Found: running a mile-long stretch of beach in Fort Lauderdale

I’d never seen a Bentley before, let alone three in one night. Or, for that matter, the sheer number of Hummers and SUVs in a place famous for their lack of hills. I’ve never been on an extended stay in a place where air conditioning is not a luxury but a life-support system. Another first: mountains of garbage.

Spend a single day in urban south-beach Florida and you’ll see why global warming is a reality. There are vast expanses of pavement moving thousands of Suburbans, V10 Ferraris and Bentleys, an air conditioner in every building, and mountains of trash on the horizon. Coffee shops chill their establishments to near-arctic conditions in order to provide Floridians an excuse for a warm cup of coffee, and tanning salons are abundant despite the punishing sun. Everything tangible is a pinnacle of excess and unnecessary living.

Living in Portland, growing up in the Northwest, and never really getting out much to see the rest of the country, it was shocking to see Florida and what a departure it is. If this is how the majority of the United States lives their lives, it’s no wonder global warming is a reality.

Photo credit: Andrew Ooms

I got bored. Again.

I’ve been experimenting with different styles of type-only layouts for this blog and in my other work for a while now. I finally got fed up with the low signal-to-noise of the previous design (see above), and went back to the basics. This most recent design uses only Helvetica and Palatino, and no images for anything but content.

Our total time was 2 hours, 40 minutes.

This error is largely undocumented and gave me a few good hours of headache trying to debug. I’ve used the Google Maps API plenty in previous projects, but in my latest project, I rewrote all of the basic map loading script and arrived at the page spewing “a has no properties” with every map interaction.

The fix is to call map.setCenter(GLatLng(#,#)) directly after instantiating the GMap2 object. For whatever reason, this fixes all ills, and relieves my headache.

Website design and development is still a mystery to the majority of the internet-using public. Sure, they've meddled with Frontpage or maybe even Dreamweaver; they've made a page about Led Zeppelin in the 90's with “Under Construction” .gifs, and have used some sort of service to bling-out their space; they consider themselves internet power users. Why then, when someone hears I make websites, is the knee–jerk reaction to request services from me for free or for a nominal fee or trade? The only other parallel I can draw is a doctor: people do ask doctors to look at things for them, or ask their advice. That's fine, and in many cases, I'm sure they're glad to help. In many cases, I'm glad to be of assistance with my friends' or family's website needs. At the same time, can I or that doctor really say no? Can we deny a friend's request for help, guidance, or assistance? Not unless you want to seem like a megajerk.

I don't ask you to scratch my back or remodel my house, work on my range-of-motion post-injury, paint me free art for my wall, balance my checkbook, do my taxes, refinance my home, scratch my back, give me a pedicure, teach me to salsa, give me discounts on electronics, give me your couch, be my personal shopper, publish my book, give me your bike, let me sleep with your sister, or teach me calculus. Why should you?