And Curiouser

Lindsay had her baby — Briony — yesterday morning. It feels like I’m officially an uncle now, almost like there was only half a baby before (that is, Jessie’s baby, Chloe). It makes sense, I guess; the two events were so similar and intertwined that it almost feels like a single instance. Caitlin couldn’t see Briony, unfortunately. She came down with a bad case of laryngitis this week, which means she can’t be around the babies (or my mom for that matter, who just started radiation this last week). She stayed back at my apartment while I went to the hospital, which felt pretty weird. She’s been such an important part of everything for quite a while now, and it felt weird not having her there. But that’s a good sign, right? I took some pictures for her. I know it’s not as good as being there in person, but at least it was something. Anyway, if all goes well we’ll have a good seventy years to heckle Chloe and Briony.

It had never occurred to me before this very moment that at some point I’m going to be sixty-five and Briony and Chloe will be forty. They’re potentially going to be around for three-quarters of my life. Suddenly, it’s become a lot easier to think of them as family. I like it when thoughts like that catch me off guard.

Note to self: get off lazy butt and finish writing “After the End”. I think the only thing holding me back from spitting out the last page is fear that everyone will hate it. That’s a fear I need to get over, though — this was written for me, and I, as the audience, love it immensely. I know it’s weird.

Oh, and this weekend I was hit by a bus. That is, my car was hit by a bus, while I was in it. Good times.

Randoms:

• Why I Copyfight, by Cory Doctorow. A fantastic piece on why we should care about the copyright battle, written by the figurehead for the movement. This is an issue that I’ve become really passionate about over the last few years (and how could I not, as someone who works in creative media?).
• As part of my continued rediscovery of music I loved in high school: Gorecki, by the group Lamb (Like it? You can download it here). Trip-hop is the one music genre that I’d be more than happy to see make a comeback.
• XKCD contemplates eternity with awesome results.
• It came out that Focus on the Family is about to see major layoffs. Apparently, painting Obama as a child pornographer and homosexuals as the children of Satan doesn’t bring in as much money as it used to.

I wrote this on another site in response to people advocating the use of table-based layouts on the web.

I think that semantic web development is an important aspiration, regardless of W3C recommendations, and using table-based layouts is in direct conflict with that goal. CSS is necessary for separating content from presentation, and separating content from presentation is important for accessibility, SEO, aggregation, copy editing… the list goes on. The internet is no longer about presenting a single piece of content a single way. It’s about mobile browsers, feeds and aggregators, embeded information — it’s about the content. For years we tied the content directly to the presentation, and table-based layouts grew out of that. But the content is separate now. It stands on its own. And we should be approaching layout design as crafting one way in which that content is presented, rather than being part of the content itself.

I know a lot of people are staring at this comment with wide eyes, saying “… But it’s just a little site that I was paid $50 by my uncle for. Why should I care about semantic design?”

It’s simple. It’s not that people should care about semantic design. It’s that shoehorning presentation into content isn’t something that we should be doing, at all. Mashing them together shouldn’t be an option. Semantic design is just how things should be done.

We’re not there, yet. HTML and CSS still haven’t quite come of age, and inevitably presentation will still leak into content. But we shouldn’t be advocating it. We shouldn’t tell people to mash their content and presentation together because it’s “easier”, because it’s really not. It’s just different. And, in my opinion, wrong.

Godwin’s Law (Mike Godwin, 1990)
“As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”

The Greater Internet F**kwad Theory (John Gabriel, 2004)
"Normal person + Anonymity + Audience = Total f**kwad."

Obama just won the US election. People decided to vote for hope over fear, freedom over constraint, tolerance over hate. The most despised President in US history is no more.

California’s Proposition 8 just passed, which removes the rights given to homosexual couples. Two steps forward, one step back.

Michael Crichton died today. Regardless of your opinion of him as an author, he was one of the reasons I started writing. It’s a tremendous loss.

My younger sister has been in various stages of labour for the last thirty hours. “Anxious” doesn’t begin to describe it.

My older sister was due a couple days ago, now.

And life continues unabated.

You know this book is going to be awesome. You knew that before you even read the back of the book. How did you know? Because of the cover. We didn’t hide anything — you know that there’s a guy named Johnny, and that he’s awesome. Also, there are going to be dinosaurs. And explosions? Almost guaranteed. ‘There is no way this book could suck,’ you’re telling yourself, and you’re right. The worst-case scenario is that this is going to be some story about an average teen who ends up saving the world. Cliché to be sure, but still awesome. But guess what? We’re not going to bore you with a story about some everyman overcoming the odds. In most stories, heroes are made – not born. Johnny Awesome was not such a hero. Johnny Awesome was awesome from the start.

Even so, I’d be lying if I told you that awesomeness radiated from him at birth. In fact, it took a while for those around Johnny to discover how noteworthy he really was. The reason for this was simple: Johnny found the world around him so trivial that he shied away from the normal pursuits of children. It was years before he spoke his first words (a point we’ll come back to shortly). His kindergarten teacher was actually convinced that Johnny was a fairly daft child. She would hold up two cards, one red and one blue, and ask Johnny to point at the red card. He would sit there quietly, starting intently at the cards. The question posed seemed simple enough, but Johnny saw the trick within: a red card only appeared red because of the reflected light. In short, the red card wasn’t red at all — it was a rejection of red. Of course, if he pointed at the blue card, his teacher would simply pass it off as an incorrect answer without giving Johnny a chance to explain his logic. So, he simply sat in silence, his eyes locked on the cards.

But back to the awesome cover. Just look at that. Rocket launchers, dinosaurs, sunglasses… ‘That’s going to make an awesome climax,’ I bet you’re thinking. And you’re right, that would make an awesome climax to an awesome book. This book, however, is so much more than that. This books starts with the rocket launchers and dinosaurs, and goes up from there. That’s right — at this very moment, Johnny is staring down a T-Rex, rocket launcher in hand, sunglasses glinting in the light of the volcano.