Friday, May 13, 2005
Breakfast: half Joe's Ohs and half rice krispies, red pear. On the bus lately I've been reading Zeldman's Designing With Web Standards—it takes a long time to get through it all and though I'm familiar with all the concepts it's very nice to have it all laid out with clarity from a very big-picture perspective. I still don't believe all-CSS layouts are best—all those that I've seen have problems—under certain, possibly common conditions—which never occur with old-style table-based layouts. Hybrids are best for now—I think sites I design should need at least and at most one table for layout only. This approach is still okay with W3C and still (moderately) okay with respect to accessibility. All-CSS might be best someday and might be best for some sites now (depending on the layout requirements), but for most sites I think that day is not yet here. I've also been variously switching among three books at reading time. The two others are an old Studio Techniques (Willmore) written for Photoshop 5.0 and Fresh Men: New Voices in Gay Fiction (White/Weise). I've also been working on a new web project for my cousin Corinna. Linkchecking. Updated a page for James. Updated the funding page for Susie. Chatted with Tony and Andy. Installed Fx 1.0.4 for half our computers and our server too. (Fx is the official abbreviation for Firefox, ICYDNK.) Coded the new admissions calendar for James. Lunch: Ena brought back sandwich orders from Yellow Submarine. We talked about what we all would do if we had a lot of money—essentially everyone voted for travel and hedonism and charity, and I also wanted to build something that would last a long time like a Frank Gehry building or an institute or something like that. James talked about glaciers and Alaska. Software CD-ROM work. Dinner at home by myself: leftovers. Nap. Met up with Tony Q, Andy, Ryan, and Patrick C at the restauraunt formerly known as Baja Fresh. We attempted to go to a lot of places which simply didn't have room for us to sit or otherwise seemed too crowded: Cafe Flore, Sweet Inspirations (which Tony mistakenly called Sweet Vibrations), Lime. We barhopped, choosing a new leader for each bar: Tony chose The Bar on Castro. Tony went home—I think he was just a little tired. Ryan picked The Metro, I picked The Pilsner, Andy declined to pick a new bar due to the lateness of the hour. (I can't remember which bar Patrick C chose or if he chose at all.) Andy and Patrick C explained (but did not demonstrate) what a wobbly H is and they both taught Ryan and me some sign language signs: Chinese, Canada, sex, shy, whore. Andy and Patrick C sang along with Erasure's A Little Respect in the Pilsner. We talked about three-person relationships, houseboys, hard tops versus soft tops (with respect to Mercedes convertibles and convertibles in general), Windows, Mac, Linux, video editing software, karaoke, fancy shirts, baseball caps, bartenders, whether age matters, television commercials, Deborah Cox, Kylie Minogue, whether Badlands is bad (yes), Vancouver BC, deep-fat fryers, video games and video game companies, our jobs, the scale of pretentiousness in bars in the Castro, bathhouses, how Andy's parents met Mick Jagger and what that has to do with Andy's lips. Was going to drop in on BriKelJess, but I ran into The Hawk on my way back to the car who said that Fruity was at a movie and BK was in P-town for (I think he said) his sister's baby shower. I said hello-goodbye, we traded hugs. Patrick R has been in New Orleans since Thursday for a writers conference called Saints and Sinners (May 12 to 17). I haven't written much about him lately because he wanted to surprise his mom and I don't know if any of his family would be reading here and spill the beans. The surprise wasn't perfect but also not entirely ruined partly due to a mention of the event—and Patrick's name—in the Times-Picayune. Patrick is leading one panel discussion, he's a panelist on another, and he'll also be promoting our online literary journal Lodestar Quarterly.