Month: March 2001

Wow, 11 days between new anti-blog entries [pre-anti-blog/news merge]; that’s a record so far.

Some other nifty design stuff can “fill the hole” for now: I recently read an article on the aforementioned A List Apart that purported to be an analysis of web trends for the year 2000, but really it was a glorified hotlist (just like this anti-blog). From what I could tell they were nifty sites. [If I spent more time writing this I could come up with more descriptive adjectives than “nifty”—sorry.]

Another cool site—Precinct.net—deftly merges natural photography and technology, as Adobe puts it. Gotta have Flash 5 to view it.

Soon I promise I’ll do some thinking. Maybe my trip to SF will be mentally stimulating. Future issues will include adjectives and why webloggers refer to themselves as “we.”

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The trip is really happening—Thursday night Amber and I are boarding the “Empire Builder” (not very PC, is it?) and connecting to the “Coast Starlight” in Portland.

We’re excited. More later.

Well, the NTSB says that over 44,000 people die in car accidents a year, compared to about 6 train passengers…. That should be a comfort, but, well, it makes driving seem so much less safe….

And Suki, our little New Year’s kitty, now weighs 8.8 pounds. 3 weeks ago she weighed 7.8 pounds. Admittedly, she had just had a radical ovarihysterectomy. The vet said she might have actually simply done some growing, making the humane society’s estimate of her age wrong. They had her pegged as a year-old cat. No one’s perfect.

Happy St. Paddy’s Day—hope you get your fill of green beer!

Back on the “early days of the web” kick, remember random URL generators? What the hell is the point?

I was looking for last Friday’s A List Apart—Do you do web design? If yes, read A List Apart religiously! Anyway, it wasn’t there—Zeldman is at SXSW in Austin. [Why didn’t I go?]

However, he left several nice breadcrumbs in lieu of an issue. One of which is a link to the 5k, a contest for the best web design below 5,120 bytes. I’ll enter—why not? [Deadline: Sunday, April 8, 7 pm CDT.]

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Hey hey—we bought the train tickets and Amber & I will be gone March 29 through April 8!

Snow this morning. SNOW. It’s been falling since last night, and is falling as I write this. Why do I live here?

You may have noticed: No portfolio yet. I’ve been working on bringing everything into Photoshop from Illustrator, Quark, and PageMaker. It’s all coming together.

Ever thought about immigrating to Canada? You can’t just go there and become a citizen; it’s harder than that. They have a complex point system that takes into account age, education, language skills, occupation (including how much training your occupation supposedly requires, and how much demand for it exists in Canada), number of years of experience in your job, and up to 10 points out of 70 for “personal suitability.” They say it’s rare to get 10 points in that category.

For some reason they lump graphic designers in with illustrators (not that there’s anything wrong with that), which has the effect of lowering the number of points graphic designers get for the amount of necessary training (or ETF). So—if I called myself a graphic designer, I probably wouldn’t get in. If I called myself an art director (15 rather than 7 training points), I’d have 64 points without considering the personal suitability factor.

At that point, to be eligible to immigrate to Canada, a Canadian immigration official would have to award me 6 out of 10 points for personal suitability.

Think about that.

The necessity of the occurrence of that surreal situation as a condition of Canadian immigration is quite discouraging. Just the phrase “personal suitability” gives me weird chills. Not even considering the actual risk I might not get 6 points—they say on average 5-7 points are awarded. [Naturally, I’d make an excellent first impression, so I’m certain I wouldn’t have to worry about that.] However, there’s also the $1475 (Canadian) entry fee and minimum savings of $10,000 (Canadian) to think about.

Don’t worry; I’m not leaving anytime soon. The joy of Minneapolis is that it has all the disadvantages of Canada (cold) and the disadvantages of the US (traffic), but without the advantages of Canada (socialized medicine and so on). <sarcasm>Hey, at least we can freely elect our president.</sarcasm>

Happy Birthday, Will! See, I can do it…. [Posted retroactively—doh!]