ivantohelpyou

Why do résumés have to be so boring?

Sure, if it's your first job out of college and you're applying to a placement firm to be scanned, processed, indexed by keyword and forwarded to an HR department that has to flip through 700 virtually identical résumés to find the top candidates for an initial round of interviews, yes, there's a great argument for meeting the traditional expectations for how a résumé should be formatted.

However, if you're sending a résumé to someone that you actually expect will give you a few moments to consider your life history, why not make their job easier by punching it up a bit? I'm not referring to emoticons ("gr8 job, under nda tho :-X") or unnecessary graphics. Instead, I'm advocating the judicious use of color, shading, tables and spacing to communicate critical information on a single page.

Ever since attending Cornell to study Japanese, I've had a real problem trying to create a linear narrative on my résumé. For me, learning Japanese was a long-term investment in learning how to speak and read the language of one of the world's largest and most dynamic economies having one of the world's most fascinating cultures. However, from a domestic recruiter's standpoint, my language education sent the signal: "Hire this guy and six months later he's out of here." In fact, my first editor at Bank Systems & Technology indeed thought that I wouldn't stick around for long. Fortunately, I was hired anyway, and I stayed with the company for over six years.

Now, it's even more complicated. For the past few years I've been going to school at night towards a master's degree in foreign literature and culture, and I've also taken some IT classes. Then, I briefly joined the IT department at CMP, the publishers of Bank Systems & Technology. Even though it all makes sense in the context of my goals and abilities, the résumé itself became disjointed, hard to explain, and way too much for a single page.

This posed an interesting design challenge, which I solved by borrowing a page from the world of print magazines.

First, I created a four-column grid. The first column was for dates, and the next three columns correspond to the categories of "Business," "Technology," and "International." For each date range, I indicated how my activities aligned with these categories, merging cells where appropriate. For the palette, I went with colors evocative of LinkedIn.

Now, the story's much clearer. I started out as a techie, went to business school, added a year of language study, put it all together for a stint, and then returned to the USA, etc.

By demonstrating depth across related subject areas, the format also lends credence to my stated goal of "Seeking profitable opportunities to create and manage global Web 2.0 communities."

You can download the PDF here.

Now, I just have to add rounded corners to make it look right at home with the Web 2.0 aesthetic.

Labels: résumé

Took Ratt for her usual walk around New Westminster today. As we were about to cross Royal Ave., I noticed a fast-moving car whose driver obviously didn't see that the light had turned red, and who was about to barrel straight through the intersection. I gesticulated wildly at the red light and he came screeching to a stop. The driver sheepishly hunched over the wheel as I crossed the street, glaring.

"What an idiot," Ratt muttered.

"Yeah, it wasn't even like the sun was in his eyes," I replied. "No excuse."

When Scooter got home, we went for another walk and played fetch in the park. Ratt said that the stick tasted extra-good.

Scooter wants a Japanoid. Either the Figaro, the Sambar, or the S-Cargo . Turns out the showroom is right here in New West, which is probably why I've noticed these little cars before. The steering wheel's on the right side, but according to the site, "Many of our cars are so narrow you can drive on whatever side of the lane you want."

The importers are allowed to bring 15-year-old cars to Canada, but they've got a fight on their hands against federal officials considering a change in the age requirement to 25 years.

Personally, I've got no problem with the import of unusual vehicles. Instead, as a matter of public policy, the government should concentrate on unusual drivers.

Labels: cars, new westminster, talking dogs

Here's another SmallBizResource post, inspired by my work with ShopSite, an e-commerce platform.

If you're a Web 2.0 designer or developer, what would you rather do? Take the time to figure out what's going on in a legacy site so that you can carefully make small adjustments and improvements in order to bring it up to current standards? Nah, that's too time-consuming and expensive, and the client isn't really interested when the current site works reasonably well already. It's much more lucrative to find virgin territory, or get a client willing and eager to do a tear-down.

I first selected ShopSite to get the online retail store for UbU Clothing off the ground quickly, but now that I've got that old-time Web Standards religion, I'll have to dig into and rewrite the ShopSite custom templates in order to get it just the way it oughta be.

The ShopSite templating system cranks out table-based layouts using an extremely limited set of proprietary tags. For example, within a template you can write [-- IF variable --] to test if variable has been defined, or [-- IF variable constant --] to test if variable = constant, but you can't test for inequalities, substrings, compare two variables, or anything else we've been able to do since the days of FORTRAN. The result is cut-and-paste spaghetti code that's really difficult to understand.

So I'm working on a workaround. There have GOT to be other ShopSite users that want to be able to modify their sites without working with these ridiculous templates or having to hire one of the cabal of about a dozen gurus who know how to modify these ridiculous templates.

Labels: ShopSite, web design, Web Standards

Shelfari is a Web 2.0 startup that lets you can create your own virtual bookshelf, browse other bookshelves and leave comments. The company received $1M in funding from Amazon. (more)

I asked Scooter for her take on the Shelfari concept.

It's for people who only read so that they can tell other people what they read, because you know they only read half the @#$% they say that's on there. You think they're going to put Danielle Steele up there? I don't think so.

Or it's for people who know how many pages are in War and Peace. If you're really reading it to read War and Peace, why would you need to know how many pages there are?

I respond:

I have to admit that on some level, this service does appeal to me.

In fact, I did read War and Peace, and counted the pages. Not that I didn't get caught up in the story of Boris and Natasha and the rest, but it was for a class and I was on a deadline.

And I did take inventory once. In fact, I have an Excel spreadsheet with over 500 rows, listing title, author and category, plus an indicator of whether I should keep, sell or donate. That was a fun evening.

For users of the service, the fundamental question is, "When should I Shelfari a book?"

Here are some possibilities:

• Based on ownership. This requires that you take inventory, and the problem is that you have to keep it current. It's easy enough when you're in acquisition mode, where every time you buy a book, you add it to the Shelfari list. But then what? What if you lend the book to someone. Do you have to update your Shelfari list? Or what if you sell a book? What if you move across the continent, put boxes of books on your front lawn for sale at $1 each, and then donate the rest to charity? Would you have to keep your laptop open at the yard sale to update your Shelfari? Or what if you put all of your books into boxes for storage in the basement of a warehouse? Should those books be in your Shelfari?
  
  
• Based on readership.You can create a bookshelf containing every book you've ever read. But then you have to deal with several edge conditions. First, as Scooter points out, what if you read a book that you're not proud of reading, or that you don't want on your permanent record? Second, what if you didn't finish the book? Third, what if you didn't really understand the book? All of these conditions make the choice of which book to add a decision fraught with potential errors in judgment.
  
  
• Based on social signaling. Here's the sweet spot. The point of most of these Web 2.0 exercises is to meet other people with similar interests. And the point of meeting people with similar interests is to have an excuse to hook up. So, if you use Shelfari, don't ask yourself whether you own, intend to own, read, intend to read, or if you've have had any first-hand association with any particular book.
  
  Instead, you should ask yourself, "What does this book signal about me?" Create the aspirational YOU based on the people you'd like to meet. Want to meet other people enchanted with the hijinx of the Russian aristocracy? Go ahead, add War and Peace to your Shelfari. Do you like cats? Well then, add a bunch of cat books. Think of it as a dating service, and you'll be spot on. By contrast, if you add 500+ books to your online collection, you're never going to hook up through this thing. People who collect books won't want you moving in with all of your books into their already crowded living spaces, while the people who don't collect books will think you're an obsessive kook.
  
  Keep it to the 10 to 20 books that you'd talk about at a party and you'll do just fine. Rotate often, and don't get caught with yesterday's bestseller on there, it makes you look cheap. Nobody wants to talk about that. Just go to the NY Times bestseller list once per week or so, and add a random book that strikes your fancy.
  
  
• Based on logrolling. I would also recommend Shelfari for authors who want to blurb other authors with the expectation of a quid pro quo. This is a variant of social signaling.
  
  
• Based on desire to share your opinions. OK, I get it. You read a book, and you want to share your opinions. By posting your reviews on Amazon, Shelfari or any other such location, you can be assured of getting a built-in audience.
  
  But that's far too limiting. Unless you're getting paid to write a review, why should you bottle your opinions into a reaction to a single book? Look at what professional scholars do: They examine literature for trends and connections relating to the author, other works, society at large, genres, theories, you name it. The book itself is nothing more than a starting point for further exploration of literature and culture. But if you limit your writing to Shelfari, you're stuck with the "book review" form. Forget it, use a blog.
  
  And, if you're really dead-set on writing reviews, you can still use a blog for that while still getting the ability to make sure that your reviews get pulled into the Web, by using microformats. The general idea is that you use agreed-upon HTML tags to mark up your writing. Specifically for reviews, the hReview format defines a way to present your review (of a product, business, event, person, place, website or URL) in a standard format that search engines can read. Use this hReview Creator to see how it works. For example:
  

  Inspiring!

  Feb 26, 2007 by Ivan Schneider product

  War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

  ★★★★★ Loved this book! Clocks in at a hefty 1185 pages, but keep in mind that some of that is for the critical essays, which includes notable philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Woody Allen. You can totally get through it if you pace yourself.
  

  

  0.3

  This hReview brought to you by the hReview Creator.

  Even better, if you register yourself as an Amazon Affiliate, you can get paid if someone clicks on a book that you review. Go ahead, click on the War and Peace link above and read the damn thing already. You know you want to. Come on, how cool would it be to say, "I was reading War and Peace the other day, and it really spoke to me about the situation in the Middle East." (In the interest of full disclosure, I'd get about $0.81 on the transaction if you take my advice.)
  
  Do you think that Shelfari would let you embed affiliate links in your book reviews? No way — and that's why Amazon invested $1M into the company. My advice to would-be reviewers: Write your own book reviews, say whatever you want, use microformats to tag your content, and why not collect a little of that Amazon commission while you're at it?

Labels: Web 2.0

I just added and "claimed" this blog on Technorati, which tells me that there are over 2.6 million blogs in the blogosphere, and as the new guy I'm at the very bottom.

So, for my first milestone as a blogger, I'd like to make it to the top half of the list. I want to be among the top 1.3 million blogs in the world. It's an ambitious goal to leap ahead of 1.3 million people in the race for the top, but I can do it with your help. Click on the "add to my favorites" button to give me a hand!

After seeing the film Rocky Balboa in December, I wrote a blog post for SmallBizResource about the lessons for small business, which was published in early January. Because CMP and Forbes have a content-sharing agreement, the post was republished on the Forbes Entrepreneurs page.

From that, I received an inquiry from a reporter from Diário Económico business newspaper in Portugal. I answered several questions about the article and my own business, and on Feb. 8th the article was published in the paper (image to right).

If you're in Portugal, you can download the article by paying 1 euro via SMS mobile payment, but otherwise you can read one of the English versions (SmallBizResource or Forbes) for free.

There's a sidebar about me ("Agora, a sério, façam assim"), which translates through BabelFish as follows:

Now, the serious one, makes thus

For besides writing as ` to freelancer ' for some publications, Ivan Schneider constructs ` comconteúdos websites ' of management emotores of ` e-commerce '. It believes that the niches demercado are the future and that the communication saw InterNet will have a basic paper in these businesses, that open great chances for the small companies. So far, it is not repented of nothing in its passage of liberal professional e, in its in case that, cliché "I only have penalty not to have started more early" is not applied. Em1998 could have started its proper business, after the MBA, but it preferred to go to work as journalist for the Bank Systems & Technology. During five years it interviewed the entrepreneurs most innovative, gurus of the area of information technologies and of the board. "If some of this exposiçãome infected, must be in excellent form", ironiza. E leaves some serious advice for who thinks to initiate its proper business: they read the book "Bootstrapper's Bible: Howto Start and Build the Business with the Great Idea and (Almost) No Money "of Seth Godin (as to construct to a business comuma almost great ideia and without money) and that they are asked if they are entrepreneurs or ` freelancers '. It is possible to have a proper business of both asmaneiras, but it has a great difference to emtermos of attitude, chance and planning.

Patrícia Cascao, the author of the article, writes: "The article was a great success. The one most read ever, in the management pages of Diário Económico."

Fantástico!!

The virtual stores are empty. The design simulations are kludgy and represent the ultimate exercise in pointless boredom for users who want to indulge their ultimate fantasies, not decide between olive green and stainless steel for a new refrigerator.

InformationWeek, Feb 24, 2007

In an earlier post, I tried to fit the content-structure-layout-behavior Web design paradigm onto the Second Life world. Now, I'm not so sure that's the way to think about it.

The SL world itself is comprised of a database of scriptable objects. Let's take the simple example of a box that (1) changes to a random color whenever touched, and (2) counts the number of visitor touches. Here are the key properties of the box :

• Ownership
• Location in x-y-z space within the SL grid.
• Outline of object in 3D space
• Texture and lighting
  
• Scripted behaviors

Fundamentally, when I create a scripted box object in Second Life, I am using a proprietary interface to add an object to the SL database. That's the back-end.

On the front-end, access to this object is limited to registered users of a custom browser, i.e. the Second Life client. You can't fetch an object to display within the context of a Web page or an environment outside of Second Life. Instead, you have to log in, create your avatar, and then navigate to a proximate area to a given position in x-y-z space in order to interact with any given object. Making this slightly easier, Second Life does have a Webmap API that can display maps within a webpage, or spawn the Second Life client to go to a specific point.

Imagine a command-line interface for Second Life.

% login as ivan
You are logged in as Ivan
% move to SLPoint('ahern',128,128)
You are there.
% look around
You can see the following object(s):
# X Y Z Name Appearance Actions permitted
1 100 200 0 touch-me box {Color}R:255;G:0,B:0 [touch]
2 200 600 20 Wilma Furry Female, Furry [more] [chat]
...
% touch object 1
Object 1 (touch-me box) has changed Appearance {Color} to R:0;G:0;B:255.
% say "Hi" to 2
Chat initiated with Wilma Furry.
CHAT: ivan says "Hi"
%
CHAT: Wilma Furry says "hello"
%

Doesn't have quite the same curb appeal as the visual version, but it's pretty much the same idea.

Now, imagine that you could query the Second Life object database without having to use the graphical front end.

/* Find me all of the people in SL who knit */
SELECT username
FROM users a
WHERE "knitting" IN a.hobbies;

/* what are the locations of the tallest objects in Second Life */
SELECT x, y, z
FROM SL_object IN
SELECT max(z_top - z_bottom)
FROM SL_object;

Here's another question: what would a search engine spider look like in Second Life? Through the standard interface, there's no such thing as an invisible visitor. It would have to be something like a flying pig that runs a Zamboni pattern around the rink, navigating into structures as necessary to take snapshots of everything it sees. Alternatively, the flying pig could start at known sites and operate by certain heuristics, such as teleporting to each event or following people around. These approaches have obvious limitations compared to the ability to poll the database directly.

Considering these thought experiments, here are the capabilities I'd like to see in Second Life:

1. API to load any Second Life object through a standard Web page (preferably flash).
2. Navigation and content accessible through a text-based, screenreader-enabled interface.
   
3. Browser integration with Second Life worlds
4. Search engine readiness for Second Life worlds
5. Second life visualizations of non-SL activity
6. Versioning of SL objects
7. Runtime, server-side compilation of SL objects based on visitor properties, i.e. PHP for SL
8. Separation of object access from presence
   

Finally, returning to the model of content-structure-style-behavior, we might add a fifth layer: visualization. This would hew to the linked ideas of progressive enhancement and graceful degradation.

We should have a Web where all sites can be viewed as simply structured text; as layout-driven text using CSS; with smoothly-functioning interfaces using JavaScript, AJAX, Flex, or other frameworks; and as a 3-D visualization.

Use case:

1. User conducts a search for "hotels in San Francisco near Moscone Center on 14-18 April"
2. System responds with a list of hotels, addresses and price ranges.
3. User clicks on "view on city map"
4. System spawns SL client with a a map of San Francisco highlighting hotels.
   
5. User does a fly-by, sees that hotel #1 has great views from the 5th floor up, and that hotel #2 would require a walk up a steep hill.
   
6. Back in browser, user clicks on "Show rooms for hotel #1."
7. System refreshes SL client with roofless cutaways of the available rooms, laid out in a row.
8. User flies over each room, decides on one with the ideal configuration, does a brief walkaround, and presses the "make reservation" button.

Much of this should be possible with the recently-announced open-source client for Second Life. We'll see!

Labels: second life, visualization

Scooter says:

• Where are the worst-dressed no-names? This year's television coverage only shows the stars on the red carpet who can afford stylists.
• Exception to the above: Sally Kirkland. (Joan and Melissa say: Sally Kirkland reveals that a rabbi designed her... I'm not even calling that a dress. It's not. I'm sorry, I'm frightened. Proops calls it a "maelstrom." That's so nice of you, Greg. I call it a tornado.)
• I don't care what Jay Manuel says, Kirsten Dunst's dress is lovely.
  
• Seinfeld was funnier in five minutes than Ellen was all night.
• Rinko Kikuchi (Babel) was robbed.
  
• gasp (at the sight of George Clooney)
• The Lives of Others - awesome!
• We don't get the good commercials up here in Canada, so we have to channel surf.
  
• In case you missed it, Brooke Hogan won Best Grill in the 2006 Teen Choice Awards.
• If you want your dog to look like Brooke Hogan, check out DogGrillz.com.
• Pilobolus is great, but whatever happened to Mummenschanz? Why aren't they at the Oscars?
• What's up with John Travolta's hair? Looks like it was styled by Melissa Etheridge.
• Thank you Kate Winslet for refusing to be skinny.
  
• See what Queen Elizabeth could look like if she tried?
• Most women lose weight when they divorce - Reese Witherspoon lost 10 years.
• Overall: Yawn. Nice try, Ellen.
  

And here's what I think:

• Where was Borat?
  

Here's my SmallBizResource blog post based on a PHP Vancouver presentation by Jeff Barr about Amazon Web Services. Here's what Robert Scoble says about the idea.

Labels: Amazon, Web 2.0

After a Northern Voice presentation about Second Life, I thought to give it a try. I joined the "Furries" by making my avatar a dog, a choice which I assure you is merely part of my ALM thesis research on the topic of talking dogs.

In Second Life, communication occurs on several parallel levels. First, there's the real-time interaction between avatars on kinesthetic (through movements), visual (appearance) and textual (instant messaging) levels. Second, there's the communication between visitors and "landowners," who have the ability to create a 3D version of a home page in virtual space. The same way somone can work on a home page to add various layers of content, structure, style and behavior, someone in Second Life does the exact same thing using a different set of tools.

A well-constructed Web page will present the content (plain text) no matter the access device, whether a screenreader, a text-only browser, a browser with CSS turned off, a browser with JavaScript turned off, and so on. This concept is called progressive enhancement, but it works much differently in Second Life than it does on the HTML Web.

First, you need structure, which is the land. If you don't have land, you can't build, and so this is the foundational layer. But just having land won't get anyone to visit, and so the next phase is style. You have to put something on your land, from SL primitives (trees, boxes) to promore complex constructions. Once you have a styled or themed property, you can add behaviors to your objects. Finally, as people interact with your property, you build community. Technically, you could hold a rave on an empty lot in Second Life, or in a public area as a "flash mob." But for the most part, you need structure at a minimum, style in most cases, and behaviors to stand apart in order to attract community -- which in the final analysis, is the content.

• Content: Community
  
• Structure: Land + Location
  
• Style: Appearance, images-video-sound, objects
  
• Behavior: Linden Scripting Language (LSL)

Compare to the Web equivalent:

• Content: Text
• Structure: HTML
• Style: CSS
• Behavior: JavaScript, DOM scripting, AJAX
  

To summarize:
On the textual Web, content comes first. In Second Life, the content arrives only when the audience does.

Key takeaway:
In Second Life, nobody knows that you're not a dog.

Labels: northern voice, NV07, second life, talking dogs

On the first day of Northern Voice, I show up using my preferred tools of the trade: a notebook, four-color pen and a Filofax.

On the plus side: paper is easier to carry, it doesn't need batteries or a power outlet, and the act of writing doesn't make a clickety-clack sound while other people are trying to concentrate on the speaker.

However, it does mean that my coverage of the first day of the conference starts on the second day of the conference or later, which is the typical dead-tree media approach.

Speaking of dead trees, the conference is being held at the Forestry Sciences Center. The lobby exhibits have all manner of interesting ideas for the best use of lumber in home construction, using pre-fabricated components and other innovations. This will save timber resources, which is awesome because that means there'll be more paper for me to scribble on.

Time for day two... more coverage to come!

More photos:

• Photos by Rachael Ashe
  http://www.flickr.com/photos/fooassociates/sets/72157594552502483/
• Photos by Travis Smith
  http://www.flickr.com/photos/nep/sets/72157594552678725/

The big story in Canada: Telus was selling pay-per-porn over its wireless network, the Archdiocese of Vancouver complained, and now the company has backed down.

A few observations:

1. The National Post's Colby Cosh describes mobile phones as "an attractive pipeline for prurience in households where the PC and the TV are shared, or for anyone who worries that his browser history may be monitored." This tells me that nobody's using the "Fast User Switching" capabilities in Windows XP or Mac OS X, which ostensibly let people share a single computer. That's probably because of the "What, do you have something to hide?" response you can expect from the spouse to whom Fast User Switching is proposed.
   
2. As a "pipeline for prurience," a mobile device can be used for storage as well as display. Virtually any device (e.g. iPod) with a USB connection can act as a private repository for images or movies. Put a password on the device or the files, and it's secure. The user could plug the device into any computer, unlock the files and access the desired images without leaving any traces. Absent connectivity, loading mobile devices with porn requires access through an Internet-enabled computer. But once you have an Internet-enabled personal mobile device with sufficient storage, you have an ideal mechanism for managing private files, including adult-oriented content. Consequently, the "it's a small screen, nobody would ever use it anyway" argument is a red herring. Even a small device can light up the big screen.
   
3. Telus and the other wireless carriers have brought this problem upon themselves with their limited devices, obsolete development platforms and restrictive policies. If they were simply common carriers rather than content providers, they could step back and say, "We're just the carrier, we don't control the content." By putting themselves in the way as content gatekeepers, they leave themselves open to all sorts of bad PR.
   
4. This paper on Wireless Net Neutrality by Tim Wu describes the deadweight economic loss from the current arrangement. For example, I can't write a decent piece of software for a mobile phone without getting the phone company's permission. As the paper describes, if I want to write software for the Web, it may cost me $20/month for a Web host before I'm open for business worldwide. But if I wanted to write software for a cell phone, I'd have to wait months for approval or denial of my idea, buy my way onto every network in the country, cut a deal with each provider to serve up my code, limit the functionality based on the carriers' various business models, and share the profits. If the wireless companies would simply do a good job at being a common carrier, and let the market do what it does best, the levels of innovation would be astounding. Based on Tim Wu's arguments, I'll bet this is going to be an active public policy debate over the next year or so.
   
5. Aside from the phone company, who's going to be against Wireless Net Neutrality (WNN)? Based on the Telus kerfuffle, I'd venture to say that the talking point will be, "WNN = Porn." If the phone companies don't control the content on the networks, then the airwaves will be humming with millions of flesh-colored 0s and 1s, to be collected and furtively squirreled away on the mobile devices of sex addicts for later perusal on their sub-$1000 hi-def televisions.
6. So, did Telus pick a fight with the Catholic Church in order to lay the groundwork for its upcoming PR battle?
   

My take: "Don't hate the player, hate the game." The little mobile devices didn't do anything wrong, so let's open up the wireless networks and let the free market do its thing.

In this podcast, Web design author Jeremy Keith speaks with Adobe's Scott Fegette about the history of JavaScript, Web design architecture, the merits of the term "progressive enhancement" versus "graceful degradation" (too sordid) the "deceptively fat client," frameworks and more.

Jeremy wrote DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model, as well as the just-released Bulletproof Ajax (Voices That Matter).

Labels: ajax, javascript, podcast, web design

Sometime past midnight last night, I was reviewing the future simple tense in Italian, and came across a textbook exercise in which I had to voice my opinion on whether the following would be true in the year 2222:

• All airplanes will fly as fast as the Concorde
• There will be no need for money
• We won't eat meat, only vegetables
• All citizens will be able to vote from home on their computers
• People won't go to school, but rather study from home
• Nobody will write letters or use the telephone any more, and everyone will communicate with e-mail.
  

Then, I noticed a string of 2's in the taskbar -- it was 2/22/2007!

Wow, and this is the day before the release of The Number 23.

My answers to the above: "Non sono d'accordo" on all counts.

• Why would you want to fly that fast all of the time? Fly slowly, see more.
• Maybe not tangible, paper-based or metal-based currency, but virtual currency will be with us for a long time to come.
  
• It'll be much more expensive to eat meat in the future, but I doubt that vegetarianism will trump culture in that time frame.
  
• This is already happening in Estonia. But saying "tutti i cittadini" assumes that all citizens can vote, and that's not the case now nor will it be in the future. A two-year-old may be a citizen, but that doesn't give her the right to vote.
• SARS and its ilk notwithstanding, children will still leave the house from time to time to gather with other children in a learning environment.
  
• If you write a letter using e-ink on e-paper, is it still a letter? Or is it an e-mail transmitted via paper?
  

I'm redesigning my site with the help of CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions by Budd, Moll and Collison. Thus the animated rollover on the links on the home page and all sorts of other goodies yet to come.

I'm heading to Northern Voice ("Canada's blogging conference") tomorrow and Saturday, and so in preparation I've set up my blog right here on ivantohelpyou.com.

After two days at the WebDirections North conference in Vancouver, I'm learning how to use CSS instead of ugly in-line markup. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's just the way Web design is done by the pros.

Problem: Each browser seems to interpret CSS differently. So, the CSS experts have come up with various ways to build CSS files that work for multiple browsers.

A different approach: Why not serve browser-specific CSS files based on a browser test? I did a quick search and found this, a PHP Browser Detection script. The script determines what kind of browser and operating system you use, which can then help to create a CSS file that'll actually work.

The new version of Microsoft Office Word 2007 includes a method for posting directly to an existing blog. Just testing how it works.

In the trailer for new Fantastic Four movie, “Rise of the Silver Surfer,” there’s an exciting aerial chase sequence where the Human Torch follows the Silver Surfer through the canyons of Manhattan, into the Lincoln Tunnel and then over the pristine, verdant forests of New Jersey.

I was born and raised in the Garden State, but I wasn’t aware that it looked so beautiful from the air.