Influences

The previous version of this site, designed five years ago, went stale to me a year or two after I created it. After enjoying the spotlight for a few years after the launch of Stopdesign, I slowly faded back, where I continued to watch from the sidelines and admire the work of talented peers around me. Current and recent designs from the hands of Dan, Jason, Jina, Jon, Khoi, Mark, and Shaun have all influenced and inspired this version of Stopdesign in one form or another. Be it a palette, a grid, a type treatment, or a date format… Each of these designers sweat the details, and it shows in their craft. I’m humbled to have met and exchanged ideas with each one of these people in person.

I sometimes think of him as my alter ego, but I could never be him. Malarkey gets his own paragraph, because he is to web design what all four of The Beatles were to Rock and Roll. He is cool and hip and original and compendious at once. His personality, design sensibilities, and instincts around code make him a threat I’d rather be working with than against. His thoughts on HTML5 and standard naming conventions have been taken to task on this new site, with the exceptions of a few abbreviations and shortcuts for which I opted along the way.

Heroes

• Eric Spiekermann, for FF Meta and Stop Stealing Sheep (the first book I ever read about typography). I’ve beaten Meta to death, and it still looks good no matter where I use it. For the many who have asked over the years, the Stopdesign logo is my own bastardization of Eric’s pure, immortal version of Meta.
• Paul Rand, for his infinite wisdom and bitch-slapping avoidance of mediocrity in design.
• Jeffrey Zeldman for being the Godfather of Webstandards, and Eric Meyer for being the Jedi Master of CSS.
• Arthur Counts (junior high and high school art teacher, the one that saw potential talent in me when I was 11 years old; yes, Art Counts is really his name), Eugene Harris and Michelle Shoemaker (college art professors who helped me discover Design, the perfect mix for me of art and logic), Tracy Mitsunaga & Dennis Dimos (first creative director and design director I worked for, and my first professional mentors), Barbara Kuhr & Jonathan Louie (creative and design directors at Wired, and the ones who prevented me from giving up and leaving San Francisco when I thought I couldn’t sustain a career there).

Saint

Lastly, and most importantly, I am indebted to my wife, Cam. Her love and encouragement have pulled me though tough times and lots of self-doubt over the past few years. She’s my biggest fan, and my most helpful 2am critic. She also brought our first child into this world — an event that forever will inspire me and ground my sense of priorities in life. Finally, she’s also the one to thank for allowing me to work on this site after our daughter was put to bed each night, and through every long weekend for the past month.

I owe you all.

Why now?

The new design was brought on by multiple factors. I’ve been wanting to write more. But the few times I pulled up the site last year, I felt uninspired to write, knowing the design was feeling stale and dated. I wanted a new design, but never knew when I’d have time to undertake the seemingly huge, uphill task. The past few years have been filled with major personal changes for me. Getting married, working for Google, buying a house, and our latest adventure, the birth of our first child. All of these replaced the time I spent previously on my own projects. It’s difficult to crank out a new design when I only get a few hours at night after everyone but the dog goes to sleep, or in the morning before they wake.

The kicker that finally got the new design going: my server was hacked toward the end of last year, causing Media Temple to lock down everything, including any scripts or admin access. Malicious files were spread throughout my server, in random locations. The reps at Media Temple blamed it on an old version of MovableType that I hadn’t ever taken the time to upgrade. Oops. (Here’s a plug to update any old software you’re using, if only for security reasons.)

Because there were so many files in so many locations, and not all of them could be easily found, Media Temple provisioned a brand new server for me. They asked that I not copy everything over wholesale, for fear of unintentionally copying over files that were not mine. So I had a clean slate, albeit a forced one.

Grids rule

This design is way overdue. The last big redesign here was in 2004, a time when many of us were still designing for 800×600 resolutions. Time to move forward with a cleaner, simpler design, a wider width, more white space, and an obsessive attention to small details that most people will never notice. Like using a baseline grid (more on that in a future entry). The layout is based on a fixed-unit 12-column elastic grid, sized in ems. It creates just enough restraint, but still provides flexibility for today’s simple layout configurations, plus a few more future variations. I can check the grid on any page by simply adding ?g=1 to the URL, like so.

My type

I’ve always liked Helvetica as a typeface, and chose to use it for everything (with exception of the logo). The restraint of one typeface, along with a limited selection of type sizes, placed extra burden on spacing and arrangement to convey hierarchy. I tried to stick to the absolute minimum amount of content and navigation necessary to find one’s way around. More could be added later, but I liked the stripped down nature for most of the templates.

All colors, together as one

Never content with a single color throughout the site, I modified a few headers to give each section a slightly different feel. I’ve done this for the last few versions of Stopdesign, and I wasn’t about to skip that for this one. I get different headers simply by hooking on to already-existing body ids with a few additional CSS rules.

Technical nerdery

Some who read the footer will notice I switched to WordPress. This wasn’t so much prompted by the MovableType exploit of my previous server, as much as it was due to the difficulty and frustrations I had trying to upgrade MT after the compromise. Plus, I started using WordPress a little over a year ago for another personal site at dougandcam.com. In fact, if you visit that site, you’ll see a lot of design and content similarities to this one. This design was a chance to elaborate on what I had done at D&C D&C was the proving ground for WordPress, and where I learned how its template system and syntax works. Ultimately, I switched to WordPress because I was familiar with it, and had lost all my familiarity with MovableType. With no offense to my friends at Six Apart, development on WordPress seems to be happening at a faster pace. And it just fits more in line with what I want to do for now.

The particulars of which CMS I use aside, it was a lot of work to start over from scratch, rather than just modifying existing templates. So not only did I create a new design, I also completely switched template languages, plugin capabilities, and even a bit of my site structure. Previous versions of this site already relied on PHP extensively. So it was a welcome change to be able to interact directly with WordPress via PHP. (I never tried MovableType’s PHP templates–seemed like too much work at the time.)

IE6: the new Netscape4

This version of the site is also my first opportunity to give IE6 the proverbial finger. It was liberating to develop this site without checking my work in IE. Time for everyone to say I dropped IE6. Hello :before and :after pseudo-selectors, attribute selectors, adjacent-sibling selectors, and all kinds of other simple selector tricks that should have worked years ago in every browser.

I didn’t even check any version of IE until last night, when I figured I should at least take a peek to see how gloriously IE6 barfed all over a 10-year old CSS2 specification. Impressive, it was. For now, I’m using conditional comments to serve a custom stylesheet for IE6 just to turn off most of the styles. This seemed like the lesser evil, and at least ensures the poor souls still using IE6 can at least read my content. IE6 gets a stripped down, single-column view that will get no more attention of love after this. I’ll be able to yank those conditional comments and the entire stylesheet anytime I want. I noticed IE7 had one major problem with a negative margin, so IE7 gets its own little stylesheet too.

Getting personal

I mentioned above that I wanted a more personal feel to the site. Since I’m working in-house at Google, I’m not hustling contract work, so there’s no need to market Stopdesign like an agency or firm right now. Because of that, I decided to focus much more on the text of the site, downplay most of the imagery, and go with a very subdued, minimal presence. I chose to display recent Twitter status messages, Flickr images, and my current reading list on the home page to make the site even more personal. Forgive me if you’re not into baby pics–my daughter occupies the majority of my non-working and waking hours, so she’s the subject of almost all photos for the time being. That will change over time. Just ignore the cuteness in the sidebar if babies aren’t your bag.

Watch for sharp edges

Some of you may have already seen the new design a few nights ago when a slight gaffe of my own doing broadcast the new server’s IP address in a feed aggregated by Hot Links. That’ll teach me not to change Feedburner settings before I’m actually ready to pull the trigger.

I haven’t had time to polish every last little detail. But if I keep worrying about that, I’ll never get this design out there. There are still a few glitches in the site here and there. And there may be a few broken links or some missing pages now and then. I’ve done my best to prevent link rot by being diligent with mod_rewrite rules. But you may encounter some oddities or inconsistencies, especially if you dig back through older entry and archive pages.

I’ll do more explaining in future entries. I already have 5 drafts started.

So here’s to a new year. To our new President and the hope he brings. To many more ideas to share. And to a brand new design.

If I were to write an extended update here that covers my recent life, technology that interests me, and the issues I’ve been mulling over, it would consist of the same answers I provided to John. Thanks, John, for taking the time and interest to ask the questions. And thanks, DWM, for publishing my responses.

Alas, for some reason, that wasn’t to be. On a fine Sunday morning before the conference, I bent over the sink to spit out some toothpaste, and felt a shock of pain go through my lower back. I instantly told myself, “oh, it’s nothing. just a twinge of pain. it will go away in a minute.” But it didn’t.

Cam and I waited out the injury, hoping the pain would subside and magically heal itself, and I would be able to medicate enough to fly to Vancouver on Tuesday morning, and attend the conference as planned. Over the next two days, my back got progressively worse, until I could barely move or sit up in bed without excruciating pain.

Long story, short, the pain continued all last week. And I had to cancel my trip to Vancouver and plans to speak at and attend Web Directions. I tried to fight off the depression and the negative thoughts. But the disappointment I felt was huge (and still is). I was forced to miss out on the opportunity not just to speak again, but to hear so many great speakers at once, and to reconnect with friends I hadn’t seen in over a year. Not to mention the snowboarding in Whistler after the conference.

This is the fourth time in the last two and a half years that I injured my back to the point of debilitation and forced rest. I have a bad disc in my lumbar region. Doctors told me after first injury that I might be forced to deal with it the rest of my life. Physical therapy helps immediately after the injury. But after the pain subsides, I tend to forget about the exercises and the stretching and the fact that my body is not perfect.

If I am to make a difference in the future health of my back and my body, I must make changes to my daily routine. The treatment I learn after each episode must be folded into the strands of my life.

I really don’t want an injured back to prevent me from doing anything or going anywhere else.

I’d just like to leave one note for anyone else planning to board or ski at Heavenly in South Lake. Do not rent your equipment from Heavenly Sports on the mountain. I repeat, do NOT do this. That is, unless you like waiting in line for up to two hours, only to get inside and deal with the chaotic process of renting from the most unorganized team of rude, clueless “equipment specialists”. We made this mistake once, but we won’t make it again. The equipment is old; the specialists lack any knowledge in proper adjustment of basic bindings. It’s pretty bad when the instructors employed by the same resort advise all of their students to avoid the mountain rental shop at all costs. Instead, either rent locally and drive up with your gear. Or rent at any one of the small shops closer to the lake. Or get your gear from the Burton demo shop in front of the California lodge. Just don’t plan on renting anything from Heavenly.

Busyness accounts for a lot of it. 2006 brought a lot of changes for me, personally and professionally. Planning my wedding, putting Stopdesign as a business on hold to go work for Google full-time, getting married and honeymooning afterward, moving to a new place, getting a dog, and the life and responsibility that comes with all of the above. 2006 treated me very well — I’m certainly not complaining.

Another major reason for the lull in writing was general blog burnout. I was tired of writing on my own site. With greater numbers of readers building through 2004 and 2005, I felt greater pressure to write longer article-like posts with take-away content in every entry. More nutrition in every bite. And I was tired of other blogs. Tired of keeping up with hundreds of feeds. Tired of posts that pandered for comments or held contests to gain traffic, or those that recycled another me-too meme or blabbed about the wonders of Web-2-point-whatever.

So I stopped using my feed reader completely. I let go of the pressure to keep up. I let go and just lived my life. If I wasn’t working, I wasn’t really on the Web. I only visited sites I liked and sites of my friends occasionally, just to keep loosely updated on their work, thinking, and lives.

Lately, my interest is piqued again. Not so much by a fear of not keeping up with the world of blogs and news and events. But by a general desire to write for the sake of writing. In my daily life, I’m exposed to design in entirely new ways that I’ve never experienced before. I face new challenges. I encounter new ideas, situations, and interactions. In many ways, it feels like I’m just starting out in the world.

So I look back to my first post of this blog, and think of returning to my roots. Write for my own record, not what I think others want to read. To lay out my thoughts, responses, and reactions to my industry and the events that surround my career and interests. To chronicle the bits and information around me. Short posts or long ones; on-topic or not; doesn’t matter. Just write.

So whether obvious or not, I’ll be adding a statement to this site that the words, views, and opinions expressed here are solely my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my new employer, Google. I’ve been assured that my voice will not and should not be silenced by joining Google. So you should start to see and hear even more from me now that I don’t need to worry about losing a Stopdesign contract just for blogging about working on something post-launch.

It was a tough decision to put the contract work I do under Stopdesign on hold for now. But as many people already know, I’ve been working with Google for the past six months as a contractor, and the relationship has gone quite well so far. I’m actually quite excited about the opportunities and the major challenges that lie ahead for me, the teams I’ll be working with, and the company at large. Here’s to hoping and wishing for a successful adventure and many great things to come.

Four jobs I’ve had

1. Hot dog cart. At the zoo. You don’t want to know where those dogs have been. Seriously.
2. Dishwasher. King of the kitchen.
3. Theater usher and janitor. Try ripping non-perforated tickets wearing slippery white polyester gloves. Also, it’s best to never see your local movie theater in full light.
4. Fabric softener box-taper. The glue used on a shipment of 600,000 boxes of Snuggle wasn’t holding. So the shipping company bought a few cases of Scotch tape, and hired 8 temp workers at $6/hr to tape the boxes shut over 3 days. Ah, Temp days. Be jealous, be very jealous.

Four movies I can watch over and over

1. Amélie
2. The Bourne Identity
3. The Godfather
4. Apocalypse Now

Four places I’ve lived

1. Delaware
2. Columbus
3. San Diego
4. San Francisco

Four TV shows I love to watch

1. Lost. We’re hooked.
2. Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Funny.
3. Good Eats. Zany, but fact-filled.
4. Three’s Company. Childhood comfort show, with a bowl of mac & cheese, please.

Four places I’ve been on vacation

1. Florence
2. Paris
3. Sydney
4. Barcelona

Four of my favorite dishes

1. round
2. square
3. inlaid
4. paper

Four sites I visit daily

1. CNN
2. Flickr
3. Google
4. MacUpdate

What a boring list.

Four places I’d rather be right now

1. Cinque Terre
2. Whitsunday Islands. My own island, preferably.
3. Jumping at Nevis Canyon. In a heartbeat, all over again.
4. Home

Four bloggers I’m tagging

Çelik, Davidson, Klein, Shea

Well, I can start by ensuring anyone still reading that everything is indeed OK, and has mostly been so over the past 3.something months. Possibly a little hectic, and at times, stressful. But overall, good things have been (and are) happening.

First, to answer a recurring question, or maybe an assumption some of you made about the excuse for my absence in writing here: No, there is no book being written. Sorry. Maybe at some point. But nothing in print is coming from me in the immediate future. Other things, projects, and people have been occupying my time.

I spent much of last fall occupied with one project, of which we (client’s team and I) completed the bulk of design work in November. I may never be able to fully address nor write about what that project was/is, or who it was for, even though many of you may end up using the product or at least trying it sometime this year. However, there were some new techniques devised specifically for this project, and insights gained about managing complex style sheets in team environments, which I’ll be sharing in generic forms during upcoming speaking engagements.

Possibly the single biggest change in my life which may have partially attributed to the hiatus from this blog is my engagement to the love of my life. We were dating for just over one year when I proposed to her in San Diego last November. The excitement and busyness of planning for a summer wedding began soon after (if not before in her mind!) I rarely write about topics of personal nature here. But this one is so big, and so life-changing, it at least deserves mention for those of you who know me.

Soon after that, the holidays hit full force. Parties to attend. Long-lost friends to see. Then, unluckily for me, a week before Christmas, I re-injured my back, this time at SFO as I was about to get on a flight to Ohio to spend Christmas with family. Reason for injury was stupid: I was pulling my overly-burdened gift-laden suitcase up some stairs instead of taking the ramp. Must have twisted the wrong way as I was pulling. Mom ended up flying to San Francisco instead, and helped my fiancée nurse me back to good health. Fortunately for all of us, the recovery was much speedier this time.

Anyway, no excuses for not writing. I don’t regret the break. Nor did I ever feel pressure or worry about the lack of updates when friends and family members kept warning me about losing readership. It’s been a good break. One that was certainly needed. And good things happened in the interim.

Lots of ideas for topics I’d like to write about fill my head and the text files on my desktop. Even if I’m the only one who ends up reading these words, so be it. It’s kind of nice to take a long enough break that I feel like I’m starting over.

Total volume of music on my computer:
11.2 GB (2,331 songs, 6.1 days of music) Not much compared to some friends. A mixture of music ripped from CDs, passed from friends, downloaded from artist sites, bought from iTunes. I’m sure there’s a few that snuck in from the old Napster.

The last CD I bought:
Guero by Beck
Beck hasn’t disappointed yet.

Song playing right now:
Nothing yet. Too early in the morning. Neighbors still sleeping. And I’m not in the office yet. Maybe a rotation of Eels and The Killers. Or maybe Elliot Smith. Or the strumming of Django Reinhardt. So pick something from those, and you might have what’s playing for me in an hour or so.

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:
Sorted the library by highest play count and picked a few from that.

• Nothing Better, The Postal Service
• Spitting Games, Snow Patrol
• War on Drugs, Barenaked Ladies
• Give Me Novacaine, Green Day
• As the Rush Comes, Motorcycle

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:
Not sure what these five think of things like this, but I haven’t seen their names yet, and I’m curious.

• Matt Haughey, because I want to know what a new dad and his daughter listens to
• Jeff Veen, because I want to see if he’ll actually do this and pass it on.
• Jason Kottke, because he’s on a roll with 50 things to do with your iPod, and let’s face it, the man simply doesn’t blog often enough.
• Merlin Mann, because he’s got tons of music, and he’s good at creating lists of 5 things.
• Jason Klein, because he’s funny, usually has good taste in music, and needs more posts on his blog.

It hit me all of a sudden near the end of a meeting earlier this afternoon. I started to feel light-headed and dizzy. My vision got blurry. Now, my stomach doesn’t feel quite right. Muscular control and ability to think is quickly waning. Body parts are twitching. And in general, I feel like my body could collapse at any second. Yet I’m told that going to sleep is the last thing I should do right now — that I should force myself to stay awake until at least 8 or 9pm tonight to acclimate my body so it won’t remain wonky the rest of the time I’m here. Right now, it’s only 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and all I can think of is crashing hard on my hotel bed.

Unlike last December, when I stayed only three short days, this time, it’s a full week. I was here for such a short period the last trip, I must have run entirely on adrenaline. This time, for some reason, it’s a different story.

When I was younger, I never believed in the concept of jet lag. What were all those crazy travelers complaining about? I didn’t understand how a few hours time difference could throw your body’s entire context out of whack enough to physically affect it in negative ways. Now, I think I know (and am experiencing) its effects all too well. Up until last year, I told myself that flying West was never a problem — that going East was what potentially played tricks with one’s mind and body. However, that theory blasts apart when flying West means not only crossing the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. But also when it means crossing that pesky International Date Line, causing the virtual loss of 24 hours in an instant.

Do you experience jet lag? What do you do to fight it? Or to stave off its effects once it starts to settle in?

“I have a simple question for you. How do you stay organized? I’m struggling with keeping things on point and I’m wondering what you use. [...] Any thoughts on how to improve my organization with software, practices, etc… are much appreciated.”

I’ve never answered this question, even to myself, so it’s a little tricky to think about it. I’ll do my best. It’s a pretty broad question that can get into all kinds of areas. I think I’ve been organized most of my life. My mother would probably back this up. I was always rearranging my bedroom, or tearing apart my closet growing up, reorganizing so everything made sense to me and looked the way I wanted it. To do that, I often pulled everything out, and only put back in the things I knew I wanted/needed to keep. Everything else either found a new home, or eventually got donated or tossed. I can see relationships in organization with both my physical and digital worlds.

Physical world

Physically, I prefer to have less things visible in my environment than more. When my desk is cluttered, I feel disorganized. Like I’m really behind. The messiness represents a time period when I’ve been too busy to keep things organized. In my mind, once I have familiarity with a place (apartment, office, hotel, etc.) everything I have with me usually has a logical place it belongs, and I’m pretty diligent about putting it there. Sometimes I slack, and forget to put things in some designated or logical place, so it takes an hour or two on a Saturday morning to clean and file away the little things.

I also believe in keeping a pretty open filing system. I have filing cabinets at home (my desk there is a big thick door on two filing cabinets). And I made sure I had plenty of file drawers in the new office. The files at the office are mostly empty right now. But they’ll get filled up soon, once I port some of my stuff from home, and begin using them here.

Digital world

Digitally, my practices follow suit. Everything has a place, even if those places are hierarchical, like directories and folders. I rarely have more then 5 or 6 files/folders on my desktop at any one time. The items that are there are either awaiting storage in the correct place, or are items I need to deal with in the upcoming days or weeks. Otherwise, all files belong somewhere, which ensures I can find them later when/if I ever need them.

I use a Palm pretty often. I carry a Palm in my messenger bag all the time, and make constant use of its to-do lists and other databases. All contacts are stored there, and I’m fairly rigorous about keeping them up to date. SplashID helps keep all my personal data (accounts, serial numbers, etc) in one convenient place, and keeps it all encrypted too. From the same company SplashShopper is a blown-out version of the old free HandyShopper. I use SplashShopper for much more than just shopping lists: movies I want to see or rent, books I hear about that sound interesting, packing lists for international trips.

I saw BurnoutMenu 2.0 mentioned the other day on Merlin’s 43 Folders, and I’ve been giving it a spin. So far, I love how easily accessible it makes all my to-do lists. I have a keyboard shortcut that pulls up the menu extra at any time, showing me everything in my lists. Hierarchical, color-coded priorities, and dead-simple to quick-add new items to the list.

I’ve been traveling a lot over the past few years, so I’m also fond of a little app for the Palm called Travel Tracker, which I’ve been using for four years now. It’s invaluable in keeping all my travel plans (flights, hotel, car rentals, restaurant reservations) in one spot. TT automatically adds entries to your datebook, and maintains them if you ever make a change, so it acts as a good central spot for all travel-related data management.

Organized design

For projects, I have a clients folder within my user folder. Inside each client folder is a folder for each project. I keep all relevant sketches, comps, and source artwork grouped together, usually in a folder called “art”, within a folder for that project. I keep any relevant contracts, MOUs, and documentation in a folder called “docs”. I repeat this system over and over again, to the point that I don’t even think about it anymore. Current projects for current clients are added to the sidebar (Mac OS X finder windows) so they’re quickly and easily accessible.

In design, my patterns can be seen all over again. Simplicity. Clean space. Tear everything away, start fresh, and only add in the things that are needed. Keep them that way. Design serves a purpose, but shouldn’t get in the way. If I’ve added too many elements in, I may need to go back and prune more away. One of my mentors was the Creative Director at HotWired, Barbara Kuhr. She was constantly coming over to my desk, pointing at my design, and asking my why I needed that line. Why I put this element in. And I’d be forced to either justify it, or remove it. She’d push me to make design bolder and more interesting and use less at the same time. A great lesson for life in general.

CSS organization

The same practices apply with coding, like authoring CSS. I set up certain sections in my CSS files that are almost always present: page structure, links, header, footer, lists, etc. Those sections are always demarcated by commented text and lines created by dashes. This way, I almost always know where a certain rule should go, or where to find one when I want to edit or troubleshoot.

After writing so much CSS, I’m even a little anal as to the order of properties within each declaration block. Backgrounds always go first. Then position or float information. Then width/height measurements. Then margin/padding/border. Then text formatting and color. Not every one of those properties is always present, but that’s the general order I usually try to follow. I’m usually not even conscious I’m doing it by now.

Most of the above is second nature to me. But every now and then I find new methods and tools, and try incorporating them into my life and practices. Some stick, some don’t. How do you stay organized?

At 43m (142 ft), this jump from yesterday (Kawarau Bridge) was nothing compared to the one I just did a few hours ago, (Nevis Highwire) which comes in at a cool 134m (440 ft) and about 8 seconds of falling from a jump pod suspended by a few cables above the middle of a deep canyon.

And yes, that’s me in the photo above, executing the stiffest swan dive of the day from the Kawarau (the smaller of the two I’ve done so far). On that jump, I came six inches from hitting the water below… More photos will surely follow.

Up until then, the small club field seemed like a worthy adventure neither of us had ever experienced. But that first rope tow is where hell started for me that day.

The idea of these rope tows is to grip the moving rope loosely and build up speed until you and your snowboard or skis are moving at the same speed as the rope. You have this metal “nut cracker” device (it looks and functions almost like a real nut cracker, just a bit larger) connected to you via a harness around your waist. Once moving along with the rope, you’re supposed to attempt to lock the nut cracker over the rope, thus eliminating the need to keep your hands tightly gripped on the rope.

The rope tow system: what a horrible design. Although it may be cheap to install on a low-budget ski field, it’s a nightmare for someone that’s never used an old-school rope tow before, especially while trying to keep a snowboard straight. Call me spoiled because of all the high-speed lifts at California, Nevada, and Utah runs. But John — Mr. “I’ll never swear at another T-Bar again” — Allsopp only did marginally better than me with the rope tows.

Let’s just end it there, and conclude that I never came close to figuring out the stupid rope tow. John was a little better off than me, and at least succeeded in getting halfway up the first tow lift. The only real ski lodge for the club field was located at the top of the first lift. If you can’t figure out the rope tow from the bottom, you’re out of luck. So since neither of us could conquer the rope tow, we both ended up hiking the first 150 meters straight up a 45-degree incline to the end of that first tow. Once at the lodge, we could rehydrate and rest from the multiple hikes it took us to get that far. More attempts at the higher rope tows ended with no more success than the first.

Though we left the club field that afternoon feeling rather defeated, neither one of us could get over the incredible views of the surroundings at that altitude. A photo gallery posted once I get back to the U.S. will certainly include some shots from the day at Broken River.

Fortunately for us, after two straight days earlier this week of closings, (supposedly due to high winds, but we think it could be due to something else…) Mt. Hutt finally opened on Saturday. So we actually got a good day of boarding at our intended destination. Early runs were greeted by hard-packed snow. But a mid-day snowfall dusted the slopes with just enough powder to make carving a lot easier that afternoon (and it protected my bones from several dramatic falls). A great day of boarding, even if it was two days late.

I dropped John off at the Christchurch airport early this morning for his flight back to Sydney. I think we were both pretty exhausted and a little sore from the two previous days of snowboarding. I’ll return to Sydney next Saturday for a couple days before flying back to San Francisco the next Monday.

I successfully arrived in Queenstown late this afternoon. It was a fun drive down here from Christchurch. Winding though the mountains, gorges, and snow-covered plains of New Zealand’s south island at 100km/hr can’t get much better. I knew there’d be a stark contrast of the weather here from the tropical Aussie beaches in North Queensland, but I still don’t think I was prepared for the cold temps — even when not at the top of a mountain.

Before logging off for tonight, I’ll give a quick plug for Wotif, a great resource for huge discounts off last-minute hotel and accommodation bookings. I think it’s originally based out of Australia, but it has available bookings in 32 countries. As of last night, while still in Christchurch, I didn’t have anything reserved here in Queenstown. I’m now staying at one of the nicest hotels in Queenstown, with a huge room overlooking Lake Wakatipu, and I’m only paying $15 NZD more than a hostel bed I had in Sydney, thanks to the deals on Wotif.

And a quick heads up: I didn’t originally think I would make it to New Zealand’s north island. But if you live in (or happen to be in) Wellington, I’m spontaneously heading to your windy city at the end of this week for a couple days of relaxation and (supposedly) some of the world’s best coffee, before heading back to Sydney. Look for more details in an upcoming entry if you’re interested in meeting up.

There’s an excitement somewhere in the back of my mind. But I haven’t been able to pull it to the front yet. Maybe it’s because I’ve been sick the last few days, forcing me to back out of projects, and delaying packing and last-minute errands until the true Last Minute™. The excitement will come though, probably when I step off the plane and start hearing that wonderful Australian accent everywhere.

Regardless, I’m on my way. I’ve dreamed of going to Australia since I was a teenager, and now it’s finally happening. The conference is only a few days away, the visuals for my talks are basically complete and ready to go, and I’m so looking forward to meeting everyone at Web Essentials.

I’m not sure yet how often I’ll get to post travel updates here. I’ll have my laptop with me the first week, but I’ll leave it Sydney to shed the weight for the rest of my travels. Besides, there’s too much to see and do to be working with a computer.

So here I come. September 27, 2004… I’ll never know ye. See you on the flip side.

Whether you’re attending the event or not, the organizing team set up an event weblog over a month ago, so anyone can keep up on the latest developments before, during, and after the conference. As of last week, Web Essentials still had some available spots, so it’s not too late if you’d like to make some last minute plans.

And wouldn’t you know it? The week before I leave for Sydney, I come down with a nasty little throat infection and a fever of 102. Something’s been spreading around the office the past couple weeks, and I guess I’m not immune to it. I went to the doc this morning, who put me on penicillin, and advised me to do nothing but rest before I leave on Sunday. I’m confident I’ll be able to recover by then, but this horrible timing throws a big wrench into all the work I’m trying to finish before I take off for a month. I certainly don’t want to have my sinuses blocked during the 14-hour flight from LAX, so I think I’ll be heeding the doctor’s orders.

Here’s to several days of rest, hot tea, echinacea, soup, and forced scaled-back project involvement.

A: In my case, I arrived home from the second conference late last night to find this waiting inside the front door:

A giant (approximately 3′ x 3′) Get Well Soon poster signed by lots of the attendees from Web Visions 04. Many of the short penned messages were serious and to the point. But I laughed at a few of the humorous ones:

• Heal up (or else we break the other leg)
• Back up, save disk
• As the official photographer, I wanted to shoot you!

The poster was a welcomed surprise, and greatly appreciated. Maybe I’ll get a chance to see you all in Portland next year. Thanks to all the well-wishers and those who took the time to sign the poster — some of whom may not have even known the person (me) the card was going to. I’m recovering more and more each week, and physical therapy seems to be doing wonders in strengthening my back and abdominals and getting everything more limber than I’ve ever been. Cartwheels in no time, right?

Update: Matt Haughey just pointed me to two pictures he took of people signing the poster at the event. (Gives you an idea of its size.) I can imagine the distractions that it must have caused as it was being passed around!

During my six-year tenure at Wired, we were acquired twice. Once by Lycos, then Lycos by Terra, a giant Spanish media portal. My position managing U.S. design standards opened up several opportunities for travel to Terra’s headquarters in Madrid. There, my local colleagues introduced me to the tradition of hopping from bar to bar to sample the tapas at each one, all while sharing stories, exploiting our language differences, and pulling practical jokes on each other. I speak just enough Spanish to communicate fairly well, but the team at Terra taught me the language of Spanish design. Planchetas, reglas, marcas, y más. I treasure their friendship.

I love doorways and windows, and the typography that often graces their existence. While sightseeing on my own in Madrid (and later in Barcelona) I was enamored with the store fronts of many bars and cafes that make up so much of the Spanish urban livelihood. If I remember correctly, this beautiful cerveceria was just a stone’s throw away from Puerta del Sol.

Aside from the fact that one of the CSS techniques I wrote about uses “Doors” in the title, I think articles and tutorials are the doorways and windows which enable us to see and enter a different world. So this photo seemed appropriate to use as a base for the Articles section header. This header makes use of the most aggressive motion blur of any of them. Although I was going for texture and color (not recognizable imagery) I still enjoy having a purpose behind the imagery I use, no matter how abstract it becomes.

I think the building in the shot is some type of apartment building with retail space on the bottom floor. I was riding in the passenger seat with friends, Stacy and Kara Gary. (Stacy is a freelance photographer in Naples, FL.) They were showing me the sights and sounds of Miami since it was my first time visiting.

Temperatures were considerably warm that night. (90°F was the readout on a bank clock.) That’s nice for touring Miami at night, so all our windows were down. We were cruising along at about 45 MPH as I stuck my camera out the open window and snapped the shutter button. Thus, the original motion blur caused by the extended shutter speed of an automatic Canon PowerShot 300 with the flashed turned off. (I added even more motion blur for the header image.) A fluke that it came out so well. It was a joke that I was taking pictures at night with a point-and-shoot digital camera while moving at a decent speed. This shot became one of my favorites from the trip.

If anyone couldn’t glean my sense of humor from yesterday’s post? Yes, I found staring at the number of unread emails (27,385) on top of Mail’s dock icon to be quite funny. It’s nothing I was upset about, and was only a minor annoyance to go back through ~200 mailboxes to select-all and correctly mark the messages as read.

As I stated in a comment yesterday, I used to be mailbox-happy. I’d create a new mailbox to isolate each different type of message in a heartbeat. During my time at HotWired and Lycos, so much email was flying around, I had a different mailbox for every product or service we offered, a mailbox for each major department, and a box for some of the user feedback lists to which I was subscribed. The mailbox for feedback on the Wired News redesign had over 2500 messages in it, and I was only on that feedback list for one month.

I delete email semi-liberally. Any one-liners, “me-toos”, or messages with no significant content that I’d ever need to reference again get trashed. Do I need the rest of those messages from 1996? Probably not, and after this, you can bet that a lot of them will get physically archived and removed from Mail’s library. But it sure is interesting taking a look back through some of those messages to see the new ideas, the work being done, and even many of the arguments that occurred in the HotWired offices then. They could fill a pretty interesting book.

For the record, there were 280 .mbox files in ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes, totaling 211MB in size (without attachments). Since that’s 8 years of email for me, at this rate, Gmail’s current size limitations of 1GB could maintain me for about 32 years.