Archive for January 2008
Posted January 20, 2008 at 10:33 PM | Tagged as: Books | Comments Off
Lately I’ve been on a steady diet of technical books and management/leadership books, but my required reading for an upcoming meeting at Bryn Mawr has gotten me back in the swing of reading other subject matter. This is a good thing, since I’ve got some very interesting reads coming up…
First up is a book by my friend, Chris Connelly. He’s written Concrete, Bulletproof, Invisible and Fried: My Life As a Revolting Cock, about his life in the music industry. His career has spanned nearly three decades and has included stints with industrial groups such as Fini Tribe, Ministry, Pigface, and the Revolting Cocks (duh!), just to name a few (seriously). I’m hoping that some of the stories that I’ve heard over the years — like the time he disassembled every piece of furniture in a Four Seasons hotel room with William Tucker — appear in this book… and I’m sure there will be plenty of other crazy anecdotes, too. Chris is still making music, though of a much calmer, more esoteric variety. He has a new album titled Forgiveness and Exile coming out this spring that I’m also looking forward to.
Today I pre-ordered Hubert’s Freaks: The Rare-Book Dealer, the Times Square Talker, and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus by Gregory Gibson. The book tells the true story of Bob Langmuir, a rare books dealer in Philadelphia who discovered a treasure trove of never-before-seen prints by the legendary Diane Arbus. The photographs were taken in the 1950’s at Hubert’s Dime Museum and Flea Circus, a Times Square basement phantasmagoria — an odd piece of Americana deserving of such documentation. The New York Times has an interesting article which piqued my interest… though I’ll be honest and disclose that my mom went to high school with Bob, which is how I learned about all of this in the first place.
The next thing I need to work on re-integrating to my reading queue is some fiction… any suggestions?
Posted January 8, 2008 at 5:32 PM | Tagged as: Career, Meeeeeeee, Web Standards, Work | Comments Off
I’m very honored to be featured as Christopher Schmitt’s first interview of the year. Christoper is a stand-up guy, a great designer, and prolific author. We had a good chat about work and non-work stuff, and you can read the whole thing here!
And just in case you didn’t notice, the line-ups for the 2008 An Event Apart conferences have been posted. Eric and Jeffrey asked me to speak to the Boston crown on June 23-24, and how could I say no? I had such a good time last year in San Francisco and it seems about time to take my message to the East Coast.
Wow, we’re only eight days into the year… how am I ever going to keep up this level of ass-kicking for the remaining 358 days? Whewh!
Posted January 8, 2008 at 2:24 AM | Tagged as: Meeeeeeee, North Dakota, Web Stuff | 3 Comments
So, I’ve redesigned my site. The old design was up for over a year, and I got many interesting comments about its “pinkness” — funny, because to me it was mostly black text on a white background (with various hues of magenta for accent) — but that’s how people saw it. I guess it did serve to communicate that I have no problem with being seen as “girly” in the world of tech, but I didn’t set out to make any particular statement by it. (My apologies to anyone who’s disappointed by that statement, but I’ve got to be honest.)
This new design — or the color scheme, I should clarify — is very close to my heart. It’s the same set of colors I used to paint my house in North Dakota, and since that house is being put up for sale, I wanted some way of remembering it. Plus, I knew I wanted swirly things in a new design. It didn’t all come out exactly as I had imagined, but with tweaking over time it just might get there. The code certainly could use some work — I made a number of design changes in the process of putting things together and the code reflects that bit of schizophrenia.
Despite all of that, I’m happy to see something new. The start of a new year, after all, is all about getting a fresh start, right? Comments on the design are welcome.
