Posts from September 2016

I’m criminally behind in sharing this with everyone, so I’m jumping straight to the bottom line here: I’m teaching a workshop on advanced CSS layout techniques in October, and co-teaching another workshop on CSS animation in November with the inestimable Val Head.  Both are courtesy O’Reilly & Associates, and will be conducted at their offices in Boston.

A few more details:

• New CSS Layout (October 17-18) is two days of deep diving into flexbox, multicolumn, grid, and related technologies.  There will be a heavy emphasis on Things You Can Use Today, including bugs and how to handle them, with a keen focus on using everything in a progressively enhancing way.  In other words, you should walk away knowing how to use new technologies right away, without leaving behind users of older browsers, and have a good sense of what you’ll be able to do in the next 6-12 months.  This will be hands-on, interactive, and very much a dialogue with technical instruction.  If you’re looking for two days of watching me drone in front of a slide show, this is not that.  I’m not even sure I’ll have any slides at all — I’ll probably spend the entire time in BBEdit and a browser instead.  The class size is limited to 40 people.
• CSS Animation (November 17-18) is another two days of diving deep into the topic.  For this one, I’ll spend the first day going through every last piece of CSS transition and animation syntax, with generous helping of transform.  On the second day, Val will show how to put that syntax to use in a way that serves and strengthens your design, instead of undermining it.  It’s basically a day of learning how the tools work, and a day of learning how to properly use the tools.  Again, class size of 40; and again, very much hands-on and interactive.

So that’s what’s up.  Looking for ways to seriously expand your skills in layout or animation or both?  Come, join us!

• Workshopping was published on Wednesday, September 28th, 2016.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, CSS, Standards, and Work categories.
• There have been two replies.

It was right about now, exactly two decades ago, that I pulled on my Tom Servo “I’M HUGE” T-shirt and strolled from my apartment over to Strosacker Auditorium for the CWRU Film Society’s screening of MST3K: The Movie.  I’d gotten the evening off from my tech crew duties on Schoolhouse Rock Live! at the Beck Center so that I could catch the movie in a theater again, having been one of the few who’d seen it during its initial theatrical run.  To say I was looking forward to it was an understatement.  I’d been a fan ever since my high school best friend, Dave, had introduced me to it with a VHS copy of the “Rocketship X-M” episode.  The first HTML document I ever marked up was a copy of the MST3K Episode Guide I’d found on Usenet.

I was a staff member of the Film Society, as well as of the university — at that point I was just over a couple of years into being the campus Webmaster and, more or less coincidentally, not quite a couple of years into being divorced.  The Film Society was a fun way to pass weekend nights in good company, contribute to a collective effort, and get to see a bunch of movies.  So when I pushed through the glass lobby doors, I looked around to see what needed to be done.  The ticket counter was already staffed by a couple of people, neither of whom I’d ever seen before.  Which was to be expected, a month into the fall semester.  We always picked up a few new members as incoming students got adjusted to campus life and looked for stuff to do.  I clearly remember one of them, a laughing girl with short-ish curly hair and a unique clothing style.

I remember because later that evening, after I’d seen the movie and was manning the concession stand for one of the later shows, she wandered over to see if I needed any help, then stayed to flirt.  For once in my life, I smoothly responded in kind.  We kept up the good-natured banter throughout the evening, peppering it with sharp looks and sardonic grins.  As things were winding down on the last show, just as I was opening my mouth to ask her if she’d like me to walk her home, she asked me if I’d like to walk her home.

And that’s how Kat and I met, twenty years ago tonight.

Anyone who knew either of us well would never have pegged the other as a likely match.  She wasn’t even an MST3K fan: she’d come to Film Society that night, a month into her graduate school studies, to join up and thus have a group to hang out with, and hadn’t even really looked at the schedule first.  We had wildly different tastes in music, art, food, recreation, even basic relationship expectations.  And yet, somehow, one way or another, with a lot of work and a lot of luck, it’s worked out.

In the time since, we’ve had experiences more amazing and suffered more deeply than either of us could have imagined, as we traded tidbits of information and innuendo over an array of candy bars that balmy September evening.  We’ve each shown strength neither of us would have imagined in ourselves.  I think we also bring out the best in each other, and that too is a kind of strength.

Two decades.  Hard to believe, sometimes, but we did it…and, as Crow might say, I’d do it again if I had to.

Thank you, Kat.

• Twenty Years Later was published on Tuesday, September 20th, 2016.
• It was assigned to the History and Personal categories.
• There have been eight replies.