Whilst looking for Atlantis photos, I found a packet of Kathleen’s shots from the 1999 Team Universe in New York City. I rescanned them, cleaned them up a bit, and converted Kat’s page to the new format (not sure how that got overlooked, since the new format is much easier for me to maintain).
If the background looks somewhat familiar, yes, these were taken in the World Trade Center courtyard.
As we wade into 2006 amidst a minor (or perhaps not so minor) Windows exploit crisis, one wonders at the plethora of clueless Web sites out there.
I’m stunned by the number of sites that are just absolutely broken for viewers without Flash. Big sites, too, sites that are paying for websters that should know better– sites like virginmobile.com, tlc.com, scifi.com, and hundreds more. These people have apparently never even considered that their sites should degrade gracefully.
The Flashers may well ask, “Why is this an issue for me?”
Well, first of all, you should generally try to avoid behaviors that are specifically denoted on Vince Flander’s famous “Web Pages That Suck” site. It’s just embarassing when someone sends that link to your boss because they’re frustrated with your broken site.
But much more important than that, you’ve created a single point of failure for your site.
Let’s say for the next zero-day exploit, Flash is the target (and a tempting one it is), and that there’s no easy patch forthcoming. Advice from the security gurus is simply, “Disable or uninstall the plugin until further notice”.
How long will it take you to rebuild your pretty, animated, multimedia site from scratch– in good ol’ HTML and CSS?
How long just to get a plain page up and working?
How many thousands of dollars of lost revenue will that cost your company in the downtime and will they take it out of your check?
Yes, I know it’s more difficult to work within the cross-browser HTMLspace. I know it takes skill and insight and experience and experimentation and compromise to get an attractive, intuitive design to work.
Guess what? That’s what you’re being paid for.
Since I write such myself, I have little patience for whiny excuses. And $DIETY help you if you ever have to defend a Flash-only site design from an ADA inquiry.
Putting the backup HTML version in place now is a win-win proposition– your non-Flash customers will appreciate it, and if Flash becomes an unexpected liability, you won’t have to scramble to recover.
But anyway.
You may have heard this before, but I’ll pass it on again:
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
I have quite a few good rants built up, but I’m smack in the middle of redesigning and moving my Six Flags Atlantis Memorial page.
What brought that on was simple: Amazon.com didn’t send me a verification for my sister’s Christmas present.
Then I realized that Amazon was using my old Freenet address, which I rarely check anymore.
Then came the terrible realization that my Freenet account currently had no .forward file, and worse, hadn’t had one for some time.
So I logged in to the Freenet, and sure enough: Twenty-four thousand emails, 99% of them spam, 1% I that I really wanted to keep.
Well, normally this would be simple: use PINE mail to select on certain predictable (and usually naughty) words, and begin the mass deletion, right?*
Wrong.
I’m not sure if they have a governor that restricts cycles, or whether the machine is just so overworked that it’s not stable, or it’s just so slow that the threads are colliding.
But if you try to do any operation too big, it just kicks you out of PINE.
So over the course of performing a very large number of smaller batch deletes, I had time to consider whether it might be time to close up shop on the ol’ Freenet account and migrate the few remaining items (mostly the samples from the languishing but still progressing album Yellow Seven, the Atlantis Memorial, and maybe the Bad Poetry page) over to lucas-photo.com.
And that got me thinking that the Atlantis page is suffering from code rot anyway, and probably needs a complete overhaul in any case, lest someone see it and think I still write code like that (shudder).
So I’m rebuilding it.
So stay tuned.
* Now if you didn’t know PINE could do this, here’s the info:
Wherever you are tonight, whatever you are doing, may the blessings of the season embrace you and yours.
Spammers, even you. Give it a rest for one night, willya?
First, GO GATORS for their record-breaking 11-0 start. This is the most unselfish team I’ve ever seen.
Watching the game, I saw crowd behavior that’s always puzzled me: going crazy behind the basket during a free throw, attempting to distract the shooter.
Think about it from the player’s standpoint for a minute.
He sees an ocean of movement, with one fixed point of reference: the hoop.
Brownian-motion crowds are actually quite helpful to a player’s ability to see, and focus on, the basket.
If you want to mess someone up at the charity stripe, tilt yourself to the side about five degrees and sit perfectly still.
Now you must go forth, and use this power for good, not evil.
I’ve been woefully negligent in updating the blog over the last several days. That’s due to the holidays. “Stressmas” I heard a Cincinnati DJ call it.
It won’t be the norm. Hang in there.
In the meantime, I realized that I’d lost one of my pages in the move. I wrote the person with deep apologies; she was very gracious and now Katherine’s page has been restored.
In Macbeth, Shakespeare described his moving-target, things-are-not-what-they-seem Birnam Wood. Gainesville has its own version, the “People Would”.
Like Bigfoot, no one has ever seen this mystical “People Would”, but pundits and politicians have routinely used it to justify all sorts of exciting and insane infrastructural meddling, from downtown parking to bicycle lanes to roundabouts, sales tax increases, bus routes, Wal-Mart placement, East side development… the list goes on.
The problems come when the predicted actions of the “People Would” don’t match up with what the actions the predictor would personally take– especially when the predictor is trying to get “revenue” out of the “People Would”, acting as though that money wasn’t coming out of your pocket and mine.
My favorite is the list of (mostly futile) actions taken to increase bicycle traffic in the city. “If we narrow the streets…”, “If we charge for parking…”, “If we lengthen the wait at stop lights…”, “If we install (hideously expensive) bicycle lanes…”, “If we create a ‘Rails To Trails’ across the area…”, “If we had a ‘Yellow Bike’ system…”
“…then ‘People Would’ ride their bicycles more often, reducing traffic and pollution and America’s dependence on oil and All Sorts Of Other Good Stuff™.”
But the damn “People Would” won’t cooperate.
Possibly that’s because of a certain elephant in the room called Common Sense– for example, the six months out of the year when it’s too insanely muggy to ride to work, or the two months out of the year when it’s too insanely cold, or the distributed two months when it’s raining (insanely, of course).
The two months when it’s nice enough, “People Would” might indeed ride its collective bicycles– or just walk. The rest of the year, it had better get the roadways it paid its taxes for, or else it might start demanding a refund.
Bottom line is, the few of the “People Would” who ride anyway, would and do ride. The rest of the “People Would” don’t, for the wholly valid reasons stated above and others.
Some other great examples of the predicted actions of “People Would” not matching reality?
“‘People Would’ be willing to pay an increased tax to support (insert supposedly popular pet project)”. (Common Sense Reality: History says, no, the “People Would” not– having shut down tax proposals at the polls year after year. Even when the Judiciary put its knee on the community’s throat and said, “You WILL build us a new courthouse”, the “People Would” was looking for ways out of it.)
“If we eliminate free parking downtown and create garages, ‘People Would’ be willing to provide a new revenue stream.” (Common Sense Reality: Or, more likely, ‘People Would’ just go to the mall, where parking is free and usually plentiful– the plan thereby backfiring, with downtown merchants taking the punishment.)
“If we make the traffic lights as inefficient as we possibly can, causing backups, gridlock and delays; then pass insanely high traffic ticket rates on red-light runners, and pipe those revenues to some vital-sounding pet pork like ‘Trauma Center Funding’, then the ‘People Would’ not recognize what we’re doing and form a lynch mob.” (Common Sense Reality: You guys are so busted.)