The last few weeks I’ve been pretty depressed. No particular reason, just one of those things. At those times I really crawl into a shell. But the weekend was absolutely fabulous and I see myself bouncing out of it fairly fast.
Playing with CSS
I really only started to get heavy into CSS a few months ago. I mean, I new what it was and I knew that it could be powerful, and I was using it… but I wasn’t really using it. My use basically consisted of stripping out the inline styles and actually applying classes to things instead.
It was a few months ago that I stumbled upon Dave Shea’s csszengarden. It absolutely blew me away how many widely different concepts could erupt from one set of markup. I was truly bitten by the bug, and spent one long weekend doing what ended being a relatively poor entry. It has no artistic concept behind it – a monotone blue with meaningless abstract graphics that was completely broken in IE, and only worked in other browsers some of the time. But I undertook the exercise for the purpose of learning and expanding my abilities, and on that front I scored big.
Well I checked my usage stats today (first time in a while) and immediately noticed a huge jump in hits – almost double the normal amount. After closer inspection, I saw that my stylesheet was being pulled on a regular basis from the zen garden site. I took a peak over at csszengarden and sure enough, my entry was there in the Conceptual Designs section. It was very nice of Dave to put it there, as broken as it was – when I submitted my entry, I stated that I didn’t think the entry was ready, but that I was looking for good feedback. You can view the submission here
Some Fodder for the Mind
I finally got to the bookstore over the weekend to pick up some things that I’ve been meaning to read for a long time.
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These new books are:
- Coder to Developer by Mark Gunderloy
- More Eric Meyer on CSS by Eric Meyer
- Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman
I was a bit dissappointed by Coder to Developer. I was completely drawn into the book after reading the forward by Joel Spolsky. That’s not to say that it wasn’t a good book. I just didn’t fit at all into its intended audience. For one thing, I’ve been project managing web applications for a very large corporation for over 3 years now. We have official methodologies from the PMI crammed down our throats on a regular basis. These methodologies are good for building skyscrapers, or even for very large software development projects, but they are way overboard for the small Intranet applications for which I’m in charge. I kind of hoped that this book would shed some new light on things, but it did little more than re-affirm some habits and methods that I’d previously developed on my own.
That was for the chapters that I actually read. There were whole chapters I got to skip. I think the book might better be titled “.NET Coder to .NET Developer”. I completely understand the premise of the book, that Gunderloy is going to work us through his methodology by example, and that his example happens to be a nifty little .NET application. But for the rest of the developers out there in the world, I don’t think there’s much use for whole chapters on how to set up your .NET specific IDE. I really thought it was a bit of a shame… had the author really tried to generalize some things a little more I think it would have made a more profound impact on a broader reader base.
That said, the book was extremely well written. I have already recommended it to several of my co-workers who do know .NET and will definitely benefit from its teachings. I was tempted to give my copy away… but I’ll let them buy it and throw a few more cents toward the author.
I haven’t cracked the other two books as of yet, but I look forward to doing so, and I will post my thoughts about them as I finish them.
Got Some New Wheels
On Saturday, my wife and I resumed our search for a convertible to toot around in on the weekends. We visited our favorite salesperson Janet Krivulka at the Great Britains to look around the lot for a bit. Janet sold us our Jaguar X-type last year, and is now in charge of their internet sales department. I was fully expecting to not purchase a car. However, they had a very nice 1999 Saab 9-3 convertible there with fairly low mileage and a decent price. We decided to take it out for a test drive, and I was pleasantly suprised by it. That car handles extremely well, and it has a whole lot more power than my Protege5. To make a long story short, Sunday was a beautiful day, and we spent most of it cruising around with the top down.
Sucked Playing Golf
Last Friday I played a round of golf for the first time in 4 years (and my 4th time ever). I averaged a 7.6 on a par 3 course! But it was a low pressure match with one of my co-workers, who gave me his old set of left-handed clubs afterwards, so it was all good. I got some much needed exercise, and some sun too. The funniest part about the whole outing was on the 16th hole when I noticed that his left hand was in front of his right hand. I didn’t have the courage to correct my grip that far into the game – for fear of shanking one off into the next fairway. So yesterday I went to this little driving range, got a small bucket of balls, and corrected my grip. I will do much better next time we play. I only hope that’s not 4 years from now!
