Today was Larry’s birthday, and our office joined a group chat to discuss how to celebrate. Larry asked me, albeit drunkenly, to please please please post this on my blog so that he could read it sober. I agreed, albeit drunkenly, and I am drunkenly posting it. Names have been changed to protect the guilty. Lar, I hope you had as awesome of a birthday as I remember it being. More so, actually. This hangover is totally worth it. keep reading »

With Microsoft’s new browser, IE9, set to release in two days, there’s a lot of hype and speculation surrounding it. Google IE9 and you’ll find a ton of op-ed pieces about why it’s great, or why it’s not as great as it should be, and all manner of bullshit. For the uninitiated, Internet Explorer is a huge deal in the web design/development community. For over a decade, we’ve been saddled with IE6 as the primary browser used by the vast majority of users. It isn’t that there aren’t better browsers out there, it’s that when IE6 dominates the vast majority of user share, responsible designers and developers have to cater to audiences locked into outmoded browsers. They are forced to rely on code that may not be as correct or efficient as it otherwise could be, and they can’t evolve their designs to embrace modern browser technologies. keep reading »

I’m one of those people who’s personalities became established very early on in life, for better or worse. Thinking back on events during my childhood, I fondly recall some of my antics, and think, “boy, I was completely right. My dad was being a total dick about that, and it was not a character building experience in the slightest. I learned nothing from that experience except how totally sucky it was.”

That is just one example of how I was right, but I look back on it fondly, reveling, years later in how very right I was. I feel like I should elaborate and tell you a story about myself. The story goes like this: we were on a cross country road trip, something we did a lot of when I was a child, (it’s the great American something or other, after all), and we had gone up to Colorado then down through New Mexico and across Arizona, where I think we gave up and turned around. This may have been the same iconic road trip where we saw the Grand Canyon, or perhaps my adult mind just groups all of the road trips into one massive, unending car trip spanning many years, and always at the height of summer. keep reading »

To: Boss
Subject: Re: Work Stuff
Date: September 3, 2010

I’m not upset about this, mostly because I am too busy being upset about the thing yesterday wherein I was so furious I went around the house trying to find something that deserved to be kicked, and then I failed. This is interesting for three reasons, because it means:

1. I have a finite amount of anger, or a finite ability to experience it. Consequently, I am limited to choosing the best and most worthy thing to be angry about, rather than diluting my anger and trying to distribute it evenly.

2. People can benefit from this. Provided there is always something worse and more infuriating happening, any lesser irritations will be dealt with kindly and diplomatically.

3. The flip side of course is that being the worst and most infuriating thing results in getting a face full of 100% fury concentrate.

I stepped into the elevator earlier this week, after the whole Monday morning roach fiasco, and a couple of ladies got on as well.

One of the ladies gasped, and I looked around to try and discern what the source of her alarm was. I saw what looked like a giant roach in the floor of the elevator in front of her, its little antenna waving. I gasped as well, prepared to cling to the nearest tall person and climb my way up to their face.

“What’s wrong?” One of the ladies asked.
“I forgot my purse upstairs!”
“Oh no!”

I looked at the roach and I realized it was just a giant fuzzy ball of lint. I tried to yawn gaspily to make it seem like I had just been tired.