Dear Internet Explorer 6 User:

Published
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jbgoode
on July 24, 2008
in nerdness
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Dear IE6 user:

I hate you.

Nothing personal, you understand, and really I just hate your choice of browser, not you.  But that lead was too easy to resist.

You may not realize this, but you make web developers’ lives (and your own for that matter, but we’ll cover the selfish angle first) much more difficult than it needs to be.  See, when you browse to a site with IE6, innocently shopping for your widgets or reading your content or whatever it is that you’re doing, the web server dilligently records your visit, and notes the fact that you are using IE6 instead of a more recent browser.

And when that happens, dear reader, it means poor web developers like me are a little more likely to have to support IE6 when we’re making all the websites that you know and love.  And honestly, we’re tired of it.  It came out in the dark ages of the web, in 2001, when Microsoft and Netscape were in the midst of fighting with each other over what standards web browsers would support, and thus it has very poor support for web standards.  And web standards are a Good Thing for people like us, and thus for people like you who use what we build.  Web standards mean that we can build something one way and be reasonably sure it will work across various browsers and operating systems.  If that’s the case, we can build stuff in less time and for less money.  We can spend more time and money doing cool stuff instead of lame stuff like chasing down cross-browser bugs.

But you, dear IE6 user, are standing in the way of this effort.  Because those pesky web servers are logging your every visit, we know that you are out there, much as we would like to ignore you.  Sadly, your numbers are still large enough that we cannot yet ignore you, lest we lose your vaulable pageviews.  Some people in our field, you should know, have the idea that we should ignore you anyway, which is pretty tempting.  But those people generally don’t work in places where they have to answer to people who don’t care about web standards but only the money that comes in from the web channel.  So most of us still have to deal with you.

But let’s say that you don’t really care about progress on the web.  “I can still make my purchases on Amazon and read the New York Times”, you might say, “so why should I care?”  Well, there’s a personal angle here too.  Yes, dear IE6 user, you could even stand to benefit too!  IE6 has many known bugs and security vulnerabilties that newer browsers don’t have.  Microsoft tries to do a good job of patching it up to keep it from blowing stuff up, but of course they are going to put most of their energy into IE7 and the upcoming IE8.  So honestly, they are only dealing with you because they are forced to, as well.  If you upgrade to the newest version of IE, your browser will be more secure, and will be less likely to experience weird errors or even crashes.  Your computer and I will both love you a little bit more.

So if you’ve read this much of my (sorta) impassioned plea, dear IE6 user, please: just visit the IE downloads page and upgrade.  Or hey, you could upgrade to Firefox and get an even better browser.  But either one is cool - whatever’s easier for you.  And thanks!

mantra for today

Published
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jbgoode
on July 23, 2008
in Uncategorized
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“imagine the life you want to live.”

fantasy football scouting

Published
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jbgoode
on July 10, 2008
in Uncategorized
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To the person who leaves the printouts from ESPN.com with fantasy football scouting reports in the men’s room at work:

Thank you.

game criticism

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jbgoode
on July 8, 2008
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It seems like everyone is talking about how games need more critical thought than they get. And I agree. Pretty much everything could use more critical thought. For the amount of time and money that people put into making and consuming games, it would be nice to see some more justification than pure escapism.

Now, escapism is the root of any true connection with the audience, I think. A book like Moby-Dick has had staying power because it succeeds as an adventure story as well as a treatise on man’s capacity for self-destruction.

Escapism has been a good enough reason for me, but I won’t deny that it still seems like wasted time. After the machine is switched off, the experience vanishes, more or less. It won’t stay with me and inspire trains of thought the way even a relatively simple movie like Once does. Why?

Part of it is economic, but that applies to movies and novels and other things, so that can’t be part of it. Honestly, I think it’s because games are interactive, and most people are stupid, or at least lazy.

Now, anyone that says games have a similar cultural footing as the traditional media as books or movies is probably trying to sell them. There are some that try hard, and a few might even provoke some thought. But the whole idea of what a computer game is will have to get upended before they can have the potential to change lives, inspire people and live forever.

I think the game industry suffers from what the movie industry suffers from: fear of failure.  There are such large amounts of money involved in making a big game these days that game publishers and movie studios stick to the formulaic, the lowest common denominator.  So you get games and movies that are diverting, but that have no staying power at all.  There are indie movies out there that do all right, and there’s a thriving subculture around them of people who identify with the aesthetic and what they might call “indie values”.  But where are the indie game designers?  I’m sure they’re out there.  I have been meaning to check out these award-winning indie games for months and never gotten around to it.  When I do, maybe I’ll have new faith in the capacity for games to be more than mindless entertainment.

Now, pardon me, I’m off to do a little fragging…

surfing rules!

Published
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jbgoode
on July 8, 2008
in Uncategorized
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So we went on our family vacation to Maine recently, which was awesome.  I surprised myself, though, with how much of it I wanted to spend at the beach.  We spent two days hanging out on the beach out of the 6 we were there, and it just didn’t seem like enough.

When it was time to leave the beach on those days, I didn’t want to go, even as I was playing the good daddy and shepherding the boys away from the water.  When we were eating dinner, I just wanted to go back to the sand.  When it was raining and threatening thunderstorms, I figured we could hang out at the beach till we actually saw lightning bolts.

We did some really fun things in between beach times, don’t get me wrong.  I would have been bummed to not go to Strawberry Banke or the zoo.  But I have to confess that I just can’t get enough of the beach.  The lake is fun, and there are nice things about a lake that the ocean doesn’t offer, but there is simply no substitute for the power of the sea.

Probably the main reason I’ve been thinking about it so much was because I took a surf lesson.  I can’t believe I’ve waited this long to try it!  And I have to try it now, when I live hundreds of miles from the ocean, when I lived within walking distance for years and years in SF?  What the hell was I thinking?  Surfing is the perfect sport for me.  It’s by far the king of the boardsports.  It’s strange to me that snowboarding has gotten so big when both skateboarding and surfing are so much better.  Skateboarding is the ultimate in simplicity.  You have a pretty cheap and simple device that’s super portable, and you can do it anywhere that’s flat.  Surfing takes more effort because you can only do it in specific places, and the board is much bigger, but still, you just dive in and go.  With snowboarding, not only do you have the most equipment of any of the three, but by and large you’re restricted to specific places that are generally far from populated areas.  And these places have to maintain huge infrastructures to get people from the bottom to the top of the mountains and to keep the snow cover reasonably consistent in many of them.  And yes, lots of places don’t need snowmaking, and you can always hike, but that’s not the reality for most people.

Taking that surf lesson and falling in love with it instantly made me realize what it’s like for people who live in NYC or Boston and who love snowboarding in Vermont, but just can’t make it up here very often.  They have to look at it the way I have to look at a surf trip: it’s a commitment in time and money and it’s a very special occasion when it can happen.  They dream about moving to the mountains, and they read our website just to get the merest taste of the lifestyle.  I take snowboarding for granted now.  It’s easy to go and there are lots of incentives to go.  I should go more than I do, given how easy it is.  It’s good to remember that many people are not so lucky…

But it’s summer now, and all I want to do is go surfing again.  I want to feel the sand in my toes.  I want to watch the sun go down over the ocean (yes, I know I’m living near the wrong coast for that, but sunsets over the ocean are better than sunrises).  I want to smell the overpowering smell of sea life, permeating everything, flavoring everything with that metallic tang.  I want to clear my head with the constant roar of water slowly grinding rock to powder.  I want to watch my kids dig holes to see the water flow in as the tide comes in.

Ah well.  I will do well to remember those people who envy me, just like I envy beach residents right now…

Adobe fanboy

Published
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jbgoode
on March 14, 2008
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I’m beginning to understand that Adobe’s corporate strategy these days is centered around unifying designers and developers, and maybe I’m starting to go along with it.

I went to this VT Flash User’s Group meeting last night and it was actually really interesting. It made me a lot more excited to learn Flex – it seems like Adobe’s really trying to address what they called “designer-developer productivity”: making it easier for designers and developers to work on stuff together, and giving us tools that we can all use collaboratively.

I did not know too much about their new product Air, but it’s basically a way of making a desktop application out of a Flex project. So you could have a Flash app that can work online or offline, and can use local files on the user’s computer, the clipboard, etc.

I came out of the meeting feeling like that’s the future of web development work – for example, a catalog product that has the depth and feel of the print work with the interactivity of the website. People could browse through community features and interact with other brand lovers while online, but they could take it with them and lovingly browse through all the product lines when they’re away from their network connection…what people create could be a catalog that can come to life.

If Flex can live up to its potential and let us bring the design and programming worlds closer together, it could transform the industry. Don’t worry though. It might be Java, ABAP or C#, but there’s always going to be a need for server-side programming. These fancy apps will need to get data from servers and there will always be a need for databases that get them. And we’re always going to need to print stuff. People like to hold things in their hands sometimes. But they’d flow from one of the Central Beautiful Functional Things that are created for each brand.

Maybe it’s the pizza I ate while I was there, but something happened last night that made me swoon over Adobe for a bit. Their RIA page has a bunch of good information too.

Manifesto over. Carry on.

P.S. For the record, yes, I won an iPod shuffle there, but no, that has nothing to do with the enthusiasm in this post. At all.

my birthday

Published
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jbgoode
on March 13, 2008
in john
. 0 Comments

I had a fantastic birthday! The kiddies made me homemade cards, which melt me every time.

Kacey got me tulips, and they’re even in a pot so that I can enjoy them all year.

My wonderful loved ones chipped in to let me feed my gadget love with a new GPS unit, so I can drag all of them out to go geocaching as soon as the icy grip of winter loosens.

And best of all, my wonderful lady surprised me with a night out on the town! She arranged for the kids to be taken care of and everything. It was so great to just be able to have a drink with her and talk. It was strange to sit at a bar with her, since we used to have so much great conversation over beers when we were getting to know each other in San Francisco years ago.

Thank you for the well wishes everyone!

winter sickness

Published
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jbgoode
on March 2, 2008
in enzo, john, kacey and salvatore
. 0 Comments

It’s been one of the worst winters I can recall for sickness. I don’t think our family’s been this sick, this regularly, since Enzo was a baby and started going to daycare.  Not-so-coincidentally, Sal has started going to daycare at the YMCA for an hour three days a week. That’s not so much, but how long does it take to pick up a virus?  I tell myself that it’s part of young childhood, that it will help his little immune system grow stronger, and that it always seems worse than it is, because when he cries it’s so pitiful.

But man, when he wakes up, like he did a week ago, wheezing, and barking like a seal when he coughs, it’s scary! I’ve done this before, with both kids, but there’s nothing quite like the feeling of helplessness a sick child can give you. We put him in the shower, and then took him outside, and he started sounding better, and he fell asleep.  We took him to the doctor a few days later and he was diagnosed with pneumonia.  He’s been on antibiotics and sounds much better now, but it’s just the latest in a long series of illnesses this winter.

Kacey got pneumonia herself in the fall.  She had a nasty cough that started in November, and then by the first week of December she had been diagnosed and was laid up for most of a week, spending most of every day in bed.  It’s probably the sickest she’s been since I’ve known her.  She went on antibiotics too, and it cleared up, but minor colds have come back a couple of times in the last month.

I myself have been sick on three or four occasions this winter where I’ve had to miss work, and that never happens.  Most of them have been the kind where I was just too tired to move around much, and where my head would pound if I over-exerted myself.  I have done well for the latter half of the winter, but like I said, minor colds have hit me way more often than they ever used to.

Even Enzo, who is normally the healthiest of all of us, has missed enough school due to being sick that we’ve gotten the first letter from the school district warning us that attendance is very important…

Reason enough to be excited for spring to come!

Once

Published
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jbgoode
on February 18, 2008
in movies
. 0 Comments

My faith in local radio may just have been restored by a movie, of all things.

Kacey listens to the radio in the car and one day she heard some song and the DJ mentioned something about it being from a movie called “one” or something.  When she tried to find it on Netflix, she found a movie called “Once” that seemed close enough.

I knew that it was about a busker (Glen Hansard) and a woman that he meets on the street (Markéta Irglová), and that was about it.  It opens with a guy standing on the street in what looks like a pretty nice commercial district, singing and playing a guitar.  He seems to have a pretty good voice, but he has to stop singing soon because a junkie steals his guitar case with the money in it.  It turned out that scene was really the only one to try to delve too much into what it’s like to be a busker.

After that the title credits start, over a long slow zoom into him singing a whole song, a song that is captivating from the start.  I realized right away that we were in for a bunch of incredible music, as long as the story could stay out of the way of him playing.  And as it turns out, the star of the film is his music.  There’s a loose plot about him meeting a girl and them making some music together and becoming friends-maybe-someday-lovers and then them parting ways after an epic recording session, but in fact a lot of the movie is just singing and playing.  When you read that description, it seems like it’d be boring, but in fact it’s riveting.

The reason is that Hansard and Irglová aren’t really actors, but musicians who got talked into acting, instead of the other way around.  It turns out that Hansard is famous in Ireland as the leader of a band called The Frames, which you can bet I’ll be checking out, and he’s an absolutely incredible musician.  A lot of singer/songwriters have an obvious imbalance between singing and playing, a strength that they naturally play to.  But Hansard seems to know just the right balance to strike between the guitar and his voice, and he’s got a voice to remember - gritty and soulful, with a hint of a growl that can swing up into a falsetto in one strum.  She’s a less obviously talented musician, but she’s a good partner for him in the scenes where they make music together.  She plays subtle piano and has a sweet soft voice to back him up.

The main characters are just called “guy” and “girl” in the credits, but it wasn’t even till we saw the credits that we realized we never learned their names.  That’s the kind of spell it puts on you - you are so much a part of their world that you forget about the usual conventions of movies.  The plot doesn’t move too much, and it doesn’t resolve in a way that you’d expect, which alone is plenty refreshing.

I’ve always loved music, and I’ve always wondered what it would really be like to be one.  Watching “Once” brought me closer than any concert tour documentary or biography could.  And I’m so grateful to have discovered Hansard and The Frames.  I can’t wait to get ahold of some of their albums!

I have returned

Published
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jbgoode
on February 18, 2008
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It’s incredible that the last entry in here is of Sal as a baby.  He’s a boy now, and we just put his crib away a couple of weeks ago in favor of a toddler-sized bed. And Enzo is in kindergarten now. Kacey’s a full time mom, jewelry artist, business consultant and children’s book rep (all from home), and me?  Well…I guess I’m doing the same stuff I’ve always done.  I’m still working for the same place, and still doing much the same things when I’m not there.  Which as you might expect means that I need some new outlets for my energy after all this time.

So I’m going to have a serious go at blogging now.  I struggled for a while over picking some kind of theme, but as Kacey wisely said, “I think the most important thing is to just start doing it, and a theme will probably come out naturally.”

I know that I’m going to try to review all the media I consume, so there are categories for music, books, and movies.  I watch a lot of TV and play a lot of video games, too, so those will probably make it in here at times.  I don’t usually catch things right when they come out, so don’t expect me to be timely, though.

Anyway, you can probably expect some bits about programming and web usability, and just random stuff that I observe.  Sound eclectic?  Yeah, that’s the theme so far…