Extra! Extra!


Is anyone else that rides the Brown or Purple on a daily business thinking "It's about time!"? The Diversey stop, at which I embark and disembark daily, has got to be one of the worst L stops in Chicago. It's dirty, cramped, unorganized and handicap inaccessible. Of course, if approved, the impending renovations will ultimately result in a fare hike. I think it's needed, so I'll take the good with the bad.

All work and no blog means... nothing really.

I have been busy wrapping up work on a search engine for a local client, which is due to go live on Friday. It's a project that was conceived over 6 months ago, but has finally hemmed and hawed it's way to the finish line. It is part of a bigger redesign effort (of which I am not a part of) that went through 6 - yes, 6 - design iterations (hem, haw, hem, haw...). At any rate, it's done.

Next up - a PHP/MySQL back-end overhaul of this site and then (maybe) another redesign. What fun!

A site I've been working on for the past couple of months (on and off, actually) went live today. fin-now.com introduces another 100% XHTML Strict and CSS compliant site to the web.

This was a fun site to work on from a web standards perspective and the client was really enthusiastic about the entire process. Leave your comments, questions, or constructive criticism below before you go.

As you may have of noticed, there has been a good deal of social discourse of late around blogging. Many self-labelled 'experts' have been penning articles attempting to outline the reasons for its new found popularity and social significance. Some I've read and some I've not. I won't bore you with the details related to my opinion on the subject - it would only add to the noise. What I will bore you with is a blurb from Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that sheds some light on my take on blogging.

"The irresisitable proliferation of graphomania among politicians, taxi drivers, childbearers, lovers, murderers, thieves, prostitutes, officials, doctors, and patients shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down the streets and shout: 'We are all writers!'

For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.

One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived."

Kundera published this work in 1978. Obviously the web was 15 years away from being created, but that aside, it seems to me that he was speaking somewhat abstractly about blogging. I think he was on to something.

Just returned from Hawaii. No easily available internet connections meant no posts - all apologies. I had a great time and took loads of pictures - shouldn't be long until I post some of them here. I enjoyed Kaua'i quite a bit more than Maui - it was more lush, far more relaxing and much less touristic.

The highlight of Kaua'i was an hour long helicopter ride over the Na Pali Coast, a good portion of the island's west coast that has remained untouched. To get a better feel for the coastal environs, I hiked 2 fairly rugged miles of The Kalalau Trail, from Ke'e Beach to Hanakapi'ai where around every turn beautiful scenery awaited.

The highlight of Maui was watching a spectacular sunrise atop the 10,023 foot Mount Haleakala (a dormant volcano) and then hopping on a bike to ride 38 miles back down the mountain to sea level. An absolutely stunning experience, to say the least.

Off to Hawaii for 11+ days of rest and relaxation. I'm flying into Kaua'i today where I'll be spending 5 days exploring, snorkeling and having fun in the sun. From there I head to Maui for more of the same. I expect to post a few times while I'm there (laptop is in tow and NetZero installed), so stay tuned.

Danger's Hiptop communicator is ready for mass consumption, as it is apparently available nationwide under the guise of the T-Mobile - Sidekick. Reviews and chatter on the subject is mixed, at best.

As I've mentioned before, this is just the first of many all-in-one communication devices to hit the market, so I'd hold off purchasing for a few months to see what the competition comes up with.