Some New Years Resolutions for Us All

Help me make these happen. They're not the sort of things that one man can do alone.

First, in fashion. Argyle is the new plaid; houndstooth is the new pinstripe. This is my decision. Everybody go make it happen; now please. While you're at it, no more tucking jeans into boots unless you live in Texas. Even then, it might not be such a great idea.

In application interface design, I want to see woodgrain where I'm starting to get tired of seeing brushed metal. Brushed metal was cool for one season, but it got overused mostly because Apple refused to follow their own Human Interface Guidelines. The madness stops now, people. Woodgrain is the new brushed metal, for when the interface is meant to duplicate the feel of an existing device. I want a stylized look that *isn't* going to become so overused it loses its edge. People are so jaded with window decoration these days and they need to be snapped out of it. Elegant is the new complicated; beautiful is the new functional. Spread the word.

In web design, let's sit back and revolutionize the way people interact with web pages and the Web as a whole. It's time for a transformation in the nature of the medium. I'm not talking Web 2.0 here. I'm saying that Web 1.0 was really Print 2.0. Let's not chain ourselves to words on paper; we don't need that paradigm to constrain us any more. So let's band together and make an experience that is unique and completely separate from looking something up in a book or reading a newspaper, but that is so intuitive that people will feel like it's how they've always been doing it. I have my own ideas but it's too soon for them to come out. Let's race and see who gets there first.

And in my life, I want to get back to the production end of music. I love to listen, but I also love to play, and I haven't been playing at all recently. Getting my decks out of storage was the first big step. Getting my skills out of storage is going to take some doing. I can do this though, and I will do this. My mind constantly swims in music and I love it. I need to bring it back, but this time I'm going to use all of the new music that I have grown to either love or grown to realize has a place in hip hop, and I'm going to bring it back. A lifetime of listening to the widest possible variety of music night and day will definitely teach you that everything is connected and everything is influenced by everything. The best hip hop deejays are the ones that listen to rock (see also: DJ Shadow, but in particular Afrika Bambaataa and Prince Paul).

I know this is a tall order for myself, but within five years I want to be able to do whatever I want. You can take that to mean that I'll have enough money or enough influence or enough power or enough streetcred so that if I say I want to take three months and drive a motorcycle through all of South America, I can. If I want to travel to Siberia to take photographs of old soviet nuclear waste dumps, I want to be able to do that. We're entering decade three here; it's time I showed the world my power move.

That is all. Until later, space cadets.

-- m a x

Thanksgiving

I just returned from the odyssey that was Stahl Family Thanksgiving 2006. Oy. . . . It was really great to see my aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and everything; it was just really not so great having to drive six hours to get to Cleveland, drive six hours back, and suffer the awkward situation that is my relationship with my brother-in-law. Seeing Juliet again was awkward, too. I don't know what's wrong, but I worry about her a lot, even if she does constantly drive me away with her behaviour. Methinks that's an entry for another time though, or maybe another place.

Emily's parents were asking after me. I should write up a super-snooty bio and resume online somewhere for people to find. Maybe I'll even post it here! Hrmmmmm *schemes* stay tuned, space cadets.

A Lesson for the Kids Out There

Before you decide to do some work at home, go ahead and look at your environment at home and make sure it's sufficiently similar to your environment at work for you to actually accomplish things. Things to look for include having similar software on your machine, having a similar server setup, and last but not least never trusting another human being to test your site from outside your home.

To all the people who tried in vain to help me out last night, thanks, but I really oughtn't've asked you in the first place 'cause it ended up being more embarrassing the more people who could view my incompetence. The site worked great on my machines, but didn't work at all on other people's outside my LAN. It looked straight outta ninety-three (oh by the way, Brian; you could've said that first; that'd've been handy to know). Bah. It's no one's fault. I was developing it in a vastly different environment then I planned on launching it. Even so; I was embarrassed and that was no good.

For those that still care after last night's fiasco, I was demonstrating the capabilities of my AJAX-enabled FAQ component, for Joomla. This component is capable of maintaining groups of frequently-asked questions in an intuitive and un-cluttered interface that people so far seem to love. As an added bonus, browsers that don't have Javascript enabled can still view the FAQs if they want (though they won't be treated to the awesome slide-out effect I wrote in). This site I'm including it in will not be publicly-accessible (it's on an company WAN), but the same FAQ component will be used on Vi.llaino.us and also on another upcoming project of mine. The beta version of it, if you will, is also on the First Data website.

Yeah . . . so . . . my dev environment is a little better at home now and I shouldn't be having any of these problems anymore. Good times, right? Until later, space cadets.