Throughout high school and even into college I really liked english classes, I liked the writing and creativity. The construction of a well formed document with flow and coherence.
I guess that is why I started a blog, it has been an on and off relationship for a while since high school and when motivated my thoughts can come flowing out.
Its like programming, after some well thought out procedures and operations does the flow of the program work, function correctly and look beautiful.
One of my new years resolutions is to get back into writing, I really enjoy it and it needs to become a large part of my life. Now working with some really phenomenal writers I see where I am lacking and really need to get back in the game.
Its easy as a programmer to just say “Im a programmer, it doesn’t matter if i spell things correct as long as they are consistent”. That has been the mentality at work for a while now and it really doesn’t help anyone since misspellings often fall through the cracks and it makes everyone look unprofessional.
My biggest issue is using larger or obscure words since working on the web and dumbing everything down to fifth grade level its hard to get back to reality and write good copy where every word counts.
There is a lot of things I am passionate about and web standards and accessibility is one of them. Working the university environment as really inspired me to take my knowledge and teach others.
Although standing up, teaching and seeing everyones reaction when they get it is great I would love to expand my reach beyond the people I know. I will be speaking at a conference in March about publishing and promoting events online.
A large part of my job is creating tools for people to use and teaching them how to take advantage of them. Although we are part of a university environment the tools we create are meant to be used outside since marketing has to reach external audiences.
And seeing more of the people I follow online writing books and speaking at large venues about their passions really inspires me to write a book and help everyone curious about how pulling information together in a decentralized environment. Getting the tools built, getting peoples buy in and keeping users using the system for their and the whole communities advantage.
More to come later on book ideas and more frequent updates due to my New Years resolution.
Merry Christmas to all! The world revolves around great people with great intentions. Don’t forget to give what you can and make things a little better for someone else. There is a greater good happening here and you’re in it.
Quality doesn’t happen by accident. Its like brain age, you always suck at first then you get better with time, they don’t let you start out as an all star.
Without inspiration nothing gets done, nothing good at least. And although good things are subjective its easy to notice when you see them.
My inspiration is talks, I love listening to them, reading slides and see what people are working on. Their passion inspires me, their love for their projects and leading edge work makes me want to further my work. Its not to compete with them its just their pure passion they are pouring out to the crowd makes me inspired to pour my passion into my work and hopefully be able to present my work to an interested crowd.
Secondly inspiring blog posts really get me going and ready to work on something that will change the world. I have a philosophy that if something you are working on will not change the world your time as a living thinking human is being wasted, might sound a little harsh but i am not an absolutist. Of course things like shopping or cleaning are not what I am talking about but all interactions with people and work. The thought of expanding the human race always needs to be a motivating factor.
We are all human, we all have the same goal in mind, lets not loose sight of that.
So I decided it was time to update the look of my site. I knew I needed more room for content, code snippets just don’t fit in 300 pixels. This update was primarily inspired by my recent decision to move from Palm to Blackberry.
Back to basics, getting rid of the clutter and flare, my site is not here to sell a product but instead teach ideas and present research. One thing the Blackberry does that Palm lacks is the back to basics text driven menus and single application screen and single method of traversing the phone.
The Palm reminds me of Java, over the years it has grown to try to fit everyones needs without realigning or saying no to features which only fit one category of customer. Clunky interfaces and random restarts often happen because of the lack of integration.
In addition to the actual functionality improvements the screen on the BB is a tiny bit smaller but RIM has way better font support and smoothing so making the text quite small increases the amount of text on the screen by 25% over the Palm. I didn’t make my text size any smaller but what I did was increase the space for each entry and went to a fully em controlled layout for more flexibility.
Realigning the content with the right column in my mind was the best decision of the realign, before all my “personal” data was scattered at the top, left and bottom. I decided to concentrate it all on the right column to a clear separation from the article and personal items.
Another thing that bothered me about SimpleLog is that it did not natively validate. The Archives and Search page had some terrible nesting issues. Diving into the core code I changed these to produce a better POSH structured site. Before I was experimenting with the Blueprint CSS framework, well lets just say it was thrown out the window in this version, way too much overhead and not enough benefit.
The design will transform as time goes on as all things but as of right now straightforward is in and I am sticking to it.
Throughout high school and even into college I really liked english classes, I liked the writing and creativity. The construction of a well formed document with flow and coherence.
