Day 1: An Event Apart

So the first day of An Event Apart Boston is over, and I have to say, it was as eye opening as I expected it to be. Granted, there was one presentation that was eye-closing, but that’s probably due to a combination of being after lunch and being boring as hell.

Eric Meyer is the one who’s presentation hit me the best. To loosely quote him: “CSS doesn’t care what you think and element should do.” He followed this by taking a boring old HTML table with boring old data, and then using CSS to make a pretty looking graph. This is not something I would have thought of, but it was done rather well, and it keeps all of the semantic markup you need!

There were some other things thrown in the day that were very good and educational, so I’ve got my mind working overtime right now thinking of the ways I can bring those lessons into my everyday work. More after tomorrow’s sessions!

Zipcar is awesome!

I've had a great experience so far. I signed up on the 21st, was approved the 22nd, and had my card the 23rd. I was bored sitting around today, so I went online, found a Mini available from 8-11pm, and took it.

I can't believe that I can just go to a website, pick a time and a car to drive, and then wave my card in front of the windshield and drive away. The people who came up with this idea are geniuses in my book.

The Mini was a fantastic car to drive. It is zippy, handles fantastic for such a small car, and rides very smoothly. I took it out without a destination in mind, which is the best way to drive. I picked up a friend on the way out, and we listened to music, talked, and relaxed the whole way around. We made it up to Salem, and then coming back through Lynn we managed to get caught going in circles. Fantastic time.

Next Saturday I get to take a Volkswagen Rabbit down to see my parents. I can't wait to take that one out. It seems like it'll be a great ride.

Why isn't it automatic?

I've was shopping around on the interpipes for some t-shirts/hoodies, and I found NoiseBot, which had some funny shirts on there. A little pricey, but not too bad.

Until I found this at the bottom:

Instead of just automatically giving you free shipping for spending a buttload of money on their site, they require you to enter in a code to get the free shipping. Why?

They're not nice enough to tell you at checkout time that you qualify, for no real good reason. I dunno. I feel like some things should be obvious to merchants, but for some reason, it's not. Even little things like putting the zip code textbox before the "City" and "State" fields, and then automatically filling out the other boxes based on the zip code entered. It shouldn't be hard to do so (and if it is, one of us — the USPS maybe — should set up a simple XML feed to grab that data for our servers to parse it). Enough rant tonight.

New blog design is now up

Hey everyone,

Just in case you didn't notice, my blog has a new face to it. Let me know what you think of it, good and bad.

~Out~