Stunslinger.com Blog

I don’t know why I didn’t write about this earlier, but we had a time trying to fly out to Oregon for my graduation.  Our flight was set to depart at 6:30pm, so we left our house at 5:15pm to get to the airport by 5:30pm.  As we left, I made a comment to my mom about how great the traffic is in Salt Lake, and how convenient it is to live 15 minutes from the airport.

As soon as we got onto the freeway heading toward the airport I saw a sea of brakelights.  What?!?  We turn on the radio and they’re reporting massive slowing all the way out of SLC.  Oh crap.  At this point it became white-knuckle driving.  Not because I was driving so fast, but because every minute that ticked by made us less likely to get to the gate on time.  Well, on time enough for my wife to get a pre-boarding voucher because of her leg.  Luckily, the traffic opened up as soon as we turned onto another freeway to the airport, and we made it there by 5:45pm.

I began to relax at this point, realizing we only had to park in the econo lot, hop on a shuttle and check in.  When our shuttle came, we waited while it went down the row and then turned…AWAY from the airport.  We had to loop around, picking up nobody, to the next couple of rows of shuttle stops before it finally headed toward the terminals.  It was 6:00pm by the time we checked in.

Then I looked again at the screen on my self-check luggage terminal.  It said, “Delay, new departure: 8:05pm.”  Well, on the one hand this was a good thing, we were now very early for our flight.  Well, I wish it was 8:05pm when we left.  Apparently our pilot was stuck in Denver, and his flight didn’t arrive until nearly 9:00pm.  But, we still got on, and Mrs. Stunslinger got her voucher which ended up getting all three of us in the bulkhead row.

Last thing: As we were waiting on the plane, there were two women with two babies sitting across from us.  The flight attendant asked if they were twins and was told they were.  She commented on their eyes, and the mom said, “Yep, one has nice blue eyes and the other has nice brown eyes.”  Then the flight attendant asked if they were identical twins.

Yes, they were identical twins with non-identical features.  Ugh.

I had forgotten that people give you presents when you graduate. Since this is my last graduation (unless psychologists get prescription privileges and I’m forced to get a post-doctoral masters), I’ve gotten some amazing presents. Two really stand out, so I’ll tell you about them:

MacBook Pro
That’s right, I’m writing this post in my parent’s guest bedroom, using wi-fi on my brand new MacBook Pro. I’m really excited about this, as I’ve been lusting after these suckers since they came out. I’ve never had a mac before, but I think I’m in the process of changing. So far, to use the cliche, everything has just worked. I started the sucker up, entered in some preferences and was using it in a few minutes. The only frustration I have is using Safari, because little things don’t show up in it (like TinyMCE in this Wordpress field) so I’m downloading Firefox. I love the integrated webcam and can’t wait to use it with iChat AV. Now I’m just frustrated that I have Photoshop, Illustrator, Word, and other programs on my home comp (a PC) and will have to buy them fresh for this comp.

New Shoes
I’ve been talking about getting some white K-Swiss shoes, so I can look oh so stylish. That’s right, I care what I look like, and I even read GQ every month. Anyway, I really like all white K-Swiss shoes, so my wife got me a pair for graduation. But, these aren’t just any pair: they’re customized. She got a little “DR STUNSLINGER” (except it’s my real initials instead of stunslinger) sewn onto the side of the shoes in light gray! How pimp is that? I’ve got customized shoes, the next stop is a blinged out watch and chain, and I can walk down the red carpet with no talent. Ok, maybe I exaggerate a bit, but I thought that was super cool.

Well, today we have a big shindig with lots of people coming over, so I should probably think about getting ready for that. Well, I should definitely at least put clothes on!

That’s right, as this is posted I am participating in my graduate school’s hooding ceremony for those of us earning our doctorates and masters degrees this semester.

I put quotations on the word graduation in the title because even though the ceremony is going on right now, I really won’t be Dr. Stunslinger for four more months.  Our degree is actually conferred when we finish internship, and for me that’s the middle of August.

Despite all this, it’s still rather exciting.  I remember my first year in graduate school, when I thought it would take forever to reach this point.  I watched the hooding ceremony, wondering what life would be like at this point and realized I needed to just worry about my upcoming semester rather than something years down the road.

Now I’m at that point down the road and it’s sort of surreal.  I’ve been doing this thing so long it doesn’t seem like a huge accomplishment, but I know it is.  I actually feel guilty because it seems like just another ceremony to me, yet I know there are people out there who would love to be in my position.  I remember feeling the same way when I earned my master’s degree.  In my program, it’s not a terminal degree, it’s just something you get after two years in the program (of course, you have to pass a national test and finish the appropriate credits), so it doesn’t seem like a big deal.  Yes, it was cool that I had something to put after my name when I was working, but other than that it didn’t seem like a big deal.  At the time I thought, “When I get my Psy.D., then it’ll be a big deal!”  And now it’s here, and it doesn’t (yet) seem like a big deal.  Maybe it’ll hit me in a bit, or when I get my actual degree.

Well, just thought I’d let you in on my psyche at this important moment in my life.  Well, actually I’m writing this the day before my moment.  I just set it to post while I’m being hooded.  Gotta love technology.

I’m addicted to music, I think it’s fair to say.  Ever since high school, when I found music that spoke directly to my frustrations and worldview, I’ve been a voracious consumer of music.  After years of joining CD clubs, buying new and used CDs and everything, I have well over 400 albums, all on my iPod.  So why do I have a hard time finding something to listen to?

I scroll through my music, ranging from punk rock to indie, pop to rap and nothing jumps out at me.  I keep saying, “That wouldn’t be bad, but maybe there’s something better.”  Right now I’m listening to Eastern Philosophy by Apathy, which is a great album, but still I wonder if there isn’t something else I’d be liking more.

I remember when I had eight CDs, in junior high.  At that time I absolutely loved my CDs.  I never complained, I always knew which one I wanted to hear.  So essentially my mind has become paralyzed by the wide range of options it must choose from.  I know I’ve read about things like this in my psych textbooks, but I’ve never really experienced it before.

Maybe it’s time to just hit random and see what comes up (chances are I’ll like it!).

Yesterday I had a crazy busy day.  I was running from one appointment to the next, really feeling productive.  Every time I left my office I noticed a funny smell in the lobby, but I didn’t have time to really investigate (besides, who wants to go towards a bad smell?).  By the early afternoon I began to wonder if something was seriously wrong, when a guy walked out of the crappy bathroom and informed me someone had crapped on the floor.

Excellent.

I really hope this was some sort of floridly psychotic person who had no idea they weren’t in the right spot, as opposed to someone deciding, consciously to defecate on the floor of the bathroom.  I just don’t have time to worry about this kind of stuff!

Thankfully “engineering” came and cleaned it up.  It apparently took 3-4 of them standing around in the lobby talking for quite a while to get it cleaned up, but I can’t complain because the smell is gone and I didn’t have to do it.

I would argue that it very well might be.  Don’t get me wrong, I love Heroes and Prison Break.  The Office is brilliant.  Notes from the Underbelly is showing some promise.  CSI is always good.  Battlestar Galactica has its place in the upper echelon of tv shows too.  But more than any of these shows, I love Boston Legal.

I think the relationship between Denny Crane and Alan Shore is the single best part of the show.  This is the first time I have ever seen a complex relationship between two men shown on television.  Too often male friendship is shown as mindless, full of tv watching and not talking.  Definitely no sharing of emotions.  This speaks to tv’s over-reliance on stereotypic characters, which can be fine at times.  Of course, when a show like Boston Legal comes along and holds itself to a higher standard, it stands out even more because of the low quality of its competition.

In Denny and Alan’s friendship, we see two men who truly care for each other.  Not only that, but these are two hyper-masculine male characters who are able to be emotionally vulnerable with each other.  We also see two men who have very different views on a multitude of issues, but who are able to connect anyway.  At this time in our country’s political climate, we need more role models like these two.  Do they have flaws?  Absolutely.  Despite this, they work out problems and forge a friendship that allows for differences of opinion.

This show scores high points in other catagories as well: tackling current issues without sounding preachy, setting up plotlines that are both serious and humorous, bringing me back each episode with hooks while avoiding soap opera filler, and presenting compleity in nearly every character on the show.  There are no black/white dichotomies in these characters, and that takes great effort on the part of the writers.

So, is it the best show on TV?  For me, the answer is yes.  It doesn’t get much better than this.

Yesterday was Earth Day.  I know, I know: yes, that “holiday” is still being “celebrated,” and it actually seems to be growing in popularity as people actually start caring about the environment.  Wired magazine even included the term “ecosexual” in this current issue to describe people who are all up in the environment’s grill.

Anyway, Home Depot actually did something useful yesterday: they gave out compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs)!  Company wide they set out to give away 1,000,000 CFLs, which (if each one replaced an ordinary incandescent bulb) would reduce CO2 emissions similar to removing 70,000 cars from the road.  I do think that’s pretty cool.  And yes, Home Depot did plan to benefit from this giveaway through an increase in sales.  I never said they weren’t a business, but I think this is absolutely acceptible.

So Sunday morn I awoke and headed down to my local Home Depot with my mom in tow (hey, why not try to get two bulbs?).  Now, I had read about this on the internet, so I didn’t know how it would actually play out in the stores.  Not to mention that I live in Utah, which doesn’t seem to be super concerned with reducing our carbon footprint.

We walked around and found the lighting section, all the while looking for an indication that there were free CFLs.  We saw none.  No signs, no helpful people in orange aprons handing out free CFLs, nothing.  Ok.  Maybe we should check the advertisement, certainly that would have something about it.  Nope, nothing there either.  What the?  Finally my mom asked someone, and they gave her two and told her we needed to buy something to get them free.

Again, I have no problem buying something (I bought a few more CFLs) to get a freebie.  What did seem odd to me, is that this is the only promotion I’ve ever seen that had literally no advertising.  If the goal of Home Depot was to promote the use of CFLs to improve the environment (or even to boost their sales), don’t you think they should have some sort of advertisement?  Was my Home Depot the only one this way, or was this a company-wide policy?  Weird.

Anyway, I still give them kudos.  I got my two CFLs for free, plus two more I bought.  I installed three of them when I got home, and they work great.  In fact, the light is more accurate than the incandescents I replaced.  I have a green shirt that always looks brown in my bedroom, but now in front of a CFL it is obviously green.  Not to mention the energy savings, and even the heat savings (CFLs operate around 90 degrees, incandescents around 325 or so)!  So I say, yay Home Depot and yay CFLs.

Too often people forget there are numerous little things we can do to reduce our emissions.

If you happen to be a longtime reader, you may remember my back and forth opinions about using Wordpress as a content management system (CMS).  After deciding it was too much of a square peg to fit the round hole, I gave up on the idea of using a pre-built CMS.  I had spent time looking through other open source CMS systems, and found them lacking.  They may do fine for some designers, but the way I think about a CMS just doesn’t fit with their structures.

So I thought I was stuck creating my own CMS for each project as it comes along.  But then two commercial CMSes came to my attention, and I think I’ve found happiness as a designer.  The first I found was recommended by a friend while snowboarding, Expanse.  Expanse is laid out very simply, and I can absolutely see setting a client down in front of it and having them be able to use it with relative ease.  It has a templating system that allows you to generate your own code (as valid as you want it to be) and insert content with template tags.  Excellent.  I don’t like convoluted systems where I specify in the CMS what template should show what content: I want a CMS to manage my content and I’ll worry about the presentation.  And, for a commercial CMS this is great, they only charge $29.99 per site license, and 10% goes to a charity of your choice.  So, you may be asking, why doesn’t this article end as a “go Expanse, it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread” post?  Simply because I cannot purchase a license.  Their website currently has registration disabled, and the owners have not responded to three emails I sent them begging to be allowed into the club.  I guess I look funny enough that I’m relegated to standing in the cold watching the happy, shiny people the bouncer already knows walking right in.  Suh-weet.

So then I stumbled across Expression Engine through a great article by Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain on his redesign of their website.  After seeing some great sites run on Expression Engine (like Veerle’s blog, 31Three, and Andy Detskas for starters) I decided to download the core version and try it out.  I must say, it didn’t all click right away, but I’m beginning to catch the fever.  It actually has a similar system to Expanse, but at this point it seems much more comprehensive and flexible.  It also costs a bit more: $99 for a personal license, $249 for a business license.  Expression Engine also has the ability to include ecommerce as a module, which Expanse doesn’t.
I always thought there needed to be “things” in addition to pages in a CMS.  So often on sites, I need to let the client create multiple instances of something (CDs for a discography, pictures/descriptions for a portfolio, etc) and I like to control these so the code is valid and semantic, and it’s easy for the client.  Yes, I could just give them a blank WYSIWYG space, and show them how to insert pictures, headings and lists and how to make sure they all line up right.  But why not give them separate lines to fill in this info, and then use those to generate lean code?  This is why I thought CMSes needed to let me define a “thing” (and I mean really define it, with my own fields) so the client can populate their pages listing “things” with ease.  Well, both of these CMS options do that and that made me happy.  I could not believe when I began learning Expression Engine that this weird concept I came up with, they already thought of and made it the core of their product.  Top notch.

Just for fun I looked through web design portfolios and galleries of well-styled websites.  Nearly every single site I saw featured tabbed navigation.  I remember the first time I came across the tutorial on Suckerfish drop-down tabs purely done through CSS.  It seemed like a great option for sites.  Somehow, tabbed nav went from another technique to “the new black” in web design.  Your site just wasn’t raved about unless it featured tabbed nav.

Before this, nearly every site seemed to have left-hand navigation.  In fact, I remember reading books on web usability that argued you shouldn’t try other forms of navigation because people expected nav on the left side, and doing anything else decreased usability.  Now, it’s become so rare, I am surprised when I see sites with “old-school” left-hand nav.  It’s as if, as soon as tabbed nav appeared, left-hand nav was seen as a design crime.  Usability discussions no longer talk about left-hand placement, now they talk about accommodating screen readers and other issues I think are actually more important than where the navigation is located.

So here’s the rub: I like tabbed navigation.  I notice my designs automatically start out with a nav bar somewhere near the top.  But I also don’t want to fall prey to forgetting older, still excellent, techniques in favor of the new.  So I say, use tabbed nav when it serves the design, but also consider left-hand nav…and even right-hand nav!  Maybe dead-center nav will work best for a design.  Maybe no nav.  I’m going to challenge myself to get outside the box of the current trends, join me won’t you?

That’s right, it’s April 18 and it’s snowing in Salt Lake City.  Weird.  Two weeks ago we had temperatures around 70, and now there are big snowflakes slowly drifting down from the sky.  Many of my colleagues are annoyed with the weather change, but I actually like it.

It’s not even “bad” snow, it’s not really sticking so there should be no commute problems.  It’s just a nice change to look out my window and see huge snowflakes falling down once again.  Probably the last time I’ll see serious snow for a while, considering it rarely snows in Oregon.  The nice thing about Oregon is, when it snows everything shuts down.  It definitely is better to have a snow day than to be in my office looking out the window at it.

Ah snow…