After working at home for over a year now - my spectrum of “dressing up” has so many new levels - here is my personal dressiness hierarchy:

1. The bottom: No shower - wearing pajamas
2. Errands/average day: Shower - warmup pants, or shorts, with flip flops with a t-shirt
3. More dressed up: Shower - nice shorts, golf shirt, flip flops
4. Even more dressed up: Shower - nice shorts, golf shirt, sandals
5. An outing: Shower - jeans, nice golf shirt or t-shirt, sandals
6. Another outing: Shower - jeans, nice golf shirt, shoes
7. An occasion: Shower - nice pants, nice golf shirt, shoes
8. An event: Shower - a suit, heels

Why do I even mention this? The other day I had to just laugh at myself because I actually thought that “if I put sandals on instead of my flip flops - that might looks bettter..” Fun times.

Finally we got a nice break in the weather here in Chicago over the weekend and it was time to get a new grill. In the past I had always bought grills that were pre-assembled but they never had an ignitor that actually worked. All the wires were always in place, but I could never get it to work (not even my Dad could get them to work). I am not a huge flame fan so lighting the grill with a lighter always made me nervous. Any way - after putting the grill together myself this time, I am proud to say that the ignitor finally works! Needless to say, this was another example of “if you want something done right, do it yourself.” Fun times

After spending an hour on something that should have taken me 20 minutes - I wanted to pass on something I should have caught right away. The problem: you use CSS to lay something out and it looks great in Firefox and Safari - but not in IE. At this point I validate the CSS to make sure I did not forget a bracket or something stupid. Next step - validate the XHTML. This is where I would have solved my problem, but I failed to take this step. At that point I would have seen that the script I was working with did not have a doctype defined. Once I added in the doctype - everything loaded as expected and I could not believe I missed something so basic. Lesson learned - and hopefully you will know now as well to make sure a doctype is always set.

I recently picked out and bought a desk for my office from Room and Board. The desk was delivered to my house yesterday and I could not be any happier with the experience. Since I am in the service business myself, I am always appreciative of great customer service and wanted to share my experience.

After the delivery, I got an email from a Room and Board employee:
Checking in with you to make sure that you are pleased with your purchase.
If there is anything that I can assist you with, please let me know.
Thank you for shopping at Room and Board.

Since I have been extremely satisfied, I decided to let them know by replying back to the email:

Hello. Thanks for checking in. I have been a Room and Board fan since the day I walked in your showroom in Wilmette. I have been extremely happy with your company’s service throughout the entire process. Your web site is easy to use, the people I spoke with at the warehouse were nice and the delivery men were very courteous and on time. I love the desk and look forward to complimenting it … [more]

One of my top pet peeves in my field is the use of self-signed SSL certificates for public web sites. I have no issue with using self-signed SSL certificates for a development environment or something internal, but when you have outside users, you need to show them that they can trust you. Just today - I got a “secure” email from my student loan company (which first got marked as junk). When I clicked on the URL in the email (https://securemail…) I got the error message “certificate was signed by an unknown certifying authority”. My blood began to boil.

A. You have all kinds of personal information about me, my loans, etc and you cannot pay $199 a year to get a certificate that my browser recognizes and trusts?

B. You make an extra effort to send a “secure email” to a “https” (secure) site, and choose to setup a “securemail” sub-domain - and when it comes to the certificate, you skimp? Wow.

It has officially been one year since we bought our Land Rover. Did I write this down? No. Land Rover sent us an “anniversary” present in the mail with a card. We got a very classy box with a card, a $2,000 off coupon for a new Range Rover (thanks - that should cover the floor mats) and a Land Rover duffle bag. I am continually impressed with the service and thoughtfulness of this company.

I would like to think we all have standards of some sort. I expect people to treat me with respect as I will treat them with respect. Other people demand to be catered to at all costs - all the time. This morning at the train station the police were out and about issuing tickets for all people who crossed the tracks (there are 3 sets - closest: from Chicago, middle: express trains to and from Chicago depending on the time, far set: local to Chicago). Anyone who has ridden the Metra for a few days/weeks/years has crossed the tracks (after looking both ways of course) to catch their train (and we have also seen people get killed doing the same thing too). It is not always smart, but when you know the schedule, you also know what other - if any - other trains are coming and going. This morning, I was trying to catch an express train. Unfortunately, the train showed up early, and after seeing the police there, I was not going to cross and get slapped with a $250.00 fine. Don’t worry, some idiot did…and got fined. … [more]

I love Photoshop. I always have. I can still remember the first time I saw it. It was version 3 in a computer lab at Penn State, running on 7100s with Mac OS 7.5.1. It was a rainy day and I was enlisted to help the instructor keep the class of PSU faculty and staff on task as well as help with any technical difficulties. One look at the program and I was in love. I spent many of the following weeks in that lab on the weekends, after training faculty, staff, and students creating all kinds of graphics and whatnot for fun. Since I believe that software should be purchased and used as the license agreement states…I gave up Photoshop at home and now only use it at work for work related projects. As most people know, I like to do a lot of projects at home…so since I did not want to put out tons of money for Photoshop, I decided to try gimp.app…an open source graphics program.

Most of my time spent in gimp.app is enjoyable. I love working with graphics, but for nights like last … [more]

This humidity is driving me crazy…how is it that so many others, including myself live in an area that has such extreme temperature changes? I remember a few months ago barely able to go outside to walk Triscuit in the cold, now here I am with extreme heat and humidity. On another note…I have been using public transportation for a number of years now, but never did I see what I saw today…someone clipping their nails over their purse, then pushing the clippings into her purse. Wow.

Now to take a minute out of your day to remember April 23, 1985, the day that will ever be remembered in marketing history.

I do not usually post anything on the weekends, but I wanted to give my respect to Jef Raskin who died yesterday.

After a confusing day filled with follies of all sorts…I have to ask someone (because my answer is biased): do standards (both technical and personal) and hard work really matter? The day started off by me losing the last spot in my normal train parking lot to someone that I waved in front of me so they could make the turn (it was easier for me to do it, so I thought I would give them a break. Little did I know, they would take a quick turn into my parking lot and take the last spot causing me to miss my train and park much further away than I am accustomed to park.

As the day went on, I was reminded that double standards seem to be the standard. How is it that the others, who do the bare minimum (hopefully soon to be featured on thebareminimum.com (what you wonder why it is still at the bare minimum…it is called redoing the CSS and design for this site)), and seem to be stress and worry free, yet content to live like that while I am stressed out and produce quality solutions? (and then are … [more]

When I first started creating web pages with using SimpleText or BBEdit, my code was super clean…it might not have been as complicated as it now, but everything was in it’s place and it was damn impressive to look at. Enter in GoLive CyberStudio (now Adobe GoLive). Lots of great features and awesome site management, but my god, the code is nasty. Since I decided to design my pages using CSS instead of tables, I have once again found myself coding web pages in text editors or in GoLive’s source code editor. I am a much cleaner coder than Adobe GoLive, but I still make mistakes, and sometimes forget to properly code something, making my pages not compliant with the W3C’s standards. So what do I do? Enter Tidy. I use the command line version, but there is also a cocoa implementation of Tidy that is also pretty cool. So, no more excuses for nasty, non-compliant code.

Well, yesterday after hours of frustration and CSS style sheet number three, I started thinking that what I wanted was not possible...not even close. Thoughts entered my mind like : "maybe I will forward all IE users to a nice web site on standards" and "maybe I could pdf my web site and make users do that." These thoughts were the desperation speaking. I dreamt all night about CSS classes, divs, and elements and woke up determined to find something that would work. Enter my new hero: Tonico Strasser who authored an awesome layout which I based my design on. I have learned so much about CSS...and this experience has been an education. I am still not a fan of IE, but it is something we have to deal with and I have dealt with it. I have a few spacing issues with IE still, but everything looks pretty good. Sixty plus hours worth it? Yes. Standards are important.
[tags]CSS[/tags]

There are some days when I cannot work until I am happy with my desktop picture. I have been known to scour certain web sites for the perfect desktop picture and I like to think I am familiar with the top desktop picture web sites (per my taste) but I was stunned to find a new amazing desktop picture web site that I had never been to before: http://www.mandolux.com/. This web site almost made me want to start using dual displays, and for those who know me, that says a lot. Desktop pictures are important to me because they often set the tone, and color, for my designs. I can often look at any of my designs and tell you what desktop picture I was using at the time when I created the design. I have a new desktop picture and a new design in motion for jappler.com, so stay tuned. PS. Happy New Years!

Back in November when I went to the World of Coca Cola with my friend Doug, we sampled flavors of pops from all over the world. Today, I have finally had a chance to post pictures of what we sampled. Some good, some bad, but none better than Coke itself.
PS. Stay away from pop from Italy, unless you request a Coke.

There comes a time when you are at work, travelling, or somewhere where you "really wish you could access your home computer(s)." Some people are fortunate enough to have static ips so they can simply access their computer by using their static IP. For most of us, we have to deal with dynamic IPs. For years now I have been using a great service (DynDNS.org). With dynDNS, you can set up a domain name that will point to your computer, and will update when your IP changes, so you will always be able to connect to your home computers. Sound cool? Here is how to set it up:

There are 3 basic parts to configuring DynDNS.

1. Create an account. Go to DynDNS.org and at the top right of the page, click on the "Sign up now" link. Once you have an account, log in and choose a domain name from DynDNS's options. Then, from the computer that you want to be able to access from outside of your home, add a host, and your public IP will automatically show up in ... [more]
   

I travel pretty frequently. Not everyone does travel a lot, so I can understand that certain travel specific hassles and the likes would not bother people like it bothers me. Yet, I also drink a lot of water (and Coke (not Pepsi)) so I often have to go to the bathroom. Regardless of how much you drink, everyone has to go to the bathroom sooner or later and often several times a day. My point? How many hotels do I have to stay in where the toilet paper dispenser is out of reach? Who thinks that it would be ok to have to contort your whole body just to get a ply? (which ends up to be about two feet because it is so far away) I cannot think of the last hotel I was at (and I usually stay at high end hotels) where the toiler paper placement made sense. It is either way behind you nearly on the floor (like my current hotel) or perhaps on the other side of the room. My point? Where are all these so called designers when such a simple placement decision ... [more]

After reading a few messages from my php mailing list, I again stopped to think about a content management system. Plone is amazing, but unless you have access to your own server, or have a host that supports Zope/Plone, you need something else to work with. I was intrigued by XOOPS until I went to my CMS info site. Not too much good stuff to say. I was excited that it was object oriented and that it used Smarty, but looks like I will keep looking, or perhaps make my own one of these days. Stay tuned.

The county tax office, when the deadline for taxes is a few days away, is like the DMV on a good day. Tons of people, no organization, and weird smells. As I was filling out the paperwork for my exemption, a woman sat down next to me. You know the type...no sense of personal space when it comes to your sense of smell. My goodness...what is it about really bad perfume and some people? Who can possibly think that this perfume smells good, and then who in that bunch decided it was ok to bath themselves in this olfactory nightmare? What company makes this (and why)? Of course there is no escaping this smell...especially when you are jammed in a room with a bunch of people who are not thrilled about being there. On a slightly better note, I did have the plasure of seeing some diversity...you know, the woman with the feathered mullet, next to the wealthy woman with her Chanel glasses, handbag, earings, and necklace on. I enjoy diversity.