monday, march 28, 2005
Boring post #3
I got into UC Santa Barbara and UC Irvine. Yay. I’d like to go to both.
Things I’d like to be when I grow up: a university librarian (the grown-ups love this one), a crazy neo-journalist/editor, and/or something involved with advertising and industrial design.
A weird picture of me from a long time ago, for perspective:
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tuesday, march 22, 2005
Nutty favorite sesame nuts
Trader Joe’s Sesame Glazed Blanched Walnuts are seriously good: sweet, crunchy, and nutty. I can’t put them in the snacking-nut bowl because they get eaten up right away.
Blue Diamond Pecan Nut Thins are also tasty. The crackers have a weird buttery coating, but they’re crunchy and not too salty.
I like nuts and eat a lot of them, being some crazy vegetarian. From most-favorite to least-favorite:
| kind | good things | bad things | butter |
|---|---|---|---|
| almonds (roasted unsalted) | sweet, dense | the raw ones are gross | yes (smooth) |
| cashews (salted) | nutty, roasty, crunchy-hard | Winer likes them too | no |
| peanuts (dry-roasted, unsalted) | familiar, not too oily | not the best ratio of fats | yes (crunchy) |
| walnuts (roasted, unsalted) | creamy, oily, crunchy-smooth | walnut dust lands on me; skins are bitter and stick in teeth | no |
| pecans (unsalted) | oily, different | cloying somehow | no |
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wednesday, march 09, 2005
Calculated menu items
One of my secret subdomains (tm) just got popular — super OS X menubar items, a big list of menu extras. I’m still working on it, though.
I have a theory: any page with something vaguely new involving OS X, freeware, web design, and/or color gets up to the Delicious popular list sooner or later. Low threshold for “useful” things + a big old percolating cluster = profit! (sort of)
Things that super OS X menubar items will include when I can figure out how to code or include them:
- A short explanation of how to use and get rid of menubar items
- Category pages
- Groups of interesting items: the colorful ones, the iTunes ones, the all-text ones, etc.
- The list of rejected items (with reasons)
- A form for submitting suggestions
- Filtering by cost, openness, icon style, quality, maybe publisher
- Maybe: A separate list of the ones included with OS X
Also, I have like fifty new items to try out and possibly add.
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friday, march 04, 2005
HTML is fun
I’m teaching my Web Design class now. They learn XHTML and CSS the proper way or else. The real teacher gets paid for doing nothing, but that’s OK because she’s been doing that all year. Naturally, there are some challenges:
- I have no textbooks and no curriculum guidelines. I’m making it up as I go along, with the help of some websites.
- We have barely enough working computers, which all run Windows 98.
- “Make it look professional? That’s BORING.” Bring on the clip art and Comic Sans. I showed them The Page of the Damned and they said “Cool!”
Some of the students actually want to learn HTML/CSS; some don’t. People at our school get thrown into a lot of electives they don’t want. Why should anyone learn web design if they don’t care about it?
I say because HTML makes you smart! It’s all about language and meaning and categorization and problem solving — essential skills that we don’t get enough of. But can I teach this? Maybe, maybe not. It doesn’t matter. I’m being used to fill up time, so anything they learn is gravy.
The secret final exam: seeing if they’ve implemented their knowledge on their Myspace profiles! Haha, maybe not. I don’t think I’d be exaggerating to say that Myspace is the internet’s [eye-wateringly ugly] killer app for high schoolers. Friendster and Orkut and all that were just practice runs. The real market for social networking sites was these teenagers who check their Myspaces while I’m trying to mash some CSS into their heads.
