09.15.99
Posted in General
at 10 pm
It always feels good to get things done, but it seems to give me a really strong sense of elation to finish a project off.
At work, a number of projects had been stacking up and out of the 5 that are in progress, three have been completed within the past 36 hours.
Nikon, PROdX, and ESCO all have been closed out and shipped. Well, actually there will be nits and picks, I’m sure, but those will be on seperate job tickets. Once the sites and resources are in place, I’ll post the URL’s for everyone to see.
I’m glad so much of this stuff is public, work that I can show to others, rather than items being hidden being firewalls in corporate intranets.
A few weeks ago I mentioned that I was organizing the projects using Acta, a piece of software known as an outliner. Well, I’m happy to report that from the system that we developed has been a stunning success. By keeping up with each line of items to do, writing them down and checking them off, at the end of the project we’ve got a beautiful list, step-by-step of everything that we did on the job.
Using this system, everyone has been keeping up-to-date with all of the projects. Projects have a number of different catagories:
Sales: Projects that the sales people are discussing. Usually these projects are in the concept stage, possibly requiring mock-ups.
In-House: Projects that are internal items. A few of these include print collateral, the web site, the promo CD, etc.
Pre-flight: Projects that have had an intent agreement signed and we are still collecting materials, getting a final estimate together and a final layout of the site.
Live: Thse are sites and projects that are in progress. In the outline we note each step up through the first review. After the first review meeting we walk away with a list of notes for the site. That list gets put directly into the outline where it is the actual list that we work off of, working until the list is done and we’re ready for the next review.
Wrap-Up: Here we make the archive on CD, prepare the deployment of the site, review the project and work out how to make the system better. Now that we have these projects into this stage, we can finally try out this part.
I’m pretty proud of this system. I’ve been the main designer of the outline, drawing from the systems that we had at CMC, New Interactive, and what I developed at OMSI. It’s small, but very flexible. I’m hoping that it will be a good way to start off, then we can migrate to more robust software. I’m pretty optimistic.
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09.14.99
Posted in General
at 1 pm
Sep 14 Tue (01 PM)
Well, here’s a good test of my HTML interpreter for my journal. On the Flash mailing list I’m on, someone just posted a long list of Flash help sites. I’ll be going through these this week.
<http://www.turtleshell.com/asm/tutorials/index.html>
<http://www.marketcenter.net/berto/>
<http://www.flashzone.com/>
<http://www.extremeflash.com/>
<http://www.lunarmedia.com/flash4/>
<http://flash.lynxweb.com/>
<http://www.flashtrend.com/frameset.htm>
<http://www.bolivarstudios.net/index2.html>
<http://www.webpagetogo.com/FS/WD/>
<http://www.flashresource.com/>
<http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/>
<http://stickman.flashzone.com/tutorials/>
<http://www.users.bigpond.com/xtian/welcomenew.html>
<http://www.moock.org/webdesign/flash/>
<http://www.manoone.com/flash2.htm>
<http://www.enetserve.com/tutorials/>
<http://www.egomedia.freeserve.co.uk/index.html>
Good stuff, I hope.
BTW, I posted into the TidBits Mac maiiing list with the following comment regarding Apple’s new commercial and the US Army’s use of the Mac as a secure web server:
In light of the recent use of Macs to serve the US Army’s web site, I think the most recent Apple ad had things backwards. Perhaps the G4 should be shown protecting the tanks! 😀
<http://www.apple.com/powermac/tanks.html>
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09.13.99
Posted in General
at 12 pm
Sep 13 Mon (12 AM)
Amy and I are hunting for a new apartment. She has been and I’m finally fed up with the noise levels from the traffic on Belmont.
Southeast Portland has a number of east-west feeder streets. Working down from Burnside (which devides the postal addresses North and South) there’s Stark, Belmont, Hawthorne, Division and Powell. (The N-S streets are numbered.) Hawthorne, Belmont and Powell connect up to bridges directly into downtown. (The Morrison, Hawthorne and Ross Island, respectively.)
Out of the three, Belmont is the least equiped to handle the traffic volume. Where we are situated, there’s a rather tight corridor of buildings (great for collecting sound) and a 24 Plaid Pantry “quik-mart” right next door (great for attracting sound).
If anyone has any suggestions for a 2 bedroom in inner SE or downtown, with a Washer and Dryer that allows pets, drop me a line.
Bo sent me a couple notes this past week, including a link to a site that he thinks (rightly) is right up my alley. <http://www.quietsiren.com/font.html> It’s about type and the love of type. Amy and I were looking a book this evening about this very subject. I do love type.
Bo’s other note was about his Birthday. (HB Bo!) And he also noted that mine is coming up as well. That’s right my quarter century mark is coming up this Friday, the 17th. Well wishers can contribute to the ‘Buy Ross a new Mac’ fund, truly a non-profit agency at this point. 🙂
Let’s work this thing back towards being a journal rather than a weblog, shall we?
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09.11.99
Posted in General
at 1 pm
Sep 11 Sat (01 PM)
This week has just cruised on by. After working on Labor Day (ha!) Working till 10:00pm or Midnight the rest of the week, we got two projects to their final stages. One is a Flash-based promotional piece that I’ve been working on solo. The other is a web site for Nikon, which I put a lot of design work into.
The Flash piece has been incredibly educational. We adopted the project from a client after they ran into some problems with the original developers. So I didn’t get to do any of the design, but I’ve basically re-written the entire thing, putting new walls, floors and ceilings in a bad bilt building.
That’s a bit harsh, it wasn’t so much badly built as: A) Built by someone who was learing as they were developing it, and B) built by someone using Flash 3. Reason A explains why certain elements at the start of the movie are so strangely implemented, and why towards the end, there are some more elegent implementations, with more extensive use of objectification and componentized movies.
But there was still a number of changes to make including using a consistent set of Typefaces, optimizing the use of Library elements (reuse reuse reuse!) and more consistency int he navigation.
I like where the piece has gone and I’m proud at how far we’ve taken it, but it’s been difficult not having any one to talk to about the work. Transitions, scripting, etc. are all outside of the realm of what anyone else has worked with in Flash, so I’ve been a bit on my own except for a mailing list with a huge mail volume. (4 – 5 digest per day!)
I’m hoping this weekend I can relax a bit, take my mind off of the huge push that was last week, get my Fall Syllabus in shape and have a less stressful week coming up.
Oh did I mention the guy who we hired and then quit the next day, then we counter-offered and is still in negotiations? This is the guy that we needed just for his Flash skills, and to replace Eric who’s leaving for New York in November. I’m still so pissed about that. I hope it gets resolved soon.
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09.08.99
Posted in General
at 12 pm
After the heady days of ’95-’98 it seems like web technology has really ground down.
During those years, a new version of a browser came out nearly each quarter, the big guys were still looking in at their own projects, rather than out at the rest of the net, and I’d never seen a URL in print., and certainly not on TV.
I guess things have really turned the the corner. I was thinking to myself the other day, “what’s next?” What am I really looking forward to in regards to the web?
There’s just one place to look: Mozilla.
With IE 5.0, MS again proved that it’s chasing taillights (then eating the car) that it’s best at. That’s great during those times when Bill’s looking for a new thrill, but once it’s in front, the pace of the race drops flat on it’s face.
The real differences between IE 4 and IE 5 were negliable. Builder.com had this list as part of their review of IE5:
* Listen to Net-broadcast radio stations while you browse
* Get links related to the site you’re currently visiting
* Make Hotmail your default email client
I can’t say I’m overwhelmed.
So what do I want? I want a Mozilla in every computer and a Flash/SVG plug-in in every browser. PNG would be nice to, but only once it can do animation.
<http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/>
This is what _I_ want. I will do what I can to encourage people to head in this direction. I think a lot of people are looking for the same thing. Once I get this, I’m sure other technologies will be added to the wish list, but if Mozilla delivers HTML 4.01, CSS-1, and support for SVC and PNG come about I will have all the tools I want for now. Color, motion, sound, placement and text: these are the controls I want.
(If the core of Mozilla (Gecko) will be really modular, will you be able to swap out the core of IE and replace it with Gecko? Will someone create an ActiveX control that will do this automatically? How about a Melissa type macro that automatically swaps out the proprietary heart of MS’s browser with the open source heart of gold? Can’t imagine it? You will. 🙂
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09.05.99
Posted in General
at 12 pm
Wow that’s weird.
<http://theweb.startshere.net/index.phtml?channel=199>
Let me start at the begining. 10 days ago, Jorn at Robotwisdom started ripping on me in his weblog. This exhange was noted by the guy at Internet Alchemy <http://alchemy.openjava.org/> (I saw IA’s URL in my referer logs.) Going there, I found some commentary on the the whole mess, plus links to me and RW.
Hmm, that’s cool. So it’s a publicly heald opinion that the RW guy is a real loose cannon. (Who never replied to my e-mail, BTW.) Good to know I’m not being singled out for his abuse.
Anyway, I’m looking through the rest of the entries at iAlchemy and come across a number of blurbs about RSS, content syndication and such, with most of the traffic being directed to this <http://theweb.startshere.net/> which seems to be a portal agrigator, like Netscape’s Netcenter, or Userland’s service, both of which I’m registered with. (Dwelling is one of the oldest channels at Userland, might I add.)
So I think, ‘Hey, I’ll add Dwelling to this new service too.’ I get through the whole submission form and the site comes back saying ‘Sorry, this channel has already been added’.
Huh?!?!?!?!!!!!
Well it seems that they took the very open records at Userland and added most if not all of the channels that had signed up to their new service. I’m a bit flattered, a bit surprised, and perhaps a bit upset.
My name and e-mail address are attached to the entry at Userland. Would it have been that difficult to let me know what was going on? I’d rather not IP protect my RSS file (which provides all the syndication). I’m more than happy to let people experiment with the content that I’m putting online, but I would like to know when it happens.
Simply finding the links in my referer log isn’t the most pleasent way to find out. I guess it’s the age old problems of recognizing that there are people behind those annonymous files, behind that phosphor-laced screen. Having those faces there, means that you should communicate with them. Be up front. Make contact.
But overall, I’m happy to be part of this aggrigator, and will even include a link to it below.
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09.01.99
Posted in General
at 12 pm
I got a couple of oohs and ahhs on my latest desktop background, so I’m including it here for everyone.
<http://www.ordersomewherechaos.com/~rosso/articles/1999/mir-impact/>
Recently I had seen links to NASA’s Image site and found this spectacular impact drawing. A few days later the blurb on Slashdot about Mir’s abandonment sent me to a site that had a bunch of images of Mir.
<http://www.flatoday.com/space/today/>
I took images from both sites as desktop backgrounds, and noticed the resemblance between two of the images. It was a just a quick multilayer Photoshop document away from combining the two, giving us the ultimate view of the end of most life on planet Earth.
The image is 1024×768, 168k JPEG.
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Posted in General
at 11 am
If anyone has tried sending me a page in the last couple of weeks, let me know. My pager was disconnected for some unknown reason and we’re trying to pinpoint the day the problem occurred. Drop me a line of the last few times you may have tried.
The pager is working now however, so things should be okay.
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08.29.99
Posted in General
at 5 pm
Last week Jorn Barger, or http://www.robotwisdom.com started slagging on me, out of the blue. From what I can tell through his multi-day rant my unlawful acts were: a coding mistake, use of the TARGET=”_blank” attribute, supporting properly structured markup, and having a ‘weblog’ that was ‘overdesigned’.
Where to start. First off, he lumps Dwelling in with ‘weblogs’. Dwelling is a journal, better called a diary. It’s about me. From what I can tell, Jorn is discussing Weblogs which he defines here: http://discuss.userland.com/msgReader$3865 but to my eyes is a daily list of links to new things on the web.
Dwelling is not about the Web. It’s about ME! I happen to be heavily involved with the wired world, but get this straight: Dwelling is a Journal, NOT a weblog.
As for being ‘overdesigned’, I have yet to find one page that makes me give even one iota of weight to his sense of aestetics. His pages have all the design quality of a babboon’s ass. His vision of the electronic world apparently doesn’t include art. I saw the other web pages he critiqued as overdesigned, and saw how some even cowtowed to him. Disgusting really. http://www.egroups.com/groups/weblogs/25.html?
As for coding mistakes, don’t go around his site too much else you’ll hit 3 dead links (to pages within his own site!) in the first 7 minutes like I did. And I hope he can find some way of coping with links that open into new windows. I supposed he must have been traumatized by geocities as a small child. (I can only guess that’s also where he learned design.)
It’s been a long time since someone got under my skin like this. I’m not sure what did it: if it was his ragging on me, his decision to do it in public, or the fact that he never bothered to contact me, or that he has yet to reply to my mail asking him just how he reached the conclusion I was a villian.
If I had any kind of contact with him ahead of time, I might not have taken this so personally, but this was so out of left field. The only reason I found it is because I have access to my logs and found the referer hits coming in.
Well, we’ll see if he responds as the only way he’ll know I posted this is if he notices this page in his referer log.
:E … Breathe in… Breathe out… 🙂
In brighter news, my personal inbox is down to 8 mails, I updated my projects outline, and borrowed a bike from Kam. Now to run down to Fred Meyers to grab some supplies for it. Other than the issue above (which I really ought to ‘let go’), things are going really well: I’m confirmed for teaching this fall’s class at PSU, I got my last credit card paid off and I’m getting things organized or done. Either one is a good thing.
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08.26.99
Posted in General
at 10 am
Aug 26 Thu (10 AM)
Starting with this new entry, you might notice that the e-mail and pager respond links and forms have moved to the bottom of the page.
The original ‘respond’ link was supposed to eventually tie into a message board for people to respond publicly to my crazed rants. Since that isn’t any where near the top of the priority list, I’m moving the contact devices to the bottom of the front page template.
This should also have the added benefit of speeding up the page display time for slower machines, particularly on weeks with lots of entries like this one.
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