Tuesday, January 13, 2004
Brought in a small spider plant for the office. Met Cindy W, Ena W, and Aaron Huwe at the old student lounge to discuss its closure and what to do with the remaining stuff. Staff meeting. Lunch with Melissa at Minh Tri. Made updates to the HPM schedule for Kristina. Updated the P1 schedule for Debrah. Showed Debrah how to change font sizes in Internet Explorer and how to override Web designers' font size choices. Student directory on the web: it now warns gracefully when cookies are rejected. Of the 3 orders I placed for computer equipment on January 9, the first to arrive (today) was YesMicro, shipping out of Fontana, California by UPS Ground. Dinner with Patrick at Bombay Indian: garlic naan, hot chai for Patrick, chicken tikki masala, chicken tikki korma, rice. Sun released a new patch for the Linux server, and after I installed it yesterday's problem disappeared. I knew it was someone else's fault. Patrick's mom sent us a late Christmas gift: a set of snowman cheese spreaders, snowman salt and pepper shakers, a snowman wine bottle cover, and a package of gourmet red beans and rice mix. Fun! My mom and dad sent me a late Christmas card along with a check which I'm planning to not cash. Been reading The Web Content Style Guide by McGovern, Norton, and O'Dowd. Section 1 is good. Section 2 provides an overview of Web design best practices, but this material is covered in greater detail in Jakob Nielsen's site, useit.com. Section 3—the largest section—is very much not to my liking. They mix up dictionary definitions with grammar usage recommendations with—why?—advice for computer newbies. I wish they had simply stuck with usage focused on Web writing, which is not easy to find all in one place. Why did they think I need computer newbie advice? For example, "attachment" on page 42 doesn't simply describe what an attachment is. It goes into detail about computer viruses, how to avoid them, and so forth. I didn't need this entry at all, and much of Section 3 is the same in one way or another. I felt cheated because I thought I bought a style guide written by writing professionals—not The Internet for Dummies. It describes "cookie" as "a piece of software..." (the definition goes on, but already it's not as correct as it could be). The work lacks adequate guidance with Web typography issues. (A List Apart is among the best references for Web typography best practices.) The dictionary definitions were incomplete immediately after the book had gone to press—even Google is a much better source for that kind of information. Consequently, I can recommend only the portion of the book which can be read on Amazon. Very disappointing. It took me about 20 minutes to go through the whole book.