This post was almost entirely inspired by “Learning to Smoke” by Tom Chiarella.
Smokers are a curious bunch — insular, thick skinned, social, and generally sharing. We congregate under leaky awnings, on park benches, and on pub balconies to inhale the foul nicotine carrying fumes that non-smokers think controls our lives.
Smoking is generally seen, amongst smokers at least, to be a social habit. We prefer to go on break with other smokers, we enjoy the chatter over a cigarette, and we enjoy the solidarity of knowing that we are looked down upon by most non-smokers.
But, for me at least, there is another side to smoking — one of solitude, of thinking, of reflection. I enjoy having a smoke with another smoker — whether that be at a bar with a random stranger, or on a smoke break with a colleague who smokes — but I also enjoy those that I have by myself.
When I can’t think, can’t write, can’t solve a given problem, my first port of call is a cigarette. A cigarette smoked in solitude. It affords me the time to think. It chases away distraction. It is something that I can do absentmindedly, or something I can do mindfully, but it is something that helps me think, write, solve. Above all else, it calms my mind.
From the heart-starter first thing in the morning, to the sleep inducer before bed, a cigarette smoked in solitude can transform my mental state from one of near panic, to one of calm collectedness.
Sure, there are probably other ways that I could achieve that, and sure, I will wake up in the morning and have a bit of a cough before my feet hit the floor. Certainly I should definitely quit. But I am, at least for now, happy in the knowledge that clarity is just a cigarette away.
So, I’ve had this dream ever since I was about 15 years of age. Its kind of a stupid dream, and I’m possibly a little bit ashamed to admit it, especially considering it’s such a cliche these days, but I want to build websites.
I don’t want to do it for fun, or as a hobby, or even as a sideline thing. I want to make it my livelihood. I want to spend days and nights sitting in front of my computer using Photoshop, Fireworks, or whatever the best graphics software for the web is, and produce beautiful websites for amazing people, and then have that design be largely ignored by 95% of the population. Because to me, thats what design is.
Design is creating something that serves its purpose, and helps the user get what they want with as little hassle as possible. Users shouldn’t notice design, in fact, in my opinion, if anyone other than someone who has an interest, or a modicum of understanding of design notices your design, its either bad, or too flashy. Unless thats what the client wants of course.
But there are several problems with my dream.
Graphical Knowhow
I don’t know how to use any of these graphics packages in even the most basic way. I can open an image in Photoshop, crop it, rotate it, and maybe apply a filter or two, but thats it. These tools are essential to a graphical designer. If I can’t create a graphics, then all I have is colour and text.
Design Principles
I don’t really have any understanding of design principles. At most, I understand that whitespace aids readability, but thats about it. I know nothing of colour theory, typographical grids, grids in general, vertical rhythm. Without these, and other design principles in my work, they are a mess, and nobody wants to end up with a mess.
Technical Chops
Sure, I can create well structured, semantic, meaningful markup that describes the content1, and I have a pretty good grasp on much of CSS, but there are elements of CSS that elude me, along with even the most basic understanding of Javascript.
With CSS, I don’t really “get” positioning, or z-index, and a couple of other properties, including much of the new properties in CSS3. When it comes to Javascript, any script that I can write is generally hacking away using one of the many libraries available, and using someone else’s code as a reference.
Learning Factor
I’m not some sixteen year old kid who can afford to spend every spare moment in front of my computer, just playing in photoshop, and reading blogs and articles on design, and picking things up as I go along. I have rent, and bills to pay, and groceries to buy, so I need a full-time job, which rules out full time study, not that I would be accepted into any design school anyway.
Neither of those really matter anyway, because they aren’t how I learn best. I learn best by working with a mentor. Someone who really knows their shit, and is willing to take the time to hangout with me, explain things, and show me things once or twice, then lets me have a crack, and tells me where I go wrong.
When it all comes down to it, its unlikely that I will ever achieve my dream, but I’ll keep dreaming, and keep on sitting at home, in front of my MacBook, doing what I do—build websites for myself that use next to no graphics, and wishing I could do it better.
Patrick Rhone linked to an interesting post by a guy called Fraser Spiers titled “Be Your Own Cloud” all about how we are getting ever closer to the dream of data ubiquity, and connection to our own data.
In particular Fraser talks about how a couple of recent technological advances by Apple have brought us ever closer to the dream—Apple Remote Desktop, Back To My Mac, and and sleep proxies, as well as the hardware advances in the new iMacs.
The way I read what Fraser had to say, he wants to have a powerful machine sitting on his desk at home, and to be able to access that machine, and all its power, and data from anywhere he has a network connection. Whether that be on his iPhone, or from his MacBook Pro.
the key thing is that I never want to have to say “oh, I can’t do that thing here – it’ll have to wait until I get home”.
I have my own thoughts on creating my “own cloud” but I’m not sure I know how to articulate them. The benefit of my vision of the personal cloud is that its available and possible to do today. Without relying upon waiting for new technologies to be where they need to be to allow it.
I do know that it possible to build a server that sits in your garage at home, and runs pretty much any service you could possibly want – from file serving, to video streaming and most things in between.
There will be those that don’t want to go down this route, because its adding another machine to your already taxed network, and its having an impact on the environment. But just like the technologies mentioned earlier, there are hardware technologies that are improving all the time.
Solid state drives are getting closer and closer to being ready for mainstream all the time, and these not only provide performance benefits, but also have power benefits as well. In addition to that, the revolution that is going on right now in mobile computing will eventually result in innovation in low power consumption CPUs and motherboards.
Which brings us back to Fraser’s original post, and the fact that we aren’t there yet, but we’re not far off.
Do you bottom post, or do you top post? Do you even know what I am saying? No? Okay, when you respond to an email, do you write your response at the top of the editor, or do you write it at the bottom?
Its as simple a question as that. Or is it?
Some people who engage in email significantly have a definite preference. Other’s just don’t give a flying fuck, and to those people I say — This is serious shit, its almost like there is a religious divide out there, just check the archives of any nerd mailing list.
I’m one of the few people who are aware of it, but just don’t care either way. I’ll admit it, I’m a top poster. There is a reason for that — I don’t want to have to read, or even mindlessly scroll, through all the crap that went on previously to get to the most recent addition. I know what was said, I was there, remember?
But then, I think about it a bit more, and I realise there are situations where bottom posting makes more sense. The mailing list situation — perfect example. Business emails that are often forwarded on “FYI” (fuck I hate that btw) — another good example. In these instances I agree that bottom posting makes more sense because I don’t have to scroll all the way to the bottom to read my way back up to see where the latest has come from.
Ultimately though, in my opinion, bottom posting is useful in such a minor set of circumstances that top posting is my choice, and will probably always remain so — shit, I even used Thunderbird, which bottom posts by default, for over a year, and the bottom posting thing was one of the main reasons I switched bask to Outlook.
Back in February Dan Benjamin wrote an amazing article on “Why Your Avatar Matters” . Amongst other things, he mentions the fact that humans are wired to recognise faces, the fact that having a consistent avatar aids recognition, and branding. Most if it really applies to people building or representing a business.
I’m not in business.
But I still think my avatar matters. The reason is this: I am who I am, or at the very least, I try to be; whether that is on the internet, on the telephone, or in real life. For that very reason it is important to me that I represent myself in a factual, and real manner.
My current avatar is pretty crap. I have thought of all different manner of creating a better one—making myself “pretty” first, having one drawn, finding a better photo, shoot, I even thought about having a professional photo shoot (until I thought about the cost). Ultimately though, because it’s not something that I will see a return on investment in, it’s not something I have invested in.
I mentioned a while ago (in a sort of “farewell” type post) that the when I started blogging again, I wanted to create something like Shawn Blanc had created with his website.
Recently, I have discovered another Sean, Sean Sperte (coincidently — through Shawn’s twitter stream. Random) who has created a similar experience with his website — Geek & Mild.
I used to lay in bed at night, after I had turned off my laptop, and tucked myself safely away between the sheets, next my beautiful girl, and bust out the iPhone to peruse the older posts on Shawn’s site.
I’ve found myself doing this with Mr Sperte’s site lately as well. His content is a pleasant mix of Apple, web, tech in general, and life. I do like the fact that although he is apparently a committed Christian (something I definitely am not) he doesn’t always write from that perspective.
A perfect example of this is his post on Apples opposition to Prop 8, back in the day. His post is mostly a quote from Apple, with a question at the end of it —
“I’m stunned. It’s insane that any publicly held company would consider taking sides in a political discourse like this. I doubt a company-wide poll was conducted in order to determine how Apple employees felt about the issue, so it’s safe to assume this statement was generated among Apple executives — most likely the board of directors. How arrogant of them.
When I first read that post I thought to myself “FUCK YOU Sean Sperte, who the FUCK do you think you are?” But then I left it for a moment, and then I read it again. Sure, he’s Christian, and by virtue of that fact, probably supported1Prop 8, but that wasn’t his point. His point was to question the intelligence of a public company actually making such a controversial statement so openly. At least I think, and hope it was.
So, yeh, there is my gushing, teenage wet dream post about a blog that has existed for a lot longer than this post indicates, but I have just found.
Music lends itself to collection. Digital music in particular is prone to this phenomenon. As a direct result of the collectibility of music, it also lends itself to clutter.
I am a music collector. I also, have a lot of clutter in my music library. I decided whilst I was migrating my music from the external hard drive that I would trim my music collection. Just get rid of the music that I don’t enjoy a whole lot, or listen to anymore.
I started by removing the artists that my partner had added to the library1, or requested be kept in the library. Once that was done, I wasn’t satisfied.
I then started to go through and find artists that I had added, and never listened to. There is probably a reason that I haven’t listened to them in a year or so – I am never going to! With those taken care of I had just one more type of music that I wanted to remove — music I don’t listen to or enjoy any longer.
With that out of the way, I ended up going from 98.17GB to 48.62GB — a pretty good effort if I do say so myself.
Footnotes
She gets the old PC, and the whole library still lives on the hard drive, its pretty safe to do this ↩
So, I’m redesigning this blog, again, and I’m looking around at the way blogs tend to shape up today. There tends to be two main trends in blog design:
Minimal
Most commonly, a monochromatic colour scheme, and lots of whitespace
Fucking Busy
Lots of sidebars, lots of pretty pictures (particularly in the header) full of ads, “friends” lists, archives in your sidebar, redundant “recent posts” lists, et al
I don’t particularly want to partake in either of these trends, so I’ve been looking around, collecting images, and doing a few sketches. Basically where I’m at is something mildly monochromatic, but with splashes of colour thrown in there for interest, no sidebar, and little in the way of useless, trivial information.
I’m probably going to toss the whole “About” or “Colophon” page. Actually, I’ll probably do away with all the pages except for a dedicated archive page (to which I will pay a lot more attention than the one I currently have). I don’t really have a need for “sections, or pages or any of that stuff — I have a separate site for most of that anyway.
I’d like to reinstate comments, but keep that as simple as possible.
All this has led me to also want the most lightweight, and fast-as-fuck blogging engine. WordPress isn’t bad, but its got a whole lot going on that I just don’t need. That said, I do publish from MarsEdit these days, and I don’t have to face the interface except to approve comments (that would be a handy feature to have), so maybe I could get by with WordPress.
It’s all kind of up in the air at the moment. It’ll come together at some point. Meanwhile, I’ll post random entries every now and then, and see how it goes.
When I decided I was going to move to Melbourne, I was looking forward to a few things that I haven’t actually gotten around to doing.
One of those things was actually making use of the portability of a laptop and hanging out in coffee shops with my laptop, drinking good coffee and working on whatever I was working on at the time.
I never actually got around to finding a decent coffee shop with good coffee, let alone hanging out and working in an environment like that.
When I decided to start blogging again, it was due, in no small part to the fact that I had just started reading shawnblanc.net. Shawn’s blog is basically a tech blog, aimed towards Mac and iPhone users, as well as the occasional personal post.
I wanted to create something similar with I Am Deanacus. Somewhere I would post well written treatises on software, and technology, with a focus on things that I feel passionate about, with posts about my personal life being occasional.
Unfortunately, I never found my voice, I never found a rhythm, and I’m not anywhere near the writer that Shawn is. Furthermore, I got too caught up in trying to design a theme for my blog that I liked, and I thought represented the personality I wanted to present.
I also had forgotten just how much I hate the WordPress interface. Sure, it’s had updates, and redesigns1, but it is still downright ugly, and a pain to use.
A result of these factor’s, I have been slow to post to this blog, and I can’t see that changing for the time being. I have just migrated to a new platform, and I am just starting a new job, and my partner is not the biggest fan of me spending hours of my spare time in front of my laptop2, when I could be, you know, being her boyfriend.
I guess in the end, this post is kind of a farewell. I am not giving up on blogging, but I think the way I will move forward is to post very occasionally until I do find my voice, and a design that I am happy with having for a long time. In the mean time, you can keep up with me via Twitter, or you can drop me an email, or you can even keep tabs on The Nicotine Diaries — the blog I don’t have to update.
Hi, I'm Dean, and this is my blog. A collection of random rantings, and half written musings with the occasional completed, and even somewhat researched article. More.
