May 13, 2009

Nothing to Do

Things still to do ...

• work on advanced features and clean up for sherryk.com
• work on the header for a super-secret awesome blog concept (which was not my idea, but wish that it both had been and that I had time to help admin it)
• take a logo design pencil sketch or two for the Hugo Award and do them up in Illustrator - preferably before the deadline
• build the new entertainment center
• take everything out of old entertainment center, strew it all across futon & living room
• remove old entertainment center
• finish ripping out living room carpet which has been under entertainment center for 5 years
• pull up carpet tacking along wall behind old entertainment center
• put everything on new entertainment center - find new homes for many things
• find a new place to put Twofish, Bluefish, my betta
• hold the traditional sea burial for Flash, the red betta, who I'm pretty certain is now dead and will certainly be dead by the time I get home tonight
• find a dentist & get tooth fixed
• find a new family doctor
• create wedding invitations for my cousin
• create 2 twitter avatars for friends
• get stamps
• tutor refugee kid
• redesign Red Monkey - as per sketch I did umm, ages ago
• redesign CoyoteThunder.com homepage
• oh hell, redesign every fricking section of CoyoteThunder
• draw Grandma a get well card ... then a birthday card
• finish the choir tracks
• design the CD

And somewhere in there I should probably get some sleep. And write meaningful blog posts. And ... oh hell, time to go to work now ....

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:42 AM | Comments (0) | Blog | Stumble

April 30, 2009

Poseidon and the Bitter Bug

The first song I heard by Indigo Girls was, like most folks my age, "Closer to Fine." And I have to say, I really, really liked it. It was infectious, it was fun ... and unlike a lot of "pop" music, it asked you to think a bit, too. While the music, the beat, the progression of notes all can sweep me away, the music that I enjoy the most is music that makes me both feel and think. Every Indigo Girls album from Strange Fire all the way through Poseidon and the Bitter Bug has more songs which make me think & feel than songs that don't. The fact that I have always enjoyed the way Amy and Emily's voices blend and the type of music they coax from their guitars, mandolins and even the banjo (and we all know how much I adore the banjo) ... and the way that they've grown as musicians, adding drums, orchestra (and even *gasp* electric guitars at times) have always remained amazing to me.

There are bands that I once loved, but which grew in a different direction than I did. Best example is U2 - I haven't liked anything they've done since Rattle & Hum - and I adored pretty much everything they'd done up to that point. There's nothing wrong with the music they've done since then, I certainly don't think they're a horrible band now or anything. But I adored the musical direction they took in Rattle & Hum and simply haven't been as interested in their direction since then.

REM is another band where I had to have everything they'd done once I discovered them ... but somewhere around Monster, I stopped buying CDs. I'm not sure why, but the intense connection I'd once had with their music just ... faded.

Indigo Girls, on the other hand, have grown as I've grown and apparently we're still growing in similar directions. I admit, I was frustrated with their frustrations with a big name label and I enjoyed the risks they took in their music and their ever-evolving sound (which nonetheless always remained uniquely identifiable as Indigo Girls) and worried that the record label would try to force them to make only clones of "Closer to Fine." So, I was very curious to see what would happen once they broke away from the big label.

Poseidon and the Bitter Bug came out a month ago and somehow I managed to not notice that until this past week. Interestingly enough, they released a double set - one disc as a "studio" album and the other as an acoustic album.

I find it interesting that the first review I read of the CD complained about the "over-production" of some of their previous albums - I assume the reviewer was thinking of Swamp Ophelia, for example. For me, I found the progression from Strange Fire (their first CD) through Poseidon and the Bitter Bug to be one of constantly growing musically. No album was some odd re-invention of what it meant to be Indigo Girls, but instead was an outgrowth of what had gone before. I found it interesting when their music took on new depth with new arrangements and new instruments added to the mix. This reviewer (I'm afraid I didn't save the link, sorry) enjoyed the acoustic version of the album more than the "studio" version.

And here's where I think Amy & Emily were simply brilliant in releasing this dual album. There are plenty of fans who prefer the simplicity of two voices and a couple of acoustic instruments. A kind of campfire, back to the roots movement. There are some folks who are sick to death of a voice and guitar and that's all there is. I don't quite fall into either category (shocker, I know). But I think it was brilliant of Indigo Girls to both continue to explore their music the way they want to - and to also give that segment of acoustic fans who've been with them since the Uptown Lounge (and earlier!) what they loved in the first place.

As for specific songs, once again, I'm going to have to listen to the whole CD in a place where I can concentrate and read the lyrics along with them. They always make me think. I have yet to get an album of theirs where I don't want to sit with the lyrics and get lost in the music and what they're saying (both lyrically and musically) - this CD is no different in that regard.

From my superficial listen at work yesterday, the songs that have particularly caught my attention are "Sugar Tongue," which wasn't at all what I expected - though I expect that to change again when I can really listen with the lyrics - "I'll Change," "Ghost of the Gang" and most especially, "True Romantic."

Let me tell you, I thought on first listen that Amy had actually swiped Radiohead's "Creep" with "True Romantic." And I'm not the only one who's made that connection. However, when I listened to "Creep" and "True Romantic" back to back - they're not the same song at all. (And, to be honest, I'd be beyond SHOCKED if either of the Indigo Girls actually swiped a song. It's just not who they are.) What amazes me is that as much as I adore "Creep," I think that "True Romantic" goes even further - it's an even better song. I would guess that it's a kind of riff off of "Creep," kind of an extension of it. Of course, I still need to sit down with the lyrics and really study it.

The weird thing, though, is that I have this odd tendency to hear lyrics that are not there. For example, in "Sounds of Silence" by Simon & Garfunkel, I can clearly "hear" a space in that song for the words "fuck you." The words are not there, I'm not physically hearing them, don't worry. But I can hear the intention of them. I've done this a few times with Indigo Girls songs as well, including some alternate lyrics to "touch me fall" that are rather ... umm ... racy. (And then I found out that there were some alternate, private lyrics to that song that were rather close to what I "heard.") For "True Romantic" I keep hearing "True Believer." Dunno why, I've got to make some time to listen to this CD more carefully!!

At any rate, I think the CD is well worth the money and I love the fact that they added an Acoustic Sessions disc as well.

I fully expect this CD, like all of their others, to grow on me the more I listen to it. And I'm constantly amazed at how they grow as people, as lyricists, as musicians - and that we seem to be growing in the same directions.

And now, I'm late for work ....

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:05 AM | Comments (1) | Blog | Storytelling: She was, of course, supposed to be sleeping. | Stumble

March 30, 2009

Just Another Word

We have become a lazy people.

I am not speaking about bloggers. I am not speaking about the U.S. Or the U.K. or Canada.

I'm speaking about a good portion of the Western world.

Chances are this is not really a new thing. I probably shouldn't have said "become" a lazy people as I'm fairly certain this is not a new trend by any means.

I think, however, that with the increased emphasis on the concepts of "freedom" and "democracy," we've perverted those terms into something meaning "I have the freedom to do whatever I want to do." We seem to have lost sight that freedom is a responsibility not to ourselves to make ourselves as happy as possible, but a responsibility to build a community.

Naturally, I'm not talking about everyone, and of course, it's difficult to talk in generalities because there are always exceptions. I'm one of those people who as soon as I hear a declarative "This is the way a thing is," I'm looking for the exception to prove that sentence is not fully true. Oppositional, I suppose. So I'm going to admit up front this is not true for every single person nor even every country in the Western world.

But I think it is a large enough trend to be concerned. We have taken a few phrases that we like of political rhetoric surrounding freedom and democracy and turned them into an excuse to do what we want when we want. Furthermore, what many have learned from genuine efforts to create good self-esteem in children and young people is: I am most important; my happiness is most important; I can do anything I want to do; I should do anything I want to do; if you do something to inhibit my attempts to do what pleases me, you're against freedom and against democracy and probably a terrorist to boot.

While many of those statements are true, they are only true to a certain degree. Yes, I am pretty darn important to myself - but I don't live in a vacuum. If my happiness involves something against the law, how can my happiness be "most important"? It might be most important to me, but obviously the community in which I live thinks my happiness is not so important. If, for example, my happiness involves seeing how much stuff I can swipe without getting caught - things are not going to go well for me. I'm damaging the community around me. I'm not respecting the happiness of those around me.

Naturally, that's an extreme version. A smaller one (and one that is actually true rather than hypothetical) is I enjoy listening to my music rather loudly. A lot of us find happiness in that. It can be rather exuberant to lose yourself in the moment, own it.

But your freedom to listen to your music as loudly as you want might just interfere with your neighbor's freedom to live in a peaceful, quiet surrounding.

We have a responsibility to balance our freedom to do what makes us happy with the compromise required to live in community.

It's not just unfair to tell your neighbors, "You knew when you signed the lease on the apartment that I listened to loud music. If you don't like it, leave." It's not just unfair, it's irresponsible. You do not have the freedom to cause unhappiness in your neighbors.

I think we often forget that. We've become so centered on the individual that we want a political candidate to talk TO US. To OUR issues.

Really, though, politics is not about one candidate or one politician. Well, it shouldn't be anyway. Politics should not be about the individual, it should be about finding a way to build community. It should be about knowing there will be compromises - many of which we feel impinge upon our happiness because it's not exactly what we want.

And here's the really tricky part. Building community, understanding that politics is about compromise, does not mean that we don't speak up when we don't agree with what's happening or what is being decided. But there should be a balance between working for change and just being pissy that we didn't get our way.

We have to decide to act and to be proactive ... not simply react. Not simply whine, I'm unhappy. After all, everything is amazing. But we focus on what is not making us happy. We focus on the crappy economy, on our crappy jobs, on not having enough stuff, on not having enough space for our stuff, on how we're not appreciated for the wonderful human beings that we know we are ... but are we appreciating those around us? Are we appreciating the stuff we do have?

Or are we reacting because that's how we've been taught to live our lives? React to the news, react to the economy, react to people who have just absolutely FORCED us to not be as happy as we could.

Take some time today to appreciate someone who doesn't get enough appreciation. The person in the cube farm who's always so quiet. The crossing guard helping the kids across the street and who always holds you up when you're running late EVERY morning. (Because you know, it's sooooo the crossing guard's fault that you're late and they know it and they're obviously not helping the children get across the street safely, they're obviously out to get YOU.)

Hell, even your boss. Take one minute to act with deliberation today and appreciate just one person whom you usually complain about or don't even notice. Decide to foster community and decide to help someone else pursue a little happiness.

Live deliberately today and remember that yes, you do have the freedom to tell your neighbor to move if they don't like your loud music - but you also have the common sense to remember your responsibilities to live in community with others.

It's not all about you.

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:19 AM | Comments (2) | Blog | Stumble

March 17, 2009

Whatever Happened to Dreamweaver

When I first started building websites, back in the days of completely grey backgrounds, Mosaic and that upstart Netscape, I coded a site "by hand," that is, I used a simple text editor and wrote all the code myself. It wasn't hard. You put < p > at the end of every paragraph (I know, I know!) and animated GIFs were the height of kewl. As the web left kindergarten and moved on to junior high, coding a design meant using tables to contain chopped up bits of images and the tables could get pretty complex. It was easy to get lost in the code trying to figure out which cell you were in now if you'd spanned 3 rows and 2 columns ....

And then there was Dreamweaver, Macromedia's way to make web design easier.

For most web professionals this meant you could visually design a table - and then flip back into the code and clean up the mess that DW had made. Not perfect, but much faster than trying to code a complex table completely by hand. Basically, you'd design the site in Fireworks (think Photoshop but instead of editing photos, you edited shapes and buttons and such). When you had the design looking all purty, you began thinking, "Okay, I want text to go here, here and here. So, let's cut these images here and here and then code a table to make the images "glue" back together and put the text where I want it."

What made this work was the fact that you could flip from the visual look of a site (WYSIWYG editing) back into the code, make a change and then flip back to the visual to make sure it still looked right. You see, most designers are visual people. That's kind of why they're into design.

As the web graduated and headed off for college and then the big bad corporate world, it matured. Both those who coded and those who designed wanted the language of the web to be more semantic, to make more structural sense.

Back in the day, the code to make a word bold, was < b >. When you wanted to turn off bold, it was . Pretty simple and semantic, but it could be better. You really wanted a strong emphasis on that word or phrase and that's why you made it bold. So today, the code is < strong > instead. Italicized text's code is < em > for "emphasis." But looking at the code: < td colspan="5" > is not really very semantic. What does that mean, really? The web began using something called CSS to structure pages, a way of styling different elements in a semantic way.

The first time I ran across CSS, I was webmaster to four university sub-sites, plus my own webspaces. I discovered it in Dreamweaver's interface - I could suddenly style text! I could declare a style .times14 and then every time I wanted to use that typeface and size, I could just click a button and Dreamweaver would make it happen. Wonderful!

The truth of the matter was that I had grown far too reliant on Dreamweaver and I wasn't keeping up with my handwritten coding as much. This was the smallest portion of what CSS could do even then.

Today, many sites (particularly most blogs) take full advantage of CSS, although the "quirks" of how it displays from browser to browser still cause as many headaches as the "quirks" of how tables once displayed still making coding a site a challenge. Now, you can create a "div" to contain a section of the site. For example, a div might be called "content" and you put all the styling you want for your content into that div (and its specific components). In other words, maybe the main column of your blog is your content div. You (or the person who wrote your theme) coded that div to tell the browser, "Hey, we want this to be 400 pixels wide and to appear about 10 pixels to the right of the left sidebar. Also, the background of that content area should be this particular nifty image (that is contrasting enough that the text can still be read easily.) In addition, every paragraph should be in the font Arial (or, failing that, Helvetica or some other sans-serif font). Also, the title of a blog post should be about 18 pixels high and dark blue and italicized."

In other words, using CSS meant you could place sections of your site, set backgrounds and even code the look of the font just one time instead of for every paragraph.

When I first started really utilizing CSS, I learned it the same way I did HTML: I looked at websites who used it and figured out the code that way. I began coding my websites by hand again, partly because I enjoy knowing I can do that (I am, after all, a major geek), partly because coding for the web was suddenly semantic and easy again, and partly because Dreamweaver's support for CSS seriously sucked. The "design view" portion of the program just didn't display CSS very well.

Now, I've been using Dreamweaver since oh, version 2, I think. I loved it for years. It beat the socks off Microsloth's FrontPage and Adobe's GoLive left me cold at first.

Today?

Well, Adobe purchased Macromedia back in 2005 and I wondered if it would be GoLive or Dreamweaver that would "win" the merge. I was rooting for Dreamweaver ... and then I used GoLive. It actually rendered CSS in the design view! I had never managed to get Dreamweaver to do that (except for some textual stuff - but never the placement of a sidebar, content, sidebar kinda thing). I wasn't an instant convert as I had far too many sites being maintained in DW and I didn't want to migrate everything, but I was definitely thinking of starting new sites in GoLive instead.

Dreamweaver, it seemed to me, had grown old and stale and was no longer really conversant with what designers wanted. Its original big draw was the ability to visually design something ... and have it write the code ... and then have the ability to go in and "correct" or simplify that code. (And then go back into design view to verify that you had not, in fact, screwed something up with your simplified code.)

So when I began working somewhere that used GoLive instead of Dreamweaver, I was not really concerned about it.

Unfortunately, GoLive is no longer being produced - Adobe has thrown itself fully into Dreamweaver. Even more unfortunate, they've left the best things about GoLive behind instead of integrating them into Dreamweaver.

Just one quick example before I head out to work:

The place I work now owns about a bazillion websites. All of the designers work on all of the sites at some point or another. Hence, we have a Websites directory from which we work on Brand A site, The Music Site, Brand B site, Our Main site, etc ad nauseum. This makes sense to me. We use a versioning software to keep conflicts between designers to a minimum and, in fact, merges our changes (in other words, I might be working on page x in Brand A for a project ... and another designer may be working on a project which also means he has to edit page x). We do not include our images folder on our hard drive or in our versioning software. Those are stored on an images server, and it serves out those images to all of the sites.

GoLive understands that our images are out on another server. And when we flip to design view, it knows where to get those images and display them for us so we can make sure the code we just changed still displays everything correctly.

Dreamweaver doesn't get it. It cries. It cries piteously and repeatedly, "HEY! HEY! HEY! You put the images folder outside of the main folder! HEY!!!!11!"

In addition, GoLive understands that when we pick harddrive/documents/websites/OURCOMPANY/brandA/ as the root directory for the Brand A site, that it's the ROOT directory. In other words, when a page is coded to refer to an image or a stylesheet (that's what a CSS file is called), it knows that it should look on the website at the top directory for it. Likewise, when it's looking on my hard drive to show me how a page will look, it will use the root directory I set as the "top" directory - instead of using harddrive/ as the top directory. (Basically your computer's hard drive is the top directory for your computer. When you code a site, you often code it to refer to the top directory of the website - so any design program you use needs to be able to say, Oh, you mean the top directory of the website, not the top directory of your computer.)

Dreamweaver doesn't get it. It won't find your stylesheets if you coded them: /stylesheet.css. Instead, it looks for your stylesheet in the top directory of your computer.

This means that NONE of the styling in the sheet will work in Design View.

Which makes the visual editor pretty much useless.

And the Dreamweaver team seems to think this is actually a selling point - you can see your page uninhibited by all that pesky design.

And if you absolutely insist on viewing it with the stylesheet, well, you can manually add it. Manually. Add. To. Each. Page.

And, if you're unlucky enough to be working on a huge e-comm site wherein different pages use multiple stylesheets? Add each stylesheet manually. Separately. You can't even multi-select from the dialog box!

So now we seem a bit stuck at work. GoLive is old enough now that it is pretty common for it to crash. Dreamweaver totally screws up our workflow and doesn't understand much of what we need it to understand. Do we limp along with crashes for now and hope Dreamweaver gets it eventually? Do we bite the bullet and make the switch now? Do we completely change the way we code AND the way IT has all of our sites set up?

I don't know.

But I no longer think that Dreamweaver is the best WYSIWYG web program. In fact, I'm thinking right now, that it's more than a little over-rated.

Too bad our sites are too complex to just code by hand all the time.

Maybe now is a good time for us to simplify ... of course, that would mean a total redesign of every site ....

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:38 AM | Comments (1) | Blog | Design | Stumble

February 24, 2009

If Mom Says OK

I need to take a moment and give a huge thank you to a stalwart reader and commenter. I met Tara through the great site Cre8Buzz (sadly now defunct). Through the last year or so, when I have not been very regular about posting and, in fact, when many of my posts were not really up to par, Tara kept coming here and leaving an incredible amount of comments. If I tell a story, she comments and connects with it. If I share a photo or a drawing, she is always there being encouraging and making wonderful comments.

I really appreciate that.

I personally suck at interaction and don't read everyone else's blogs nearly enough and am rarely bold enough to comment ... which, of course, in the blogosphere generally means that people lose interest in my blog. (And I don't blame them - the interaction is the best part of blogging. I'm just an introvert online and off.) So I really appreciate the time that all of you take to drop in and have a look around Red Monkey. I appreciate it when you do take the time to comment and know that I do try to get to your blogs ... I'm just slow and more talkative on Twitter than I am in commenting on blogs.

At any rate ... go give Tara a look-see. Tell her I sent you.

Posted by Red Monkey at 7:41 PM | Comments (0) | Blog | Stumble

January 17, 2009

Catching Up

Frantically trying to get this freelance site completed, hence all the extra energy I have right now is heading into that site. I'm hoping that by next weekend, it will be completely done. (And then I can show it off as well as get back to blogging.)

This week has been intense. We've had at least two days where the temperature didn't break ZERO Fahrenheit and more snow and ice than I ever want to think about. We probably have well over a foot of compacted accumulation on the ground and my morning drive to work has been just incredibly stressful. I love doing 70 on the bypass in good weather ... this past week there have been times when 40 was not particularly a smart speed. I've seen a couple of nasty wrecks and yet still see people try to do 70 despite the ice. Coming home at least there's enough sunlight to see the road conditions - but the conditions haven't really been any better.

I'm hoping to have some breathing room after this freelance site is done ... and then I can get some drawing time in (and finish writing the last segment of House Made of Web as well).

Heck, I've even been too busy to take a picture of all this snow!

Posted by Red Monkey at 8:50 PM | Comments (1) | Blog | Stumble