children + flat-screen TV = expensive disaster waiting to happen

Yet manufacturers somehow put very soft screens on TV nowadays, instead of something more durable like glass. There are a few products out there for protecting your TV but I found them a little expensive. Instead of waiting for big toy-shaped dents in our new LCD, my solution was to get a sheet of acrylic at an art store, drill out flat slots, and attach it using long velcro strips which thread the slots.

A few details:

• Our 32 inch TV just happened to be about the dimensions of a 24″x36″ sheet, which at 1/8 inch was $20. Maybe a  quarter inch could stop a brick, but an eighth inch is enough to deflect most projectiles and keep peanut butter off the LCD surface.
• Long strips of Velcro are a few bucks at a hardware store. I wrapped it from the top and bottom around the back. The upper part sticks to the lower part, so there is no glue or anything on the TV itself. It has enough surface area to hold the acrylic sheet.
• Drilling the slits was a bit tricky and I admit I did a poor job of it — not perfectly flat, but a little bumpy. Maybe somebody has a better technique or tool for creating the slots.
• The acrylic sheet bows a little. But it is hard to tell from the front. It also gets a little staticky. To clean, I would take the whole thing off and wipe it. Wiping only the front seems to attract dust to the back because of static.
• As for glare, it has a glare when the TV is off, more than the matte finish of a typical LCD. But with the TV on, you can’t see the glare.

So far it has worked well and saved our TV from several bumps. Take a look:

You think I’m pedestrian and tacky? Guess the fuck what, Picasso. We don’t all have seventy-three weights of stick-up-my-ass Helvetica sitting on our seventeen-inch MacBook Pros.

….

Sorry I’m standing in the way of your minimalist Bauhaus-esque fascist snoozefest. Maybe sometime you should take off your black turtleneck, stop compulsively adjusting your Tumblr theme, and lighten the fuck up for once.

….

People love me. Why? Because I’m fun. I’m the life of the party. I bring levity to any situation. Need to soften the blow of a harsh message about restroom etiquette? SLAM. There I am. Need to spice up the directions to your graduation party? WHAM.

…

While Avenir is practicing the clarinet, I’m shredding “Reign In Blood” on my double-necked Stratocaster. While Univers is refilling his allergy prescriptions, I’m racing my tricked-out, nitrous-laden Honda Civic against Tokyo gangsters who’ll kill me if I don’t cross the finish line first.

Funny but not exactly true.

Unconventional? Perhaps. But give it a try. Students of Japanese language will certainly find it useful.

(Hint: The top page is randomized, so if you bookmark it or set it as the default browser page, you’ll get some new kanji each day)

Now we’re going to add all sorts of “semantic” items like nav, header, article, footer, which will absolutely not be compatible with older browsers.  (This ensures that  it will take years before it is considered “safe” to use. Pages such as this break in browsers as new as IE8!)  How exactly is this an improvement upon existing use of DIVs with class and id? You can use your DIV in any way you wish to accomplish all of these things. If a standard nomenclature was needed (like Dublin Core), that could have been standardized, as in <div id=”nav”> <div id=”header”> and so on. This works today.

The user will never see this anyway, and search engines could easily understand the semantic nature of these divs, since just about everyone uses the same names! (That was supposedly the basis of the research proposing these — they were drawn from he most commonly used div names) Google could easily — today — treat anything with an ID or class of “nav” as a navigation. Heck, it probably already does. So where’s the benefit for these major changes to the most widely-used document standard in the world? I’m not seeing anything that couldn’t have been achieved in other ways.

A while back, A List Apart had some suggestions for adding extensibility while preserving backward compatibility using attributes. (Ex: <div structure="header">) These were duly ignored. But the introduction is worth repeating:

I’m going to make a bold prediction. Long after you and I are gone, HTML will still be around. Not just in billions of archived pages from our era, but as a living, breathing entity. Too much effort, energy, and investment has gone into developing the web’s tools, protocols, and platforms for it to be abandoned lightly, if indeed at all.

Let’s stop to consider our responsibility. By an accident of history, we are associated with the development of an important tool our civilization will use to communicate for decades to come. So, when we turn our minds, idly or in earnest, to improving HTML, we must understand just how far-reaching the ramifications of today’s decisions may be.

This also seems a step back to the bad old days of font tags, b, i, etc. These were not only presentational, they were also not extensible or flexible. Class and ID enable great flexibility, so that new techniques can be developed and sites can be changed easily from a central style sheet. Now we are back to an array of one-trick ponies that are hard-coded into the HTML. And we will add more in coming years, which will also break compatibility.

Headings and sections

And then there’s those sections:

<section>
  <h1>Level 1</h1>
  <section>
    <h1>Level 2</h1>
    <section>
      <h1>Level 3</h1>
    </section>
  </section>
</section>

Maybe I am missing something, but the current usage of h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and their child paragraphs are equally structural, giving clear hierarchy. Is it really better to only use h1′s in nested sections, rather than the less verbose use of numbered headings?:

<h1>Level 1</h1>
<p>Level 1 content</p>
   <h2>Level 2</h1>
   <p>Level 2 content</p>
      <h3>Level 3</h1>
      <p>Level 3 content</p>

Even the video element, which I welcome, might be messy: Is it clear that everyone will switch to OGG or Vorbis or whatever the spec says? All we need now is Microsoft and Apple strong-arming everyone to push their video formats as the standard. Isn’t this why Flash video took off in the first place — because it bypassed the OS makers video format wars?

So, is HTML 5.0 a consequence of the latest round of browser wars? Perhaps the rush to beat the competition has pushed Firefox, and soon the others, to rush into HTML 5.0 without adequate thought.

Also, is this a case of browser and OS makers strong-arming the W3C into making HTML a friendlier place for their web apps, rather than the ideal that the users, coders and designers would have wanted?

Many of the fixes in HTML 5 seem to solve non-problems. It is also not future-proof or extensible. In 5 or 10 years, they will need to add entirely new elements, and remove some older ones. So we are stuck with never have a truly extensible standard that is backward and forward compatible.

I’m not against progress, but I think they could have done better than this.

* My older theme wasn’t as “widget-ready” as I had hoped when I added a ReCAPTCHA plugin for comments.

Perhaps that is why this is so hard to read. Technically, it’s not. It’s just unpleasant enough that it feels hard to read.*

* Hey, is any of that stuff peer-reviewed, any way?

• Yearly folders: 2009, 2010 …
• Monthly folders inside of those
• Files named: YYYY-MM-DD — Year-Month-Date. This sorts automaticvally under Mac and PC file systems, and avoids the meaningless IMG_0001 filenames that come off the camera.You can use some free tools to set the filename automatically using the EXIF data (some metadata hidden inside the photo which records the date and other details when the photo was taken). Plus, if the photo is emailed or misplaced, or pulled off a DVD archive, it is immediately clear where it belongs.

As a bonus, if you want finer grained sorting, you can name them YYY-MM-DD HHMMSS — yes, that’s right, Year-Month-Date Hour-Minute-Second. I find this works well if I have taken photos of an event, and somebody sends me their shots of the same event. If the dates are correct, they will sort correclty, given you sort of a multidimensional view of the action. Colons between the HHMMSS would be best but are not allowed in names on most computers. (Adding dashes would make it look like a date)

(To take it to the extreme, you could use: YYYY-MM-DD HHMMSS NNNN. Some photographers like to keep the four digit number that their camera appends for cataloguingreasons and if they shoot bursts of multiple  photos per second. I haven’t found this necessary)

Why this date format? One thing I quickly realized, living abroad in Japan and Germany, was that there are numerous arbitray date formats which are not compatible and are confusing. The YYYY-MM-DD (optional HH-MM-SS) format is the best solution. The year at the beginning tells you you are not working with the America MM/DD/YYYY (or the European DD.MM.YYYY) style. This is also an international standard, ISO 8601, by the way.  More people (and companies) should use it. There’s no good reason to have every August sort together in a folder (08-2007, 08-2008, 08-2009…) or to have such confusion that airlines have to type out words for months (18-JUL-2009) to avoid ambiguity. But I digress.

If you need to add a title or label to a photo, I recommend adding it after the date, not before, or it won’t sort correctly: YYYY-MM-DD HHMMSS – Birthday party.jpg

Finally, these filenames are helpful for keeping every photo uniquely identifiable, but it is not sufficient. You really need to tag photos wih keywords (IPTC to be precise). You can do this with some free software like Picasa or iPhoto. The filename is more like a backup and organizer, while the keywords enable searchability. Together, you basically have a bullet-proof system.

To sum up, here’s the file system, including the folders:

YYYY/MM/YYYY-MM-DD HHMMSS – Filename.jpg

And here’s what a photo from the Fourth of July, at 8pm sharp, this year would look like under this system:

2009/07/2009-07-04 200000 – Fireworks.jpg

Arial is everywhere. If you don’t know what it is, you don’t use a modern personal computer. Arial is a font that is familiar to anyone who uses Microsoft products, whether on a PC or a Mac. It has spread like a virus through the typographic landscape and illustrates the pervasiveness of Microsoft’s influence in the world.

And later:

When Microsoft made TrueType the standard font format for Windows 3.1, they opted to go with Arial rather than Helvetica, probably because it was cheaper and they knew most people wouldn’t know (or even care about) the difference. … Of course, Windows 3.1 was a big hit. Thus, Arial is now everywhere, a side effect of Windows’ success, born out of the desire to avoid paying license fees.

Apparently the only virtues Arial possesses are

1. It is similar to Helvetica
2. It is virtually free

Arial is now a symbol of laziness and mediocrity. But Microsoft is moving on with a new generation of fonts, the C’s: Calibri, Cambria, and so forth. These fonts are better than Arial, but the big problem is they are not licensed for Mac, Linux and other OS’. This means that Arial will persist as a core web font whether we like it or not, since the critera for a web font is the lowest common denominator — ie. fonts that every machine has standard. (See CodeStyle’s survey of web fonts or a Visibone sample card)

I end with a plea: Are there really no type foundries out there that will do the world a favor and offer, for free, a choice sans serif font to Microsoft and Apple so as to settle the petty rivalry over fonts which has crippled web typography?

From HF&J’s blog:

…One thing we can say as type designers is that Gotham isn’t pretending to be anything it’s not, which makes it an unusual and refreshing choice for a campaign. Political typefaces have a way of being chosen because they underscore (or imagine) some specific aspect of a candidate, working hard to convey “traditional values” or “strength and vigilance,” or any number of graspable populist notions. The only thing Gotham works hard at is being Gotham.

…none of these familiar approaches can explain the utterly confounding typographic dress chosen by Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Hillary’s snooze of a serif might have come off a heart-healthy cereal box, or a mildly embarrassing over-the-counter ointment; if you’re feeling generous you might associate it with a Board of Ed circular, or an obscure academic journal. But Senator McCain’s typeface is positively mystifying: after three decades signifying a very down-market notion of luxe, this particular sans serif has settled into being the font of choice for the hygiene aisle.