Go!  NOW!

Seriously, I’ll wait.

………….

Ok, good.

I have been looking forward to Inception for some time.  Christopher Nolan did an amazing job generating buzz on a property about which we knew essentially nothing almost a year before it’s release, and I admit that when it comes to sci-fi I geek out and totally fall for that kind of thing.  As the release date neared and we got little tidbits of information fed to us, I got even more excited.  Judging from early previews, there was a distinct Matrix flavor to the film, and while this is not necessarily a bad thing, I hoped that the film would be more original and stand on its own, transcending such comparisons.  It did so, with flying colors, and gave us some of the most interesting and original sci-fi in a long time.  I could go on, but I don’t really want to talk about the film itself, but more what it may have spawned.

The night before I saw Inception, I was chatting online with some friends, and I said that I was hoping that the film could invigorate the cyberpunk genre, since it looked at the time like it had that type of feel.  I could not have been more wrong.  Inception does not breathe life back into cyberpunk, it created its own, brand-new genre, which I am calling psychopunk.  I have had people tell me “mindpunk” or “dreampunk” would sound better, but I think “psychopunk” better captures the idea.

Cyberpunk, for the uninitiated, and its cousin, steampunk, are sci-fi genres where the primary basis of technology form the foundation of the world in which the stories take place.  Cyberpunk features high-end computers-usually including artificial intelligence-cybernetic body modification, and lots of mind-machine interface.  Steampunk, by contrast, deals with steam power, cogs, gears, vacuum tubes, and a lot of brass and rivets.  Interestingly, stories in both genres tend to be about people that are outsiders.  Usually the protagonists are some sort of everyman with maybe one exceptional skill, who is thrown in to some situation far outside his experience, usually dealing with forces far beyond his reckoning.  The primary difference between the cyber and steam varieties tends to be that cyberpunk stories tend towards the dystopian, characters are often nihilistic, and the endings are at best neutral, whereas steampunk has a more optimistic world view and the protagonist is more often what would normally be considered heroic, and “happy” endings are normal.

What we get with Inception and psychopunk is something else entirely (I am going to try and avoid spoilers as much as possible, but if you are worried you might not want to read further).  The dream sharing in Inception is not really technology, it is instead technique.  This brings it closer almost to a martial arts epic than it does the cyber or steam punk genres.  The only technology related to the dream sharing is a device that fits inside a hard shell briefcase.  It has tubes that feed drugs and possibly connect each of the people sharing the dream and a button in the middle.  That’s it.  We are never told how it works, or why.  There’s this thing in a briefcase, and it helps people share dreams, that’s it.  Cyber and steam punk spend a lot of time discussing technology, Inception largely ignores it, other than a one line statement about how the military developed the technique.  Instead of the tools, it is the abilities of the characters that make dream sharing work the way you want it to.  In this way the film (and the genre I am imagining it has created) makes heavy use of the Competent Man, albeit a more specialist version, as each member of the “team” in Inception has one thing in the shared dream that they do better than the others, although every team member seems capable of picking up the slack if someone is disabled in some way.  Inception borrows from the cyberpunk genres also in that the story itself is mostly a classic heist story, as are most-and indeed the best-cyberpunk tales.  The dream sharing also takes a back seat in many ways to psychology itself (hence my preference of “psychopunk” instead of “dreampunk”).  The main characters cannot accomplish their mission within the shared dream unless they first analyze their target, and understand him/her.  They have to delve into motivations and tendencies in order to get inside someone’s head and get the result they want.  They are basically profilers, albeit somewhat crude ones.

All of this is surface glitz to set Inception apart from what has come before, but the real genius, the real difference, comes only at the very end of the movie.  The film is great all the way through, but becomes genius in the last 5 seconds.  The ending is ambiguous.  Again, trying not to spoil, but the last frame of the film completely fails to answer the major concerns of its main character at the end.  This is not a “gotcha” ending where there is some surprise and you go back through the film in your head to find the clues, it is ambiguous in the truest sense of the word, it provides no answer at all.  The reason I say this is genius is simply this:  I mentioned before that a primary difference between cyber and steam punk is that one is pessimistic (or at least nihilistic) and the other tends to be more optimistic.  Inception is neither.  Or rather, it is whichever one you want it to be.  The ending gives you, the viewer, the choice.  What happened?  You decide.  There are basically two choices, and your own psyche makes the movie end the way you want.  And that is genius, and that is what needs to characterize the psychopunk genre.

The psyche in psychopunk is not just in the story, it is in you.

http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/06/01/old.microsoft.browser.dying.off.amid.rivals/

To sum up, IE6 has dropped below 5% usage in the U.S.  This is a Good Thing.

IE6 has been the bane of web designers for years now.  It is very old from a technological standpoint.  It is non-standards compliant to an extreme degree.  Unfortunately, it has held on far longer than it should have, due in part (I believe) to Microsoft’s blundering release of Windows Vista.  Vista was so reviled that a large number, perhaps even a majority, of Windows users remained on Windows XP right up until the recent release of Windows 7.  In fact, some statistics seem to indicate that adoption of Windows 7 has been slower than it should be, despite the fact that it is much improved over Vista or indeed any previous Windows release (better mark your calendar, you won’t often see me give MS any credit).  I blame the slow move to Win7 as an unfortunate byproduct of the loss of trust MS suffered after the horrendous Vista release.

Personal reflections and digs at MS aside (I can’t help it, it’s like instinct to me now), anyone designing/developing for the web is probably breathing a tremendous sigh of relief today.

First if all, there is navigation of pages. We are used to point and click; an iProduct gives us touch. Easy enough, but when designing, one has to remember that a human finger is not as precise and pointy as a mouse cursor. Navigation elements on a site need to be large, and have more space between them, to make browsing your site on an iProduct a good experience. Another thing to remember is that there is no such thing as mouse-hover or mouseover on an iProduct. The cursor does not exist when the screen is not touched, and so many of the event handlers web designers use to highlight things like navigation buttons simply won’t work. With this in mind, navigation needs to be made very clear. A link, whether it be text or a graphic button, needs to very obviously be a link. Along with rollover states for navigation, drop down menus are problematic on an iProduct. Apple has given us the functionality by invoking the normal mouse-over event when touching on a navigation element that triggers a drop down, but unless your site is extremely large I would highly recommend doing away with hierarchical drop downs in your site menus. One touch to the destination should be the rule, as far as it is possible.

Another interesting thing I discovered is that certain CSS properties that work perfectly fine in Safari on a desktop computer are ignored on an iProduct. The most important of these I found are fixed elements such as DIV tags with a position:fixed attribute, or background images using the  background-attachment:fixed property.  The reason for this is simple, and makes sense once you think about it.  On an iProduct, in order to accommodate large amounts of page content on the smaller screens, the user has to be able to pan around the page, and unlike a desktop environment, you don’t get the ever-present cursor and scroll bar with its handy buttons, to say nothing of having a mouse with a scroll wheel.  The result of this is that a touch and drag on an iProduct screen has to pan the page around on all directions, and fixed elements will not behave properly in that environment.  Accordingly, Safari on the iProducts ignores the fixed property items and moves them around with the page as a whole.  It might be helpful to think of a web page on an iProduct as akin to looking at static printed document that has active areas that allow you to bring up other, related, documents.

The easy solution to all this is simply to make your navigation really big and chunky, which I hate; and to avoid the use of fixed properties in your CSS, but frankly the cool things you can do with them in the desktop environment make that an unattractive choice.  You might notice I have used them here.

Can we have our cake and eat it, too?

The answer is yes.

We have a couple of options we can use to accomplish this.  WordPress makes this very easy as it has some built in functionality that smooths the process along.  If you are not using WordPress, similar results can be achieved using CSS Browser Selector.  For WordPress users, check out this excellent article by Nathan Rice on using the WordPres body_class function to detect if your user is on an iProduct and serve them altered CSS instructions to make your site iProduct Friendly.

I’ll let you read the article to get the full scoop, but what is happening is essentially that if someone on an iProduct comes to your site, alternative CSS instructions can be used for any elements that might be problematic in the small-screen multi-touch environment.  I was able to use this to remove the fixed properties from various site elements, and best of all, I was able to increase both the size and spacing of text and graphic navigation elements.  For the user the changes are totally transparent, and I as the designer don’t have to compromise on my desktop design in order to have a usable site on an iProduct.

With millions of iProducts flying out of Apple’s warehouses, I think iProduct prep is going to become a vital step in delivery of web sites.

WordPress.

Yeah.

I have resisted the siren song of WordPress for quite some time.  For one thing, I was quite comfortable working in Seditio and was reluctant to learn a new system that, as far as I could see, was just going to do the same thing.  Also, I had tried WordPress years ago, when shopping for a good CMS, and at that time had found it very limited.  Back then it really was only good for making a blog, and the theming system seemed incredibly stiff and confusing.  Additionally, when one looks at WordPress sites, they tend to look really alike.  I had always assumed this was due limitations of WordPress itself but have discovered it seems to be more of a limitation of the theme designers, or perhaps more charitably the result of a fad embracing the “classic” WordPress layout.  Add to this that a gadfly colleague of mine had been pestering me to give it a try again, since she was hearing great things about it, and I reluctantly consented to take a fresh look.

Needless to say, I was impressed.  So much so that when I redesigned the Ribit Web Site I scrapped the old CMS and re-did the whole thing in WordPress, including bringing over 2 years of blog entries.  WordPress has really grown up in the last 5 years or so.  The theming system is very elegant now, although in truth I cannot say for sure if this is a result of it changing or me just being more experienced now.  The blog is now simply a feature of the site, albeit a big one, rather than the whole enchilada, and the blog features (archives, links, comments, etc) do not have to dominate the site landscape.  And while I remain skeptical of a lot of the current talk of Search Engine Optimization, WordPress now makes it very easy to help the web crawlers find your site more easily.  I enjoyed learning the ins and outs of the system and found that the engine now actually helps me in my design efforts by getting out of my way and freeing me up from some of the more tedious coding chores.  The extensibility and vast plugin library available was also a big incentive.

After completing the Ribit site, I was so impressed that I decided my own site should be redone for WordPress.  And here we are.  The design was kept essentially the same.  A few changes include the removal of any form of drop down navigation, as lately I have been trying more and more to sideline navigation as a heavy design element, and the inclusion of a more WordPress-esque sidebar.  I also did a lot of CSS research during this redo and have discovered quite a few new tricks.  CSS is really coming into its own now and I can see a point in the near future where we can do web page layout with the same freedom we enjoy for print.  The entire process of recreating my site has taken about 2 weeks, working just on weekends really and some evenings; and it only took that long because I played around a lot with new CSS and script techniques.  I estimate if I had just applied the design exactly as it appeared before I could have done it in a day.  Or less.

I think I am going to enjoy being on board the WordPress train.  I am already adjusting all my incoming work and plan to use it as my primary site development environment for the foreseeable future.

Now, I grew up on LEGOs. LEGOs were my life. Every birthday, every Christmas, and any other time I could manage it I talked my mother into buying me more LEGOs. And with Home Reserve, for the first time I would be able to play with LEGOs (in a matter of speaking) as an adult in a way that did not require me to steal my nephew’s Christmas presents.

Ordering is easy, you pick a style, you pick a fabric (lots to choose from), you place the order. Our order took about a week to ship and arrived within two weeks altogether. The prices are good. Really good. Our loveseat arrived in 2 boxes. Pretty big ones. The UPS guy seemed unhappy with me as we live on the second floor. Assembly was incredibly simple. I have never seen assembly instructions so detailed. There was an attention to detail and making the customer’s life easy that I have never before witnessed.

Some highlights:

1. Each wooden frame part was numbered, with the number cut into the part. Identifying pieces was a breeze.
2. Each box included a little courtesy bag with a sanding pad and gloves to help avoid splinters.
3. The entire thing can be put together with a phillips head screwdriver.
4. Assembly took less than 2 hours.

If you are in the market and don’t mind a little work on your own part, I would highly recommend checking out Home Reserve.

Pics of the assembly process!

So what?

None of this is much of a reason to get all freaked out and spew so much hatred for a harmless book/movie series. I have heard some haters say they don't like how the twilight fans (they call them, if you will excuse the term "twitards") "just go on and on about how great it is." Yeah, so? When have people who really like something not done this? How does someone liking a book or a movie affect you so negatively? My fiancé is of the opinion that a lot of the hatred comes from young men who are frustrated at all the girls their age being infatuated with Edward Cullen or that Jacob guy. I can see that, but really, why get upset at that? The damn girls are giving you a freakin' handbook on how to behave to get their attention. That aside, I have seen just as much hatred from women speaking of the series, so I am not sure how much the blue-balls factor is weighing in.

I think some of the hatred might be coming from the goth/vamp crowd, angry that the epitome of their chosen world view has been worked over into a teen coming-of-age story. You might want to research vampire myths around the world. Your idea of vampires, largely inspired by the vision of Anne Rice, is not all that true to most western lore about vampires, and is miles off of vampire myth in other parts of the globe.

In the end, Twilight is a fad. I don't use that word in a pejorative sense. It is something that is really huge right now, but will fade into the background eventually. If the series stands the test of time it will still not be as big as it is now – nothing ever is. If you like it, enjoy it while it lasts, if you don't…just ignore it.

I told him I knew a plan for a low tech chiller using flexible drier tubing and a big trash can, simple to make, easy to clean, and comfortable. Off we went to Home Depot, and a little while later I got to create my first Halloween effect since the various parts of Psycho Detail scattered across the country a few years ago.

You see, recently, I have not been sleeping well. I have had bad dreams every single night, dreams which almost always involve my death*. I have been at a loss to explain why, until a few days ago when my insightful fiancé pointed out that I was at the same age Shawn was when he died.

It was a little bit jarring to realize that I was having issue with mortality at my age. I am 39. I don't really think of myself as old. Hell, I barely think of myself as middle-aged, but if I step back an view things objectively, middle-age is upon me, or at the least right on the horizon. Two of my childhood or early adulthood friends have died. My last living grandparent died this past year, as did one of my uncles. The majority of my friends and acquaintances are either married with kids or confirmed lifelong singles.

I really am middle-aged.

This means I have to think about things like retirement. I have to think about my diet, and start worrying if my familial predilection for heart attacks is in fact genetic and not the result of lifetimes of southern high fat and salt diets. I have to exercise…on purpose! I have to contemplate on a semi-regular basis a world without me in it. I have to make plans for when I am gone.

I hate this. Some scientist needs to invent a machine that stops time. Like…yesterday.

*As a side note, that stuff you've heard about dying in a dream meaning you really die? Total bullshit.

I play World of Warcraft. Occasionally, us nerdy types, in the course of trying to fake a sense of accomplishment via fantasy by killing the big monsters, step back and just have some fun. The above was the result.

For those in the know vis-a-vis WOW, We did this in the recently introduced raid dungeon of Ulduar. This was after we had cleared the trash mobs leading up to the Flame Leviathan, but before we tackled the big guy himself. That is me on a steampunk motorcycle doing an Evil Kineival style jump over a bunch of buses, or in this case, tanks.

Special thanks to Moonwynd of the Boomstick Saints guild on Sisters of Elune WOW realm for the video capture, editing and music selection.

Well, last week it happened again.

But worse.

This time, the layout was really simple, none of my usual attempts to push HTML to the breaking point. It was a very simple 2 column layout. I wanted the left column to remain fixed in place so the navigation elements did not scroll off the page, and used what should have been an IE friendly solution in CSS to make it happen. There was one catch, however. The site (which is not yet complete and live as of this writing) was for an interior designer, and contained a portfolio section for display of photos of the spaces they have designed. To show off the photos in a large size I used a great little script package called Lightwindow. It works by creating floating layers on the fly with javascript and placing the desired content inside the resulting window-within-the-window.

Everything worked great until, as usual, I tried it out in Windows IE. There, when one dismissed the floating window, several of the layout elements on the page disappeared or moved. For no good reason. It took about 6 hours of trial and error to discover that a CSS parameter* in one of my DIV tags was confusing IE when used in conjunction with the Lightwindow scripts. I want to be clear here, Lightwindow works fine with IE, the problem was not with the script at all. The problem was with the Miscrosoft developers who are too lazy or maybe just too stupid to implement standards that everyone else has no problem implementing.

Just to put that in perspective, Firefox, Safari, Omniweb, and Konqueror had no problem whatever with combination of the script and the CSS parameter I used. Only Windows IE had a problem with it. Of the browsers that worked, 2 of them are open source projects, one is by a major corporation and the last is by a small development house that makes cool software for Mac OS X. So, of those, only one set of developers is paid much, and 2 sets are not paid at all. And yet, somehow, all of them managed something that the FREAKING MILLIONAIRES at Microsoft could not handle.

Please, follow the links I posted above to the web sites of those browsers that work. Stop using IE. For my sanity.