Who Needs Role Models?

I grew up knowing I had my heart on my sleeve. Every emotion I feel seems to start on my face, move to my mouth and then register in my brain. So when I find myself thinking “they should just calm down” about someone (other than myself, of course) the irony isn’t lost on me. For the fourth year in a row, I am participating in the About.com Readers’ Choice Awards. I set up some categories related to web design, in February solcited nominations, and now the finalists are getting votes. As in previous years, some people feel that there is a problem. Their site isn’t a finalist or they think another finalst is cheating or they can’t vote or they can, but too often or something like that. And they might start with a letter to me, but then they will move on to nastygrams and sarcastic comments and more. This happens every year. I explain the rules, remind people that you can’t be a finalist without being nominated, that cheating is not tolerated, and that About.com is doing all they can to make things fair. And then I (try very hard to) let it go. Ultimately, I think that it’s great that people value these awards enough to get so upset about them. But I’m not interested in freaking out because of them. I want to stay calm and recognize that the awards will do what they do whether I am upset or calm. So I choose calm.

I’m starting to wonder if other web design sites DELETE the anachronistic and ultra-conservative design comments. It seems like whenever I write a post talking about a more modern style design, I ONLY get comments talking about how horrible it is because it’s new and different. Of course, they don’t say that’s the reason, but that’s what it really comes down to. Makes me depressed, as I really like looking at the new stuff, but when the only feedback I get is “eww, that sucks, the scroll bar makes the car move, it doesn’t scroll down the page” it’s hard to stay motivated. Specifics:
I posted a picture of the Beetle.com website last Wednesday as an example of an innovative site using HTML5 in a new and exciting way. This resulted in (so far) five comments. Two of which were positive, which is more than usual and the rest were critical with one guy going into detail about all the reasons that he found the “quality” of the site lacking. Most of them were upset with the usability, which makes me wonder if they were viewing it in some crappy browser like IE7 or something. They don’t say. My Opinion
I think that the web is changing. The classic website with “pages” and sections is going to go away and be replaced by sites like Beetle.com that are more like experiences, like games, like applications. Content is still going to be very important, but websites are going to need to compete with all the other things vying for our attention like video, radio, television, movies, other websites, mobile apps, desktop apps, and oh yeah, our work… (what’s that?) Websites that are fun and draw you in are going to be more successful than ones that are just focused on slapping up “content.” I think the other thing the people commenting on my Beetle.com post need to remember is what the audience of the Beetle.com site is and the demographics of who Beetle.com is trying to attract. Sadly, I suspect that the demographics of people who come to my site on About.com are much older (and more boring and less “hip”) than who Beetle.com is going for. Volkswagen wants to promote the new beetle as being “more power, less flower” but they also want to get on the cutting edge bandwagon of HTML5 siteapps. So they built a site that reflects that. It’s not just a website and it’s not just an app, it’s both

Helen, the Drawing and Sketching Guide, then pointed out that I’d have gotten smoother lines using a vector drawing tool instead. But I had a lot of fun drawing this stegosaurus (my favorite dinosaur!) using her tutorial and my Bamboo tablet.

I am trying to get comfortable drawing on the computer directly, rather than in a notebook and scanning. I have been resistant for a while, primarily because drawing with a mouse is challenging. Then when I got the tablet, I realized that I was still chicken. So I thought that if I did some exercises like the ones on Helen’s site, I might get more comfortable with the idea. Let me tell you, drawing with a layer tool is really cool. You can draw the body of the stegosaurus on one layer as a big circle/oval and then draw the plates on top, and simply erase the parts of the body that the plates cover, without worrying about erasing the plates! I know, this is probably obvious, but it was almost magical to me, and I’ve been using Photoshop since 1995!

The hard part of changing my lifestyle is that while it’s going great, it’s easy to keep doing and not get frustrated. But when it’s not, it’s not. I’ve now had two weeks in a row of either no weight loss or weight gain, and my measurements have gone back up. And this is after I started going to CrossFit twice a week to try to get more fit. I know, I know, if I’m weight training I’m going to grow muscle and that weighs more than fat. But I’ve only gone to CF three times, and I doubt strongly that 2 pounds of muscle were formed in that time frame. I’m hoping it’s water weight and that if I just drink more water and wait it out this too shall pass. One success: I was able to keep from downing all the valentine’s chocolate in the house (which is really just one small box of See’s, but still…) after looking at the scale this morning. So, I’m trying to cheer myself up by posting the Valentine book I did for NORBAG (North Redwoods Book Arts Guild) It has the quote inside “Be around the people you want to be like because you will be like the people you are around.” And then in the heart cutouts I wrote artists, writers, book artists. The cover is this cabbage rose paper I got in Seattle with an appliqué heart that came on a card I got a while back.It’s an accordion book made from a kit that my mother-in-law gave me. Like many of the books I make, I liked it so much I didn’t want to send it out to the swap. :-) But I did, because I don’t need 90 million books lying around. I hope whoever gets it likes it too.

So, Apple has been pushing their “iPad App of the Year” in my face every time I open the app store for the last few weeks. So, because of repetition, I finally broke down and watched the video displaying it (see below). A very pretty blonde woman attempts to pretend that she’s manipulating the world’s largest wall iPad using Snapseed. Unfortunately, the only thing I got out of that video was that Snapseed can be very hard to use when pretending to use it on a giant wall iPad. Look at her expression when she’s trying to manipulate the photos. It’s as if she was struggling to get her hand in the right place, and then the director would yell “SMILE!” and she’d go “oh yeah, I’m supposed to be having fun!” and smile for a second. After about 4000 takes the crew was tired and the director gave up and just cut it together with what he had. I started wondering if the only point to the video was to get her model career started, as there seemed to be more images of her than of the app itself. I then went to my standby app evaluation: go to the app in iTunes (iTunes) and look at the Most Critical reviews first. Yep, here we are, from slugworthy: 1 star, “WAY overrated”. Slugworthy feels that filterstorm, photoforge2, and photogene2 are “MUCH better.” And hey! I already have those apps! Good, now I can go get an americano at *$ instead! [iframe_youtube video=“IFH-FqQlIWo”]

This December I was busy doing a lot of things, from Disney World with Mark, Jaryth and Mark’s parents, to both our birthdays, to Christmas, to work, and more. But one of the fun things I was doing (okay, all of those things are fun for me) was making some books. These are some of the books I made in December (and early January):

Elves

My mom sent Jaryth some mail art of some elves, and every picture had one elf sticking his foot out. Jaryth does that when he’s crossing the street, to check for cars. And of course the elves cracked my mom up. So she sent us the postcard. I loved the elves so much that I carved a stamp of them. And then made two books about them.

So far, everyone I’ve spoken to this weekend has asked me if I’m going to dress Jaryth up for Halloween. Up until today, I’ve been telling people my idea is to rip some of his older shirts and pants, put some black splotches on his face and call him “zombie toddler” and leave it at that.

But the real answer is “no.” He’s 3 1/2 years old and he has no idea what Halloween is. He’s excited that I had some Tootsie rolls on the table tonight so he could have some “choc-wat” but beyond that tomorrow is just another Monday to him. Actually, it’s just another weekday, as our routine isn’t all that different except for the time he wakes us up in the morning.

[caption id=“attachment_398” align=“aligncenter” width=“320” caption=“Cover of my 2011 Holiday Book”][/caption] This is the outside. On the inside it’s blank except for the instructions. The idea is that everyone who gets a book can then customize it with their own family memories. I’ll be taking mine to Thanksgiving this year to get people to write in it. [caption id=“attachment_399” align=“aligncenter” width=“320” caption=“The inside of the holiday book for 2011”][/caption]

I’m doing the proof edit of my book, this is my last chance to fix typos or correct errors.

Naively, I thought there wouldn’t be very many because I’d already had my draft copies (written in Pages and converted to Word) reviewed by me, two tech editors, my acquisitions editor, my development editor, my copy editor, and me again.

HOLY SHIT! was I ever wrong.

You see, whenever the copy editor made a change to one of my headlines, that resulted in crazy stuff happening in the Word conversion. Interestingly enough, I wasn’t seeing it in my copy of the .doc files, but when it would get to the production department, they’d be left with headlines that read such things as:

I know, I’ve ranted in here about email before, but seriously, the messages I receive sometimes send me around the bend. In the last week or so I’ve had the following (paraphrased) gems:

• One man asked me for some help in building a complex website. He sent his first message on day 1 and when I hadn’t had a chance to answer it, he sent it again on day 2. I finally responded to his question suggesting an answer and that if he had more specific questions, he should post them to my forum. Over the next 3-5 days he sent me numerous more questions, and if I didn’t respond within 24-hours, he would resend the message. Finally, after getting tired of answering his questions (he really needed to take a class on how to use a computer before he’d be able to build a basic website, let alone the complex one he wanted to build) I just stopped. After four days of no answers from me, he started over. Yes, he sent message 1 (which I’d already answered) to me again. Messages? Meet the spam filter…
• I got a long (LONG!) letter from a man who wanted to build a complicated photo-submission website. He seemed to have a good idea of what he wanted but no understanding of how to do it. I was getting ready to ignore his message when I saw that at the end he asked me if I knew anyone who could help him. Phew! I sent him my “hire someone” spiel talking about RFPs and Freelance Switch. He wrote back saying thanks. This one was unusual because of that thanks. Most people never respond at all.
• Then I got an email from someone asking a bunch of questions that indicated that he really had no clue how to use the interwebs or describe his problem. The questions were along the lines of “I tried for 2 hours!! to read your email, but I couldn’t open it. Um, buh? How the heck should I know what is preventing you from opening an email message? And telling me how long you flailed blindly at it doesn’t improve my chances of figuring it out, but it does improve my ability to ask the last question you asked—“Do you have to be a computer science major to understand this or am I an idiot?” Uh, I’ll take answer B!
• So, then Mr. Idiot answers my reply. His way of saying thank you “wow! I didn’t think I’d get an answer!” does not inspire me to great heights of desire to answer more stupid questions from him. Now he wants to know why my article doesn’t work on his web page. Of course, he doesn’t include a URL. Unfortunately my psychic powers are on the fritz, so I ignored that message.
• He emailed again today, this time with a URL, and to tell me that because of my site 2/3s of his entire site is gone. I think he also mentioned that he spent 16 hours working on it. Maybe I’ll answer this one, um let’s see… [DELETE].

Here are some tips if you want to get an answer from me by email: