Category: anti-blog Page 11 of 12

I actually did something on April 21st that coincides with my mostly anti-corporate political views — I participated in the peaceful 2,000-strong anti-FTAA protest in St. Paul. It was a good experience and I’m glad I was there. I’m also glad there were others on the front lines, [found on DiK] and I salute them.

This is not to say there aren’t major inconsistencies in my life that I probably need to address at some point. Case in point: Last weekend, on April 28th, I saw the Brewers play at their brand new, largely publicly financed, corporate naming rights purchased Miller Park. [I’ve loved baseball as long as I can remember; I put a bit of distance between myself and the sport a couple years ago, but I still like it.]

The point is, while I was there enjoying Geoff Jenkins’ three home run game and Ben Sheets’ first major league win, controversy exploded on the web, apparently. A company called ThreeOh launched a corporate-sponsored site called Reboot that was supposed to be a big event in the “web community;” the idea was that participating sites would all redesign and “reboot” at the same time on May 1st. It was a pretty ambitious project, and by all indications, a large-scale disruption. So. Is ThreeOh a publicity-hungry corporate shill or a valuable resource that injected a little life into the web? Probably a bit of both. I mean, I found some nice sites with good ideas, but, well, cripes — it’s sponsored by a brand of gin. How nastily consumerist.

The consumer culture is one of the more troubling things to me about the rise of the corporation. It’s frightening how much power huge corporations have over media, culture, government, politics, and even education — increasingly people are ceasing to be citizens and becoming consumers.

Want to learn more? Read The Nation, and Z Magazine, magazines of great integrity.

So why haven’t I updated this site in almost a month? [Later, this becomes high posting frequency. – JLG, 3-20-2020]

It’s not so much that my enthusiasm for keeping this site updated is flagging, though that is part of it.

I think it’s safe to say that it’s been easy to get burned out on this site. I spent a ton of time last month (really, it’s only been 3 weeks or so) putting together the portfolio. It’s harder than it looks, and I still have things to finish.

I have also been (as might be predicted) insanely busy. The redesign of the DNR site is in a critical stage that I seem to be not entirely able to reconcile with the large number of requests for updates and new projects from my co-workers. [But that’s my job, so I’d better do it.] I’m also attempting to do some freelance design, as I may have mentioned, and I’m a bit behind on that. Visiting family and old friends, as I did last weekend, involves a lot of strangely exhausting time behind the wheel. And there are other stresses as well.

With all that said, I have been keeping track of sites to note in this space — and the list begins here.

Here’s a mildly amusing thing — an April Fool’s joke — that I masterminded at work. We actually got good feedback from customers and good press (unfortunately only available in a paid archive), so I think it was worthwhile. (I didn’t write it, but I did doctor the photo [which is no longer there! I might have to try to find it…?!].)

These are people who do what I do much better than I do: Design is Kinky; linkdup; preloaded.

A good source for freeware fonts: Shy Fonts archive. Though it’s no longer active, there are links to current stuff.

Why didn’t I ever look at Zeldman’s or Joe Clark’s code before?

I can make those nifty “explanatory rollovers” (see above link) with the title attribute in the anchor tag. Good.

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.”

* * *

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.]

* * *

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!]