Arranged Delirium

Everyone knows about everyone’s love/hate relationship with Facebook. But here’s evidence of my most recent frustration:

They’ve abandoned the post button. This really speeds things up, since now you just need to hit enter to post your statement. Whew! It’s a good thing no-one actually ever uses enter for anything important…like, say, a line break or new paragraph? I suppose this is a lame attempt to be more like Twitter?

Interface Fail.

Addendum: I have been taken to school. Apparently a paragraph break can be accomplished via the Shift + Enter combo. Did I miss a visual cue or something? Well, at least its the same approach that every other software interface uses…Oh wait. It’s not.

I’m constantly repulsing efforts from others to collect or save data.This usually surprises most people who assume that as a technologist, I want to get my hands on as much information as I can. Actually, the opposite is true: I’m always looking for ways to more effectively filter information so that I can keep as little as possible and try not to become inundated with large quantities of spurious data that I didn’t really need anyway. I’m typically in the minority on this issue - although I think I have the right of it - but more people are starting to think about this. There’s a recent OpEd piece in the NYTimes that discusses the tangible implications and realities of all this ‘ethereal’ information we like to work with. The author further suggests that we conscientiously look for data-reduction strategies. What a great idea!

A lot of my colleagues complain about our students needing too much hand-holding; but I tend to take a different approach. I think there is a lot to be learned through failure. But that means you also need to be able to tell someone when they are not performing well. It seems to me that a lot of today’s student’s don’t always take that criticism well - and a lot of my colleagues concur. The problem though is that critiquing someone’s work doesn’t mean that they are a horrible person. It just means that they could improve is some ways. I can hardly think of any area in my life where I couldn’t do something better. (Aside from teaching - obviously I’m great at that!) I struggle though with that fine line between real encouragement and valuable critique.

In any event, this has been on my mind a lot lately, and I recently read The Modesty Manifesto - an OpEd piece by David Brooks. In it he pulls together statistics from several studies but sums it all up here:

there’s abundant evidence to suggest that we have shifted a bit from a culture that emphasized self-effacement — I’m no better than anybody else, but nobody is better than me — to a culture that emphasizes self-expansion.

...and there seems to be some evidence for that. I’m not trying to make the whole “this generation doesn’t respect…” argument, but I do think that the obsession of self that we see reflected through “social” media is rather evident and pervasive within culture today. I’d even suggest that it isn’t simply about youth: the majority of Twitter users are actually over 30.

Brooks continues to extend his point to the prevalence of the individual over the concept of the virtuous citizen. I’m not trying to continue that discourse, but the article did make for interesting reading.

If you are in driving distance to Toledo and looking for a short trip, you might consider swinging by Hudson Gallery in Sylvania. I’ve got a couple of images showing there right through April, and I’m sure they’ll appreciate all the traffic that gets sent their way. The opening reception for the show is Saturday March 26th from 4PM - 6PM.

The images I have showing include Texture and Abstract. You can see samples of them here.

PS: I just realized that the names aren’t on the site. Basically, they are DesertTextures_S.jpg and DesertTextures_R.jpg, respectively. For the visually oriented, they are the last two on the next to last row : )

One great thing about web development over the past couple of years, is that we’ve finally seen a breakdown of the IE hegemony! IE is still over 60%, but at least most folks are running version 8. (Really? Why are you still using IE?) But its made testing and developing web sites a bit more of a chore. Add in the recent explosion of varying mobile devices, and suddenly you’ve got a couple dozen viable operating systems and browsers to support. (Or, at least to think about supporting.)

As a professor at a small college, its become beyond my abilities to support and maintain multiple testing kits - even with dual or tri-booting machines, it’s too time consuming. So, I’ve decided to outsource. There are two compelling services that I know of off the top of my head: Litmus and CrossBrowserTesting. I decided to test both, and both are quality services. I think that if you were running email marketing campaigns, Litmus might have an edge for you. For general web development, I found both services adequate. In the end, I decided to go with CrossBrowserTesting, primarily because: 1) it was cheaper, 2) did everything I needed, and 3) had a more robust free trial period which made for a better evaluation.

Best of all - this is going to speed up certain elements of my grading in my web development courses…

Other Notes: Most everything works on the Mac OS with each browser. Linux/Unix boxes running Firefox are all good; some of the ancillary browsers are problematic, but do a good enough job of rendering most valid CSS and constitute such a small market percentage it’s not worth addressing. Windows machines are much more problematic; but if you are running a recent version life is better. IE versions before 8 remain the biggest problem. The question now is: do I add browser detection and route folks to a different style sheet, or just forget about it? IE 6 & 7 make up about 24% of the general web viewing population, and about 8% of the folks that access my content.