vanderwal.net

Wonderful Show on Election Day

There are about 275 voters ahead of me inline outside to vote. This is my new place to vote and those around me say there has never been a line outside before. This is an incredible showing of people with faith in the system, particularly after the last election fiasco.

Come join the fun and have your say.

Vote

Please Vote!

Ninth Anniversary for My Personal Site

At some point nine years ago I began my first personal site. It was November 1995 and CompuServ opened up space for their users to publish their own site. This trek began with creating a page using a text browser and some prefab components from CompuServ. The computer this adventure began with is long gone. But, the remnants of the site remain, mostly in the links page, which became my bookmarks that I could access from anywhere. I never really went back to using browser based bookmarks after this point.

My personal site has changed over the years, from a site that was named the "Growing Place" that housed poetry, links, a snippet about consulting work I was doing, and a homepage. Version 2 was a move off of CompuServ to Clark.net hosting (which became Verio and was never the same after) came with frames and FrontPage buttons (the buttons never worked right after they were edited) and the links page grew and the consulting page moved from active to "under construction". V.2 also had some CGI form pages, mostly for mail and a guestbook that was not linked.

Version 3 (about 1998) was a move to vanderwal.net and had a black background with electric green and electric blue text. V.3 provided more links and had a small page of annotated links that was updated infrequently, and was mostly short notes to myself and was not linked to by anything but referrer logs. V.3 began using ColdFusion and then ASP, as that was what I was playing with at the time. This version was hosted at Interland, which was not a favorite ISP as I was doing bug fixing for them and their poor system administration.

Version 4 (November 2000) was moved to an ISP with PHP. This was just after our wedding and a photo gallery was born. The site stayed in black with blue and green for a short while, until it moved to a blue and orange theme (April 2001) inspired by the trip to the mother country Holland on our honeymoon. The annotated links were still being kept by hand, but were linked to finally. December 2000 I started using Blogger, which made the annotated links easier and provided a spark to post other information.

We are still in Version 4, possibly in version 5 as the graphic design morphed in November 2003 to its current state. This design validated to XHTML and made maintenance much easier. Off the Top weblog was converted to PHP in October 2001 after leaving Blogger and hand maintaining this section for months. The hosting has remained the same and has been steady.

There are many things in the works, but other outside commitments have been putting things on hold. The markup and CSS need to be cleaned up for greater ease. There are some hosting modifications coming, which could trigger some more changes on the back end programming side. There are some design and presentational structure changes that are being played with as there are a few things that really bug me. I really want the comments back online and I have plan for this, but it needs some time to work out the details. There are some changes external to this site that could be coming also, which will make things much easier in the long run. Maybe these revisions will be done by the 10th anniversary.

New way to view politics

I learned something about politics today. This past year or two really has had me scratching my head and wondering what I am missing. There are some individuals I can not fathom how somebody could vote in the manner that they claim to. Today I found the answer...

At the drugstore I was checking out and a toy was playing "I've Got You Babe". My cashier, who is elderly was complaining to her manager that she was getting a headache from the music.

Manager: Do you not like Sonny Bono?
Cashier: I don't know Sonny Bono
Manager: He was the governor of California
Cashier: He was?
Manager: He sure could not sing, but he was a great Republican governor.

I am trying to turn my head so she does not see my San Francisco Giants cap, but somehow I do not think that would ring a bell as being part of California.

Today I learned suspending reality is a great way to look at politics. Well, for some. Tuesday I vote with my reality fully engaged and with an eye on my son and his future. I vote not to dismantle the future with building huge deficits, destroying the environment, nor dismantling foreign relations. But a future that is safer, with global warming in check, solid education, sound economy, innovation and science respected, creativity embraced, diversity embraced, and living in a country that the world respects again.

Mess Transit

I am on the bus heading back to my car after spending an hour on the DC Metro and only going one stop. The Metro system has bee getting progresssively worse and now seems to be resembling a system in the third world and not one in the capitol of the U.S. Who knows where this mess will end.

Good Party?

Yesterday at the end of a little party for Will, I was asking if he enjoyed his first birthday party. He responded with a, "yah". That completely made my year as it was the first yah or yes we have heard. Fortunately he repeated it for Joy later.

Crawl in a Hole

There are days when you see something that makes you want to crawl in a hole out of embarrassment for somebody else.

This evening presented one of these moments. I was walking toward the Metro platform and I thought I saw a fake tail or odd fashion accessory hanging between the legs of a woman wearing a skirt. The closer I got the more curious I became. I was wondering if it was a belt that wrapped and then draped to nearly touch the ground. As I got close and ready to make my turn up the platform I realized the accessory was inside her skirt. Well the accessory was actually toilet paper.

Walking

He is walking!

Personal InfoCloud Rescues the Day

I had a wonderful experience where my own Personal InfoCloud worked successfully (I have had many problems having the right informaiton I need at my fingertips). I had been having general conversations about a lunchtime presentation or roundtable as part of a string of Adaptive Path training, but I was not exactly clear on the concept or the format of the discussion. I knew it was to be informal, but could also use slides if wanted. I thought I would just use some handouts of the content of the Accessibility is Little More Than Web Best Practices presentation (10 copies surely would be enough for a roundtable. When I go the the training session I looked around and could not figure who other folks doing roundtables would be so I asked the manager who else was doing the lunchtime stuff and the format. I was the only one and the format was wide open.

That morning I had converted the presentation from Keynote to PDF and e-mailed it to my mobile phone address and my gmail account. I was standing next to Bryan and mentioned I had my presentation in PDF on me, which got an inquisical look until I said it was on my phone (Treo) and I could e-mail it to a laptop and present from that. So I sent the presentation to Jeff's laptop, which had WiFi (they all had WiFi actually). In a couple minutes a PDF version of the presenation was available to click through and present from.

Not only did I have the times and addresses in my phone, but I had my presenation as a back-up. The PDF was fine for these slides as they are designed as handout to use as lists. Were it not this way I would have been kicking myself for not also having the Keynote version.

As a sidenote the number of Treo users was impressive. I know of eight Treos that I saw at the sessions. I also saw many Macs laptops of attendees taking notes and only saw one or two PCs. This would be in a population of 40 or so folks.

Back and Digging Out

Coming back from six plus days of being untethered from the net I found I had 1117 unread RSS feeds. This is worse than my personal e-mail stack, which was just over 550 (I get to my work e-mail stack tomorrow, which averages about 80 e-mails per day). The RSS feeds really threw me as I was not expecting it to have snowballed like that.

There were a few things I was wanting to follow that I knew may pop their heads up while I was away so I followed these on my Treo 600 on Google News and del.icio.us aggregator. I was able to find most of what I was looking for and do a quick read and then e-mail an annotated link to one of my personal e-mail accounts. I did find some things on del.icio.us that I just copied into my del.icio.us bookmarks so I could come back to them later.

I got far less done on the writing front as my son was along for the vacation, which made it a real family vacation and not the usual working vacation with the laptop on my lap on the front porch when I am not playing in the waves. No, I would not say I am rested, but I do have more wonderful memories of a great summer get away. Our time schedules shifted to a 10 month-old's eating and sleeping schedule. When we drifted to our normal shore vacation schedule we had a cranky kid, which only took two days to convert to a vacation fully focused on the kid. We met many wonderful new people, stayed in a different B&B, and found a new restaurant to add to our favorites.

I am now ready for the last two days of the week and to start responding to e-mail tomorrow. I am also ready to tackle my writing assignments that are well over due. My laptop is also fully updated with OS and software updates that make it really sing, too bad Windows updates never make the machine perceivably faster.

It is Okay to be Quiet

Things will be quiet here for a few days, unless I post from the mobile, as I will not have the usual connectivity. I may try and find wifi, but the goal is to relax, write, and read. Those that want to say hi can use my mobile e-mail, if you have it. Gmail will also work using my normal moniker when I post about the web. Untethering is tough, particularly when there is cool stuff going on that I want to stay on top of.

Profiled at InfoDesign

I am the current InfoDesign Profile - Thomas Vander Wal. This was harder than I thought it would be an many alternate answers ran through my mind, but I finally narrowed it down as much as I could. Peter has many other wonderful profiles and interviews at InfoDesign Special. I have been inspired and found new resources from these glimpses into other designers lives.

Thinking about Thinking

This past Saturday morning I finished the Steven Johnson book Mind Wide Open. I really enjoyed the book and may go back and pull out parts to store in my own notes.

But, there is one thing that kept niggling me as I read past the section on neurofeedback, which was used to improve concentration and attentive focus. I kept wondering if I am pulling all this information in, how it gets synthesized. The book did bring out some answers as many often focus on differences from what is already stored in the mind. I completely agree with that and I often work in that mode. But, as I read, my mind drifts to memories or to related items. This drifting is where it seems to get stored in memory and I will pull out the information weeks, months, or years later. This drifting is also where I often find unique answers and view problems or current solutions and find improved was of doing the same thing. This is also why I tend to read broadly across topics as well as deeply in areas I am passionate about.

The problem with improving focus is how would my synthesizing take place. Do others read in the same way? In college I had an office hours discussion with a professor complaining that I often had to reread paragraphs and pages as I had found my mind drifting, which was inspired by what I was reading. The professor and his office mate felt this drifting was a very good thing as it lead to better examination of what is known to one's self as well as fostering creative solutions. All more to think about.

Le Tour 2004

It is Le Tour time again and we are following Oskar's Tour updates and his Tour links. Here in the U.S. we are following the Tour on OLN. It may finally be time we got Tivo so we don't miss a bit of the peddling.

The summer is the time we turn our focus to Europe to watch the tennis Grand Slam's of French Open and Wimbledon (these were the calming influence when we had horrible reverse culture shock in 1988). But, it is the Tour that brings back memories of Hinault, LeMond, Roche (watching him ride into Paris in person), Indurain, and Armstrong. Le Tour is summer as it has been since the 70s in our memories. It is always a reminder how little we are on our bike, even the years we were putting well over 2,000 miles under our peddles.

Good Bye Grammer

In loving memory