Recently Jason Kottke twittered:
When I was 13 or 14 years old, the last year I was an active member of the Boy Scouts, my troop spent a week at camp. The camp was new and modern and full of great activities. The pool director liked to have people tossed in the pool. Birthday. New merit badge. Any kind of recognition at all was an excuse to pick someone up from the dinning hall, carry them to the pool and toss them in. Great fun.
The night before camp was to end it was decided that the pool director needed to be tossed in the pool. When he tried to escape, and was caught, everyone ran out of the dinning hall to watch the fun. I tripped and fell in front of several hundred people and was trampled in the stampede. To this day I can remember seeing all these boots and shoes come at me and running over me.
At the time I was fine. One of my assistant scoutmasters managed to wade into the tail end of the crowd and scoop me up from the floor. I was seemingly okay. Several hours later I came out of my tent, turning blue in the face and collapse on the ground. I remember coming to in the local emergency room. “Delay stress reaction” was the diagnoses. Other than a couple of bruises, I was physically okay.
To this day I have a lingering hesitation, almost a fear, of large groups of agitated people. I would not enjoy a European soccer game at all.
Managing a crowd is a difficult thing. Masses of people do funny things and once they are headed in a direction it is nearly impossible to stop them. To read today that a Walmart employee was trampled to death while trying to unlock the doors for “Black Friday” shoppers sickens me.
Are we so desperate to save a dollar or two that we are willing to trample a fellow human being to death? I am outraged and saddened. Somewhere a child is going to get a toy or gift that was purchased over the dead body of another human being. All because their parent had to buy it at 5 am instead of 9 am.
Only in America.
Yahoo! News is reporting the results of a simple literacy test given to US government officials. The results are dismal. Elected government officials scored just 44% on average on the test which asks questions about history, economics, and civics.
You can take the test yourself. I scored 27 out of 33 for 81.82%.
Last week I was fortunate enough to attend a two-day overview of the capabilities and features of Adobe’s Dreamweaver CS3 product. The session was a highly level look at the major features and workflow the software provides. My employer is looking at using the tool for interface mock ups and screen design. With that responsibility shifted from the Information Technology department to the product planners and their Business Analysts, something was needed to give the BAs a way to capture web page layouts and interface designs.
What struck me most about the two day session was the utter lack of consequence presented with most of the features. The focus was on what the tool could do for you, but there was an utter lack of discussion about the merits of the technique at hand, or the costs (hidden and otherwise) of using it. For example, Dreamweaver allows you to point-and-click your way to embedding some dynamic controls on a web page. The controls are JavaScript based and rely upon proprietary, copyrighted code that Dreamweaver inserts into your site. As long as you continue to use Dreamweaver you can modify those controls as needed.
However, if you should stop using Dreamweaver, you would lose the ability to modify or maintain those controls. In our case, the page or site developed in Dreamweaver will be used as a guide for development, with the actual code being written outside of the Adobe product. It will be impossible therefore to do any kind of roundtrip engineering; once the site is developed and placed in to production, the proprietary code will be long gone. The Business Analyst will be forced to start over fresh, or try and build upon the non-Dreamweaver code to design the enhancement.
Simply because a tool or process gives one the ability to create a thing, doesn’t mean they understand that thing. Yes, Dreamweaver is a powerful tool, and it allows people with relatively little, or even no, web design experience to create a feature rich site. However that doesn’t mean they can support it, not does it mean that the output of their efforts can be integrated into a larger workflow. Tools which detour around the understanding and skill that comes from an apprenticeship have a hidden cost. Knowledge doesn’t equal skill or understanding. I’m not saying that Dreamweaver is bad, or that sites generated and maintained with it are bad either. I am saying that relying of the software to be your experience base, rather than having some experience of your own, is potentially dangerous.
We were all taught how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide in our heads using nothing but pencil and paper. Most of us use calculators today to perform these functions but we all have experience and skill doing it ourselves. Without having gone to the trouble of learning how to “do it by hand” we would fully appreciate simple mathematics nor would we really understand how it works. Building a web site is the same way. Without at least a cursory apprenticeship, using a point-and-click tool to generate a site for us may cripple our ability to fully appreciate its true potential or its real cost.
Apprenticeships, indeed, artisanship, is a lost and dying art.
Going to the movies isn’t what it used to be. Or maybe it isn’t what I fondly remember it as being. The timing of our weekly trip to Manhattan this Saturday allowed me to take in the new Bond movie while Sibylle was teaching. The 1:45 show time fit neatly into our usual schedule so I went to the movies.
1:45 brought the start of eight solid minutes of commercials, including one overly patriotic National Guard recruitment piece. Commercials. After I’ve paid $6.50 for matinee.
From 1:53 until 2:12 we had previews. Obviously the previews are geared to the feature, so they are usually of interest to me. But 19 minutes of previews? The one for The Spirit, a graphic novel coming to the big screen, probably contained the entire story line in the several minutes it ran.
Finally at 2:12 or so we go to see the theaters self-promotion clip, filled with people happily consuming overpriced soda and popcorn.
The movie itself began around 2:16. A full 31 minutes after the advertised starting time. Unbelievable.
Oh. As Bond movies go this one was fair. I haven’t seen the previous one (or ones?) with Daniel Craig in the title role, so I didn’t have the back story for what is apparently a sequel. The new actor is cold-blooded and almost robotic. This is not your father’s sexy, double-entendre Sean Connery Bond by any stretch of the imagination.
Next time I think I’ll wait for the DVD and watch it at home.
One aspect of the recently concluded campaign for the White House that I found difficult were the character assassinations made by both President-elect Obama and Senator McCain. It is all too easy in today’s sound-bite driven world to generate something damning about another person using out-of-context quotes, or references to half truths. And it appears that we as a nation more readily respond to situation-comedy style zingers than anything with substance.
American’s are becoming steadily less literate and it shows in how we decide major issues. A recent study of campaign rhetoric found that the 1860 the Lincoln-Douglas debates were conducted at nearly a 12th grade level. The Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960 were barely 8th grade level, and the last three election cycles have all been closer to 6th grade level. We are facing some tremendously complex issues involving science, religion, finance, economy, ethics, and cultural differences - and yet we can’t elect a president unless he or she can speak to us at a 6th grade level. From, America the Illiterate:
Most news has become entertainment, “infotainment,” and as such has little value and even less meaning. I read several different news sites every day, comparing and contrasting stories to try and suss out the real story behind the agenda of the reporting agency. I read foreign and US sources, national and local, opinion and “factual” pieces, and I still feel like I am getting an incomplete picture. If the Obama administration follows through and delivers a dynamic, up-to-date information portal it will move me, and everyone else who utilizes it, one step closer to the source. Yes, I expect the White House to put their own spin on stores they “self report” on government web sites. However, with the White House version in hand I can then mine the news sites for their take and hopefully develop a more informed opinion of my own.
Television has made Americans passive. We want, expect, to be told what to think, how to dress, who to like, what to fear, and what to believe or distrust. Without a critical eye toward the source of those values, we are little better than automatons, blindly doing the will of others. That 80% of American households didn’t purchase a single book last year is a frightening. No, reading isn’t a panacea, it doesn’t guarantee that the reader will gain enlightenment. But it does exercise different parts of the mind than does passively getting your information after someone else has digested it for you and reduced it to a palatable pulp.
Finally, now that the election is over it is time for all of us who voted for a change to uphold our end of the contract we signed with America and with President-Elect Obama. We need to stop gloating and start giving. We need to stop asking and start doing. Electing a new president isn’t going to magically fix what ails this country. He cannot do it alone. We all need to be involved. Write to your Congressional representatives (you can find out who they are at Project VoteSmart) and tell them what you want, and what you don’t want, in this new administration. Participate in the public forums on change.gov. Exercise your citizenship. I know I will.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a website called mydogmeg. One of the features was a sub-domain filled with links to technical sites. The layout was simple and effective, and when mydogmeg went off the air I grabbed a copy of the geek sub-domain from the Internet Archives. For a long time I did nothing with the page, but last year after moving to a new host I created my own geek sub-domain, and put a modified version up on my site.
While the layout is pleasing to me, I’ve always wanted to add drag-and-drop functionality to the blocks of links, something like the iGoogle home page where moving one widget causes the others to get out of the way. Thanks to a tip from JJ, I’ve updated the page using jQuery to do just that. You can go play with geek.zanshin.net to see for yourself. Click inside any of the boxes on the screen and drag to relocate.
I used two jQuery libraries to add the drag-and-drop functionality I wanted. The base jQuery library and the jQuery ui library. The feature that I wanted is called ‘sortable’ and it works against unordered lists. My page has four columns, called from left to right: left, leftCenter, rightCenter, and right. Using these ids the script looks like this:
/*
* geekjs.js 0.1
* Copyright (c) 2008 Mark Nichols (zanshin.net)
* 11 november 2008
*/
$(document).ready(function(){
// enable sortable on all columns
// this will add drag-and-drop functionality as well
$("#left").sortable({
connectWith: ["#leftCenter","#rightCenter","#right"]
});
$("#leftCenter").sortable({
connectWith: ["#left","rightCenter","#right"]
});
$("#rightCenter").sortable({
connectWith: ["#left","#leftCenter","#right"]
});
$("#right").sortable({
connectWith: ["#left","#leftCenter","rightCenter"]
});
});The HTML and CSS for the page implement each column as an unordered list. The bullet is suppressed, and the indent eliminated to save horizontal space. Each column is named through an ‘id’ tag, and each block of links is also named. Rather than repeat the source here I’ll let the curious among you view the page source to see how the lists are constructed.
With the page constructed, and the jQuery script in place it just works. Of course, the page has no persistence so any arrangement you make will be lost the next time you load the page. My next project will be to add a cookie so that your page arrangement will be saved from one visit to the next.
Last night we heard two speeches, a concession by Senator John McCain, and a victory speech by President-Elect Barack Obama. In reality I’m sure there were four speeches. A victory speech by Mr. McCain, and a concession by Mr. Obama in addition to the ones we heard.
Through watching West Wing, television fantasy to be sure, but illustrative, and reading about the speech President Nixon would have delivered had the Apollo Eleven astronauts met with disaster on the surface of the moon, I understand that the world often times presents the opposite outcome from what was planned. A President, or other public figure, needs to be prepared for either outcome. This means some time ago (days? weeks?) someone in each campaign was tasked with starting to put together a victory speech and also a concession speech. Certainly some details would be polished in the final hours before its presentation, but I think the body of the work would be in place well before the event.
In the case of President-Elect Obama, who writes much of his own material - he authored his two books, they weren’t ghost written - he must have been involved in the process of crafting both speeches. How difficult must it have been to shift focus from campaigning and focusing on winning, to preparing remarks to be made should the results have been different. The same holds true for Mr. McCain, may be more so. The drive and determination to keep going in the face of polls that weren’t favorable, must have made it extremely difficult to even consider drafting a concession speech.
And when it became apparent that his campaign was going to be successful, did Mr. Obama ceremoniously burn the concession speech? Or would that be tempting fate? Movies and books have made much of the superstitions in sports, particularly when a player or team is on a winning streak, do campaigns have the same kind of rites and rituals? Do Presidents?
This morning when I sat down to eat my breakfast I had to wake up the computer and refresh CNN and the New York Times, and FiveThirtyEight.com, just to make sure that what we experienced last night wasn’t a dream, that it wasn’t somehow a mistake that had been corrected overnight.
It’s not a mistake. And it wasn’t only a dream. It is a dream come true. America has a new President-Elect and a new direction, a direction toward hope, and change, and inclusion.
Eight years ago I was among those who were shocked, and then dismayed, and finally angered by the results of the election. Four years ago I was resigned and apathetic, it seemed that American’s wanted the rude, divisive, exclusionary vision that George W. Bush and the Republican party presented. For the past 20 months I have held deep inside myself a tiny lit candle called hope. For the past two months I have lived and breathed the polls and endorsements, the debates and speeches, and tried not to let my candle be blown out.
Yesterday morning I was proud and excited to cast my ballot. I felt like I was truly participating in something momentous. I believed that Senator Barack Obama would win the day, and that America would wake up today at the start of a new era. I hoped that it would be so.
I have always been proud to be an American, and I consider myself to be patriotic. However, I have been ashamed of my country’s policies and actions at home and abroad for several years now. I couldn’t, and still don’t, understand the need to substitute belligerence for intelligence, to replace compassion with disdain, to replace open democracy with secrecy, jingoism, fear, and anger. I was fearful that the character assassinations would stick, that the “power of nightmares” approach that had brought the Republicans to power would keep them there another four years.
That we have a new President-Elect this morning, who is the very antithesis of past eight years of abuse, gluttony, and venality, lifts my heart and gives me hope. The tiny candle I’ve been carrying for two years is now part of a large flame.
I am proud to have voted for Barack Obama, and prouder still that he will be the 44th President of the United States of America.
At about 6:55 am this morning I cast my ballot in the 2008 elections. The whole process took about 30~35 minutes, which is nothing compared to the lines in some states for early voting. I was only outside for about 5 minutes, and then the line moved indoors.
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Here are my notes, hastily taken on my Q Phone during my wait.
6:25 am - Arrived Vista Baptist Church. Line extends out the entrance on to their circle drive.
6:30 am - Only five minutes to get inside. Fortunately the weather is mild today so waiting outdoors wasn’t unpleasant at all.
6:40 am - Looks like only 7 or 8 voting stations. (Turns out there were only 6 electronic stations, and one paper ballot station.)
6:41 am - The voting stations are electronic, I was just handed a slip of paper explaining that the machine will “notify me” if I haven’t touched the screen for two minutes “in compliance with Federal voting system regulations.” Then you have 30 seconds to touch “resume” otherwise your activation card will be spit out and you have to start over.
Line is moving a bit faster now.
6:45 am - I’ve reached the table displaying the sample ballot.
6:48 am - My turn to register. No id check; just announce your name and sign the book.
Here are cell phone pictures from my summary page:
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And for my state level representative, this guy:
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6:58 am - Done. Got my sticker and I’m headed to work.
Regardless of your political leanings, or perhaps in-spite of them, you should go vote today.