Tag: quotes

If you’ve been involved in the WP community at all for the past couple of months; you couldn’t have missed that Root and Michael Heilemann have been… bickering back and forth about Kubrick and designs and usability and whatnot. From what I saw in the various threads on the WP Support forums, on both’s blogs and elsewhere they both need a good smack to the head. I’m too tired of the whole deal to really care who started it or who’s currently at fault.

Why bring it up then? Michael’s got a thread up that’s continuing the spat. Normally that wouldn’t be enough for me to bother putting a note up here but one of the people commenting on Michael’s thread said:

Quoting Root:

IMHO that is going to make WP less accessible to the self design end user than it is now. Some of us are quite interested in these things.

That means they’ll have to pay a designer to do it for them, hopefully. To that I say, “Bravo!” (There are way too many people running around loose on the Internet with a bootleg copy of Front Page calling themselves web designers, IMHO.)

Another person commenting replied:

There are way too many people running around loose on the Internet with a bootleg copy of Front Page calling themselves web designers, IMHO.

Hear hear

And that just pisses me off. I’m not a designer and make no claims to be one. I do have a very rudimentary grasp of CSS and a slightly better one of HTML. I’ve borrowed a book from a friend of mine and am learning a bit about PHP/MySQL. I do all my coding either in Bluefish1 or Notepad2. I looked at the template WP shipped with in v1.02 and realized it was beyond my skills to really modify at the time. So I grabbed a couple of styles from the Alex King style competition but I saw that under some circumstances they’d break. I wasn’t happy about that and I didn’t like that my blog’s style wasn’t something I’d crafted. I kept looking around for something better to use and then Root came out with his Trident template. I was able to drop that in and make a few modifications so that I had a style that’s my own. It’s ugly as all get out but I could alter it as I need it without having to shell out more money to indulge in my blogging hobby. And the idea that just because I’m not a designer that I must be using a pirated copy of Frontpage3 in order to work on my site is insulting! I also think that if WP v1.3 does make it substantially more difficult to create new themes for my site then I will have to an alternative platform.

1 When working on my desktop and booted into Linux.
2 When working on my laptop, whose CD-ROM drive sucks so bad I can’t get windows off the machine.
3 Frontpage is a piece of crap! I’ve had to use it at work a few times and it writes the most horrific code! If you’re going to claim that people are pirating web design software; why not credit them with pirating something that’s actually useful.

Adam Gessaman has a lovely quote up on his blog but if you missed the debate on Friday, then you might want go to the New York Times. As they’ve got a transcript as well as an article doing fact check on the issued that were covered. They also have a video of the debate. Note: The video requires you to have Macromedia’s Flash Player version 6.0 or higher installed. I don’t have that installed currently so I don’t know if there are any other requirements to view this but I’ll wager it shouldn’t be attempted over dial-up.

Shaun of the Dead

Shaun isn’t having the greatest of times. The staff at the TV store he works in don’t take him very seriously as temporary boss; his girlfriend Liz has had enough of always meeting at the ‘Winchester’ Arms along with his yob mate; and his relationship with his dad – sorry, step-dad – remaims heavily fraught. And now the undead have risen and are spreading their zombie curse to everyone they can get their teeth into. Just doesn’t seem worth getting out of bed some days.

Movie Trailer, via Apple

*sigh*

Note to Self: When picking movies in the future, make sure you’re picking them because the story/concept appeals and not the special effects.

Been feeling a bit burned out lately, too many weeks of running around doing stuff and not enough down time, I suspect (hence the lack of posts and lack of Ant-Boy).

Anyway, while taking a break I ran across this article over at CSM. I’ve felt that frustration as well when I was younger. Back in a high school painting class I took; I was working on painting a lighthouse on an icy shore. The teacher came over and said my waves were wrong, took the brush from my hand and painted the waves the way she thought they should be. After all these years1, I still feel somewhat annoyed/bitter that she did that. Ah well, not much I can do about it.

Our assignment was to paint watercolor landscapes. I painted trees with round tops, modeled after the pruned trees I saw as I walked to school each morning. I liked my painting; my teacher did not. She said my trees looked like lollipop trees; that they didn’t look like real trees, although they looked like the trees I knew.

Mrs. E picked up a paintbrush and painted over my trees to make them look the way she thought trees should look.

For the rest of my school years, I never voluntarily took an art class.

Anyway to Mrs. Kennar I say, though I’m not a teacher and I did continue taking art classes2 in high school and into college; I’ll never paint over your lollipop trees.

1 While I’ve been told that I look much older than my actual age (28); I’ve been through enough other experiences that thinking high school feels like I’m trudging through ancient history.
2 Though perhaps not surprisingly, I haven’t done any painting since I took that class.

While reading a blog, I followed a link they had to another blog whose design they liked. I pulled up the source code of the 2nd blog to try getting some idea of how they put their site together and found this delightful commentary in the comments:

Meta information was once really useful, but thanks to Google it doesn’t do much for your well being anymore. Kind of like comfort food – it tastes good and it makes you feel cozy but causes a lot of heartburn and gas.

The meta tags you see blow are mostly for show. All rebuilt from vintage 2001 code that was rusting out in a forgotten web site. The interior was re-stitched by hand and features an 800 thread count. I’m not sure if the ‘MSSmartTagsPreventParsing’ is needed anymore but I left it in as a reminder of how much our world is controled by heartless global coporations who seek nothing more than to turn us all into soulless lemmings with a Platinum Card.

Have a nice day!

Quote found on Airbag. Kudos to the Binary Bonsai for the link.