stevengharms

North Carolina.

So far what I’ve seen of it leads me to the following statements:

• It’s hotter here than in Austin. I’m going to remember that next time some Trinangle-r asks me about the weather in ATX.
• It has beautiful trees and space like Texas, this is something I missed in the golden state.
• There’s a hint of Georgia about what I’ve seen so far, and I did like Georgia.

My old boss ( we now have intersecting interests in town this week ) sent me an email and we’re going to go out and maybe catch up a little.

I never lived in the East Bay and I can’t say that I ever found much over that-a-way that particularly spoke to me when living in the Bay Area: the suburban metropolis of Fremont, the incongruously placed W Hotel of Newark, the Sunol grade, etc. The East Bay and Oakland were these faraway places that were close to me, but not really involved in my life.

But, uh, all those people are about to face a whole new level of traffic hell come Monday 30 April 2007. Apparently a tanker fire broke key supports in the MacArthur Maze ( an insane crisscross of overpasses, highways and bridges which abuts the Bay Bridge from San Francisco and which requires navigation for all points in any direction ).

It makes me slightly embarrassed for my 0.9 mile commute.

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Next week I’ll be travelling to Research Triangle Park, NC to visit my corporate benefactor’s other home base outside the Valley. The funny thing is that I have been to our sites in London, Sydney, and Amsterdam: all the sites that are > 10 hours, by air, from SJ, but never the one that’s roughly half that.

Well that era ends clap next week. I’m catching a mid-morning flight out to the East coast. A conference is being hosted internally on uhm, well, Web 2.0 in IT. Wait, wait, before you start thinking that I’m talking vaporware nonsense ( “Hey Steven, didn’t you mock this ‘Web 2.0’ term just a few posts ago?” ) let me say that there are real differences in the conceptual framework.

Here’s a few:

• Death of singular iconic data sources ( Web-old: cnn.com, Web-new reddit.com )
• Folksonomony ( del.icio.us versus taxonomy ( Yahoo Directory ) )
• Multi-path conversations
• Liberation of the Dark Internet

So, even if you’re catchphrase-cynical, it’s a very progressive step for an enterprise to be weighing these decisions at this time.

Unfortunately, this falls right in the middle of the final 2 weeks of my classes, so I’ve got to work double-time on being ready to turn everything in, take all the tests, etc. the week after my return. Not really ideal, but I’ve sandbagged enough points in the semester to not really be worried. This also, lamentably, puts me out of having any chance to hang out over on that side of the country and doing any exploring.

Maybe next time, and maybe next time won’t be 6 years.

At Enoteca Vespaio this weekend one of the other guests had mentioned the mysterious fricative consonant unique to Czech: ř. I had been thinking about this sound and the statement “Language X has difficult sound Y” ( particularly the hard “g” in Dutch ) and how one acquires the ability to reproduce that sound in the intervening days and decided that I would like to hear that sound in person.

Fortunately, one of my peers in my C++ class is Czech and I knew I could go to the source. After class I leaned across the table and I asked said lady, “Say, I heard that in Czech you have a consonant that no other..”

“…ř.”

”[to Lauren] That’s it, she said it!”

“…ř?( with that amazing Eastern European look that implies they are concerned but not surprised you just sprouted a third eye )”

In any case, we chatted some more about life sans vowels ( including her running off an intelligible sentence about snails in the mist that had no vowels ) and she invited us to join her friends and husband for dinner at the Baby Acapulco near the Gateway center. We did and had a very fun time.

But now check this out

During my blog-redesign hiatus I ran into a friend I made at UT in the Dutch program and who I’d lost track of since my departure from Austin. Over at her place with her awesome roommates we listened to Björk’s Homogenic, watched the terrible programming of Dutch SBS6, had parties, did jenever shots, and patronized the nearby HENDO snack-stand. So imagine my surprise when I walked into the Regal Theatres lobby and saw her standing there! We swapped contact details and went our separate ways.

So here I was, talking with my Czech classmate and her husband when I mention that I’d lived in Holland and that some of my friends in that program had later gone to Prague to teach English. As it turned out, they knew one another and had met in Praha. I looked over at Lauren and she had the look of unmitigated surprise on her face.

The world, my friends, is small. So be nice to each other.

Who knew Austin was my karmic hub?

During my recent web site redesign I decided I would start from scratch. I diligently worked and worked and finally had a ‘beta’ version of code that I deployed. It came out terrible.

I couldn’t believe it, how could I have gone so far wrong?

I had the positioning looking great, the images looked great, the screen effects looked great - yet there was no mistaking it. When IE got a hold of the page it looked like all the components were dumped in a pile in the middle of your screen.

It was about that time that I took a hold of the default Kubrick layout that comes with WordPress and began to hack it into my own creation. Many lines were excised, and many were not. Cloning Kubrick allowed me to get the central positioning and “browser resize messing up my content” issues addressed quickly.

My question was: Why did I need to start from scratch?

I’m not a web site designer, I don’t go from ex nihilo to something amazing. I don’t have a Photoshop-generated mock-up to follow. In short, there was no credible reason for me to start with an empty file called “style.css”. Yet I did it anyway.

2 weeks later I had a mess, 2 weeks after that, going the modifying Kubrick route, I had a working site that looked about the way I had imagined it.

Why this absurd compulsion to start from scratch? It’s for the birds.

The happy couple
Originally uploaded by sgharms.

Alfredo Garcia and Nicole Garcia née Morales.

This weekend Lauren and I attended the wedding of this lovely couple. Alfredo and I had lost contact of one another when I moved to CA, but, upon returning to Austin, he found me via a comment I left at another blog.

Through this past 10 months (!?!), we’ve had occasion to see each other with some regularity and were blessed to be invited to this beautiful wedding. The wedding took place at the lovely San José Catholic Church hidden in the heart of beautiful South Austin. I had only been to one other Catholic wedding ( being of Anglo - Germanic stock myself ) so the ceremony and ritual was again a bit of a foreign, although beautiful, experience for me. The mass was very interesting and the couple had included some of the best, and most mystical, parts about man / woman / creation of woman / miracles at the wedding in Cana / etc. It was very rich and very much crafted so as to provide magic into the fabric of existence.

But what more could I say? I think this picture says it a thousand times over. The bride was beautiful, the groom was elated, the parents were proud.

After the ceremony there was a short intermission and several of us repaired to the Enotecca at Vespaio with some new friends and some recently-relocated friend and had an inter-activity glass of wine and some light repast before heading to the hotel.

The reception facilities were of the highest grandeur and the food was great as well. A real bonus was to see all of those folks with whom I croquet-ed a lot in my senior year again. Most are married, moved elsewhere, having fantastic lives doing interesting things and adjusting, in many cases, to that mantle called parenthood.

Towards the end of the evening Alfredo insisted that maximally funky dancitude be seen and was simply not denied. As the evening closed, the Alfredo produced soundtrack ended and we headed out. Upon seeing the bride I casually remarked to her “Ah! Mrs. Garcia” and I saw a strange expression of realization pass over her face and she said, dare I say proudly, that she realized that was her name now. I guess when the priest says it you must be thinking “What is this guy saying, what am I doing up here” - when some guest says it to you, the “Oh, wow this is real” might just hit you anew.

She has a wonderful heart and the good Mr. Garcia has found a wonderful partner in her.

Another pair of guests, the Cortese family of Colorado and their family, invited us to a Sunday brunch-party at a house they had rented for the week in the heart of Travis Heights. I thought this was a great idea - to rent a house and enjoy it for a week versus cramming into a hotel.

It was the usual South austin shotgun-style house that had been tastefully outfitted with the modern effects ( hardwood floor, stainless steel, etc. ). It made a very cozy and wonderful spot for wedding guests to talk to one another on a more causal plane. The weather threatened once or twice to turn rainy, thankfully it were but mostly sprinkles that fell.

After a pretty consistent cycle of sleep and matrimonially-induced excitement, we headed back up to North Austin, indulged in a cold stone, and then took a nice-long nap!

The weeks of light commitment to househould duties as I undertook the site redesign had mounted up, so we exited our cloud and returned to quotidian reality courtesy of thrilling items like doing laundry and cleaning the kitchen.

In all, we felt exceedingly thankful to have been part of this beautiful wedding experience. The beautiful couple are headed off to Italy to enjoy of the Italian springtime ( good timing! ). I can’t wait ‘til they get back so that we can host them chez nous and they can regale us of their adventures and first blissful steps into the great unknown of the mystical union between man and woman.

During the move to our new apartment I came across a CD that had a bunch of old data files from my college days on it.

One of the files was called “C++ Programs”. This struck me as a bit funny as Lauren and I are taking C++ together at Austin Community College. For her, it is an introduction, for me it is a review.

Based on this old code I found, I definitely needed much more than a review. This, quite simply, is terrible.

Check this insanity out after the jump

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Oh my friends.

Yak shaving got a bit out of control and next thing I was doing a site redesign.

And then the redesign I created after about 2 weeks was not really IE-compatible.

So I went back to the drawing board and came back with the design you see today.

There are still a few tiny things ( uhm, the ‘by month’ archives look terrible ), but I know how to fix them and know that I can get it done quickly, so I’m enjoying the feeling of being in the home stretch.

So much has happened since I went new content silent a few weeks ago. Lack of a site that I felt actually looked like “me” ( that is to say, default WordPress theme, “Kubrick” ) really made me loath to post - it was an uncomfortable reminder of a job not-really-done.

If you’re going to start learning HTML, let me highly recommend the Heads First guide. It is an excellent book that gives you examples in a primitive state, requires that you work through them during the course of the chapter and then, at the end, helps you know that you successfully transitioned the work.

For people experienced with (X)HTML this book can be skipped from Chapter 1-6 as the basics of markup, semantics, design and content split are covered. The introduction te CSS styling is solid and the book rapidly progresses from simple CSS to advanced layouts. It actually explained what the heck float:right means better than anything I’ve ever read before.

Here are just a few post ideas that are backlogged and begging to surface:

• Status update from where I was a few months ago in being absolutely dumbfounded with too much stuff to do
• Developers: Why do we have this crazy need to start from scratch?
• SXSW wrap-up ( with very cool modified images to show where I was and what I was seeing ) - yes I know this is about a month late, but I saw some good things that should be shared
• How to handle a panel discussion at SXSW. A major complaint was that panels were “pointless” - here’s how to fix it
• Grid design and this great old copy of Ricoeur’s Conflict of Interpretation
• Other ruminations, opinions, and conjectures

While I don’t think this site makes much of a difference in the world, I do miss writing in this venue, so, thanks for putting up with me while I tried to put some new lipstick on this ol’ pig.

I noticed a few small render issues in IE, but this is the look more or less.