Easy Reader

It’s funny, but the more I take on, the more zen I get about work. Perhaps it’s the recent addition of a daily trek to the gym in the wee hours of the morning which is getting my day off to a better start. Or maybe it’s the Pragmatic philosophy which is beginning to take hold since finishing The Pragmatic Programmer and starting Agile Web Development with Rails. Who knows, but I am thankful for the calm.

So what else have I added to my already overfull plate? Well, I recently joined the staff of A List Apart as a copy editor. In fact Ross Howard’s High-Resolution Image Printing (in Issue 202) marks my editorial debut at the famed publication. I am very excited about getting to work with Erin, Jeffrey, Eric, Jason and the rest of the ALA all-stars as I have been an avid reader since I discovered it back in 2000. If you are reading an article and notice an overabundance of <abbr> and <dfn>, there’s a good chance I am to blame.

I am also pleased to confirm that I will be speaking at SXSW Interactive in March of 2006. At present, I am working on one session with Jeremy Keith and two other panels which are still in the formative stages. I will have more details to provide you all in the coming weeks.

Also to come are some great award announcements, a few more articles, and another potentially big announcement in the web standards arena. In the mean time, I am preparing for a private web standards training session down in North Carolina and next week’s trip to Silicon Valley, where Molly, Andy and I will be putting on a great 3-day training session as part of the Web Design and Project Management Tour from WOW.

Just when I had gotten over the loss of Design In-Flight, the magazine relaunches as a web-only publication. From the history/about page:

With the reduction in production efforts with this format, and a slightly less rigid publishing schedule, DiF is sure not to disappear again.

I certainly hope so. Welcome back!

Kel & I just got back from a long weekend up in Toronto, Ontatio. It was a mixed bag of great food & experiences and horrible weather.

We booked the trip thinking it’d be a little cooler than Connecticut and (having consulted the weather forcast) packed accordingly. We were completely unprepared for the record-breaking heatwave they’ve been experiencing (the hottest in 70 years according to Joe Clark). I have never sweat so much in my life, and that’s saying a lot… I lived in Florida for 13 years. The heat was oppressive and the city was filled with smog and haze, making the ambiance a little less than we’d hoped for.

That said, we did have fun shopping (or was that running down Queen Street ducking into whatever shops had AC?) and eating throughout the city. I touched base with Joe a few times on the phone while we were there and he made recommendations on the best places to eat in the city. Queen Mother Cafe was a fantastic little Asian fusion restaurant on Queen St near McCaul. It was very cozy and café/pub-ish in feel and decor and the food was unbelievable. We took a few shots of our entreés, if you’re interested. Another notable was Udupi Palace in Little India. It is purely vegetarian and serves South Indian cuisine. We got their just before they closed (10PM on Sundays… make a note) and the food was quite tasty and different from the North Indian fare we are used to. Also of note is Tea Shop 168, a cute little coffee/tea chain which serves tean and coffee with “bubbles” (tapioca beads). It brought back memories of the Cassava Lounge in Boston a bunch of us met up at during MacWorld 2004. “Tea with balls” – I love it.

On Sunday, I went off exploring on my own while Kel napped (exhausted from the heat). My mission was to pick up some new music and I set my sights on visiting Rotate This!, a great little indie record/CD on Queen Street, west of Bathhurst. I thumbed through some of the LPs and CDs before deciding that I was not sure where to begin reimursing myself in Canadian indie rock, so I asked the girl behind the counter to pick out some stuff for me to listen to. After listening to a few records, I left with Death From Above 1979’s You’re A Woman, I’m a Machine, Arcade Fire’s Funeral and The Russian Futurists’ Our Thickness. Each band is quite different from the others, so it provides a nice balance of the different sounds developing in Canada right now. I am sure I will write more on these later, once I have time to digest.

On the way back to the hotel from Rotate This!, I stopped off to take some photos of the massive hip-hop/graffiti festival which was taking place in the alleys south of Queen Street. At first it seemed like some brazen taggers out in the middle of the day, but then, there were so many people involved, it became obvious it was some sort of organized event. The art was amazing and was all part of Style In Progress 2005. It was pretty incredible to watch true graffiti artists at work (something normally only possible with night vision goggles). There are some great shots in our Flickr gallery from the trip.

Monday was another scorcher, but we took a short cab ride over to the Distillery District to have a mid-morning coffee with Joe at Balzac’s Coffee House. We had a good time (it was the first time Kel had met Joe and they got along rather famously) and introduced Joe to the art of Alphonse Mucha. After catching up for an hour or so, we headed back into the heat and up to Kensington Market and Chinatown before walking back onto Queen Street and, finally, back to the hotel to catch the shuttle to the airport.

The trip home was a disaster. Our 8PM flight out was cancelled, but we managed to make it out on an earlier one, only to get stuck in Philadelphia until some time after 1AM (I really have no idea what time it was). We finally arrived back in Hartford at close to 3:30AM Tuesday morning. Exhausted, we still had to drive the 45 minutes home. Not the best travel experience by far. I can’t say I will be rushing to travel with US Airways again any time soon. I could go on and on about the airline industry, but I’ll save that for another post on another day.

Anyway, if your’re interested, you can see our shots from the trip on Flickr.

Sad news, friends… Design In-Flight is closing shop. This very young, yet stellar PDF-based magazine was off to a fantastic start, but, as Andy put it, changes in his personal and professional life have conspired to make DiF’s continued publication an impossibility.

Though I am disappointed at losing such a great publication, I understand where Andy’s coming from. Having spent six years of my life devoted to a magazine I started in college, I know how tough it can be. I put the fritz on hiatus in the summer of 2000 when I moved to Connecticut, hoping to restart it again as a solely web-based publication, but time has conspired to keep it only a homepage. Will I ever find the time to get it going again or is it only wishful thinking? I’m not sure. I guess time will tell.

Andy, best of luck to you in your future endeavors.

I’ve been doing a little research lately into new laptops and I am finally starting to understand a little more about processors, etc., so I am dumbfounded to hear that Apple is dumping IBM’s PowerPC chips for Intel’s Pentium line. From my experience, Intel chips a) run really hot and b) suffer from a severe processing bottleneck (3.2 Gigahertz with a 533 Megahertz Front-Side Bus? WTF?). It seems to me that it would have made more sense for Apple to go with AMD, they’ve got incredibly powerful chips which I understand do not suffer from these problems. Maybe there’s something I’m missing, after all, I’m not a chip guy (or a Hollywood mogul).

Enough about the switch, I wanted to share some humor. I love this exchange on Slashdot in reaction to the news:

Dispel any remaining doubts; we are now living in the evil mirror universe.

I’ll believe that when the Red Sox win the World Series!

Yeah, right — that’s about as likely as finding out who Deep Throat is.

You can read the whole trail if you like.