Month: June 2007

Songs That Kick Ass

I didn’t get much sleep last night, and I was starting to drag after lunch, so I created a new playlist of songs to keep me awake. So far, so good. Here are some highlights:

  • Working Full-Time by The Constantines: The band kicks all kinds of rough garage booty. Their bass player is a god, the lyrics are fantastic, and this song rules. Works great in headphones or in the car turned all the way up.
  • Cuidado by Slo-Mo: I heard this on Channel Frederator, and it’s a great song (although it’s full of the f-word). Good thumpy Latin hip hop (but not reggaeton)
  • Battle Without Honor or Humanity by Rza (from the Kill Bill soundtrack): The horns, percussion… you can’t help but want to go kill some Crazy 88 after hearing it. Honest.
  • Back in Black covered by Living Colour: Better than the original, and that’s saying something. Vernon Reid + Corey Glover = major can of whuppass
  • Saturday Morning by Eels: I love this song more than I can say. Every time I hear it, I think of waking up early on Saturday morning with my brother, dump trucking sugar on our cereal and playing non-stop all day (all seen in a sort of Royal Tenenbaums montage).
  • I See You Baby (Fatboy Slim mix) by Groove Armada: While it’s hard to kick it while shaking it, it’s still a great song.\
    There are others, but I have to get back to work… enjoy.
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Categorized as music

Brian update

Brian had his 3 year check up today. He is in the 100% for height and weight, 41 inches and 40 pounds, respectively. The doctor is a little concerned that he isn’t as verbal as he should be. She suggested I have him evaluated by the county speech therapists again, but also said that starting preschool in the fall would probably help him improve. And apparently he should be able to put on his own pants. I think that makes me officially off of pants duty, except for my own pantsing needs. She also suggested that he watch no more than an hour of tv a day. Which, HA! For the first time ever, she also asked if Kevin or I had high cholesterol. I thought that was odd. She always asked about smoking, pool, guns, well water, pets, etc. But this was the first time she inquired about our health. Hmm. Brian received a shot today, but is in good health. YAY!

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This will bump Paris post off the page :(

Edwin, the jolliest fellow I know, gave Kevin some Weinhard’s root beer. So Much Love. For Edwin, and the root beer, and Kevin for sharing it with me. It’s so good and one of the few food items I miss about Arizona. Woot for root beer!\
Kristen sent Kevin cookies. Woot for cookies! A great way to start the weekend.\
Now I have to explain to Max why Mommy doesn’t go swimming roughly once a month. Pooo. Maybe he’ll get distracted by a cookie?

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Categorized as Jen

Reelin’ in the Years in iTunes: The Year 2000

I recently created a bunch of Smart Playlists in iTunes to segment my music by year. I have the following lists so far: before 1990, 1990-1995, 1996-1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007. Today is Year 2000 day – full of techno, Eels, Phish and Lemon Jelly.\
Here are my favorite songs from 2000 (not in any order, and probably not the “best”, just my faves):

  • Name of the Game by The Crystal Method – This song kicks so much ass, I think it was on repeat in the car for at least three months. The rest of the album it came from doesn’t measure up to the standard set by Vegas, but it’s still pretty good.
  • Get Your Snack On by Amon Tobin – Another frequent repeat. Kicks almost as much posterior as the the first song in this list. Amon Tobin creates atmospheric industrial stuff that’s not for everyone, but I dig most of it.
  • Bewilderbeast by Badly Drawn Boy – The album this song comes from is spectacular, and this is my favorite song from it. One of his few instrumentals, it’s sweet, lovely and has a wonderful beat.
  • Daisies of the Galaxy and I Like Birds by Eels – I love Eels and am sad I didn’t discover them until recently. The whole album is great, but these two songs make me insanely happy. You won’t be able to listen to I Like Birds without giggling and singing along.
  • Dirt by Phish – From Farmhouse, what I consider to be the last great album by the band, this song is heartbreaking and one of their rare slow numbers. It’s gorgeous and unlike 99% of their other stuff.
  • Everything in its Right Place by Radiohead – This song and album were my first real exposure to the bad, and I was blown away. Painful and brilliant.
  • Diamond from the Snatch soundtrack – You’ve heard this song even if you haven’t seen the movie. Like Massive Attack‘s Teardrop, this one makes the rounds in commercials, sporting events, other movies, and even a few TV shows. Bouncy rockin’ techno.
  • Gravel Road Requiem by Walkingbirds – I don’t remember how I found out about Scott Andrew LePera and the Walkingbirds, but this song is an acoustic folky masterpiece. You can download it (and hopefully buy it) on his music page. It’s funny. I met him at SxSW a couple years ago and it took me three days to remember where I’d heard his voice before.\
    Next week, it’s on to 2001: Cake, Zero 7‘s first album, Constantines, David Byrne and Gotan Project.\
    Oh, and I’m going to be on The Biblio File tomorrow night. Details on their blog for how you can join in the fun.

The CSS Working Group and Me

I’ve represented AOL on the CSS Working Group for over three years now, and I’ve always felt that I’m not able to give enough time to it, or help as much as I wanted to, because of my responsibilities in my “real” job. With recent blog posts by Ian Hickson and Fantasai, I think it’s time to put up or shut up, especially since fantasai called me out in hers

For most of my time on the working group, the only representation we had from the web design community was from AOL: from Kimberly Blessing and Kevin Lawver. When Andy Clarke joined the CSS Working Group as an Invited Expert last year, I was really excited: finally some more web designer perspective. But Andy and Kevin are both too busy to be regular participants,and when they are around, they’re not technical enough to really follow the discussions and understand the impact some silly sentence in the spec has on what web designers are trying to do.


In my defense, even though it doesn’t look like I’m following, I usually am, except when the discussion veers into the bowels of typography, internationalization or we have six hour arguments about punctuation (it’s happened, don’t try to deny it): that’s when the blood starts seeping out of my ears. When we discuss layout or things I actually want/need to use, I’m right in there.


Now, it stings a little bit to be called “not technical enough”, but she’s right. I’m not. I don’t have an inside-out knowledge of typography, of how browsers are built or the reasons certain things are hard for them to do. I build web apps, not web browsers, and after sitting through over three years of meetings, I certainly don’t want to build browsers. It’s a hard, painful and thankless job. The folks who work at Mozilla, Opera, Apple, Microsoft and anyone else who works on browsers are extremely smart and I’m in awe of them. I understand that building browser is hard, but it’s extremely frustrating when features that web developers and designers need are shot down because they’re “too hard to implement”.


I share her concerns about the lack of designer input on CSS, and that the group is dominated by browser implementors. That’s why I asked Cindy Li to be my backup in the group, and when she left AOL, asked for designers to volunteer to join the working group. I got Jason Cranford Teague and Justin Kirk, two very skilled and experienced designers, to join up, and effectively tripled the designer population in the working group. In fact, Jason’s volunteered to work with Andy to design the group’s blog, which is great!


I think the CSS Working Group needs more designer and developer input. I think W3C member companies need to pony up some designers and developers to help out – even if it’s just to provide feedback on working drafts and proposals and provide use cases and real world examples of things we need.


I don’t know what the point of this is, except that I agree with both Ian and fantasai – something is wrong. The CSS Working Group is in jeopardy of becoming irrelevant, and unless the group gets new blood and can open up, we’re in real trouble. The worst part is, I’ve had to admit to myself that I don’t have the time or ability to do anything about it other than nod and agree with them. I’m hoping that by sharing my perspective as a web developer, bringing more designers into the group, I’ve done something worthwhile in my time in the group. It certainly doesn’t feel like enough

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Categorized as AOL, CSS

Insomnia-Fueled E-Mail Management Musings

I just saw Khoi Vinh’s post on managing e-mail and since I can’t sleep, I figured I’d tell you how I manage e-mail. I use OS X’s Mail.app for work mail and Thunderbird for my personal stuff (I like keeping them separate). I don’t get a ton of personal e-mail, but I get between one hundred and three hundred e-mails a day for work (during the week, 50-70 on weekends) between projects, internal listservs and CSS Working Group stuff. That number’s been as high as four hundred during the AIM Pages crunch last year, I was getting more than five hundred a day.\
I’ve managed that load for more than five years, and have found a couple things that keep me sane.

  1. I have a smart folder called Unread Messages that has only messages I haven’t read in it. Instead of peering at threads and a thousands-message long inbox, it contains only the stuff I haven’t read. I have another smart folder that has messages received in the last 36 hours. I almost never go into the Inbox view, because there’s just too much stuff there.
  2. Respond right away. If you can’t respond in a couple minutes, open the message in a new window and get to it after you’ve filtered the rest.
  3. Do your e-mail first thing. I spend the first half-hour of the day filtering e-mail and respond, and then get to work. I’ll check back every hour or so and filter again, depending on what I’m working on. If I’m coding and in the zone, then I might only check at the end of the day, but if I’m in meetings, it’s more often.\
    That’s pretty much it. My work day is an exercise in interruption management. Between e-mails and IMs from co-workers, I deal with hundreds of interruptions a day. It’s funny, but when I really have to get something done and don’t log in to AIM or open my e-mail, I miss the interruptions. I don’t know what to do with myself.\
    Sad, isn’t it?