Thanksgiving

The 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.

The result of the joining of the offended with one another is the backlash. How dare 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.

I'm done with that.

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?

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.

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 really 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..."

I come from a place a little different from most people, I'm sure. Peter Mayer said it all for me in his song, Holy Now. 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.

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.

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 everything 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.

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.

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.

Veteran's Day

Veteran'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.

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 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.

If you pick some kid off of the street and fill him full of ideas and sign him up for a job where he loses a foot and can't sleep nights, you are in some way responsible.

If it is your job to teach this kid, in only twelve weeks, how not to lose a foot, and he does it anyway, then you in some way are responsible.

It may come about because you were distracted, tired, or because you were more interested in becoming his friend than in training him. And if your unit needs bullets, batteries or bandages and none are available, you have let them down, too, possibly with disastrous results. You cannot turn this kind of thinking off at the end of the day, can you? Or just walk away from it after twenty years? Maybe that is why Marines may stop getting paid, but they never, ever, stop being Marines.

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

There are more than fifty-eight thousand, two hundred and fifty names on The Wall, the 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.

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

It's okay to enjoy the 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.

It's Like a Drug

There is magic in being able to transfer an emotion or a feeling from one person to another.

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.

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.

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.

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, including 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Is It Cold In Here, or Is It Just Me?

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.

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.

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 brand 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.

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 and it beat Coca-Cola. But in 12oz quantities it was almost awful. Coke beat a hasty retreat from the formula after weeks, in those pre-internet days.

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 must have been studies, there must have been spreadsheets that comforted people and led them to believe that what they were doing was A Good Thing.

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….

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.

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. Helvetica 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.

But shouldn't someone have known this? Shouldn't someone have stopped them?

It 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

Learning. 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.

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.

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.

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 get 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Help!

When do you know when you have crossed the line from a problem you can handle yourself to a problem you need assistance with?

This comes up often, or at least I hope it does, as we are all constantly bumping up against the limits of our comfort zones. Maybe the issue is with something you have read about, or remember hearing of in some blog or meeting, somewhere. But maybe it's something you just have no experience with at all. What do you do, then? No, I mean after the crying?

There is a deep and wide river of testosterone that runs through the middle of this. Two or three times in any given year, someone will tell me about the time they took a problem, threw it to the ground and beat it senseless, wrestling with it for seven hours before they finally figured out a solution. This is a point of pride for many people, but it always makes me shake my head. You blew a whole day on this? When you could have gotten an answer by calling or writing anyone in the Web Developer Network and ended up five or six hours ahead, productivity-wise? And you're proud of this?

But there is something to the Do It Yourself aspect. It's a great help in learning your craft. In a former life as a mainframe computer operator, I would encounter various situations where the computer would stop, issue some cryptic message and require some assurance or comforting before it would continue. The first week or so, it went like this: The computer would crash. I would call the Systems Analyst on duty, who would then guide me step-by-step to some resolution. But about a week into my new job, all of the Systems guys were away on vacation and I had to call their boss.

"Hi, it's Mark. The Cyber crashed again" I told a frustrated manager. "What does the error message say?" he replied. I dutifully read it off, over the phone. Now, understand that these big machines don't just stop and throw up a little box on the screen with an "Okay" and "Reset" button. You would get error messages that themselves were clues as to what kind of problem you were having. Every conceivable error was cataloged and cross-referenced in huge manuals kept in a cart near the main console. CO411 might be a core, or memory problem—the programmer was asking a program to think about more than he had given it room to comfortably work in. Or it might be IO234, a problem with the Input/Output area of the big machine. Some trouble with a tape drive or a printer. Before, when I would call, the programmer would walk me through fixing the problem and I would move on, thinking my involvement was done. I was just a clerk, running a big machine.

But with their boss taught me how to learn about the machine, and what it was expecting. He wanted to teach me how to learn (what he really wanted was to get back to watching M*A*S*H on TV), so I would be less likely to call back. Soon enough, I was calling analysts with one of the giant manuals opened in my lap, my finger already on the reference for the error message I'd gotten. I would suggest a way to fix things and they would approve it and we'd move on. Within a few weeks, I wasn't calling people and interrupting their evenings, I was sending them e-mails explaining what had gone wrong and how I had fixed things. That's about the time they started bringing in pizza for me, in the evenings.

Many things in life seem to work in three's and this is where I draw the line, myself. If I discover a problem I will try three ways to fix it myself but at that point it's probably easier, cheaper and faster to call in an expert opinion. This has served me well in technology and even working on things around the house. I'll fiddle with it, I'll monkey with it and then I'll futz with it. But if it's not fixed after my fiddling, monkeying and futzing, then damnit, it's time to call a plumber.

Know what you know, and learn what you don't. And don't be afraid to ask for help.

Make It a Habit

I am fascinated by little things. My wife and I enjoy travel by car and whenever we are on the road more than an hour, one of us will start in wondering why we do things the way we do. Habits interest me. Not the traditional uniform of the Nun—that's a different interest. I am interested in how we learn to do things, why we keep doing them, and of course in how difficult it is to stop doing them, once you have started.

It's been said if you do something two-dozen times, it can become a habit. Others say it has to do with a number of times over number of days equation. If you have a can of Mountain Dew per day, every day, you may develop a habit, a behavior gives you the continued regular consumption of Mountain Dew without your having to remind yourself to do it all of the time. In fact, you will do it without any attention at all. This is especially true if you can somehow ritualize something. Have that Mountain Dew every morning when you first come in and turn on the lights.

So a month down the road, you come in to work, turn on the lights, sit down to start tearing through your day and you will reach almost automatically for that can of Mountain Dew. And at some point, if you reach out and it's not there, it can seriously mess up the rhythm of your day.

For some reason, it is universally recognized that it is much easier to begin a Bad Habit, like smoking, overeating or surfing the Internet, than it is to begin a Good Habit, like exercising or spell checking a document when you think you're done. And it's awful, trying to break a habit of any kind, once it's engrained in your daily ritual.

And so we keep doing things long after they are actually good for us. This is what I did, today. This is what I did yesterday. This is what I did last week. A friend once mentioned she was doing X "because of all of that inflation" with an appropriate Yucky Face expression. But this was in 1998, during a time when inflation wasn't a problem. But it was easier for her to continue the behaviors she had learned in the 1980s than to learn and adopt new behaviors as things changed.

I read. I mean, I read a lot. I got interested in reading about money about a week after I learned that I didn't know anything about money. But I always get two or three sources. So at any given time, I have two or three computer magazines coming to my house. I have two or three guitar magazines, now. It's rare that I get a single Web technology book on a subject. I have quite a collection of HTML books, CSS books, MySQL books, PHP books, JavaScript books, Design books and so on. I have only JQuery book, so far.

I need to make a change to a Web page. I fire up Dreamweaver. Why? Because that's how I edit Web pages. It's what I have used since about 2001 when I gave up HomeSite. And every couple of years I have upgraded, because, well, that's becoming a habit now, too. But should I upgrade to the next version? Should I be doing pages in Dreamweaver at all, now?

It's interesting, sometimes, to challenge yourself like this. Why do we do the things we do? Are there other, better alternatives? Beyond "comfort" is there some benefit to doing things the way we have "always" done them? I was impressed by Dreamweaver, when I finally stepped away from HomeSite. What am I missing out on, now, by continuing to use Dreamweaver to build pages? And how will it take me to break my Dreamweaver habit, now that it is so engrained?

Starting in September, I have taken to climbing the stairs of The Link, here at work, at least once per day. When I have been gone a day, I make it up. I have now done this quite a few times. Have I made it a habit? No, not yet. I know it's good for me and all of that, but I still have to force myself.

Habits are funny things.

I Have Seen The Future

It may take a few years but I have been to the mountain top and see no reason to change my oft-stated viewpoint that The Future Is Going To Be A Great Place To Live.

In 1993, I worked on my first Web page from the front-page portal of my GEnie RoundTable. It was awkward, but familiar. I had worked with SGML some in the middle 1980s and many of the tags were familiar. But the state of the browser art, in those long ago, pre-Netscape days, was pretty dismal. Everyone who saw the Web saw it in sixteen colors of text characters. Only. No images. No fonts. Just text on the screen, text from all over the world.

In 1995 I got a call from Microsoft. They wanted to know if I was interested in working on their new online network, hosting their aviation forum. I hung up the phone and drove to OfficeMax to buy my first Windows PC, a Compaq, and await my FedEx delivery of the new Windows 95 software.

In 1996, the mother ship called us all home and I traveled to Seattle for a convention of hundreds of forum managers. There, as in most conventions of this sort, the real action took place in the hallways and at the after- parties. I heard then that one day we would see machine-made Web pages that were "just as good" as anything we were building then. This today would be seen as damning with faint praise. But it was enough to send a shiver down my spine. What would I do for a living, on the day after that day?

In the intervening decade and a half, we have made progress toward the machine-made page, if that's how you wish to see it. But I still think we will see agencies building one-off sites for small businesses and individuals doing their own pages for years to come. I don't know that I will retire from teaching HTML when I retire, but I suspect the odds are pretty good that I'll still be retiring from some form of building Web pages.

The latest threat, if you are so inclined, comes from Drupal. Drupal is an open sourced Content Management System. Think of Lego® blocks and you won't be far wrong. Drupal calls them Nodes, and you build little systems, one block at a time, using other nodes already out there or constructing your own. Using this technique, you can quickly model the behavior of, say, an online appointment calendar, or a little weather gizmo that gets the temperature and forecast for a given ZIP-code.

We've started a pilot program using Drupal. It's good. It's been up and running for less than a year, but we can already cruise through an entire Dreamweaver-built site and convert it easily into a more Drupal-friendly format. Point-point, click-click and you can edit your pages without sending Large Checks to Adobe or to Microsoft or to anyone, really. It's a very compelling case, especially for colleges and departments with tiny budgets, which is to say, all of us, now.

Drupal is out there, being tended-to by hundreds of developers the world over. Currently in Version 6 release, we are aiming for Drupal 7 deployment. Those developers are still going to be busy, and there will probably be a Drupal 8 and Drupal 9 some day. We can decide that we are interested in upgrading or we can decide that we like what we have, when the time comes. We need only respond to the needs of the campus Web developer community, not the needs of Adobe shareholders.

There are lots of advantages Drupal affords us over the current Dreamweaver model. Not least of which is that you can edit Web pages from anywhere you can send G-Mail from, with just a Web browser and an internet connection. We can include features as they become ready, not according to some arbitrary release schedule. One day we may schedule content changes and content expirations.

But, someone will still have to provide that content. Drupal isn't a Web page editor, it's a Content Management System, and someone will still need to provide the content that needs managing. And as beautiful and elegant as it appears today, like an exotic Italian sports car, it's going to break. And on that day, they are going to need someone who knows a little HTML….

Motivation, Again

Remember that bit about bookstores? There are lots of books on motivation, and some are going to be better than others. I'm not going to try to top that here in 750 words. But let's spend another moment with this before we leave it entirely.

Some things we need to do. Some we want to do. Some things will improve our lives, our careers, our homes or our families. Others are just ordinary duties that come up on some regular basis.

Some tools I have used, to keep me on track and get the work done, include treating myself for reaching some milestone, secluding myself from distractions, focusing on the future, when the goal will presumably be reached, and the nuclear option: walking away from it all for a time.

None of these work all the time, but they all work some of the time. I make no promises, but I'm reminded of the Hunter Thompson quote, "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."

It's a rare task that can't be broken down into manageable chunks. You don't sit down to write a novel. You write a word, and that becomes a sentence. You re-read that sentence, editing until you are happy, and you write another. Eventually it becomes a paragraph, a chapter and then a book. Most work is like that.

Sometimes I'm able to get a work done if I allow myself a little pleasure after passing some milestone. I will get myself a soda, when I finish making these phone calls. I will see what everyone is laughing about down the hall, when I finish this outline. I will sneak a peek at Amazon.com or Facebook after I get this Web page validated.

That kind of thing can work for a lot of people, but it depends upon having enough discipline to forgo that reward until the work gets done. Now we're in Chicken-Or-Egg country. If you have the discipline to delay gratification, you probably have the discipline to get the work done anyway.

I can get a lot done in the middle of a room, with conversations and music going on all around me. In fact, some of my best work has been done in busy coffeehouses with a constant distracting din as people drifted in and out, clinked cups with spoons, laughed about that guy in the office and whatever else. But, sometimes, you need to be able to shut everything out and just focus on the task at hand.

Maybe half the time these days, I close my office door. And now and then I'll even turn off the lights, so all I can see is my monitor. With class in session, people use my office hallway as a conduit from Where They Were to Where They Need To Be. And it's a hallway with not a stitch of fabric, so every sound from their start to their finish, the width of the building, echoes around and, I swear, amplifies as it makes its way to my door. When a class empties out, there may be twenty conversations, forty feet shuffling, doors creaking and slamming and so on. So where in summer my door was mostly open, these days, it's mostly closed.

I have a small selection of jazz guitar (no lyrics, no vocals) that I play on iTunes while I'm working on something. Often, though, I'll listen to a selection of podcasts. Some about Web design, others about technology, news and even comedy. Each requires various levels of attention. I don't want to replace the distraction of the mobile crowd with an interview with a comedian I like, so I'm careful with what I select to listen to and when. Still, I can't control things like the Band practicing outside my window. It can be hard to write JavaScript with the drumline ten yards away working on Boom-chacka-lacka boom-boom-Boom!

Sometimes, just imagining how great it's going to feel to be done with something is enough to keep you working toward that end. Man, I'm going to put my feet up and enjoy a cold one, tonight!

Sometimes you just burn out. That's what vacation days are for. I find that a day or two off often helps clear my head and get me back in the groove, again.

What works for you?

Motivation

There are fewer good bookstores in this country, but if you can find one, the odds are good they will about a yard of self-help books, many dealing with motivation.

Motivation is interesting. Sometimes, it's like a spark. It can cause events to escalate and cascade and before you know it, nations are at war or economies are in crisis or people are in love.

Most of the job of an athletic coach is motivation. And that's illustrative, I think—I hope. There's some reinforcement of fundamentals, some critique of style or performance, sure. But mostly, the job involves convincing people to perform at a high level.

Fans of any sport go nuts when you reduce their passion to its essence. "It's a just a couple of guys, swatting a ball back and forth" sets tennis fans' teeth on edge. I get cranky when people tell me auto racing is "just a bunch of guys driving fast and turning left".

But, here we go. A coach's job is to tell athletes, who are very good at whatever it is they do, to go out there and do that thing, very well, for a tremendous pile of money, fame and other benefits, which you might be forgiven for thinking would be enough motivation, right there. And yet, coaches are some of the highest paid people on the team. So there must be more to it than that.

I know I should get "X" done, done quickly, and done well, and even that I should crow about it a little when it's finished. But for some reason, even though it may mean something from I-Get-To-Keep-My-Job all of the way up to I-Get-A-Raise, and all I have to do is just to do my job and do it well, there are any number of un-done "X" -jobs on my spindle. Everyone is like that, to one degree or another (I hope). Please, god, it isn't just me.

What is it that keeps us from doing things? Things we know we need to do, and often at our benefit?

Sometimes, it's just daily clutter and distraction. I need to clear out fourteen other ToDo items, before I can start work on the Really Big Task. I'm going to need a lot of room on my desk, so I'd better finish this little page, and do something about that receipt, and put away a few of these pens and other office supplies.

Sometimes it's a feeling of unpreparedness. I can't possibly do this now, without the proper training and tools and staffing and so on. So I need to schedule training, and get a hold of a good book, and maybe try one of those webinar things, but I can't afford a book right now and there are so many hoops to jump through, to get the office to buy one. And even then, it won't be like I really know this stuff, I'll just be the guy who read the book!

What I treasure are those moments when you end up "in the zone" and work seems to take over about 95% of your brain. You look up and it's 1:10pm. You start in, and the next time you look up, it's 4:52pm. It's like you've been working with a tailwind all day. It's the closest thing a fat man like myself can probably come to a Runner's High.

But I've been at work on a Web page or a report I really enjoy, doing a part of it I really enjoy doing, and left at five thinking tomorrow would be a breeze… and been disappointed in the morning. The spark is gone. It's the difference between hearing a comic tell a joke and hearing someone who saw that comic tell you about the joke. Comics telling jokes are very often funny. Telling about a joke never is.

Motivation is strange. Here's a team of world-class athletes, each one only here because they demonstrated they were better than a thousand others at their task. And yet they need a guy to point out to them that they are not operating at a hundred percent?

What hope do any of the rest of us have?

Ten Thousand Hours

There's been a lot of talk lately about how mastering, well, anything, takes ten thousand hours. It comes from Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers: The Story of Success. I'm wondering how true that may be in our case?

I got my pilot's license in less than fifty hours. I had demonstrated by that point the proper skills and to a sufficient level to be deemed safe enough to fly unwitting people off to faraway adventures, with a high probability of getting us all back home, again. Fifty hours. But I can tell you that I was a much, much better pilot at 200hrs.

I was easily better than four times the flier, with four times the hours. I am sure that if I was able to continue racking up time, by the time I got to ten thousand hours, I'd be pretty damned good. It's not linear—I wouldn't be fifty times better, but I would bet that I would notice the difference, if nobody else did.

I've mentioned before that when I play guitar, I can hear the seventeen year old me laughing at the fifty year old me. But I figured out the seventeen year old me practiced and played about five hours per day, nearly every day, for a period of about two years, and about two hours per day nearly every day for about a year before that. So that's about twenty-five hundred hours of guitar playing, or a quarter of the way there. No wonder I was good. Had I stuck with it through the 1980s and 1990s, you might have heard of me by now.

But I wonder if this is transferable to the Web? How can anyone become an expert at building Web pages, if you need ten thousand hours? Is there really anything to learn from the umpty-millionth <p> tag you put on a page?

There are only a limited number of tags we use every day. There are only a few tags that we use maybe once a month or three or four times per year (I don't think I have ever used the <dd> tag, for instance, and I've been doing this since 1993). Once you have mastered HTML to some degree, you probably move on to Cascading Style Sheets.

There, you have several dozen property-value pairs to learn for several dozen selectors (basically the most-often used HTML tags). That is all quite a hill to climb. But here's where it falls apart, for me.

Ten thousand hours of eight-hour days is twelve hundred and fifty days. Given a typical working year of 2000hrs (8x5x50), that's five years of heads-down markup and design, with no sick days, no all-day meetings and no staring absently at the tree outside the window—and especially with no accounting for shopping on eBay, searching Facebook for old sweeties or looking up things in Wikipedia.

And here's my problem. In any random five years there are huge changes in the Web, the way we work, the tools we use and so on. How much of that transfers over? How much of the work I did in HTML v3.2 counted, when HTML 4.01 became the choice? How much of what I did in HomeSite was I really able to carry over into Dreamweaver? And how much of what I learned of Dreamweaver MX 2000 am I still using, today?

At some point, I stopped laying out pages in tables. At some point, I quit using <font> tags. Somewhere along the line, I learned to include title attributes on links, and alt text in images.

Realistically, the way I work today, this week or this month is how I have worked for only a couple of hundred hours. Some parts of it stretch back to the 1990s, sure, but not many, and fewer with every passing year. HTML becomes XHTML and probably soon will become HTML5. CSS is moving into CSS3, now. Browsers are still rolling out about a once a year, but there are only three or four that matter so it's a new one only every so many months. JavaScript improves and so do the libraries that techniques like JQuery depend upon.

It's all still in a great deal of flux.

So, according to Outliers, will any of us ever be any good?

The Lost

I lost a favorite book bag, last week. Actually, that's when I noticed it was missing. I actually lost it months ago during our recent move. I brought it to the new house, another damned Thing from the apartment, and casually, absently, placed it on top of a pile of boxes near the front of a closet.

If we had done a better job of un-packing, we would have had fewer boxes in front of, well, in front of everything, and I probably would have found it.

My first thought was that it was probably in "this" room. Then probably somewhere in "that" room. Then maybe it was out in the garage. I tried to place it within the apartment, and locate boxes of flotsam and jetsam from that strata, but didn't find it.

My first solution was to order another. It was a Lands' End Square-Rigger Canvas Attache Case, in Green, trimmed in leather. Beautifully made, sturdy, rugged. It was featured in full-page ads in Lands' End's catalogs for more than twenty years. I went to their Web site, but could not find it anywhere. I Googled "Lands' End Canvas Attache" which got me a skillion hits, most of which were product reviews saying how great the little case was. Finally, I found one article that talked about it in the past tense, saying Lands' End no longer offered it.

Well, that's just awful.

That would be like Dairy Queen deciding they could save money by not putting that little curl at the top of their ice cream cones. It would be like Gibson Guitars deciding they didn't need to make their Les Paul models, any more. It would be like Chevrolet deciding they could do without their Corvette. For a generation, the Land's End catalog talked about how great their knit golf shirts were, what made their Oxford office shirts so great, and how wonderful their Square-Rigger canvas attache cases were. In the early 1980s, they even modified the attache case so it could be used as a computer case, in a pinch.

I was crushed. I found one in Black, on eBay, and bid on it. A couple of hours later I had won it and it is now on its way to my house. So, of course, this morning I found my original Green one, the one I've owned for ten years, jammed between a couple of boxes near the closet in a room full of boxes.

There are lessons here.

Probably the first is that we've lived in this house for weeks, now and we should be done un-packing! The second is that we should be more deliberate in where we put things. Don't name a word processing document full of Web design ideas something that doesn't include the words "Web", "Design" and "Ideas" in the document name. And don't place it in a Folder named "General Stuff" or "Ideas to Work On" or something like that. That Folder should be named "Web Design Ideas".

I should have put my bag in a closet, or near my desk, where I could see it and remember it.

Oh, for Google, and for Spotlight on the Macintosh, which seemingly find anything, anywhere. Until there's a Google for the household, be more careful and plan accordingly.

At Least There Will Be Cool

What a nice little vacation, huh?

Sorry, I got caught up in a whole bunch of little things. And some of them really were very little, but still distracting, and in one way or another the time spent in blogging was sucked away. There were a few big things, too. We bought a house and moved. My little sister had her tonsils out, got a huge infection which turned into sepsis and ended up losing a foot to amputation. And always, it was hot. How was your summer?

So, now it's late summer and the media is full of Back To School. I always get a sense of nostalgia, and a sense of hope, as the days start to pick up speed in their getting shorter. I love that sense of possibility I get from looking at a brand new, clean, totally blank notebook. All of those empty pages, soon to be filled with all kinds of new knowledge. Notes on classroom lectures, page numbers to be read or other assignments, little back-of-the-envelope budgets to see if I can spring for a hot coffee. It's all good.

Most of my associations with Fall are good ones. I have a birthday coming up the end of September. There's a British Car Show held every year around that time. Continuing to take classes makes me feel like I am making progress through Life, however bogus that may actually be. One Day, the promise holds, I'll Be Smart! And I'll have a receipt! I'll be able to prove it! Then, they will have to throw money at me! We'll see.

New movies come out in the Fall. A lot of really good shows that don't fit into the Summer Blockbuster mold, but can't wait for the holidays, will be released soon. Television used to roll out all new seasons the way the car companies did, but both now seem content to release product as it becomes available. Pity. I remember we used to stay home in the evenings for a whole week, to check out all of the new shows on ABC or NBC or CBS (all we had, back then) and pass judgement on whether or not they deserved our further scrutiny. But I am looking forward to a few TV shows.
I used to get new clothes at the end of every summer. That's gone, now. We used to move in the mid-to-late summer. That's over, too.

What do you hope to accomplish, in the last third of the year? Are you looking into new technologies? Or maybe picking up a new job? Paying off a credit card, or planning on a Big Deal for next year?

Over the last several weeks, I've gotten a new office, so I've gotten new coworkers. I've built out some new training and I'll be delivering that for the next year or so. And I've sat in on meetings about The Future… ("oocher… oocher… oocher…). I remain convinced that The Future is going to be a great place to live, even as I become more uncertain of my own place within it.

Our current model of communication, Templates supported by the Dreamweaver interface, may be coming to an end. Doubtless there were scribes, very good scribes, who shed tears at the end of the papyrus era. But there are some compelling technical and economic reasons behind the change, and I anticipate that we will be doing much less with Dreamweaver in the next version of the Template design, and in those going forward, than we have in the past. Change is a mother, huh? All of those keyboard shortcuts? They will eventually evaporate through disuse. I don't think I could debug a RedRyder communications script today the way I could in 1989, either, though.

There are all kinds of advances in established technologies. And we have seen many of them organized in ways they haven't been, before, to good effect. The iPhone continues to be popular and the iPad is still coming on strong. Why would the incoming Freshman of 2015 seriously consider loading herself down with 40lbs of books with pencil and pen markings and highlighted passages—books the bookstore won't accept for return at the end of the semester—when she can download all of her books, and more, to her iPad, and carry that around in her purse?

New challenges, new opportunities, new economics and always new weather. It's all coming. Are you going to be ready for it?

The Backup Plan

Do you have a backup plan? A Plan "B" you can fall back on if your first attempt fails? I'm a pilot. Backup plans are part of our DNA.

As we take to the runway and I advance the throttle, you're thinking, "It sure is loud in here!" I'm thinking "If the engine quits now, I'll just stop on the remaining runway". As I lift the nose and we take to the air, you're thinking, "Here we go!" I'm thinking "If the engine quits now, I'll just land straight ahead". At some point you'll be able to pick out familiar landmarks in the city and you think "They look like doll houses!" while I'm thinking "If the engine quits now, I'll land on the freeway". An airplane may disappoint a good pilot, but it will never surprise him.

This week I stand in the eye of a storm of demands upon my time, talents and technology the like of which I have not seen in years. At home, my wife and I are trying to buy a house. We have arranged financing pre-approval and scouted about a dozen neighborhoods. We have reluctantly increased our budget by another ten percent or so and, finally, found a house we both like. We wrote an offer and it was accepted and now we need to move ahead and secure our financing (4.75%!) and start down the road of un-plugging everything from hovel-A and installing it into hovel-B at the appointed day and time.

At church, I have recently become president of our board of trustees. We're staring down a bunch of repairs and enhancements to our building and looking at a capital campaign of about a million dollars. Also, the fourth and fifth grade Sunday school kids would like to put on a little play. I'm going to be spending a lot of evenings at home on the telephone and in e-mail, rounding up support for this and that and making our case.

And here at work we are about to jump into a whole new paradigm on the Web. We are going to move away from a primarily HTML-based and Dreamweaver-based template program to leaning more on Drupal. Training for the older technologies and some of the gee-whiz features people have added over the last year and more will be moving more to a video on demand model. Here's how to install the Templates files. Here's how to install the image-swapper. That sort of thing.

So into this storm comes the first indication of just how brittle a lot of technology is, today. I have my computer wake up for me about five minutes before I arrive, every morning. Our Chancellor is all about saving money these days, and while it won't probably save a single job or graduate a single kid, I turn my computer off overnight since I was told to. Well, yesterday I came in to find that Things Were Not Quite Right. I had access to my Web browser, but couldn't open up my hard drive and edit a document there. I had access to any application in my Dock, but everything else was locked away from me. I could not even restart from the menu, because the menu was gone.

Last month I signed-up for our incremental backup service. It works hand-in-glove with the Apple TimeMachine backup service. Except when it doesn't. Since I have had my trouble, I have asked around and not found a single user who was happy with the integration of our scripts and Apple's software. When challenged, the script author admitted that there were problems when a Mac tried to go to sleep in the middle of a backup, etc.

So now, when I need to be able to guarantee access to my files, I may not always be able to. And I may not know it isn't working until I actually need it all to work.

So I'm spending this week re-thinking the whole process and working on bringing up reliability a few percent.

What is your Plan B, if what you're doing today fails?

The Fifth Creative Suite

Monday morning, Adobe unleashed upon a grateful nation Creative Suite 5, forcing Web professionals the world over to ponder once again whether or not they needed to upgrade.

Adobe, of course, actually released five versions of Creative Suite, for the many and various needs of the thinker-upper set. Design Standard, Design Premium, Web Premium, Production Premium and the Master Collection, which I have always thought should be pronounced "Mahhh•stuh" in the style of the late John Houseman.

For our purposes, we are really only concerned with three of those boxes, the Design Premium, Web Premium and Master Collection are the only ones with the new Dreamweaver CS5 included. Design Premium also includes Photoshop CS5 Extended, Illustrator CSS, InDesign CSS, Flash Catalyst, Flash Professional CSS, Dreamweaver CSS and Fireworks CSS. This is nice for a couple of reasons. Adobe used to devilishly carve up the market so Web professionals couldn't easily buy Dreamweaver and Photoshop or Dreamweaver and Flash without going to the high-bucks box. And also, early money said that Fireworks would not live long after the sale of Macromedia to Adobe, which would kill the program in favor of their own in-house Photoshop. So, yay.

The Web Premium box includes all that and Flash Builder 4 and Adobe Contribute. That's it.

Flash is having a tough time in the media, as Steve Jobs and Apple have once again passed it by with the new iPad, causing a bunch of Very Public Questions to be raised in the media, followed by some Very Public Answers and much chin-stroking. Some sites have very publicly abandoned Flash for other techniques (notably HTML5) that will work on iPhones and iPads. So you may wonder why and how Adobe have now filled out three product lines with Flash?

Flash Catalyst is Flash with another user interface. You can build (simple) Flash apps now, without knowing how to code or a lot of the in's and out's of the full program. You can more easily start with a Photoshop or Fireworks document and turn its constituent elements into buttons or scrollbars. The resulting output can then be handed off to real, hairy-chested Flash developers for further enhancing, or used as-is. Flash Catalyst is probably Adobe's way of making it harder for developers to decide to use HTML5 or JQuery.

Photoshop CSS is tuned-up again. CS4 brought content-aware resizing, where you could designate areas on the image that would keep their aspect ratios (wheels on a bus, for example, that was being stretched, would not appear egg-shaped). Content-aware Fill comes to Photoshop CSS. Select a background and paint-over page elements like trees, parking meters or power lines and Photoshop will stitch together a background intelligently, based on what it thinks you're looking for. You can remove tree branches and still keep that sky gradient behind them. Clip out an irregular sky from another image and square it up before placing it behind the foreground. Complex selections are made easier, too. Guy in red flannel standing in front of red brick wall? Lots of reds, lots of blacks, lots of lines. Photoshop can select just this lumberjack, or grunge singer, and paste him wherever you need, without fear of leaving sleeves behind, or packing along extra bricks. Puppet Warp lets you bend arms and legs around user-defined elbows and knees and a new Lens Correction Filter lets you compensate more easily for the effects of bending light through glass—an awful lot of attention has been paid to the needs of electronic photographers in the new Photoshop.

Dreamweaver gets new CSS layout templates, simplified Site setup (yay!) and support for php-based Content Management Systems. Code Hints can now be customized, beyond selecting which tips you want to see. CSS support is improved and BrowserLab approximates the view of your page in various browsers on various operating systems.

No, it's not the end of the world. It's not even the end of the line. The crew that brings us Adobe Creative Suite CS5? They still have jobs. I would bet we see a Creative Suite CS6 in a couple of years. It's now up to each of us to look into these updates, and decide if they are worth the price and the learning curve. Good luck!

The Persistence

Sometimes we have to do things we don't want to do. We're not into it. We don't feel we have the expertise. Maybe it's just boring, drudge work. The best way to handle something like this? Not to sell any shoes or anything, but Just do it. Make a start and get into it.

Years ago, I used to work with a lot of writers, online. Some published, others dreamers. I got quite a bit of work through a few of them and ended up as a freelance writer, myself, for about a dozen years. One of the most frequently asked questions we got was "How do you sit down and write a book?" And the answer to that is in the question, itself. You sit down and write a book.

But there's more to it than that, of course. We used to have techno-thriller author Tom Clancy in pretty regularly and if someone asked him that question, he'd respond "I just sat down and wrote the son-of-a-bitch!" which I always thought was a disservice to the questioner.

But he's right, in a way. You do have to do it, eventually. But nobody, not even the mighty Tom Clancy at the height of his powers, could sit down and knock out a whole book at a single setting. But what you can do is to split the project up, reduce it to a whole bunch of little, easily-accomplished, tasks. Make a giant list for yourself if you need to, put everything on it—then just cruise through the list, crossing things off as you go.

Name the hero? Check. Name his nemesis? Check. Sketch out a plot outline? Check. Research the geography of the setting? Check. Gather historical facts? Check. Figure out how many characters you'll need to tell the story? Check. Flesh out the details for everyone in the book, including details that inform the character that may not actually even make it into the book. Check. On and on it goes. Then just move through it all, one at a time, building on what's come before.

You cannot write a whole book. But you can write a word. And you can string a few words together and make a sentence. And with enough sentences you have a paragraph, and with enough paragraphs, you have a chapter. And at some point you will have told your story, and you'll have enough chapters. And there's your book.

You may have a bunch of things to do for your next Web project. Find some way to validate forms data before sending it along to a database. Store the information in the database in a way that's not-so-easily hackable. Find a way to get the data out of the database, again, with at least some security. And finally formatting the data. You look at a site like Amazon.com and it's intimidating because there is so much there, there. But it wasn't always like that. Check out the WayBack Machine some time and see how Amazon has grown and changed, sometimes in subtle ways. I'd hate to start from here, designing and building Amazon.com. But you could do it. There's nothing magical about it at all. You could make a list, and then just put one pixel in front of another. Eventually, you'd have a e-commerce site.

There are a lot of problems with an approach like this. One of the main ones is probably that you will quickly run into things you don't understand. Progress slows to a halt while you read a book, or work out an issue on a scratch page. But eventually, you'll get it.

Grandpa had it right, I think. "Yard by yard, it's mighty hard. But inch by inch, Life's a cinch!"

The End of the World

I hope everything is okay with you, where ever you happen to be and what ever you happen to be doing. We have had several events in the last several days that many folks have hyped to the point that there must be people out there who are surprised to see that the sun came up, this morning.

Health care reform was one of the tenets of president Obama's candidacy. An awful lot of money was spent trying to keep it from happening. When it looked like that wasn't going to work, they just flat-out started telling lies about it, trying to confuse people, because when you are selling something, the confused mind always says "No".

I've never understood that kind of win-at-all-costs politics. If you have to steal an election, what does that say for your ideas and everyone's confidence in them? If you have to lie about reform in order to put people off, isn't it something that really ought to pass? But there you go….

Health care reform passed. And the sun came up the next morning.

A new version of Opera was released. That didn't even scare up the birds. Damnit, I wish that group had that special "It!" -factor that would bring them solidly into double-digits of market share. They are good people, doing good work on a good browser and they deserve better than they have gotten, for it. We are still waiting to see if Apple releases the Opera App for the iPhone and iPad, now.

Which of course brings us to the Apple iPad, which as this is being written is agonizingly only a few teasing hours from its official release. That said, it's already been on Tosh.0 on Comedy Central (they destroyed theirs) and an episode of ABC's Modern Family, last night. It's either going to be the missing link or the world's most expensive drink coaster. Either way, I am betting that the sun will rise again on Sunday, April 4th.

And in the harsh light of this new day, it may be well to look into the pages we have created to make sure that they are iPad ready. This shouldn't take a lot of work, of course, because we have been working on "Future-Proof" pages for a few years now, and the Apple iPad is precisely the kind of future technology we were planning on, even back then.

So the first thing to do is to make sure that your pages validate. The standard hasn't changed appreciably in more than a dozen years, so write to the standard and there should never be any question about how your pages will render in any browser. But there are other concerns.

Apple offer developers an iPad simulator, but Safari on the Apple iPad uses the familiar WebKit engine and displays in a screen just slightly bigger than that of the first Macintosh, back in 1984. Make sure you are using the real estate you have to best effect.

Be wary of plug-ins. Safari has always had limited support, which is why so much of the desktop alternative browser market now belongs to Mozilla Firefox. But Safari on the iPad (just like the iPhone) launches with no support for plug-ins, including the almighty Adobe Flash. If you need to embed audio or video, use the new HTML5 techniques, rather than depending upon plug-ins. On your desktop machine, un-check the Preference in the Security panel to Enable plug-ins and you can simulate the Safari-on-iPad/iPhone experience from a functionality standpoint.

If you have positioned page elements with CSS you may want to adjust those values.

Probably the biggest issue for most of us, though, is that iPad is yet another touch interfaced device. There is no pen involved in using an iPad. There is no keyboard. You drive this machine by means of pointing and touching things with your fingers. So, be mindful of hover-state CSS over links. These aren't going to work, since just like with the iPhone, there is no cursor to boss around with a mouse or keypad. Nothing is going to change, because nothing is recognized as a correct hover state. Also, keep in mind that closely situation links may be trouble for the differently-abled or for the overly-caffeinated. Don't stack links too closely, in other words. iPad does a great job with accessibility, so be sure to use alt= text and title= text when you can.

Apple have wrapped up all of these considerations and others in a Tech Note you will probably want to look over, just to make sure.

Unless you're thinking the sun won't rise, tomorrow.

The Speech

I had to give a speech in church last weekend, asking the congregation for volunteers for service in three-year terms on the board of trustees. I laid out the challenges that face us in the year and years ahead. I spoke of the problems with our building and how we would need to update much of it, soon. And I told how serving on the board had enriched my own life, and how it might be a good thing for others, too. After the service, during the social "Coffee Hour" more than a dozen people came up to me to say how much they had enjoyed my speech. Backs were slapped. Elbows were squeezed. I made it a point to ask each of them if they might consider volunteering their own time to serve on the board. And in every case, I was turned down.

This kind of thing can easily be a recurring theme in our lives.

We have all run up against overly-designed or unnecessarily-designed Web sites in our travels, I'm sure. You know the situation, where all you want is a new printer driver, or a .pdf of your local bike trails network or the office hours of the place you get a dog license. And instead of a simple page with high-contrast text and colors, lots of white space, headings and an eye toward what you really want or need, you are met with more than half a dozen fonts, usually in at least that many colors, and text of all sizes. Layout will be either constrained into a corner of your wide-screen monitor, or it will be stretched horizontally so wide that the entire page's content is only two or three lines deep on the page, the page header and footer only an inch or two apart because you don't have your browser sized in the same proportions as the original Web developer/designer did.

I tried to explain to a woman once that Web pages serve a purpose. They exist to pass along information. But some information really cries out to be passed along with a minimum of small-f flash and fancy. Imagine two small businesses in your town, a used musical instrument store and… a funeral home. Of the two, which site should present high-contrast acid-colored obscure fonts, animated imagery and even music that starts automatically when the page loads? If you said "The Funeral Store!" give yourself minus-twenty points. If you said "The used-guitar store!" give yourself five points. If you said "Animated graphics? Really? Like it was still 1998?", give yourself one hundred points.

Business folk refer to the Conversion Factor. How many impressions do you have to send out, to get how many sales? That fraction tells you how hard you have to work, to make a skillion dollars. If you only convince two people out of every hundred to do something, you're at two percent. If you want to make more money, all you have to do is see more people. That really is it. If you see a hundred in a day, you need to find a way to see two hundred people and, with no work on your technique, with no improvement in your rap, you will on average make twice as much as before. You can of course work on the other side of the equation, too. People who use prospect's names in their conversation close 25% more sales. People who are good listeners close 25% more sales. People with good grooming and hygiene close 25% more sales. People who hand-write follow-up letters close 25% more sales… at some point, you raise yourself from closing two out of a hundred, to closing three out of a hundred. Now, even without seeing any more people, you're making half-again as much. And if you can manage to do both, you end up making not twice as much, but three times as much.

I was very effective as an entertainer, as a comedian, maybe. But I wasn't very effective as a speaker. My task was not to show people how clever I was, or give them inspiring things to think about for the week ahead. My job was to shake the trees and scare up candidates for the board of trustees, and at that job I feel like I failed, that day.

You may have Web pages that are not as effective as you'd like. The task before you is similar to my own. You can either get more people to view your page, or you can make your page better.

We'll talk about this in the next couple of weeks. If you have any questions, this would be a good time to get them in.

The Limits

It happened again, last week: Someone asked if they had to "learn it all" or if there weren't some areas they could shortcut and leave to others?

We are kind of lucky, here at UNL, in that there are just so many of us, in many ways. If you don't have the time or the talent for something, there is probably someone, somewhere, who can help to take up the slack.

If you were interested in opening up your own Web design shop, I would say "Yes", you probably should get as deep into every aspect of the business, including Business, as you possibly can. But even there, a lot of people would make the case that you should not probably try to do your own taxes and business accounting. They would advocate leaving that stuff to the professionals. It's a busy world, and keeping up with technology and tax law may be more than most people should try to handle.

Photoshop is a wonderful tool, but it is intimidating, and a great many of the features and tools in Photoshop are difficult to even explain, let alone learning them. And in its way, Photoshop is like Microsoft Word. You get a skillion features and tools, each designed to accommodate professionals working in their particular field. But learning how to set up your page margins and inter-paragraph spacing isn't going to turn you into Stephen King. You still need to bring some talent to bear on the task of editing your graphics or images, to get the most from Adobe Photoshop.

Thankfully, most of our image-editing needs are pretty simple. We resize images, we crop them, maybe we change a color to better match something already on our pages. From time to time you may want to take power lines out of a sky or clean up some RedEye flashbulb issues. That's about it.

But even getting that far in Photoshop requires a bit of time and talent, and someone to explain it in a book, on a Web site or in person. Then, after a little practice, you've got it down.

We deal in HTML, which has not changed appreciably since Bill Clinton was president. Those days are over, and a lot of Web professionals are looking forward to HTML5, now. We will see a continuance of most of what we knew in HTML 4.01 (the paragraph tag isn't about to change) but there will be new ways of doing old things, and there will be new things we can finally do, in HTML5.

Cascading Stylesheets have been around since Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4, but support really wasn't there until Internet Explorer 6. Today we're hearing things about IE9, and how it will make our lives easier. We'll see. Along the way, we have seen support advance as the standards moved from CSS to CSS3 specification. Talk to anyone who did this for a living ten years ago and they will speak with a mixture of both pride and relief that they learned all of the hacks to make CSS work in more than one or two browsers, and they don't have to do this, any more.

Dreamweaver has grown and changed. Dreamweaver 1, 2 and 3 were honestly just cheap ways for me to upgrade my real favorite Web editor, HomeSite. But starting with Dreamweaver MX 2000 the program offered some compelling reasons to learn its new features and workflows and to keep using it through Dreamweaver MX 2004, Dreamweaver 8, Dreamweaver CS3 and CS4. There's no reason to believe they are about to muck it up with Dreamweaver CS5, either.

Still, if you can sketch out a Web design in Photoshop, and you have a lot of Webby friends, there may be little reason for you to ever spend the calories learning HTML and CSS, though doing so would inform many of your design decisions, I'm sure. If you are great at HTML and CSS but do not understand Layers and gradients or why you would use .gif or .jpeg formats or how to switch between the two in Photoshop, you can probably lean on someone who can turn out the work you need in half the time, or less, that it would take you to do it alone.

My dad was always one of those who thought that learning to change your own oil and learning to change your own flat tires would make you a better driver. I am my father's son. I know it will take longer, but I really think you should try to learn it all, and to learn as much as you can about everything, because it all works together, now.

The Learning

I get asked all of the time some variation of What’s the best way to learn all of this Web Stuff?

It’s an interesting question, because to me it always presupposes that one can learn it all. But the questioner is always more interested in the learning-y part than the all-part of their question, so I usually let it slide.

We are all individuals (Just like everyone else! I love that joke).

But it’s true. Someone like me is going to do well reading about something, most days. I can back up a page or a paragraph or two and take another run at it, if I don’t quite get something. I can take a book or a magazine with me to the doctor’s waiting room, or the laundromat. I don’t need a plug, or an appointment. I just need light.

Other people are more do-ers. They can watch something, they can read about it, they can listen to someone describe it dozens of times, but until they actually do something, it is all just theory to them.

I never know who of these types is going to attend my training sessions. I know the names of the people, but I don’t get a handle on whether this one is a reader, that one is a listener, or these two both have to do something, in order to get it. So I have tried to design my training so it incorporates a little of all of them.

There are a lot of words on the screen at any time, probably too many for some. But I’d rather have people skip over something than not have it there for them. I know the panic of needing an answer late at night and not knowing where to get it. And each course is designed to stand alone. You can come in at two in the morning and click through how to install Dreamweaver and probably get it done, in other words. If you have a few moments and want to learn about Templates, or refresh your knowledge of Templates, then have at it. It’s all there. If you have questions we can cover them in e-mail.

But I try not to read everything on screen. That would be awful. The information is there for the readers. For the listeners, I try to tell a slightly different version, and it’s probably slightly different from class to class, too. I may leave this or that part out, or focus more on something that someone asked about earlier. And at the end of each page or so I try to have a moment of, essentially, “Now, YOU do it!”

People get done earlier than others. People struggle with this or that part. I try to talk them through it, or we spend that time going over questions anyone might have about anything we have covered. When we are done, we move on to the next thing.

The nice thing is that this has all been going on for a while, now. The first HTML books and seminars weren’t all that great. Elizabeth Castro’s Visual QuickStart Guide to HTML is in its Sixth Edition, today. And a lot of that is repeat business, I’m sure. A whole lot of Idjit’s Manuals and Learn It All In An Hour titles are gone, by now. So if you learn best by reading, you have some terrific options out there.

In the same vein, A List Apart crosses the country with terrific in-person training and seminars. All of the stars of Web Development show up for these.

I love that everyone is different, responds differently to differing inputs and yet still arrives at the same destination, somehow. What works best, for you?

The Teaching

I love teaching. I really do.

In my cubicle, I have four pictures of people. There’s a photo of me hugging my wife. Her long hair hangs in streams across her face and we both have huge, happy smiles. I have a pair of photos of two pilots I admire, Charles Lindbergh, standing next to his Spirit of St. Louis, and Amelia Earhart.

The last photo is of a writer I admire, who was also a teacher. His last book, in fact, was called Teacher Man. Francis “Frank” McCourt is probably best known for his Angela’s Ashes and less so for ‘Tis. But to me, he was first a teacher.

There is something wonderful to me in the act of imparting knowledge to someone. Teaching. People come in the room and sit down and an hour or so later they leave and they look the same, but they’re different. They walk out of the room carrying some new morsel of wisdom they didn’t have when they walked in.

I love what I call the Lightbulb Moment. In cartoons, when they need to indicate that someone has just had an idea, they illustrate this by putting a lit lightbulb above the head of the thinker. There occasionally is a moment when you can see in someone’s face that Now, They Get It! Maybe one time out of a dozen it happens but when it does, it’s all worth it, for me.

I have been a teacher all my life. I can remember showing neighbor kids how to ride a bike. I can remember showing classmates how to color. In High School I made gas money by giving guitar lessons in peoples’ homes. I’d walk in and sit with you and your guitar and point out a different voicing of a chord or some new technique and answer a few questions and then leave with a few extra bucks, but leaving that knowledge behind.

I taught people how to Write. On the old GEnie network, I helped people with query letters, plot outlines, or suggested markets they might sell their stories to. Shortly after this, I started teaching people how to use GEnie, itself. They learned how to read their e-mail and how to download files and how to participate in online conversations. I have been teaching people how to go online and get things done since 1987.

I taught aviation ground school, after a fashion. It was online, in the Aviation Forum of The Microsoft Network. Someone would post a question about the regulations that were in effect at the time, or mention they were having trouble perfecting their short-field landing technique or something like that. We’d work it out. And people would come back and announce they had soloed or they had received their Private Pilot certificate at long last and we all would celebrate, because we all had a part in it.

And so today, there are people out there enjoying making music, being paid to write or just enjoying the writing process, spending time online and even flying airplanes, in some small part because of something that I said or did or wrote. That’s a really great feeling.

I used to complain because of the temporary nature of so much of technology. Those Intel commercials aside, nobody much celebrates the folks who brought us the 3½″ floppy disc, any more. Or the old ZMODEM file transfer protocol. When was the last time you marveled at the efficiency of your local bank-in-a-box ATM? Someone wrote the code for that. Someone stressed about it. Someone wondered half-way through it all if it wouldn't have been better to do that routine this way instead of that way, and even though it meant tearing out a week’s worth of code, they did it—knowing that not one person in a hundred would know or care. They did it because it was the Right Thing.

I used to complain because my first Web page is gone, now. It doesn’t even exist on the WayBack Machine at the Internet archive. In fact, the first couple hundred Web pages I built are gone, now. I used to think if I had it to do all over again I’d come back as an Architect. How cool would it be to drive by an entire building, maybe one that people recognized, one that defined a city skyline, and know that it was once just an idea of yours? That has to be a really satisfying feeling.

But then I realized that I have that, here and now. Saturday mornings, in the summer of 1995, Molly Holzschlag sat with us on the other end of a modem and taught us all HTML. I have asked Molly before, “How many seeds are in an apple? And how many apples are in a seed?” The fruit, pardon the expression, of her labors fifteen years ago is still renewing itself. Three or four times a month, I teach an introductory HTML class. Three or four times a month, I teach a more advanced version. The same goes for Dreamweaver, and so on. And those people wander out of the classroom a little better prepared to handle the challenges of their jobs. And some of them, I know, have already taught others. And so from Molly, though me to them, to others... it continues.

I don’t know what you did, today. But I taught someone something. And you’re right: It’s a great feeling.

The Drupal

It is starting to look like another sea-change may be upon us, we who toil in the Web trenches of UNL. Drupal is coming.

We started with a need to communicate our spoken language after the fact. Kewl! A few glyphs later we had a nice little written language we were quite proud of. We used it to print catalogs and schedules and letters and memos until we were crushed by the weight of all of that paper.

Then came the Internet, and with it the Web. And the Web was built of HTML.

Well, that’s all fine, but nobody knew HTML. To those not schooled in its ways, HTML was hard. HTML was tricky, like English. Always do this, except when you do that. That kind of thing. And the most popular Web browsers of the day didn’t agree on much. So you could spend $20 on a book that would teach you HTML, but by following along with the examples in the book you end up with... something else. So we had to make our Web pages even trickier to get pages that looked the same, or nearly so, in either browser.

So into this world there came to be Dreamweaver. And Dreamweaver remembered all of the arcane rules and situations for you. Dreamweaver took a lot of the drudgery out of building Web pages. And with each passing iteration, Dreamweaver got better and better at what it did, adding features no one could have dreamed of in Version 1.

But along the way, Dreamweaver became difficult. “I just want to change Friday to Thursday. Why should that be so hard?” Why, indeed?

One of the features of Dreamweaver was Templating. And Templates made a lot of things easier still. Entire areas of the page were locked down so that you could not edit them; you could not break your page. We went for Templates in a Big Way here, building page Templates for all kinds of situations, and offering training for anyone who came near a Web editor. But in their own simple way, the Templates were hard, too.

The Web is built of HTML. But HTML was too hard. So we got Dreamweaver. But then Dreamweaver was too hard (and to get the most of it, you really had to learn at least some HTML, too). So then Templates happened. Templates weren’t really hard, but you still had to know some Dreamweaver in order to get the most out of them, too.

Now it looks like we may be on to something. Drupal is a content management system that can work quite well with all of the constituent parts of a Dreamweaver Template file, building a page that looks exactly like it should, built of entirely valid markup and without error. And built through an interface not unlike what we have come to know and love in every word processor since the middle 1980s.

Point. Click. Sign-in. Point. Click. In a framework no harder to learn than 1984’s MacWrite, you can build and publish a Web page. Make it available in the navigation menu. Have it include photos, video, even. And it all works, and it all works well and for the most part it all seems to stay out of your way.

There is a tiny team at work today on bringing Drupal to bear on the task of publishing here at UNL. If their work is successful, we may no longer need to know anything of Templates, or Dreamweaver, or HTML. Or cost-object numbers, because the Drupal package is free. How cool might that be? At least, until something goes wrong. Then someone, somewhere, is still going to have to know something of Templates and Dreamweaver and HTML.

The future is going to be a great place to live. Probably.

The Funny

This is probably my least favorite part of the year. It’s cold. We have storms, sometimes storms that interfere with our carefully laid out plans. It’s rainy and windy when it isn’t snowing and icing. It’s dark when I come to work and it’s dark when I leave for home at night. You can’t stand to be near even people you love, because of the hacking coughs and the sneezing.

It’s hard to even get dressed in the morning. Do you layer-up for the 20°s of dawn or do you leave the heavy coat at home and just wear a jacket because the afternoon is supposed to be around 50°?

Everyone who isn’t worried about getting their income taxes done is worried about their department budget, or their upcoming performance reviews at work. We are in that long lull between days-off holidays and even in my own family, it seems nobody has a birthday worth celebrating until later on when it finally gets warmer. It’s an ugly time.

So these are maybe good days to remind ourselves that everything goes better with a chuckle. Even the funerals I have been to have been easier to take when someone told the story of the time....

So what can we do, to keep things lighter?

I have yet to find the HTML joke that’s actually funny. Some years ago I searched Google for “HTML Jokes” thinking I might find something I could use in my training. Public speaking manuals always say it’s good to start off with a joke to break the tension in the room, but I turned up... nothing. I was amazed by that. I mean, you would think someone would have published a page somewhere of “How many FrontPage developers does it take to change a light bulb?” jokes, or something similar. Don’t the Adobe developers make jokes about the Microsoft guys? Well, apparently not. I couldn’t find anything, anywhere. Probably the best we can do today is the photo of the Tower of Pisa, in Italy, with the old italic tags on either side of the actual Tower. See? Italic? Italy? Slanty? Okay, maybe not. I could actually show you the image except that Blogger has recently improved the way they handle images, which means you can no longer post anything and get it the way you want it, and you very often can't post anything at all. It probably wouldn't have helped the joke much, anyway.

Listen, people. Physicists tell molecular jokes at their conventions. Doctors and airline pilots have jokes. Even Accountants have their funnies. There isn’t anything funny about this Web business? I’m asking; I don’t any answers here, but it seems like there should be something we can all do to avoid opening our veins.

The Photoshop

It seems that one of the hardest things anyone can do is to try to place themselves in time. We tend to remember new technology as better than it was, earlier than it was. Crack open a box of Photoshop today and you might think we have been editing images with a program like this for years. Well, we have. Sort of.

Sit down. Photoshop is twenty years old, today. February 10th, 2010 marks twenty years for the venerable image editor. It wasn’t the first. It wasn’t always the best. But over time it solved more problems than it created for more people and so it’s here today, while ImageReady and PhotoPaint and many others have receded into the middle distance, somewhere.

As a Web professional, it’s hard for me to imagine life without Photoshop. I have nearly always worked collaboratively with others—even in the early days. So I didn’t actually need to join the Photoshop parade until v3 came about. Originally, it was just scanner software, and I didn’t own a scanner. Store-bought versions of Photoshop were always expensive, and even un-bundled from scanner hardware I had a hard time justifying it with my humble needs. I was scrambling to learn the newness baked into HTML v3.2 and the differences between various Web browsers and was probably dabbling a little in JavaScript or Flash. I had friends I could lean on for scans and edits, so it took me a few years to get involved. I finally picked up my own copy in 1995, as Photoshop v3.0.

Photoshop v3 shipped in a big, heavy Cube of Value, the way all of the good software came back in those days. It was loaded with manuals I never understood and shipped on too many floppy disks. I don’t even remember, now, installing it on my Macintosh LC/II. It had to have taken an hour, though. Maybe more. The Big Thing back then was layers. Like the old Disney animators, we could now work on images built from several composite cells, stacking them as necessary and even building humble animations just as they did in the 1930s. Pretty cool stuff, for its day. There was a lot to learn, but I really only needed to know .gif and .jpg files and maybe how to edit-out lamp posts or clouds or people in the background.

When v4 shipped, I bought it in the new-fangled CD-ROM format. That whole cube of floppies now shipped on just a single CD. Man, the future was going to be sooo cool! It was a tremendous time-saver, or would have been if I had not upgraded. See, when my Mac crashed and I had to rebuild everything, I had to first go through the process of loading up all of those floppies, and only then was able to upgrade v3 to v4 specification. A call to a sympathetic Adobe rep got me a new-install key instead of an upgrade key for the same CD and I that I used from then on.

Over the years, Photoshop has suffered its share of feature bloat, but unlike, say, Microsoft Word, Photoshop features have almost always been at least somewhat relevant to me and to my work. As the 1990s drew to a close, v5 came with some terrific advances in type handling. It was now easier to place and edit words on an image. v5.5 came out soon after with its Save For Web feature. Now you could quickly fine-tune images in either popular Web format, and see what the results would be on-screen, before you committed to either.

I’m now in that comfortable saddle of the learning curve, where you know a base of umpteen features and options and only have to learn the new things, the differences, in each new version of Photoshop. I suspect it will always be a daunting project, learning the program. Adobe even recognized this some time ago, releasing a de-contented version for people who just need to crop snapshots, edit “Red Eye” and a few other details.

Like the end of a movie, Photoshop has always had credits. Adobe have always been proud of their developers. You got to spend quite a bit of time with the splash screen, while listening to your disk drive grinding, wondering who all those folks were. Some have come and gone, but the core is a single family. I don’t know of any other software like that. We owe the Knolls a lot.

Twenty years. Photoshop. It doesn’t seem possible, to me.