i love & hate you all

Threw away my poker face

Christopher Jones — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 04:38:59 +0000

We try not to hurt anyone. That’s the goal. At least, it has been stated as a goal. I heard it. I’ve said it.

We do what we feel we should in a way that we believe to be fair to everyone involved. We don’t want to hurt anyone. We say what we say and tell what we tell and give the glimpses that we are able. We don’t want to mislead. We don’t want to cause pain. We don’t want to cause strife.

But we just might.

This is what we have to come to grips with. The possibility that each thing we think we are doing to protect others may not be. That in our effort to not cause difficulty, we have caused pain instead. Even though our stated goal was to not hurt anyone. This is the choice we make with each action. With each decision. And it is ours to make.

But we don’t always see the other side. Our entire goal is to not hurt the other side, but because we are not on it, we don’t actually see it. We think we will do what we do and say what we say and act how we act in an effort to cause no pain. But we have not been them. At least, not today.

So we guess.

At our best, we are able to put ourselves in their shoes and act in the way that we would then want. But there are other times when we cannot. We simply do not have the experience required to put ourselves in their shoes. We do not know how we should act because we are incapable of understanding their motives and desires. We cannot know how they will or do feel because we have not or do not feel it. We cannot know how they will or even might react because we have not walked their walk. We think we do. We allow reason to provide us with answers. But that is a lie. That is our fallacy. It is our pride stepping in to say that we know what we do not know. This is especially arrogant because sometimes, not always, but sometimes…

Sometimes we could simply ask.

~ Christopher]

The Power of the Internet

Christopher Jones — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 19:18:25 +0000

It began last night as reply to a simple tweet. After awhile, a couple of friends had jumped in and tweets were flying back and forth, all in good fun. And then things were kicked into the next gear. An email was received saying one friend had been tagged in a Facebook post by another. I suppose twitter’s character limit just got to… limiting.

Over the next couple of hours, there were over 200 comments across 3 profiles by 6 friends. Comments were coming in as fast as you could refresh the pages, each funnier than the last. It was an excellent evening among friends. Friends who are separated in some cases by other a thousand miles. Friends who live in 4 cities across 3 states.

It was as close as these friends were going to get under normal circumstances. And it was all spontaneous because the infrastructure was already there to support it. No one had to set up a meeting time for a conference call. No one had travel. No one had to think about it. No one had to contact the others to say “hey, get on facebook!”. No, Facebook just emailed whoever was tagged in the initial post. GNotify notified whoever wasn’t logged into their email account. Or maybe the email was pushed to their smart phone.

This is the true power of the internet. Sure, you can get up to the second data or buy the latest junk while in your pajamas or read the news from a foreign newspaper. But bringing people together is what it is all about. This is why I work on the web. This is why I bury myself in technical specs and obsess over layouts at one in the morning. It is all about bringing friends, both old and new, together. The web is about giving people the ability to live better lives, to live happier lives.

Sometimes we just need to be reminded why it is we got into our chosen profession, whatever it is, and why we have decided to stay there. For me, this is it. If at the end of the day, people aren’t better off and happier than when they started, then I have not succeeded. So I will keep reading specs, and doing research, and experimenting with code into the depths of night, because this is what drives me.

Why do you do what you do?

~ Christopher]

Better than what you’re reading now

Christopher Jones — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 03:01:09 +0000

I keep meaning to post, but writing code keeps pulling me into the abyss from which no posts ever emerge. As I am unsure that I will ever get out of the pit of darkness that is code, here is a list of what I have been reading lately.

Fonts!!!: Bulletproof @font-face syntax – Paul Irish; Defeating the Flash of Unstyled Text – Paul Irish; Generator of EOT font files for IE – font squirel; Detecting @font-face – Paul Irish Yes, I am loving Paul Irish’s site this month.; Some set font-stacks to get you started
HTML5: Detect if a browser has specific HTML5 elements with this tiny javascript; Dive into HTML5; Video tag with graceful fallbacks
Other: Running multiple instances of XP-Mode in Win7 for IE testing

Web Forms and Opera 10

Christopher Jones — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:30:39 +0000

Opera 10 Web Forms test

Basically, this is just the demo from sitepoint’s html5 article striped down to the barest of html and css. No javascript here! You’ll need Opera 9.6 or better to see the goodness. Play with each input, submit the form with blank/incorrect fields, etc.

View the source. The w3c’s HTML5 validator throws 2 errors, but I’m not sure they are legit as I haven’t studied those parts of the spec closely enough yet. I don’t quite understand the rendering of datalist at the moment, but autocomplete lists without js is brilliant.

I love Opera.

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Treasure Hunting for Geeks

Christopher Jones — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 13:31:55 +0000

I started geocaching this past week. For those unfamiliar, think of it as treasure hunting for geeks. Someone goes out and hides a cache anywhere in the world and then goes to geocaching.com and posts the gps coordinates of where they left it. Now this hidden item can be as small as your fingernail or it could be a .50 cal ammo box, it all depends (yes, the hider does tell you the size category the cache is so you aren’t looking for a ammo box when it is a pill container). The cache must be a container of some sort because inside the cache is a log… a book or strip of paper on which the finder writes their username and date they found the cache. Once you find the cache, which can be extremely well hidden and camouflaged, you put your name in the log and go back to the geocaching site to tell everyone about your accomplishment.

Enough with the basics. As I said, I got sucked into geocaching this past week. I got a free account on geocaching.com, bought the geocaching app for my iPhone ($10), and went out one evening. I planned to go out for an hour or so, check out a couple of the easy caches that the site said were near my house. Really. I left with the best of beginner intentions. Fast forward 3 hours or so and I am searching for my 4th cache of the evening in the dark on the streets of Norfolk.

I started with an easy cache, a one star difficulty rating that said it was good to do with your kids. It was even in the garden of a church, so how bad could this be? And it was simple! The directions got me to the garden and the cache was immediately apparent. But I guess that it the point of one you can do with children. Anyway, it was a good confidence boost for a beginner, since it shows you that you are doing things correctly.

I next found myself looking for a micro cache at the local Senior center. Half an hour of looking later I hadn’t found a thing, so I brought out my iPhone app and looked for something else close to where I was. And what do you know, there was another cache a little over half a mile down the road, so off I went.

This one was another micro hidden by the same people who hid the last cache which I couldn’t find. But I was a beginner, and therefore confident in my ability to find difficult caches I probably shouldn’t even be bothering with. But seriously, this evening was about how far away it was, not how difficult it was. This micro cache was at a local beach access point, so I parked, pulled out my trusty gps, and quickly found a tree that seemed to be the hiding place. But I knew I was really looking for a rock from reading the other posts on the site… well, I thought I was getting the hints at least. One problem, there was a car with their headlights pointing right at the base of the tree and I didn’t need any muggles watching me poke around the base of the tree looking for who knows what. So I stood around for a bit, looking like a tourist (I hope), watching the water and the people. It was a nice evening, so this wasn’t exactly the worst thing ever, but I was a geocacher on a mission. These people needed to drive away! Well, 15 minutes later, that stupid maroon car was still sitting there, so I looked for another cache in the area, figuring I would come back later.

What do you know, there was another cache just across the street! Well, streets. Several lanes of traffic and a field or so away. It was a nano cache on an old cannon the city had placed there… because what else were they going to do with this odd little piece of land besides put a cannon and a flag on it? Anyway, after running my hands over the inside and outside of this cannon about 4 times, I finally found the cache. And having never seen a magnetic nano cache before, didn’t even realize I had found it. I thought I had the magnet that was supposed to be holding up the cache. It wasn’t until 15 minutes later that I realized there was a seam on what I had and that it could be opened. Yay, I found a difficult one!

By the time I got back to where I had parked, the maroon car was gone and it was dark. So I headed right back to the tree and started looking under it where I had seen some rocks earlier. I grabbed the biggest rock (which was still small) and low and behold, there was a small tube super glued to the bottom of it. Cache found!

Armed with even greater confidence that before, having found a micro and a nano cache on my first day, I went back to the senior center to glance around again… in the dark. Yeah, I found nothing and as I couldn’t see much of anything, so I headed home.

All in all though, I think I did very well. I looked for 4 caches and found 3. Not bad for my first night out.