Category: Just Shelley

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Just Shelley

Birth, Death, and a little red wagon

Today was a really beautiful day and I took a break from coding to walk around the Botanical Gardens to see if all the bulbs were up. It’s now the peak blossom season, and the gardens are full of blooms, including what looked to be at least 15 varieties of daffodils.

It was busy today and by the clothes some people were wearing, I assume they were all here for the Final Four Basketball competition. I only found out about this Saturday, not being a big follower of basketball. However, the price of gas shot up 23 cents a gallon, to take advantage of the sudden influx of visitors. Someday if the price ever goes down, I’ll head back to the Ozarks and the mills.

spring flowers

I took advantage of the nice weather and my favorite seat being vacant to place my weekly call to my mother. I gather that she, influenced by last week’s events, had been to the lawyer to update her will and also make out a living will. I’m her executor, and the lawyer also drew up papers giving me power of attorney if Mom becomes incapacitated. He then suggested she and I talk about what these forms mean, so that I fully understand her wishes.

“All I ask, dear, is that you be merciful”, Mom said. “You have a kind heart and I know you won’t let me go too quickly.”

“I don’t know, Mom. You didn’t let me have a puppy when I asked for one.”

spring flowers

“What? Puppy?”

“Yeah, the puppy I asked for, when I was a kid. And you also didn’t let me have that party when I was 12. Come to think on it”, I said, beginning to warm up to the topic. “I have a lot of repressed anger from my childhood.”

She began to chuckle.

“Be afraid, Mom. Be very afraid.”

She snickered.

“All it will take is a broken leg, and *pop* there goes the plug.”

I continued to list out various childhood grievances and what this meant in terms of her continued hopes for longevity: my not getting a fiercely desired bike and she gets a hangnail, she’s a goner; the doll accidentally run over by the car and she buys it when she gets indigestion–until Mom was laughing, finally broken out of the hypnotic state created by Mysterio at CNN and Finn the Great at Fox News. Then we calmly talked about what these forms mean, and what her wishes would be.

Mom also said my niece had called her this weekend, doing genealogical research for a school project. Between my recounting of youthful hardships and my niece’s questions, Mom was in a reminiscent mood. As for me, I’m always up for a good story.

Mom remembered moving ‘up the hill’ when the Grand Coulee dam flooded old Kettle, and created the Roosevelt lake; remembered watching the water rise, with her sister and brother. Her Dad worked at a sawmill at that time, before getting tired of it and taking his family back to the two room cabin they lived in until my father helped them build a house when I was around five.

My grandparents were very religious at the time and attended the Assembly of God church, which surprised me because I never remembered them attending church when we lived near them. Why they stopped going, Mom didn’t know.

The Assembly of God church is what we attended when we were kids, and I brought up the old story about the minister having an affair and asking forgiveness from the parish and, when he didn’t get it, being forced to leave town–giving over both his home and the church to the new pastor. What a lousy thing to do to a good man, I said to Mom, and she agreed. Then she told me about the time when my brother had attended some church function wearing shorts and the same minister started yelling at him in front of the whole parish — yelled and yelled and yelled–until Mike left. Mom said he never went back to church after that. I didn’t know this story, but had wondered when Mike lost his faith. Now I know.

Mom also talked about a time when the minister, and another man of the cloth who was visiting, stopped by the house when she had the flu and spent hours telling her she needed to change her evil ways — stop drinking, stop going out, stop dancing and listening to music. She said she was so sick she just smiled and let them talk, focusing on not throwing up.

That which you sow, you shall reap.

spring flowers

Mom told me stories of the past, some of which should be kept in the family and private (or until I write that book someday). Most weren’t, though. There was the story about when my parents lived in town before moving to the farm. My brother was about three at the time, and every morning when he got up, he would grab his little wagon–a little red Flyer–and make a circuit of the neighborhood; stopping by one house for a bite to eat, another for a visit, another bite to eat at a third, and a visit to a fourth before making it home. Every morning until they moved, regardless of the weather. Lord help the neighbor who wasn’t home or didn’t answer the door when Mike would come by.

This was the same child who also used to scratch my face any chance he got when I was a baby. Then there was the time he shot the bed near me, and set the bathroom on fire, but I’ve talked about these previously, so won’t repeat them–though they are favorite stories of the family.

Dad wasn’t home much in those days, having to work long hours for the State Patrol. When he got home, Mom said, he’d pick me up and hug me and call me his ‘baby doll’ and give me a surprise — a tootsie roll, apple, whatever he had. I was a little doll, too; a beautiful baby and a very pretty little girl. I’ve seen photos and I was a charmer — wavy, thick hair, big green eyes, dimples when I smiled.

I also spent most of the time by myself since there were no kids close to my age around and my brother wouldn’t tolerate my company. She told me today she could see the writer in me at an early age, because I would weave these stories about my experiences every time I came home from my walks. Mom said that back then no one could tell what I was talking about half the time. Some would argue I’ve never outgrown this fancy.

We didn’t live far from my grandparents, but they rarely ever watched over us or had us over, which suited me fine. They would have Ellen’s kids or Jean’s, but not us. Mom thought that Grandma, who wanted to be a writer all her life, was disappointed that Mom didn’t do more with her life–become a great singer or artist. Instead she married at 19, had Mike, and then me.

I told Mom that grandma wasn’t disappointed; they had the other kids over because they were nice, normal kids. I mean, Mom, look at us: a grandson that shakes down the neighborhood at three, torches the house at four, and tries to shoot me at five. As for me, I wondered around the forest all day, and then returned home to talk about fairies and Mother Goose as if they were personal friends.

“We were freaky kids, Mom. I mean, seriously twisted little children. They were probably afraid of us.” The talk then degenerated into more snickers and more tales of incidents (”And do you remember the time when you…”); proving how really wise her parents were.

Altogether we spent most of the afternoon on the phone going over Mom’s living will. Good thing I have free long distance.

spring flowers

Categories
People Writing

Head First into Kathy Sierra

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I received an O’Reilly email update today about a new edition of Head First into Java just hitting the streets. I had reviewed the Head Into series a while back, and particularly liked the EJB book.

Seeing the book notice today reminded me of the discussion on the O’Reilly ETech conference and the 9% solution. During this, I got into a comment exchange over at David Weinberger’s post with one of the attendees at the conference, Kathy Sierra. Kathy is none other than the author of this series.

I was remiss in not linking to Kathy at the time–probably because like all magpies, a bright new shiny caught my attention and there I followed. However, I thought the book announcement was an excellent opportunity to rectify my ommission. If you haven’t chanced by Kathy’s weblog, Creating Passionate Users yet, you really should; she’s brought her “Head Into” use of fanciful and colorful graphics, and her very active, positive writing style into her weblog and it’s a fun mix. Most importantly, she’s a ‘longform’ writer, and we need more of these!

Well, along with women in technology that is.

Categories
Weblogging Writing

Telling a story

Loren Webster has taken his new addictionfascination with PhotoShop and combined it with philosophical reminisces of cars he’s owned into a set of really lovely posts, beginning with this one about a boy and his Studebaker.

I like every form of writing I find in weblogs, being more interested in the person and/or work rather any specific type, but there’s a special place in my heart for writings such as this: works that add art or photographs or poetry or music, sometimes with asides from history or linguistics or philosophy; all mixed in, subtly, with personal views and a little personal history. It’s the type of writing I love to do most, and enjoy reading whenever the whimsy strikes any of you. Even within the technology writings, I like those that sprinkle humor and humanity among all the angle brackets and arguments of which is better: Part A or Part B.

But as Anil Dash wrote recently, someone somewhere will say this isn’t weblogging. And though I think we can safely say that not everyone loves Anil (”Just joking Anil! Truce!”), he’s hit it dead on when he writes:

One good sign that a community is maturing is that some of the earlier or more influential members start trying to dictate how it should be done. Use more bold letters! Don’t use comments! Insert more pictures! Whatever the rule, it’s generally being used to assert authority over the nascent community, or to defend some arbitrary choices that have been made and are now being questioned.

This came up this weekend in another context, circumstances and participants withheld to protect me, because the lord knows if I don’t watch my butt no one else will; and as usual it grates on me and saddens me because we put a great deal of our creative effort into works that shouldn’t even exist according to these people. Worse, to some of these arbiters of great weblogging, doing so demeans the seriousness of this medium, yada yada yada.

Every year there is a new crop of people going out into the world armed with formal concepts and rules about how this all works; and every year we then have to follow along behind, tagging the clean, careful concepts with the purple and red graffiti of revolt and trashing the rules like the anarchists we are.

I have contributed to a book on weblogging in the past, but if I were asked to write a “Weblogging for Dummies” book now, it would look as follows:

Chapter One:

Page one:

“Begin.”

Now I’ve just saved you all a lot of money, which you can soon spend on limited edition “Burningbird” refrigerator magnets. Collect as many as you can; trade ‘em with your friends.

And stop by Loren’s and share your own car story.

Categories
Books

Zen of Burningbird

I received a copy of The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web from the authors, Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag, and have been getting an intimate peek into the world of web page design the last few weeks.

This is a beautiful book, with an elegant and clever layout, and featuring many examples of the famous CSS Zen Garden. With each design, Dave and Molly have focused on one specific element and used this as a basis for whatever is the topic of that chapter: Imagery, Layout, Typography, and so on.

“Zen of CSS Design” isn’t a book for beginners, as it doesn’t cover the basics of CSS or HTML. It’s a book for someone who has worked with both and wants to take their web design beyond the basics–to explore, but to do so in a way that is cross-browser compatible, accessible, and that validates.

For instance, chapter 4 provides techniques to replace the text of a header element with a graphic, but still have the text accessible to screen readers, and search engines–something that was new to me. In fact, I thought I knew CSS quite well, but I found out there’s a whole new level of tweaking I wasn’t aware of, primarily because I don’t keep up with the many design and CSS mailing lists. Luckily Dave and Molly do, and have gleaned the best of it in the pages.

As for my design, I’ve finally been inspired to clean up my stylesheet and use the ID and CLASS selectors correctly. I’ve also been fairly weak with fonts, falling back on Verdana or Arial most times. In the book there’s a whole chapter on typography, and I have now discovered georgia, which will be appearing in my pages in the days to come. This will make Joe Clark happy.

An interesting coincidence: this week Dave wrote a post about accessibility and the “aaa” Bobby rating that’s shown in the CSS Zen Garden HTML template. A group of Italian designers had challenged this rating because some of the designs do fail with accessibility, primarily through the use of color. However, as he pointed out, in the post, this is addressed in the book, which includes a decent discussion on all the nuances that can make a page less than accessible. There’s more to accessibility than labeling your images and using headers correctly; for instance, one suggestion is that text in hypertext links should be able to stand alone without the context of the surrounding text. Something that doesn’t work very well within a weblog.

After my first glance through of the book, I was inspired to try my hand with the CSS Zen Garden template, using my own Floating Clouds as model for the design. You can see the result in this page*.

As you’ll see, I’m using Georgia, and it is a pretty font. I’m also using the Floating Clouds open page body blocks and have left the sidebar items unconstrained. Rather than force all of the items into a tight, squishy box, the proximity of the elements serves as grouping — providing a balance while still allowing an openness in the design. Well, at least that’s my philosophy.

I’ve also managed to incorporate my background switching code, and do it while not touching Dave’s HTML — a requirement for CSS Zen Garden. I did this by using an import on the PHP file as the first line in the CSS file:

import “photographs.php”

The header file returned by the PHP program sets the result to CSS:

<?php
// declare the output of the file as CSS
header(’Content-type: text/css’);
?>

In addition, I also use the CSS3 “opacity” attribute for the quick summary element. This is supported in Safari and Firefox, and for those browsers where it’s not supported, the element is a solid white. Since the text is just as readable with both, and the solid white doesn’t disrupt the design, it seemed a good use of ‘edgy’ CSS. It also validates.

It’s a rather quiet design, but very readable–and at least it doesn’t hurt when you look at it, as can happen in this rather humorous look at the good old days of web design (note, lots of animated gifs in the page that opens from this link).

“The Zen of CSS Design” has been an eye opener for me and I’ll never approach web page design in the same way, again. I can strongly recommend this book — it’s definitely worth breaking into the piggy bank to buy.

*Note: I am not a designer**

**Further note: whole-hearted agreement with this statement will result in my hunting down and hacking your site. Consider the CSS Zen Garden entry I linked to. Now, think how your site would look with blooming peonies in the background.

Categories
Just Shelley

The trouble with neighbors

No, not the virtual kind…at least, not this time.

Our housing complex is a very quiet one, mainly families, older couples, and long time residents. We’ve always been lucky with the neighbors we’ve had, but our luck was bound to run out, and it did with the newest neighbor next door.

I’ve had to go over twice to tell them to turn down their music, and each time, they then spent several hours pounding up and down the stairs or knocking on the walls afterwards–once until 2:30 and the other time until 4am. There are two men living there and they’re gone most of the time, but when they’re home, it’s a constant party.

The management has informed them of the rules, and has asked me to call the police now when there’s a disturbance, so they can get official records of the events. With these, if the neighbors continue, the management will be able to kick them out. As vindictive as they’ve shown themselves to be, I’m not looking forward to seeing their reaction to my calling the police.

However, there’s a bright side to all of this: when I can’t sleep and it’s late at night, like now, I just put a DVD in the player, put on my headphones, and get lots of work done.