March 2008 Archives

Downtown Salt Lake City

My favorite moment from the trip (of which I didn't get a photo - doh!) was the giant black Toyota 4Runner SUV in front of me at Starbucks. With the license frame: "Give more, consume less." LOL.

And while Jeffrey and his brother were out joyriding in brother's luxe BMW, I had some fun taking pictures of the creepy pony. Jeffrey's brother has this 4-foot animatronic pony which is, without doubt, the scariest toy I have ever encountered. I kept turning to look at it the entire morning, expecting it to be secretly advancing on us, ala Blink. So I had a bit of stop motion fun when they weren't around and let Jeffrey discover it on his own when reviewing the day's camera shots.

Today I am exhausted from lack of sleep and not a little sick from all the eating and drinking. I'm too old to have that much fun without paying for it in a big way afterwards. And my skin was pretty unhappy with all the extra sun and dry air. I feel like my whole face has inflated and turned cherry red. :( What I really need is a few weeks of rain to recover - but of course Seattle is sunny today.

I know I put down IE a lot on my site. As a web developer, it has made my life a living hell for the last 4 years. Some people prefer to point the finger at Firefox for starting all these compatibility issues, but for the most part it is IE that deviates from CSS specifications (and sometimes ECMAScript specs too!).

However there is one issue where Firefox is wrong. Dead wrong. So painfully wrong that I have been complaining about it for years. See, Firefox ignores CSS spec on pixel font sizes. Its reasoning is that people have misused pixel font sizes all over the web and wouldn't it be nice if old granny's could read those pages anyway? But this kind of thinking is what put IE in the mess that it's in now. You can't just ignore spec because people made their pages wrong. They are WRONG.

The reason why pixel fonts are and should be absolute is because there are times when you really need text to be absolute. When it's aligning with an image, or needs to fit inside a box. Scaling it so the user can read it may make them happier, but it makes my page look really ugly and can break a lot of other elements depending on that one to stay in its own damn area. When we say we want a box to be 300 pixels wide, you don't go scaling that, now do you, Firefox? If we wanted it scaled, we would have used "em" or percent. Don't make us use a text graphic just to force the size!

And apparently this will now be causing grief to more developers thanks to the new all-in-one advertising tool from google's adsense:
http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help-optimization/browse_thread/thread/d905b7a9b02dcf23/87844a19ac8320b1

You might say that google could make their banners scalable to overcome this, but banners have traditionally been of a fixed size and few websites can accommodate scaling sizes. The fact is, we as designers should be able to say that we want our text in some circumstances to be *just the right size*. And I am pissed off that Firefox won't let me do it. And Safari. Opera, thank god you decided to just add Zoom and skip the whole font-sizing thing. You are awesome. :)

The best quote from this article: "I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that these alcopops are directed to our kids. It is a gateway drug." We were asking around the office, a gateway to what? Does Ernst & Julio Gallo really drive kids to crack? Joey said "coffee," which is probably accurate, since most Mormons don't really see a difference between coffee and crack, LOL.

For anyone who has never experienced Utah liquor laws, trust me, you haven't missed your chance. Even though you can *finally* have more than one drink per person at a table now, they can't be of the same liquor. So, a vodka margarita and a tequila margarita are fine, but a vodka martini and a lemon drop are RIGHT OUT. I am assuming you still have to have a special membership card to enter a bar (a "private club"). And although the silliness of selling wine coolers at the special state-run "liquor store" may seem a little extreme to outsiders, the only alcohol ever sold at the grocery store was sub-3.2% beverages (mostly in-state beer and modified Coors), so you pretty much have to go to the liquor store for most alcohol purchases anyway.

I am sooooo looking forward to spending this weekend there. :P