April 29th, 2010
So, I quit my job.
After three years in my current role, I recently decided that the time had come (and possibly gone) to leave. I was feeling like things weren’t going in a direction that worked for me. The people at my soon-to-be former company are great. I would work with many of them again in a minute. But as an enterprise I just do not feel that things were working out.
So where does that leave me employment-wise?
I am going to try giving freelancing a try for a while. This is a risky thing to do; I have a family to support and there’s no guarantee that I’ll be able to drum up enough work. And with both Karen and I working from home full time, we’re going to loose the corporate health insurance safety net.
But I think the risk is worth it and that I have a lot to gain from trying to go it alone for a while. The opportunities and possibilities I see before me are exciting and energizing. And I think that taking a risk is the only way to get where I want to be in life.
Will this work? I don’t know. But I am ready to take the leap.
Posted in Big events, Family, Madness, Work | 4 Comments »
February 21st, 2010
Are you a content creator for the Web? If you are then you need to learn HTML, CSS, and maybe some Javascript, too.
I have spent a significant amount of my career implementing Web sites and applications for clients. A decent amount of that time has involved implementing content management systems for businesses of all sizes. And one of the most common requests in such projects is setting up a WYSIWYG editor.
The request for a WYSIWYG editor usually stems from the desire to sheild “non-technical” users from the supposed complexities of creating Web markup while still providing them with the power to produce material that take advantage of the styling and visual design of the site. The assumption is that the content creator will not want to learn the HTML markup and CSS required to make there pages “look nice” but that they still want the flexibility and additional expressiveness of something more than plain text. In fact, a common corrollary request is to provide a “paste from Word” button. “After all”, the reasoning goes, “we already know how to write the content we want in Word.” Oh, boy.
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Tags: css, html, javascript, web, web design literacy
Posted in Code, Writing | No Comments »
February 8th, 2010
I live in the Land of Half-Done.
Our house is always a mess. Always. My wife and I have now lived together in three homes over 14 years and in all that time, I cannot recall a single time period of longer that a week when our place was not a mess.
It’s the classical modern problem: too much stuff, not enough space, and no energy to do anything about it. But that’s not the whole story. No, the truth is that sometime early in our relationship, we settled down in the Land of Half-Done.
The Land of Half-Done is a semi-magical place, where many plans are made, many projects are started, many dreams are dreamt, but nothing ever comes to fruition.
Dishes make it to the sink but never get washed. Picture frames are purchased but the prints never appear behind the mattes. Holiday cards are printed and addressed but never mailed. Old clothes are bagged but never make it to Goodwill.
It’s true that our house isn’t the largest; we’re packed in tight with three humans, two cats and a pair of goldfish. And it’s true that we have too much stuff packed in around us. However, the biggest problem is that there’s so much we never find the time to finish. And that’s the single greatest factor contributing to the piles of stuff in every room.
The trick is immediate follow-through. We’re not bad a starting things. It’s finding that extra “oomph” to finish. After dinner, the dishes have to get all the way to the washing machine, the soap needs to go in and the machine needs to be turned on. Right away. The clothes need to get taken out of the dryer, folded and put in the closest. Right away. And all of those projects we’ve started but are waiting for the time to finish, we’ve got to get pick them up again and knock them off, one by one. And before we start anything else.
It’s like a kata, a practiced set of choreographed moves that carry through from stance to stance. We need to learn the martial art of Clean Fu.
I live in the Land of Half-Done. And it’s time to emigrate.
Tags: Home Family Life
Posted in Family, Madness, Random Stuff | 2 Comments »
February 7th, 2010
I’ve been thinking about updating may little MacBook for a while now. My wife added a MacBook Pro along with MacBook and I’ve moved to a 13″ Pro at work. My old iMac G5 is bound for other pastures as soon as I can get up the oomph to post it on craigslist.
I’ve been trying to decide what my next Mac should be and one of the big considerations is screen size. I’ve been feeling like the MacBook’s 1280 × 800 screen is just a bit too tight for my current day-to-day. I was curious about the relative sizes of other Apple devices, so I threw together this graphic to give myself a visual reference to the relative size differences between the various MacBooks, iMacs, and Cinema Displays. I then decided to throw in the portrait-aspect dimensions of the iPhone and iPad just for kicks.
Apple Device Screen Dimensions
The full size diagram is 1:2.5 scale, since I didn’t see any need to scale it up to 1:1 on my tiny screen.
Hopefully someone out there will find this useful.
Tags: Apple, Hardware
Posted in Random Stuff, Work | No Comments »
February 7th, 2010
I have managed to spend most of my career as a developer and architect not doing mobile development. I had a brief dalience with Waba back in the early 2000’s. I was looking for a simple way to write apps for my Palm Pilot and at the time I was boycotting C and C++.
Every time I thought about mobile applicatoin development the thing that ended up turning me off was the devices. No matter how good the development environemnt might be—and most of them are abyssmal so that doesn’t help—I found that I have no desire to cram anything useful into the small screen size and sub-par interface designs found on most such devices.
And then came the iPhone.
And now I’m finding myself interested in branching out. No, interested is too tame. I really want to jump into mobile development with Android. I am even ready to give Blackberry a try again. And with the annoucement of the iPad, things are looking more interesting every day.
It goes beyond mobile. Working on iPhone apps have re-ignited my interest in desktop application development. I have been doing mostly Web development for so long that I had almost forgotten just how much better a native app can be. Sans the enforced framing and quirks of the browser-based world, my imagination of what I want to make do with a computer do is expanding again.
I won’t be giving up Web development any time soon, but I will be spending more of my time working with mobile devices. And I’m grinning from ear to ear about it.
Tags: Career, Development, Work
Posted in Code | No Comments »
