monkinetic weblog | redmonk.net

Looking back at our fresh starts & modest changes:

Throughout this month, a wonderful quote from Walden has been turning over in my head:

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives.

So just as, in this instance, new clothes can be seen as a fancy uniform that won’t produce in its wearer the skills, mind, or experience for their intended vocation, our new year’s resolutions usually leave us feeling like a chump and a failure.

In thinking about my own position in life and work, I actually came to a similar conclusion about myself, before reading this post. But of course, Thoreau says it much better than I could have.

I’m a real R.E.M. junkie. I recently got a bunch of iTMS money, and went a bit of a binge: my two best purchases were R.E.M.’s In Time, and their iTunes Originals collection. I also bought several R.E.M. music videos (Drive, Radio Song, Leaving New York, Near Wild Heaven, Animal, and Find The River). Wooo!

OMG. Why did I not see this before? OnLife.

No time to write more, but if you like OnLife and spend time in VoodooPad, I created a scriptlet for VoodooPad. Unzip and put the files into ~/Library/Application Support/OnLife/Scriptlets/. Restart OnLife to see the new source in your list.

Update 01/23/2006: I’ve put up a page for my OnLife hacks. Enjoy.

I was looking for some information discussing the intersection of extreme programming (which our development team is adopting) and user experience, and I ran across this selection (in Google’s book search) from Extreme Programming for Web Projects (by Doug Wallace, Isobel Raggett, and Joel Aufgang).

Get your graphic designers off Macintoshes! We are big Mac fans and have a great deal of respect for the operating system (OS), but it is a fact of life that most Web team [sic] use Windows. Furthermore, Macs are brighter than PCs. So many times we have seen a design created and shown to a customer on a Mac and then found that it was too dark for the general audience, which is 95 percent Windows users. It pains us to say it, but every Web development tool that we have seen is either not available for Mac or has a perfectly good equivalent on Windows. Photoshop and Illustrator are identical on both platforms. The only role with an argument for having a Mac is the tester and then only if the customer has selected to support the platform.

I’m curious as to what folks think of this. In a discipline which tries to include a worker-focused environment (scroll down to “ExtremeEnvironment”) I think that the designer should be able to use the hardware and software that makes him/her the most productive (and happiest).

To the writer’s statements about software and tools not being available for the Mac (”every Web development tool that we have seen is either not available for Mac or has a perfectly good equivalent on Windows”) I would say: turn it around. Every development tool I’ve needed has either been available for the Mac or has had a perfectly good — and in this designer’s eyes , better — equivalent.

As to the comments about designs having to work on the appropriate platform; these are givens - any designer worth their salt will be doing this anyway. We’ve known about gamma issues since forever and know how to avoid these pitfalls.

What do you guys think? Does running a Mac spoil the XPishness of your team? (He asked, expecting the answer no.)

I’m no sure how old this is, but it’s a valuable resource. The Font Guide For Webmasters gives a list of some of the fonts which are available on the Mac and on Windows, and gieves some tips on usage in CSS.

via eHub: Who thought that calling a webservice gookbox was a good idea? I mean, I’m only a GenXer, and I seem to remember that “gook” is a fairly vulgar slang term (IIRC) for Asian (see WordNet).

|Jodi| and I took the munchkin on her first real hiking trip today, to the Superstition mountains, on Peralta Trail (which I also wrote about here). Adelina did great. She loved the mountains, and kept wanting to go to the top of various peaks we saw. Then she found a stick - nay, a Stick - and had fun stopping and writing letters in the sand, or drawing smiley faces. What a girl! She was beat by the end of the hike, but much fun was had by all. Pics now in the gallery.