Articulated

Diary of a 34 year old

Today was a good day. Any day I have 3 servings of strawberry pie is a good one. Don’t worry, they were small ones.

Today was dedicated to watching college basketball. Duke University started the day as one members of the Elite 8 and the only top seeded team still alive in the tournament. Their opponent was Baylor University. Because of this, I know that the Baylor campus is located in Texas not far from Houston. I can also tell you they have a serviceable but uninspiring website. I once worked on the design of a website for The Baylor School, and that one is far more interesting.

I got a few birthday gifts. I’m was not expecting much this year because I’m getting married in September. It’s a destination wedding, so my birthday, wedding, and Christmas gift from several people will be that they’ll show up. My fiancee purchased sessions with a personal trainer for me. Is there a message there? The biggest gift was the one I gave myself: new software to help me learn Mandarin Chinese. It’s seems quite simple (especially for how much it cost) but then I think about how difficult it is to make something that is simple and effective and my respect for the product increases. I’ve had a devil of a time creating a simple and effective personal website.

Now that I’m 34, I should probably get that resolved.

I feel a number of personal resolutions coming on. It’s the side effect of looking back at the previous year and realizing that I’ve not succeeded in many of the goals I set for myself. There are no excuses. It’s just failure. I know it doesn’t have to be that way, and I know what it will take to change those failures into potential successes.

So here’s to my 35th year: may I take steps forward and not backward. I make this effort not just for myself anymore. There’s a family to build for as well.

Four favorites

This weekend included several of my favorite things. First there was pie on National Pie Day. My fiancee and I made banana cream pie – something she’s been asking for. Instead of the usual recipes, which employ pudding mix and pre-made whipped cream, we made our own custard and whipped some organic heavy cream. While I’m not sure this improves the flavor of the final product, the end result is much more satisfying. The pie doesn’t require that many ingredients: milk, eggs, flour, sugar, butter, vanilla extract. I had pie dough already made (a side benefit from last weekend’s berry pie).

Today, we finally saw Avatar in 3d. The movie-making technology brought to bear on this project is impressive. It is one of the most technically amazing movies I’ve ever enjoyed. Plot-wise, the movie is not that much more than “Dances with Wolves”. The story is based on two wonderful ideas: a planet where all life is literally connected in an organic electrical network; and the pairing of a human “driver” with a biological “avatar”. Unfortunately, James Cameron really fails to explore either idea in any depth, relying instead on the story devices that are easier and proven in big-budget Hollywood movies. Ultimately, the movie is enjoyable but I felt as though it missed some opportunities. At best, the movie is completely worth the big theater experience and was not ruined by poor casting and horrible dialog – the crimes that derailed “Titanic”.

This evening I made another batch of home-made pasta. I’m getting much better at it. I was inspired by the pappardelle I had last week while I was in North Carolina. The dough was rolled out as thin as possible – I think I’m going to break my rolling pin soon. I cut broad noodles from the dough (which is much easier than trying to cut thin noodles) and paired them with a homemade meat sauce. Each time I make the pasta it becomes easier. This time it cooked just as it was supposed to and was finished in the sauce.

Now I’m watching the end of the Saints-Vikings conference championship game. This is easily the best game of the whole post-season. Never a blowout, lots of good plays, some drama. Whoever wins will deserve it. It’s been a great game. I think I’ll go cut myself a slice of pie and watch the finish.

Can’t resist

I am frustrated. Nothing I do for the design of my new website is any good. Is there any client out there more difficult to work with than yourself?

Part of the problem is how large my personal website has become. There’s quite a few parts to it. There’s my resume, my portfolio, my blog, my Learning Chinese site, my Google Maps experiment, and the interactive journal from my trip to Taiwan. And those are just the major pieces.

Part of the problem (I think) is that I’ve been trying to shoe-horn all of these things into the same design – at minimum, the same grid system. I think it’s time I give up on that. Each one of these items serves a particular purpose and deserves it’s own design. Several items, like this blog, the interactive journal, and the Learning Chinese site, already have their own designs. If I tackle each item separately, I will probably have more success. Maybe.

Easing the pain of my frustration is a brand new bottle of Zaya rum that my fiancee was nice enough to track down. It’s not easy to find. Only a few places around here carry it regularly. I do need to drink it in moderation. Besides being expensive, it’s quite strong. I may have had too much last night.

The other remedy for my malady is a bit of fresh berry pie. I don’t make berry pie often, and I almost never make it during the winter. It’s impossible to find fresh berries that are good enough to really justify a pie. However, I just couldn’t resist. I purchased frozen berries. I know, it’s a culinary sin. What else am I going to do? I’m not going to spend 5 dollars a pint at Whole Food for blueberries from South America.

My pie crusts have improved significantly. One reason is that I now weigh out my ingredients instead of measuring by volume. Another reason is the switch from shortening to lard as my fat. I also started mixing the dough by hand rather than use a pastry whisk to cut the fat into the flour. Finally, I started buying better flour. As a result, today’s pie crust is flaky and delicious. Yeah, the pie’s not even cool yet and I already tried some. I can’t resist.

Time capsule

I’ve been working on the long-delayed update to my personal website. The proverbial kick in the butt that will hopefully get things moving was the removal of all the old website files from my server space. Now I have a few completed pages and a lot of dead links. I need to get these fixed as soon as possible. Hopefully, the fix will be a version of my new website.

In the process of backing up my old files, I stumbled across something marvelous. For a few months at the beginning of 2005, I kept a blog. The beginning of that year was a very interesting transitional time in my life. I was re-evaluating my life and preparing to go back to school. I was living in a place I hated but interacting with some very interesting people. For the first time in many years I felt purpose and direction. My writing at that time was a reflection of those and a few other things – including a brief and ill-fated relationship with someone I never expected was interested in me at all.

I’m glad I found this. It’s interesting as a window into that time of my life. The writing presents a stark contrast to who I am  now as I look forward to getting married and thinking about a family of my own. It also is a look back to the beginning. Everything I’ve built or torn down in this version of my life started from that point. I had stripped my world down to the bone and was ready to start over. Every life has pivot points and that was one of mine.

I’m may add those long-lost posts to this blog as a way of capturing and preserving those moments. They are bittersweet (mostly sweet) memories and I’m glad they’re still lingering.

Mobile Me

Several friends have created their own start pages. There are online services that do this for you – basically a way to have online bookmarks. It’s a good idea. I don’t always work on one computer or with one web browser, and keeping bookmarks synchronized is not feasible. So a personal start page is a nice solution. It also allows you to design what it looks like and organize the content to fit precisely to the way you work – if you’re so inclined.

I finally realized that there were too many good links I’ve forgotten. I’ve used Facebook and this blog and my web browser to save links that I felt were worthy of remembering, but that’s too many places. I don’t always browse my bookmarks or read old posts, so the links are forgotten. By creating a personal start page, I can always have these links at hand. I’ll remember to return to these sites and see what’s new. And my personal page can accessed wherever I have an internet connection.

Which brings me to the next part of this endeavor. My connection to the internet is often my phone. So I should have the page bookmarked in a way that’s easy to get to. The iPhone provides a great way of doing that. You can create a button on the home screen of the phone that will link you directly to a web page. It’s like a bookmark, only better. And it works for any web page. Unfortunately, the default icon that the iPhone creates for a web page is a very tiny thumbnail of that web page. This is basically useless. I don’t understand why they didn’t just use the site favicon. Apple did provide for something very similar to a favicon. If you place a 57×57 pixel png file named “apple-touch-icon.png” in the root directory of your site, the iPhone OS will use that image as the icon for your bookmark button. The OS will even round the corners of the image and apply the “shiny surface effect” to the icon. More about how this works can be found in this blog post by Drew McLellan.

Of course, bookmarking my personal start page is only the first step. To do this right, my start page should appear properly formatted for mobile viewing when I am on my phone. The iPhone will display normal web pages, but they are not the most convenient for the small screen. When it comes to mobile web pages, one of the best examples is the ESPN website. They did an amazing job creating a first rate browsing experience for mobile viewers. Their site is complex, so they serve up a completely different set of pages to mobile viewers. I am creating a single page. I’d like to accomplish my goals using CSS.

ESPN will serve as a useful case study for a mobile site. I suggest using a development tool to load their mobile web pages on your computer and inspecting the code. They’ve done nice work. However, to differentiate the look of a site for different devices using CSS, I suggest starting with an article from A List Apart that was published earlier this year. They break down the basics. David Storey also has a good post about developing for the iPhone on My Opera.

I still have work to do, but the beginnings of my mobile stylesheet are in place. It seems to work like a charm. I’m going to have fun when I start developing mobile websites for clients.

Joomin’

I’m learning Chinese. I’m also learning Joomla. Combining the two, I am creating a website using Joomla to document my experience learning Chinese. This is one of the reasons why my blog posts have been so rare lately. Not the only reason, but one.

I’ve been putting a lot of time into the new site lately – more time that I should have spent. However, I finally have a design and I’ve finally figured out a few things about Joomla templates. The one problem with Joomla is that documentation is non-existent. I thought Drupal was bad. Drupal has been through enough iterations now that I can usually do a google search when I have an issue and someone’s already found an answer. Joomla appears to be much younger. Consequently, everyone else is also trying to figure it out.

Over the last few days, in addition to codifying my new site design, I have successfully (if only partially) dismantled one of the default templates, stripping it down to some of the bare essentials I will need for my new site. I don’t need much, really. Just a few regions defined, a simple menu setup, and basic styles. Today I will begin adding images and CSS. Hopefully, in the next week or so, I will have the site functioning on a basic level. Then I can once again work towards the original goal of learning a new language.

學生

Now that Monica and I have completed our crazy move and life is settling back into a routine, it’s time for me to once again get serious about some personal projects I have to focus on. One of the most important is, of course, the rest of my website. I managed to get this blog set up and designed, but the rest of the website is still waiting for my attention. Likewise, my interactive travel journal and my map of haunts await graphic design help. But at this moment I am focused on a different challenge: learning Mandarin Chinese.

Ever since I began dating Monica this has been a minor goal but now it is becoming much more important. I would like to be able to communicate with Monica’s family and friends. And I know that there are some things, or some situations in which Monica would feel more comfortable (or more effective) speaking in her native language. Add to that the fact that our new home is in close proximity to a large Chinese-speaking population and I have more than enough motivation.

Monica has supplied me with some basic learning materials. I purchased a word book a while back and Monica provided, as a gift, the matching set of flash cards to work with. These are nice for building vocabulary but don’t really help me in attempts to string together words into sentences or fully comprehend the spoken language. This weekend I purchased Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar from Barnes & Noble which will help me understand some of the structures of the language and provide additional vocabulary. However, what I really need is some kind of structured learning course that will help me with the speaking and reading.

I have been looking at RosettaStone software. It gets a lot of attention and is well advertised on television. It is supposed to be a natural learning process, but the software is incredibly expensive. I would appreciate it if they provided some kind of demo so I could see how they handle the writing and speaking instruction, but they only provide a very brief demo in Swedish (!). I don’t mean to insult the Swedes, but I am not interested in learning their language. Chinese is sooo different from Swedish that I would really like to know how their software handles that particular language.

I did try a demo of another language instruction program, the L-CEPTS trainer. Unfortunately, their Java-based application had the most awful and confusing user interface. It might be cheaper than RosettaStone, but it seems so inferior.

I am considering a subscription to the instructional program published by Serge Melnyk. Mr. Melnyk’s podcast can be downloaded free on iTunes. The subscription ($10 per month) gets you access to the transcripts and worksheets that accompany each lesson. The audio lessons handle the speaking practice part of the instruction; the worksheets and transcripts are for the reading (and possibly writing) instruction. The price is right and I have enjoyed the podcasts before. My one gripe (and this, honestly, is more Monica’s gripe) is that the transcripts and worksheets use Simplified Chinese characters. Monica is from Taiwan and is devoted to her Traditional Chinese characters.

Despite this drawback, I think the price might be worth it. The audio lessons are convenient and provide an opportunity for practice, and having the transcripts is beneficial for mastering both the characters and the pronunciations (now that I have a handle on the phonetics of Pinyin).

Thanks again

It’s a holiday weekend, but I don’t have time to pause for too long. I’ve got the longest short week of my life coming up and my “holiday” will be used to make sure I’m ready. But as I pause, I am taking a moment to look back. This has been a really long year in that so much has happened (and is still happening). It could be a big year. I’m really hoping that I have what it takes to meet the challenges that are coming. To this point, there have been lots of positive developments, and for that I am truly thankful.

Moving on

Time to finish with this blog. I’ve been fretting over the design for quite some time. Tinkering with WordPress has been a lot of fun. And while I admit the design is not really that impressive, I have figured out how to do several things I wasn’t able to do before. In addition, this was the first project I have undertaken in quite some time where I began with a central idea and then determined ways in which to express the idea. “Articulated” means not only something that is spoken or expressed but also that which is composed of moving joints. Thus, articulation is the bringing together of the jumbled – disjointed – thoughts and giving them form through expression. My design here expresses the roughness by which things (like thoughts) are sometimes brought together. Not everything can be paired neatly with hinges.

But I have many other projects to work on. There is my Haunts project, which needs to be redesigned. I have an idea in mind for the design of my interactive travel journal that needs to be implemented. And, most importantly, there is my portfolio which has already been waiting a year for me to begin building. While I feel like I have been learning things and making progress, progress must now come much faster.

Not to say that I won’t continue to post. Blogging is one of the activities which helps me practice my writing skills and sharpen my thoughts. It also helps me remember things to post about them. But I can’t keep messing with the design. For right now, it is done.

Into the Press

This is my first serious experience with WordPress. I have been impressed by some of the features and frustrated by others. When I first installed WordPress, (which is made amazingly simple by my web host, Dreamhost) I was concerned about what would happen with the posts I had on my existing blog on Google’s Blogger service. Fortunately, WordPress is able to import posts from a number of different blogging systems. All I needed to do was authorize WordPress to access my existing blog, and all of my posts were imported. So far, I have not seen any errors in the posts that were brought over. I had coded most of my Blogger posts, so that might have mitigated the potential for difficulties.

Settling on a design for the blog has been difficult. I didn’t want to go with the design I already had. It was made to be simple and effective but it was not terribly inspired. I don’t know that I’m very happy with the new design I have created, but at least there is a concept behind it. I use a blog to practice articulating my thoughts and opinions. I believe that ideas don’t truly condense until they are expressed. Expression, either spoken or “written” makes the amorphous mental energies take on a structured form. In this process, the person expressing the ideas has an opportunity to evaluate those thoughts from an external perspective. My concept, expressed in the typography of the title is about joining the disparate elements of thought.

Finding the information regarding WordPress templates that I needed to execute my design was a little bit difficult. The WordPress Codex is not nearly as bad as the awful Drupal documentation, but it is not the most user friendly resource. Eventually, I was able to identify most of the files I wanted to edit (these are in the wp-content folder under themes). Starting with the right default WordPress template definitely helps. I wanted something simple, so I began with the “Clean Home” template developed by Mid Mo Web Design. My design is not really similar, but their design had all the parts I wanted and none of the cruft. From there, it was simply a matter of throwing out their CSS and writing my own.

Along the way, I also had to edit some additional stuff, including the HTML for the default widgets and some of the WordPress template tags (specifically the calendar template tag). Those were more difficult to find, but the core WordPress files are mostly within the wp-includes folder. Digging through the PHP code (much of which I don’t understand) I can usually find the places where PHP generates HTML. For some reason, the people who wrote WordPress like to use European quotes (some of which look like small arrows) as directional icons. It irks me when someone does this (although I’ve done it before for clients) so I really wanted to remove them.

There is still a bit of work to do, but I am happy with my progress. One ambitious project is to create several different color schemes for the blog that can be randomly selected when a page is viewed. I went with a monotone color scheme – executed primarily with CSS – so I should be able to create several different color sets that can be applied using jQuery or MooTools. I also need to tweak the style of some of the post metadata and the sidebar blocks.