Invariably, upon mentioning to new friends that I am really excited about ping pong, really extraordinarily excited, I’m met with at least a small amount of ridicule or laughter. Upon reflecting on why this may be, I’ve come up with only one good answer: marketing. Ping pong in the United States seems to be pushed as a game room distraction, a piece of wood you stick in your pool table when you’re bored of an adult game, a game played with sandpaper on wooden paddles on a platform of plywood. It’s much more than that, however. There is an inordinate amount of thought, hand-eye coordination, and skill involved in getting to a high level of play in ping pong. A word-class player can put up to 9,000 RPM on a ping pong ball across a full 360 degrees of possible axis, introducing a level of complexity not even considered when someone laughs at me about ping pong.

Growing up, I never played ping pong. There was a brief stint in junior high school where there was a ping pong table in our cafeteria—it broke very quickly and was never replaced. Since then, I had not played the game until my place of employment acquired a table to be put in our flex space back in March. Since then, I’ve logged hundreds of games, coming from complete incompetence to a level of play that I feel is solid enough to write about the subject with some confidence. As of writing this, I sit in third-place on our office ping pong ladder, with the two people above me playing at a level that I can’t even get close to beating. They both misdirect, lead with the eyes one direction and hit another, put opposite spin on classic shots, and place the ball at unorthodox locations with uneven rhythms. Even still, they play at an intermediate level; there’s such depth to a single game that it can takes years to play at the highest levels.

Equipment plays a big part in ability, and likely ties into the misconception of ping pong being a game room distraction. You simply cannot play a modern, competitive game of ping pong with paddles that cost $5 that you purchased at Target, nor on a pool table insert. There’s a robust market for high-level ping pong equipment, much of which can be very expensive and made of very high-end materials like carbon fiber, titanium, and custom rubber compounds. There are different paddles with different attributes for different play styles. Defensive players use different paddles than offensive paddles, and you can even acquire paddles with different materials on each side for mixing up your shots. If you are interested in beginning to play ping pong at a higher level, picking up a $20-30 paddle from, say, Amazon, goes a long way in introducing spin and control to your game.

All of this said, as of the 20th of December, my apartment will have a ping pong table. Challenges welcome.

View this on Flickr »

After realizing I had surprassed 2,000 photos in my iPhoto library, I decided I needed a serious camera. I exhaustingly read reviews about cameras and lenses and the new and hottest and chromatic aberrations and looked at photos of brick walls and compared crop factors and… well, I learned a couple of things.

1. The Nikon D90 is hot.
2. I don’t want to spend that much.
3. Lenses are really the worthwhile investment for a budding enthusiast, anyway.

I believe I arrived at a good decision; I acquired the best of the entry-level DSLR bodies, and splurged on a higher quality lens that will last me. The total cost for an excellent piece of glass, a 12.3 megapixel body, a lens hood, and a dual-function camera bag and holster was just under $1,000. I’d recommend anyone taking lots of photos with a point-and-shoot look at upgrading.

Just look at the photos.

I’ve been looking for a new hosting provider for my rails applications—Dreamhost just doesn’t cut it as I’ll be launching a new service soon, and I’ve found where I’ll be ending up, but through my search, I ran across dozens of sites that left me wondering about the companies’ commitment to their trade. It wasn’t the lack of technical information, pricing structure, or support promises—those tend to be very universal, and oversell is mostly nonexistent for VPS hosting anyway.

It’s their website.

We’ve all seen them: websites with a generic logo, the whole website full of chrome, gradients, and a large stock photo of a data-center; the whole thing reaks of template. Below the data-center, two or three columns speaking in very general, professional, corporate, human-less language about that company’s individual merits. The about page refers to the company as an entity; it doesn’t mention the people or the passion. It mentions the corporate structure and the 2/47 365 uber commitment to you, the customer, the savior of the corporation, the mother of our children, and the human-less desire as a corporation to satiate you, to be the hosting nipple on which you suckle.

As the internet grows, as more and more people use more and more services accessed through more and more websites, even the layman will begin to notice the human touch that creates an intrinsic bond and trust with a company, that feels more like communication than business, that gives you a high-five instead of a handshake.

Until then, companies like GoDaddy will continue to thrive.

noun

1. A person I don’t like; a bro: God, look at that schmead with his schmeady popped collar.
2. Alison Stiven: Schmeadison Schtiven is such a schmead.

verb [trans.]

1. make something less awesome or more uncool: Quit schmeading up this party with your gelled hair, bro!

ORIGIN 2000s: from Cloughish schmeadiocrity ‘the existence of dumb’

The event here just wrapped up, and as the intercom blares from the loudspeaker above me informing me that the alarm on the 2nd, 3rd, & 4th floors have been triggered and trained hotel staff are currently investigating and that I should stand by, I’d like to write a summary of my experiences with the event, presenters, and anything else that tickles my typist fancy.

Everything but the Nerdery

This Place is a Fucking Palace

Jesus, what a fancy hotel to host a website convention. The Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco is, at first glance, a very classy establishment, old-world with its ornamentation, presentation, and stuffiness. This provided a simple contrast for conference attendees: those in hoodies, graphic t’s, jeans, holding a Mac, looking the least bit uncomfortable: these are my colleagues. The rest of the guests in the hotel were overly dressed, pulling expensive roller-luggage, speaking prettier languages than comparatively caustic-sounding English, and otherwise looking self-important (hey, much like this post!). Upon later reflection, the hotel was an obvious choice: the Palace has the infrastructure to handle a 500-person meeting where Motel 6 does not.

San Francisco is Uglier than Portland

Mother always said that everything in moderation is best. This is true of Portland and why I feel it is vastly more successful at being a clean, friendly, livable, accessible, approachable city. San Francisco is very much like Portland, but with everything taken to an extreme. Put another way, San Francisco is Portland actualized: Bums that are actually hungry, buildings that are actually tall, hills that are actually mountains, scary looking people that will actually steal your wallet, apartments that are actually unaffordable, weather that is actually pretty crappy, China town that actually has Chinese, and a web design community that actually gives you free booze.

Oh Yeah, Did I Mention Free Booze?

Open bars are a ridiculous invention. I’ve never attended such an event, and it was a bit inundating. Literally. Ok, that was a terrible joke, but I did take it too far, consuming four-too-many dry & dirty martinis plus an assortment of other libations throughout the evening. I suffered today as a result. Thank you MediaTemple for paying for my drinks, despite the badmouthing you received about uptime when I inquired to others as to what you actually do. Really, I adore you if for no other reason than Grey Goose is delicious, and I’ll be looking towards you when my mad ideas come to fruition. Or BoxCar, because they’re local. I hope you understand, MediaTemple.

The Conference

Day One

There was a clear contrast between the two types of presentations and their content: technical, and creative. Jason, Heather, and Liz’s presentations were the most thought-provoking presentations, giving their ideas and specific mechanics for arriving at destinations where there is not a right answer—creating story through design, building community through personal voice, and building frameworks of interaction. These are ideas that you can read a book on, create a successful site that makes you millions, fosters community, has a clear tone, and tells your visitors an excellent narrative, but that you could still use the advice of others: this is a creative process, this is art where you don’t design the best painting of your life and retire.

Those creative presentations were in stark contrast to the technical presentations—these were not the IE6 of knowledge of which there is no max-width. Perhaps this is why I was left rather disappointed with Eric Meyer’s presentation, even despite him bearing my namesake. He provided knowledge and analysis of CSS frameworks that was in the same quantity superfluous for the average designer and self-congratulatory in his overly-analytical approach to inform us of three things:

1. CSS Frameworks exist.
2. You shouldn’t use off-the-shelf frameworks.
3. The perfect <h1> size is 2.33em if you average all available frameworks, and 2.0 if you want Eric’s personal and arbitrary interpretation of the former average.

This presentation seemed to pander to the lowest of all denominators in the crowd while adding enough technical detail to lose them. On the third point of his presentation, there was no discussion of what is the correct heading for your composition, what’s right for balance on your page, in proximity to navigation, logos, etcetera. In entirely irrelevant terms, Eric told us the size of headings to use. This was the most pointless of all thirty-minute-long points made the entire conference.

Then I got drunk (I mentioned the open bar, right?).

Day Two

The second day was similarly excellent despite being more technical in nature. Interaction design, information architecture, and overall British zanyness was illustrated by Jeremy first thing in the morning, thankfully waking the crowd (and me) from our (okay, maybe just my) alcohol-based stupor. The rest of the day covered reset stylesheets, some great accessibility information and analysis, microformat discussion, and workflow strategy that was completely irrelevant to my development team of one.

Doggy Bag

Of everything I’m taking away from the conference outside of marginally neat schwag and a more poisoned liver, the most important is designerly inspiration. The overarching message I got out of the event was that I need to design more humane, focused, patient (and ultimately more socially and professionally responsible) websites. Websites that care and are specific and set a mood, sends a message, that makes the internet a better place. If not me, then who?

Hank William on Jakob Nielsen’s failure with useit.com’s unusable, illegible site:

Unfortunately, I have to say, Jakob has perhaps the worst site design I have ever seen. It is as if, while he is handing out the Oscars, he is wearing a plaid polyester suit.

I have to agree. I’ve found Jakob’s site in dire need of some of his own usability magic—the font is too big, the leading too tight, the yellow color too brash, and the margins too small, or in some cases nonexistent. It makes his site useless for long reading because of the visual noise of his type and color choices. It’s 2008—one would think Nielsen could find time to take his own advice and put “line-height: 160%” into his stylesheet to make a free, fast, and huge usability improvement to his site.

This site (kylemeyer.com) parallels Nielsen’s site in a couple ways:

1. This site, too, is devoid of images used for the design
2. We both use yellow as an accent color

Despite these, this site is much more legible because of the reduced contrasts in design and sensible default type. These are not design concerns—proper type is a finite proposition. Type can be legible, or not. Surely he doesn’t mean his site to be an example of poor usability, but it appears that this is the case.

What a plague of retardation. Starbucks is one of the most ubiquitous brands in the world; they’re on every street corner, sometimes twice. Despite their immense popularity and growth and influence, they insist on using Italian names for sizes of every drink they sell, including milkshakes and tea, assuming that the average person will feel camaraderie with the brand or some such positive feeling or association. If not, then why continue the practice? Don’t want to rock the boat?

The inconsistency is what makes it worse—”latte” is now the defacto name for espresso with steamed milk, despite it being the word for just milk in Italian. When someone orders a “grande latte”, they are certainly not getting what they are ordering, and are in fact speaking a new language that only applies to ordering Starbucks drinks: I will coin this Starbuckslish.

Dear Starbucks employees,

It’s midnight. A young man walks in rather disheveled, red-eyed, still in business casual. He orders a “medium coffee.” Under no crazy random happenstance should you ever say, “you mean grande coffee?” That young man is me. I am still at the office working. I am running regular expressions over pasted in PDF jibberish to try and save myself some tagging busywork, to salvage sleep. I am hating life—don’t make me hate Starbucks more.

With love,
Kyle Meyer

Internet, meet Herberta.

People are so fucking stoked for the new iPhone. I arrived at the Pioneer Place Apple store a little before seven this morning, expecting to find a line, but found a crowd instead, sixty nerds deep. Thankfully, I was next to some rather interesting people to pass the time with, especially important because of the apocalyptic failure that was the in-store activation process. By the time I walked out of the store with my new iPhone at 10:30 (still inactive), there were about 300 people in line, first in switchbacks and then stretching down the walkway and around a fountain. Extrapolating my two hour, thirty minute wait (from the time they started selling at 8am until I finished), with sixty people in front of me, it led to a 2.5 minute wait per person. With 300 people, that wait would be a mind-blowing twelve and a half hours.

It fits within Flickr’s 90 second limit!