An Introduction to CSS3
Last month I gave this training presentation to the Interactive team at work. While many of the concepts discussed may be nothing new to some of you it was intended to get everyone, including back-end devs and designers, on the same page as to what our capabilities are.
The clients in my particular industry tend to still be very conservative so the discussion of how to handle older versions of Internet Explorer comes up routinely. I mainly ignore IE in this slide deck because, let’s face it, it just isn’t going to handle many of these CSS3 properties without additional workarounds. I touch upon that a little, but the subtext is to always strive for progressive enhancement and graceful degradation.
Hopefully others will find this useful in some capacity. If you do use it for training others, learn something new or have a suggestion I’d love to hear it, so please leave a comment.
2011 Portfolio Wrap-Up
Developer on Gecko Imaging:
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New Year, New Site
After much deliberation I chose the Ari WordPress theme to fill in for a complete redesign of the site for the new year. Nice and responsive, minimal layout, still screams “WordPress site” but what are you going to do?
Some of the older posts won’t be displayed perfectly due to the old size of thumbnails and I’m okay with that. Time to move forward.
The Trap
I’ve fallen into the classic Web Developer/Designer/Freelancer/Agency trap. So busy doing work for others I’ve long neglected my own site.
Every passing day this thing looks more and more dated. Hell, I’ll admit it wasn’t the nicest to look at, but it had some solid programming ideas behind it. Now I find myself longingly browsing premium WordPress theme galleries looking for something simple and responsive. I just want something where I can throw a link up to my latest work, bring in some tweets™, and give my contact info so the work-work-work-rest-work-work cycle can continue.
“But surely I can build something just as nice!” Yes, if only there were time.
9/11, 10 Years Later
It’s a beautiful Sunday morning here. I’ve downed my coffee, and eggs, and a danish (or two). I’m rarely up and at them this early on the weekend, but there is much freelance to do. Also, I had to get out of bed just to turn off NPR’s coverage of today’s anniversary. It isn’t that I don’t care, it’s just every other StoryCorps story is making me well up with tears. I’m a sucker for those bittersweet memoirs.
Funny that radio brings back more memories of that day than seeing any images. I didn’t watch the events happen live, it wasn’t until after both towers fell that I was even in front of the TV.
“Where were you?” Every year the same question is asked millions of times. That’s the way these generation defining moments are I suppose. Years from now on anniversary #n I’m sure I’ll have the same conversation with my future wife…
A sunny Tuesday morning in Detroit, the new school term had just started at Wayne State. I was driving in, listening to Howard Stern (before satellite radio!), on Forest Ave, just about to park when the first plane hit. There was confusion in his studio. There were descriptions of the smoke coming from the tower, but was this an accident? What kind of plane was it? Etc. My thought was that it was just a little prop plane, a bad accident, and then the second plane hit. A passenger jet. This was an attack.
I listened as long as I could, but couldn’t quite make sense of it. I thought about the surprise of Pearl Harbor and I walked across campus to my first class. I remember it seemed oddly quiet around, but then it was still first thing in the morning. In Old Main I got on the elevator with another girl. I asked her if she had heard what happened. She hadn’t. “I think… I think we’re under attack,” I said. She just shook her head a little and got off on the second floor. In this little part of the world everything still seemed to be on the side of “normal” minutes before slipping into “completely fucked.”
It was the second day of class for this Intro to Photography course I was taking. I already disliked the teacher. I also couldn’t really afford a decent camera at the time, so 10 minutes into class I knew I was going to drop it. After a short intro slide presentation by the teacher, I gathered up my things and walked out.
I honestly don’t remember if I had another class that day or what. I walked back to my car to listen to the news and wait. Being a loner still to some degree, it wasn’t unusual then to spend my breaks and lunches by myself in the car.
The first tower had fallen.
I decided my day was done and I drove home. The second tower was swaying and soon fell, the Pentagon was on fire. Everyone in Howard Stern’s studio in New York were trying to figure out how to get the Hell out of there. Reports in Detroit over concern for the RenCen being a target. The student union on campus had been put on lockdown for reports of a bomb threat. Selfishly I was just happy I left when I did. I called my best friend in Ann Arbor, or maybe he called me. Not a “hey, are you alright?” call. We joked, about what I don’t remember, we laughed, and then I hung up and watched the news replay the videos over and over and over.
10 years later, I don’t need to see those images replayed. I haven’t actively avoided television coverage of them, but I’m not seeking them out either. Yet every morning this week I’ve woken up to the stories and remembrances on NPR, and I hear another story about a father losing his son, or a wife losing her husband, and I start to lose it, and so I get out of bed, and I turn off the radio, and I get my day started just a little bit earlier than I normally would.