Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Graphic Design for Web Developers
March 04, 2011

Berta and I were talking a bit when she got home from work today about how it would be neat to team up with a designer and spew out great new web sites. I mentioned to her how with many of the designers I’ve worked with, you get about 5 designs in, and then the designs start to look the same, or there’s a style between them that’s very similar, then making the sites look very similar themselves.

To me, that was a clue to switch designers every few projects, just to keep things fresh. To her, it was a clue that a developer could clutch a design theme and run with it and get away with doing design too, an insight I hadn’t had before. And this all got me thinking about how many times I’ve urged web designer friends to produce some kind of post or video or course that explains the basics of design to developers. But nobody has stepped up.

The New Chain Letter
March 03, 2011

Yesterday, someone who I was friends with in high school, but wasn’t really “friends” with, asked everyone to repost something about curing multiple sclerosis in their statuses. I can appreciate the sentiment. Who doesn’t want to cure these horrible afflictions? But this is not how you do it.

This is the same problem I had with Neil Gaiman and the “save the libraries” campaign. Ok, sure, it’s great that you want to save the libraries. Who doesn’t? But just tweeting about it doesn’t get the library saved.

Programming Ban
March 02, 2011

I’m curious about what will come out of the iPad 2 event from Apple that is supposed to happen today. With the market for tablets opening up, it’s just a matter of time until someone releases a more functional tablet than the iPad that Apple provides. I say this having read about the reason that the iPad is so successful - Apple’s ability to offer the device for a low price. But I think that the iPad is still just a bit deficient in a particular area.

Don’t get me wrong, I use the iPad very often. It’s not deficient to the point of being unusable. I’m using to write this post right now, in fact. With a bluetooth keyboard, the iPad is almost a computer. And that’s the problem - “almost”.

Scheduling Insanity
March 01, 2011

I have some pity for families who have kids that are sports players, and I suspect that as our kids get older we’ll start sharing some more of their issues. We’ve started Riley at a karate (technically Kenpo) school that is nearby to his after school daycare. Yesterday was an interesting day, running back and forth between places, trying to get the information needed to sign him up properly. I spoke briefly with the woman at the desk there about how insane our schedules have become, running the kids to their various activities.

Abby has Orchestra and Chorus on Wednesdays and Thursdays, so Berta runs her to school early on those days. Riley’s half-day kindergarten is a royal pain – I’m not sure how other parents deal with it and why the school district doesn’t just switch to full-day. But on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we send Riley to his after-school daycare, and on Tuesday and Thursday I pick him up and bring him home where Nana watches him. On those days he has after-school daycare, the karate school busses him from daycare to their location for the hour lesson and then returns him to the school, where Berta eventually picks him up on her way home. Sometime during all of that, Abby comes home from school on the bus, where I have to be home to wait for her. All of this is subject to the Girl Scout schedule, which often changes how things work on Fridays, and to Nana’s schedule, which includes occasional doctor visits and art lessons that make it impossible for me to be out at meetings past 5pm (which might not be when the meeting is scheduled, but would include travel time home from the city or elsewhere).

Keeping Kindergarten
February 18, 2011

Riley’s been concerned lately with our too-easy dismissal of his creative works from school. Every day, he comes home with one or two, sometimes more, creations that he has constructed in kindergarten. Granted, they’re not all masterpieces - some are just assignments that are colored in with blanks filled out using the right letters of numbers. Others, though, are nice works of art for a 6-year-old. A recent project that included a double rainbow, a unicorn, a castle, and a dragon is certainly the stuff of keepsake.

But how much of this should we keep? I think this is a similar question to the one skippy presents about keepsake books. I’m not sure that Riley’s formative scribblings are going to be something he’s going to want to show to his kids, but is still begs the question, how do we decide which of the things are going to turn out to be important to him when he grows up?