general mood in the country was bad for the first time in many peoples' lives. Kids born in the early '50s grew up in a world where things got better every year and people just accepted that the American Way was the best. But nothing lasts forever.<br /> <br />If you still handle your money today the way it was popular in 1974 or 1982 you don't have much money left. Back then, interest rates were high and you could lock-in a great return, risk-free, by buying a CD. Stocks? They were cheap for a reason, though nobody could agree on what the reason was. And then one day in 1982 The Market took off. And nobody saw it coming, and nobody could agree on why, but nobody wanted to miss out on it, either. The same thing happened with real estate.<br /> <br />Political polling is slipping because they depend almost entirely upon land-line telephones. This was fine for a hundred years, but today a lot of households have cell phones only. Today there are noticeably fewer young people and low-income people around to pick up a wired phone and answer questions. This tends to overstate some advantages and understate others.<br /> <br />So here we are, building Web pages, with HTML. For a while, they told us we were using the last version of HTML we would ever have to learn. We could learn it all, at last. Once you figured out the nuances of the data definition tag, you were done and could go out and play. And build Web pages. And so we did.<br /> <br />Cascading Style Sheets came along, got better for a while and then stalled, similar to the path HTML had been on. So "this" was how HTML worked, and "that" is how CSS worked. Kewl. We got down to having only to learn the subtle differences between releases of Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver MX 2004 to Dreamweaver 8? Take a week or so and you'll be golden. Creative Suite 3? Sure! Creative Suite 4? You bet!<br /> <br />After a while it starts to look like these are the tools you're going to use for the rest of your career. People ask "Should I upgrade?" They never seem to ask "Should I buy Dreamweaver at all?" Maybe it's time to start asking.<br /> <br />Look, this is a priesthood that not everyone is interested in joining. And in truth, not everyone needs this much horsepower, anyway. You could run a small or even a medium-sized business quite easily with Dreamweaver. But if your needs are simple you don't require the kinds of features and benefits Dreamweaver is packed with. You don't need the support for various scripting interfaces, you don't need the programmy features. What you need is about where Dreamweaver was at Version 5ive! But all of those Dreamweaver developers still have jobs and the odds are good we will one day have shelves full of Dreamweaver CS9.<br /> <br />Is this a Good Idea? Is it necessary? In these troubled economic times (drink), should we just blindly upgrade every several months or could that money be better used in some other way, like getting you an extra cable channel or two, or maybe putting you into the V6 model, instead of the four-cylinder?<br /> <br />Computers were supposed to make our lives easier. We were supposed to be better off, for having them and mastering them. Can't we use some of their horsepower and intelligence and apply it to the task of building Web pages?<br /> <br />Well, yeah. As it turns out, we can. And it may signal the end of the need for Dreamweaver, for most people. There will still be some folks who have to have the kinds of gee-whiz features that are part of the baked-in goodness in every box. And they will still need training (I hope) in HTML and CSS and Dreamweaver, itself.<br /> <br />But there may be a tool that will be Good Enough for most others. A tool that's free, except for the frictional expense of training.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7970098063000974056.post-14416641222660499062010-10-13T15:08:00.000-05:002010-10-13T15:09:04.234-05:00Learning. Or, Not.It's been said often enough there must be some truth to it: You Can't Teach an Old Dog New Tricks. I may be proof of this, myself.<br /> <br />I'm taking a math class, this semester. Math for Dummies, I call it. Math 095 isn't even in the catalog. That's how elemental it is. This is basic Algebra. The kind most of us learned in high school. Hi, I'm the kid in the back of the class who drew pictures of airplanes and wondered what a boob felt like.<br /> <br />I know the feeling of frustration that comes when you struggle with learning. That's what motivates me to find different ways to illustrate an issue, and to keep asking during class if everyone is getting this or not. Some respond well to theory. Others need a more practical example. Some can hear it and know it forever, while others need to see it before they can believe it. I try to do whatever it takes to get that germ of an idea to take hold and there is no better thrill than seeing that "lightbulb moment" when someone's eyes light up and their facial expression changes and you know—they get it.<br /> <br />I don't get it. I have never been friendly with math. I can fly airplanes and I've done my taxes for thirty years. But I don't <em>get</em> a lot of math. When I started back to school to finish my degree, I knew I would need a few math classes and the Math department cheerfully provided a Math Placement Exam, to find out where my level was. I think I got my name right. Some of the equations they sketched out made no sense at all to me, but I remember some were kind of pretty, design-wise. Brackets and parenthesis and lines here and there. The kid who graded me told me I'd tested-out at Forrest Gump levels, meaning I could not even start with their 100-level classes, I would have to take Math 095 to get myself tuned-up for even Math 100.<br /> <br />This I did, in fulfillment of a promise I made to my father that I would finish my degree. And you know what? I did pretty well in that class, scoring enough points to not even need to take the final exam. I was ready to move on, except I had Things To Do that next semester and the one after that, and, well, it seems this class "expires" after a year. They may or may not have said something about that, I don't remember.<br /> <br />At any rate, I'm back. Going over the same ground I covered two years ago. Only this time I am struggling. I sit in the front row of class, just like last time. And I pay attention and I ask questions and I nod. But when I get home and crack open the books, they may as well be written in hieroglyphics. I am actually, provably, stupider this October than I was in October of 2008. Same teacher, same book, same chair. The only difference is me.<br /> <br />One of the things we learn in pilot training is to never give up. We listen to a recording of an air traffic controller as he deals with a young pilot who has screwed up, but somehow can't bring himself to do anything but scream into the microphone "MayDay! MayDay!" over and over as if that was going to save him. It didn't. We watch videotape that a thoughtful pilot provided of his own demise with a little video camera bracketed into the cockpit to record flights. You can actually feel the energy drain from a roomful of pilots as the guy on tape says "Hey, watch this!" and proceeds to ride it in.<br /> <br />Compare and contrast that with airline Captains Sully and Haynes. Sully put his gleaming jet down in the river next to one of the biggest cities in the world and lost not a single life. Haynes experienced an in-flight engine failure that took out his hydraulic system. "What's the procedure for loss of hydraulics?" he asked his flight engineer. "There isn't one" came the reply. But Al Haynes didn't give up. And though some didn't make it as his giant jet cartwheeled across the Sioux City airport, an awful lot of people lived through that crash. He kept trying things the whole time, and managed to keep the airplane away from the city and any buildings, steering it onto a closed runway.<br /> <br />My hat is off to those guys. I have never wanted to give up on anything so much as Math 095 in my life. This week.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06616574734126305546noreply@blogger.com0