Gopher It!

Yesterday, I was in a implementation meeting and of course I got tasked with creating some photoshop comps of what it should look like. One of the examples we saw had a clipart gopher, and the caption, gopher information. While it was kind of clever, it wasn't terribly professional, so everyone made fun of it a little bit. Of course one of the final comments about the designs was that none of our designs would have rodents in them. And I agree, but I never did get the idea of a gopher on line chatting with people out of my head. So the image you see is the product of, photoshop, and google, and my wacked imagination. 

It's only right when its right

Today at work I spend a lot of time making correct code more correcter. Well, it it works or it doesn't right? Well, yes, and then again, no not so much. You see on our site (work site that is) we are adding some "design elements". (i.e. the CEO saw something on another site he liked and we needed to have them on ours) So I did the photoshop comps, did the proof of concept pages and now of course they want to deploy right from the proof of concepts pages. And there is where the trouble lies. You see HTML and Javascript render just a little different in each browser and on each operating system. So of course being a good and consciences web developer, I want to test the web pages with the new "design elements" on a good cross section of the browsers and platforms. So I check the pages on five different browsers on my windows XP Pro computer, and hey, they all looked great. Now I check it on a Mac. Uh Oh...the pages look like a grenade went off at the top of the screen. So I start working on making it work on the Mac. After about a half hour of tweaking the code that already works, it looks great on the Mac, in All three browsers I was testing. And just for good measure, I check it on my pc again...Oh No, it bad on netscape 4.7. And I don't been a little glitch that you won't see unless you are look for it, I mean a why is there a big blank space where a menu use to be. So I did the cross-browser, cross platform dance for about 4 hours today.

So this is what I mean by "It's only right, when it is right". All of those iterations of html code I did today worked. Just not on all of the browsers all of the time till the end. So how many iterations, or tweaks did I make to the code to make it work, well, I lost count after 30. This is what makes web development tough, that fact that there is such a variation in the way that each browser can render the code. When you are doing backend programming, it either works or it doesn't work. Yes, of course there are ways of making code run faster. But that backend code works in all of the browsers and platforms, that is of course unless your backend code writes the html for you, then, you better get prepared to do the cross-browser, cross platform dance.

Precision Napping

My Sis, sent me this picture of my ole' cat Rufus taking one of his precision naps. You can tell that its a precision nap, by the fact that he has his tounge sticking out. And as we well know in the Kelly family, no precision work can be done without your tounge sticking out a little bit. I want to thank Sis for sending me the Rufus picture of the month. Oh, and if you are thinking, no, he isn't going to post a picture of that old cat every month, the answer is , darn tootin I am.

Loud Music

Today I drove to work. That doesn't happen that often. Most of the time I take the train. While the train is great because you don't have to sit in traffic, you are sharing a space with other people. Of course I always have my iPod with me, and I can crank the head phones, but that isn't the same as being able to just crank the music so loud that you can feel it. So driving down the 210 this evening, at a whopping 17 mph, I cranked the music and opened the sunroof. It occured to me that you do need to listen to music really loud. There are little musically phrases that you just don't hear at low volumes. Also there is a comfort in the music surrounding you like a warm blanket. Being able to feel the bass notes in your chest and through your body, making you feel a part of the music. It's like the louder it is the easier it is to be emotional connected to the song. What can I say, grandpa K was right, you have to listen to it loud.