Chatting with Annessa today, and she points me in the direction of a museum local to herself.
Snark amongst yourselves. I’ll be over here, biting my tongue.
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Take This Heat And Shove It
We’re now solidly in the midst of what is arguably the worst time of year in the fair City of Roses.
Yes, it’s “the hot season,” when daytime temperatures sit patiently between 80-F and 95-F, when the air doesn’t move enough to mean anything, and when the room I now inhabit receives all kinds of direct sunlight since it faces almost due south.
Bleah. I hate hot weather. A large part of the reason I love this town so much is that we really only get a few short months of heat before returning to the nice gray drizzly weather I’m so much more comfortable with.
You can’t do anything in this heat. You don’t want to read, you don’t want to do chores, you don’t want to cuddle up with somebody, you just want to find some ice cream and wait for midnight when the air outside has cooled down some.
Bleah, I say.
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Past, Present, Future – Round Twenty-two
I’m going to try something a bit different this week. Let’s see how it goes…
PAST: Marbles, dolls, board games or dirt?
PRESENT: Dancing, driving, reading or gabbing?
FUTURE: Ranting, raving, pissing or moaning?
Never let it be said that I’m not putting forth some sort of creative effort on your behalf, eh? Now for your part in all of this. Leave a comment just below, and if you link back here then use http://greyduck.net/ppf so people find the latest available entry. Thank you!
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Volunteer Work (Without Any Work Involved)
At Jenn’s request I agreed to help staff the Portland Bloggers/Blogathon booth at Webvisions 3 today.
Okay, half-a-booth. A half-table multi-purpose booth. Anyway.
I spent most of my day listening to a series of speakers on various web-design topics. That, and trading snarky commentary with Cat. Let’s just say there was much to snark about, and snarking’s more fun with snarky company.
And if I use a form of the word “snark” again in this entry, I’m probably going to earn some sort of Lewis Carroll Prize so I’ll knock it off now.
Let’s not forget the candy confections courtesy of the convention center and the asian market across the street. (Thank you, Jenn!) Can you say, “ongoing sugar high?” I knew you could.
Of the four speakers I heard, two were clearly comfortable with public speaking… and the other two were less so. One of the latter was an “ar-teest” who firmly believes that the designer should push boundaries and not give a damn about what anyone says, and should do everything possible to override the concerns of the client for the sake of doing something different and unique.
Bleah. In contrast, the entertaining and insightful keynote speaker who spoke last made a crack about “masturbatory design” and I couldn’t help a quick guffaw.
The other of the less-interesting speakers failed not so much because of what he said but because of a basic disconnect between his content and his audience. Let’s face it: A web-design professional either already knows about the basic history and concept behind CSS, or doesn’t care because it’s not part of their professional purvue. The poor guy was putting people to sleep in droves, which is a shame because he really meant well. Mind you, preaching standards-compliance right after an “ar-teest” has just finished preaching about throwing common sense to the winds may be a hard sell. It doesn’t help that most of his presentation was background information, and only twice did he venture into practical applications and resources.
Lest you think this a scathing review of the conference, I’ll state again that the other two speakers were engaging and interesting, and even the “CSS guy” had good things to say. Most of the good content of the day involved the concept of “finding out what your target audience really wants, and find a way to deliver exactly that.” Radical concept, no? But when you think about the range of website designs available today, the varying ways in which content and data are presented, you can see the need for driving the point home repeatedly that you can’t just slap a bunch of product icons on a web page and expect to bring in the dough.
Gee, I’m glad I don’t design websites for professional purposes. I’m happy just being a goofy little blog-building guy and a hostmaster for people who get to have the design headaches.
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Yeah, like I’m a real threat.
Found via Phoemeister, who I had been negligent about visiting for quite some time now:
Threat rating: Medium. Your total lack of decent
family values makes you dangerous, but we can
count on some right wing nutter blowing you up
if you become too high profile.What threat to the Bush administration are you?
brought to you by QuizillaOf course, my result would have to include typos, wouldn’t it? *eyeroll*
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Sponsor one little grey duck for 24 hours.
See that link up there, the one right below the random tagline? Yeah, that one. If you click on it, you can sign up to sponsor me in the 2003 Blogathon, during which I’ll be posting entries for 24 solid hours, for charity.
Neat, huh? Click on it. Sponsor this little grey duck. You know you want to.