Dave Kellam

My trusty old mac is starting to show its age. Nothing terrible, but you notice the odd wheeze as it struggles with a high-resolution slideshow or a large Photoshop comp. That said, it’s hard to complain when the machine is rock solid:

Coronado:~ dkellam$ uptime
16:46 up 61 days, 4:14, 2 users, load averages: 2.76 2.67 2.44

An uptime of 61 days? Guess it’s been a little while since the last reboot. A few specs for the curious: PowerMac G4 933mhz, 1gb SDRAM, 64mb GeForce4MX (my about screen image).

From a recent BBC interview with John Perry Barlow of the Grateful Dead and EFF, concerning Dan Glickman and the MPAA:

I’ve got good news and bad news and good news. And the good news is that you guys have managed to buy every major legislative body on the planet, and the courts are even with you. So you’ve done a great job there and you should congratulate yourself.

But you know the problem is – the bad news is that you’re up against a dedicated foe that is younger and smarter that you are and will be alive when you’re dead. You’re 55 years old and these kids are 17 and they’re just smarter than you. So you’re gonna lose that one.

But the good news is that you guys are mean sons of bitches and you’ve been figuring out ways of ripping off audiences and artists for centuries…..

Welcome to the prolonged media war of attrition. Maybe, the **AA’s should stop suing all of us and hire the odd person under-30.

“Hello website, my old friend… it’s been awhile.”

“I didn’t mean to ignore you.”

“Seriously, I tried to call a few times, but it never seemed right.”

“You’ve run off with a root-server?”

“There has to be something I can do.”

“A makeover?”

“Yes, but the last one was so ill-conceived.”

“One more chance? I promise it will be better this time.”

“I’m about to explode with glee.”

Today is CSS Reboot, that means a lot of your favourite personal sites will be sporting a fresh new look. Other folks have been at it for months, I signed up on Saturday. Suffice it to say that the place is looking a little dicey right now.

I’ll avoid details about the implementation and what I’m up to for the moment. It’s mostly about having a fresh spring-look and encouraging myself to produce more. April was not a great month in terms of my online presence. My last theme was solid, but it didn’t fit my style — look for it to reappear elsewhere in the near future.

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If you add a Flickr photo to your del.icio.us bookmarks, you’ll now receive a little thumbnail beside your link. Beyond the network stability, it’s one of those little benefits from Yahoo purchasing both sites.

It might not sit well with the old-school users that like the austere look, but I find the visual representation handy. I noticed it because I’ve been using my bookmarks to keep track of my comments around the web.

Five and a half years later, and Joe Clark’s The Web is Like Canada still rings true — chiefly, that the web may be best defined by what it is not.

For those unfamiliar with the conundrum of Canadian identity: we have an abundance of iconic symbols, but lack a set of generic traits to pigeonhole the populace. We are everyone, and we are no one. The online world isn’t much different. It endures a constant battle of redefinition, with no real end.

Where’s the beaver?

The first generation of buzzwords are now just a distant memory — convergence, portals and push. They’re the inbred cousins that you locked in a shed and forgot about. Yet, they still managed to pop out a couple of bastard children — AJAX, community and web 2.0. Just remember that most of it doesn’t mean anything to real people:

Among the crowd that actually runs Web “properties”, there are no alternatives, a lack that masquerades as a “standard”. Their Web is Starbucks; it is the three American broadcast networks before cable TV; it is a single-newspaper town. Their Web is Pleasantville before colourization. It is mainstream in the worst possible sense.

I’m not saying there’s a problem with the stupid nature of Vocabulary 2.0, language issues are part of what makes Canada great. We just need to make sure everyone is on the same page.

Democrazy served cold

Startups are not new, neither is building to flip. A business has parallels to constructing a nation, but we need to remember that nation-building on a whim is going to give us trouble.

We old-timers wonder why the oligarchs are throwing so much money down the tubes in an effort to overthrow the existing Web. We believe in a certain kind of Internet, one that’s open to new ideas but not open to every cockamamie idea.

We’ve been down this road before, and we’ll be down it again. So, heed Joe’s words and let your voice be heard:

What I want to happen is for the wise elders of the Web, those of us who’ve been online forever and really do know better than the neophytes, to use the concepts derived from the perpetual struggle to define Canadian identity as an arrow in our quiver in efforts to shoot bad ideas out of the sky.

Blam blam. Arrowed.

It’s about a week into the redesign of Eightface and things seem to be going okay. It’s taking a bit longer than usual — the home page and post pages are coming together nicely, but the rest of the site is lagging pretty far behind. For now we’ll stick to the impetus for the change and some thoughts about structure, while saving the methodology for a later post.

Dude, where’s the grunge?

Grunge is easy for me, it’s very forgiving. I needed something different, something cleaner and a bit more challenging. So far it’s very clean, there are almost no graphics in the css file other than the odd icon. I’m also making an effort to do a decent job in terms of accessibility, but I need to do more reading. Also, it probably looks like ass in IE right now.

If you like the dirty stuff, don’t despair. I’m currently in the process of releasing my last three layouts as theme packs. There should be more desktop wallpaper in the future too.

Bye-bye single column

A couple months ago, I thought that integrating the posts and quickposts would induce me to write more often. It had the opposite effect, the quickposts became more like long posts, the links ended up in my delicious stream and I had trouble finishing any of the templates. After most of the content on the front-page drops below the fold, you forget about it — out of sight, out of mind.

I’m not saying that the one-column structure can’t work, but it was having a negative impact on my posting style. If you’re looking for one-column inspiration: Michael did a good job with invader and Justin’s minimalist look is awesome. As for me, it’s off to the greener pastures of a one-glance tabloid style homepage.

The single column integrated structure won’t disappear completely, it’ll be put to use for the monthly archive view, as well as a log view for those that like their integrated feed style reading. Although that main central column will have two outliers to display date and comment count.

Hello sexy grid

Hopefully, the print influences in the design are obvious — you never know. I’ve always had a hard-on for black and white. Back in grade eight, I organized a team of five people and co-opted the school newsletter from the Vice-Principal. The first issue was a cut-and-paste nightmare, after that Microsoft Publisher 2.0 was my bitch.

Over the last week, I’ve spent a good chunk of time with my site open and copy of the Globe and Mail in front of me. The print edition has nice red accents, and thick black bars over allcaps in some sub-sections. Beyond that, Subtraction and Coudal have been the primary web influences for visual style and structure.

In terms of creating a proper grid structure, I don’t profess to know anything, so I’ll leave it to others. Mark Boulton’s simple steps to designing grids is a good place to start. Khoi offers up a nice technique to display a grid under your content. (you may have seen mine appear over the last few days). Adhering to the structure is a bit of a pain, but it works well visually.

The plan

We could call this a live redesign, or a live realign, but it probably sits somewhere in between. So, please bear with the ugliness while I get things sorted. A lot of the work I’ll be doing is actualizing things I wanted to have done with the last theme. The nitpicky bits: local searches, posting all my artwork again, going back through old posts to redo them, better subpages (links, archives), etc.

My priorities have been getting the home page and single post views in functional condition (some stuff is still missing). Next up are the search, page and monthly archive views (which should all be relatively similar). After that comes a few new additions, including a help/faq page and a more box on individual posts (to drive those ariving via deep link further into the site) and a forum of sorts, so I can provide better support for the various WordPress plugins and themes. And updates to the plugins of course. A lot of the subpages need work before I make the links to them obvious. All in all, the current implementation of the site is far from finished but the most trafficked portions are in decent shape.

That’s it for now. I’ll spend more time exploring the method behind the madness at a later juncture. To find out what’s going on with the site, check the changelog. If you’ve got ideas or suggestions, let me know.

Recently, Nintendo celebrated the 20th anniversary of the NES arrival in North America. I found the GameSpot coverage mostly unremarkable (read: nerd wet dreams), but the Duck Hunt conversation hit home last weekend.

My mom’s off in Europe, visiting my brother at school, and taking a much needed break from teaching. Meanwhile, my Dad is left at home working. I know the peace and quiet drives him nuts, so I dropped by to cook steaks and show off my intelligence.

Our after-dinner discussion included the finer points of the other brother’s video system collection, how much wrath I’d incur from borrowing his GameCube and whether or not everything bad was indeed good for you. Conversation then turned to the NES, the lightgun and Duck Hunt — one of the few video games that he has actually played. His comment:

You could never shoot that stupid dog.

I’m probably paraphrasing a bit, but you get the idea. Of course, the internet allows you to satisfy your bloodlust and kill the dog. Maybe the whole Nintendogs craze is just an attempt to even out the company’s canine karma and cultivate some love for man’s best friend.

What’s the point? Even my dad hates the dog in Duck Hunt. That says something.

Don’t have the cash for a real tilt-shift lens or even a Lensbaby? Here’s a quick tutorial for achieving the fake model photography look. I didn’t have too many photos around with a downward perspective, but I needed to give the technique a shot. This is the result:

As Marc points out on the flickr photo page, it probably would be better with the top of the chimney more focused. Didn’t really have anything better to work with on short notice. There’s a Flickr pool dedicated to tilt-shift miniature fakes if you need more. It’s really not that hard to fake.

Update: Here’s a much better example, from a trip to Bristol:

Transmit is the best ftp client I’ve ever used. How’s that for a shill? If you’re looking for something a little more indepth, Paul’s review of the current release goes into more detail. For me, the best feature is the tight integration with text editors (I’m partial to TextWrangler). Overall, it’s simple and easy to use, almost feels like an Apple product.

Now comes the hard part where I tell you that Transmit has been my client of choice for two or three years and I’ve only just purchased it recently. Why? I’m a bastard, that’s why — one of those jerks that stiffs the little guys. It’s equal opportunity jackassery though, I steal from the big boys too. It’s mine now though, and worth every penny.