What a Christmas. We went to ye olde Rochester, NY for classic family yuletide cheer. And of course we brought the boy (Mason) along. Let me just say that his family loves him! Toys, Toys, Toys! and he’s only one year old. It was momentous that we could turn his car seat around toward the front.

Other random thoughts… I bought $25 brand new boots to leave at home, Tricia bought $16 retro-1975 shoes to bring back to Chicago. My cousin Jason cut his long hair, my sister Lindsey grew out her semi-short hair. Full-size beds are much smaller than King-size beds, playpens from the mid 80’s are much larger than playpens from the 00’s. Babies like boxes and wrapping paper more than toys, Daddies like toys more than boxes and wrapping paper.

I got Grand Theft Auto Vice City for Christmas. It has to be the best game in the world. I know what I’m doing on New Years.

My little 11 month old is so bright. He’s learning to IM me. For those that understand baby imbabble, that means I love you Daddy.

What do you do when you just don’t want to go to church on Sunday? Have it come to you! Father Matt came over last night and said mass in our basement to 2 Quest Groups. 30 kids and a priest in our basement. How holy of me…or strange. I guess it makes up for sitting in front of the couch all day watching football.

A TMP lunch o’ fun. We went to the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art yesterday for some quick culture and a bite to eat. I’m just stoked that our fine city has such a museum, and the Archigram exhibit was pretty fascinating. To top it off, we ate at Puck’s at MCA, and the Puckster himself was there! Thanks for the salad Wolfey. I wonder if I should name my next kid Wolfgang just so I could call him Wolfey?

I had a great conversation with Susanna and Karin on Friday sparked by my 2 month reading of the Catholic Catechism. Philosphising on religion and its merits, or lack thereof is a great way to pass a commute. I just need to finish that dern thing – one, because I’m sick of looking at it in that sidebar, and two, because I’ve got like 20 books on order from Amazon that they just confirmed are on their way. If that’s not motivation to tear through 300 more pages of gripping religious prose, I don’t know what is.

I never even saw the show last year. I must have been properly brainwashed by the media into watching it. It was actually pretty good. Although what passes as ‘smart cinematography’ is oftentimes us looking at a scene from through the slats in a chair. Nice overt use of the handheld camera though. Much easier to swallow than Blair Witch project. Stupid as it seems, I also watched the 3 minute commercial afterward by the sponsor, Ford. I actually think that’s not a bad idea. I watched the commercial because I appreciated the company that gave me the entire show uncut. Would somebody PLEASE give me a Bills game unedited by commercials. I’ll watch a 2 hour commercial for the flowbee afterwards if I have to.

Here it is…my Mason-got-me-sick-again blog. What do you know, the zipper has caught his son’s cold again. Straight out of the petri dish called day care. If I didn’t know any better I’d think it’s me who taste tests another kid’s face who has snots running from his nose clear into his mouth. It’s me who picks up 3 day old cheese from my high chair, rubs it around in my apple juice, and jams it into my mouth…with fingers that were last checking the side of the toilet bowl to see how smooth and silky it is.

My wife never gets sick. Maybe that’s because she doesn’t have time to. What a load of crap. I was just thinking to myself the other day. “Gee, zip you’ve really got some “extra” time on your hands. What you really should do is go get sick.” Tricia has definitely developed an immune system of steel. Come to think of it, my Mom wasn’t sick very often either. I’ve done an exhaustive Internet search to find out why, but I have come up empty. Either my searching skills suck or my browser has a headcold too.

Friday was interesting…Tricia calls me in a panic that someone called her at home, saying that he wanted to talk to me. Come to find out it was a guy from Rochester that was surfing the web and found that a website he had asked to be taken down in the past was put back up. He was pissed that some of the work shown on the site was his and not the site owner’s (the site featured pictures of high-end carpentry and trim work). Well, he found the right guy.

When I was just out of school I did a cheapo website for a guy that did high-end carpentry. He had given me the images of his work, which I never even had a second thought about disputing. I did, however use stock photos for navigation. I always worried about some rights police calling me out on those stock photos. Little did I know that the guy gave me photos of work that he didn’t really do. So when I heard this guy’s story on the phone through his clenched teeth, and 3 legal notices that he read me, I had a sinking feeling…

I had put up this guy’s site a couple years ago in my online portfolio, under my student work. I didn’t ask the site owner’s permission because I slathered a huge yellow box onto every page that said “portfolio piece only, site not live”. Apparently the Google crawler that powers Yahoo is so good that it found the site hidden in my subdirectories. It showed up in search engines as though it were put up again. I took the site down in 5 minutes, no big deal. I did learn a thing or two though. 1. Permissions from all parties on anything done on the web is a big deal. 2. This world is run by sue-happy people and the lawyers that fuel their habits. 3. It is so easy to get tracked down. Even if you don’t live in the same town where you first developed something.

My obsession with the Bills grows deeper week-by-week. My NFL Ticket is getting a major work out, and this weekend is no different – it’s the Dolphins. Squish the Fish, F the Fins…whatever. I’ve come to realize that when the Bills are playing well and they have enjoyable players to watch, I’m like a housewife addicted to General Hospital. Luckily, Tricia is into the Bills too, so my obsession doesn’t have to be a closet one. Since Buffalobills.com decided to be so gracious as to post all the Bills Backers Bars in local areas across the country, I’m pretty sure my next destination has to be Lincoln Station. Hey Trish, wanna go?

I wholeheartedly agree with Sarah Horton’s ‘Beauty is Only Screen Deep‘. She laments about doing things in web design that confounds the medium. Particularly using graphic text for beauty, only to ignore the fact that users want to READ the text not LOOK at it. I too am frustrated, and I too am committing the same sins even in my latest web effort.

In the best case all web design should be using text as text, scaling to fit users’ screens, allowing for users with disabilities to access it, etc. But right now I am struck by how web display technology is getting better, but is still the worst case. I am getting up to speed on CSS, XHTML, XML, DHTML, etc. And I’m finding that it still is far too similar to the days when people hand coded PostScript to get their layouts to print on early laser printers. While we “young” designers take for granted the fact that we don’t have to do paper mechanicals, is designing for the web not almost nearly as bad? In those days making a mechanical took the designer away from conceiving of ground breaking communications, and set up the whole system of Creative Director (conceive of the concept), Art Director (execute the concept), Production Artist (execute the mechanical). In a pinch the Art Director could, and would do it all.

Now we have – just a few of the players listed here – the Creative Director (conceive of the concept), Interaction Designer/Info Architect (create the user flow), Usability specialist (test the experience), Art Director (execute the concept), and Programmers (execute the mechanical). In a pinch the “Web Designer” can, and will do it all. But wait, when trying to do so, you find out that the medium is STILL in the dark ages. The whole construct of the web and HTML was built to communicate text on screen, not visual experience. Even with all the latest standards and browsers, it still comes down to hand-coding in text, that which is meant to provide a compelling visual experience. It would be a totally different story if the web were built to be interactive based on a more visual platform.

Television works. It is completely designer controlled, and has dealt with device flexibility and accessibility. TV inaccessible? Turn up the volume, move closer to it, turn on the closed captioning, or the Spanish. What if Flash .swf + actionscript were the default web standard, natively supported by every browser without a plug-in? That’s closer to the right kind of medium for on-screen display, and designer flexibility. Plus it provides a much simpler content creation approach. Making a red square box doesn’t involve 13 lines of code.

Sadly, Flash .swf will not become the default web language. It is owned by Macromedia. Instead I encourage the W3C to provide whatever other positioning tags necessary within its standards to allow some great vendor to come in and make a completely free form HTML editing environment. The code that gets created must be perfect so that all the standards-nazis don’t complain. So that all the programmers don’t say “Oh what messy code that thing makes” (NetObjects Fusion anyone?). Give me Quark for the web now! Let it be accepted by all. Let it be the industry standard. Let it have all the options necessary to make the content it creates flexible, functional, accessible, and beautiful. When is the last time you needed a programmer to help you create a great printed piece? Let that be with the web soon! PLEASE!