Words of advice for young web developers

People often ask me if I have any words of advice for young web developers. Well here are a few simple admonitions for young and old.

There is no float:center, just float:left and float:right.

Beware of people who say top:100% will fix your footer. The hell it will. What they mean is the footer will start at the bottom of your page. Now you have a scrollbar.

If you're doing business with a nested <div> son-of-a-bitch, set width:100%. His sizing isn't worth shit, not with IE telling him how to fuck you on the deal.

Avoid designers who don't know mark-up. You all know the type. Anything they have anything to do with, no matter how good it looks, turns into a disaster.

Do not offer sympathy to the vendor. Tell them firmly, "I am not paid to listen to this drivel. You are a terminal drone."

Now some of you may encounter the Enterprise solution if you get that far. Any old page is worth coding at least to a developer, but not every page is worth templating. So you can take the offer as a compliment. They charge the easy ones first, you know, like money, all the money there is. But who wants to be the richest guy in tech support? Not much to spend it on, eh, Headset? Getting too old to cut the mustard. Have you forgotten something, Headset? In order to build something, you have to be there. You have to write the code. You did not write the code, you used a Wizard. Old fool sold his soul for FrontPage.

How about an honorable bargain? "You always wanted to become a manager. Now's your chance. Why, you could have become a great organizer and benefit the business. What's wrong with that?" Just about everything. There are no honorable bargains involving exchange of qualitative documents like Powerpoint slides. Just quantitative documents like travel and expense reports. So piss off, HR, and don't take me for dumber than I look. As an old middle-manager told me, "Watch whose workload you pick up."

with apologies to Wm S Burroughs

Armenian pizza and my employment

Today I was looking to bring home some lunch for me and Rowan and ended up on Patterson, near Libbie. For about two blocks heading east there's about six or so restaurants, all of which have some pretty tasty food. And what some may lack in taste they make up for in sheer "I can't believe there's still places like this"-ness.

Case in point: Philip's Continental Lounge. It's not Continental, there's no way you could lounge in there, and I'm seriously doubting the existence of anyone named "Philip". But on the plus side the only thing that's changed on their menu since 1962 is the introduction of Jalapeno Poppers and Chips & salsa. And that includes the photos (sorry about the quality, just click em to see the full-size versions).

Sweitzer cheese, anyone? Come on, the only people who say Sweitzer cheese anymore are little old guys who wear checkered pants and people from Baltimore.

Rowan and I have been there a few times and it's never disappointed. It's the kind of place where every dish comes with parsley and the Deluxe Salad is based upon a bed of cold, crisp iceberg lettuce. I'm fairly certain I had the flounder last time I went, as I tend to judge places by the quality of their fried fish.

A lot of people won't get fried fish at restaurants like this, I think they think it's gross or something. But it's not like I'm eating raw oysters off a dashboard; I'd be more worried about getting sick from an undercooked burger than from a piece of fish that's been sitting in sizzling hot oil. Plus there's always malt vinegar, which is an excellent food antiseptic.

But this isn't about Philip's, this is about Bakery Art (5716 Patterson).

Rowan and I passed this place the other day while driving around and, while we thought forever that it was a cake bakery, it's now (or always has been?) an Armenian bakery/grocery.

In any event the food rocked pretty hard. I got a couple of Armenian pizzas with lentils & rice, hummus, and cucumber salad. Everything was awesome.

It's all cold when you get it, but they'll heat it up if you ask. I just took it all home and did it myself in about ten minutes (just the pizzas and lentils). The hummus is pretty much hummus, but without too much lemon, which is good. A lot of store-bought hummus' (hummi?) have way too much lemon for some reason.

The lentils & rice were pretty mushy, like a thick mushiness on the order of mashed potatoes. Personally I really like that; much better than loose rice and lentils going all over the place. When warmed they are very warming and...

Okay a day has passed between me starting this entry and now. In the meantime, in the middle of that last sentence, I was made aware that I was likely to be laid off next week as there is no more work coming up for me to do (I'm a consultant).

I was pretty freaked out and I called up a contact to ask about a previous job I was offered elsewhere and this afternoon I found out the other job was still open, so I've accepted that offer. Probably the shortest amount of time between me losing and then finding another job ever. Well, nothing's set until I sign the contract, but it's looking very good. Anyways, back to the story.

Hummus good. Lentils pretty tasty. Cucumber salad rad. Armenian pizza rocked hardest. It's a flat-bread thingy covered with superfine minced beef and loads of paprika. I got the non-spicy version and if that's considered "not spicy" I'd like to have a word with whoever controls the definition of the word "spicy". Cooking it made the house smell like a Middle Easter bazaar, which is a welcome change from the usual lingering scent of dog fart.

All in all I'd definitely go there again. And now that I have another job lined up (knock wood), I'll actually be able to.

Zoey's good-time adventure day!

I recently refinanced my home, an experience comparable to sleep paralysis in its feelings of freedom and enjoyment, but this was offset yesterday by a check sent from one of my old mortgage companies to reimburse me for taxes and escrow paid this year. Not a huge check or anything, but it was sort of nice. So nice it's lasted me all of two days.

People say animals have a basic understanding of human languages, and I'm inclined to agree. Not more than an hour after Rowan called to tell me the check had come and that we should buy new phones, did Zoey decide to fall ill and wipe out what small gain we had made.

We knew right away what it was as the same thing had happened to him about a year and a half ago. Long story short, he had crystals in his penis. And not the good kind like you see pewter dragons holding, either. Little tiny struvites and calcium oxalate crystals.

If you're wondering about the pain factor involved, the first sentence of the Wikipedia article on calcium oxalate reads, "Calcium oxalate is a chemical compound that forms needle-shaped crystals." Ouch.

So off we went last night to the emergency vet (Veterinary Referral & Critical Care, just outside of Richmond), which turned out to be quite reasonably priced. After having been financially violated by the Cary Street Emergency Vet to the tune of $300 in return for no advice and incorrectly shot X-rays, we didn't expect much from the new place. I'm not trying to shill for them or anything, but the VRCC was much nicer, in both staff and cost. If your dog gets a face full of porcupine quills, that's the place to go.

This time, for just under $200, we got a urinary test, an X-ray (on CD - the future is now!) and a handy-dandy glass vile of Zoey's penis stones. Let me tell you, they ain't lying about the calcium crystals being sharp. And they aren't tiny, either. The struvite crystals just look like sand, which probably isn't very comfortable I'm sure, but the calcium looks like kosher salt that's been carved into arrowheads.

Luckily they got him cleaned out and peeing again, but we still took him to our regular vet this morning for yet more tests. All the tests were fine, no kidney damage or anything, we just need to change his diet. Glad he's okay, just need to find a good way to keep this from happening again.

Apparently the type of crystal formed is determined by the pH of the urine; too acidic and you get one type, too alkaline and you get another. In a stroke of luck, Zoey has both types of crystal. Therefore his new diet has to perfectly balance his urinary pH so nothing can grow. Not even love.

Right now Rowan and I are looking at different foods and websites to figure out what to feed him. From what we've read so far he needs a high protein, low grain diet with no protein and lots of grains. So we'll see how that goes.

Trukz - Day 58

I've been playing the online game Trukz now for nearly two months and I still don't know what to think. On the one hand it doesn't take much time to play (I play for maybe fifteen minutes a day, total) and it's somewhat engaging. On the other hand, I still can't see the point of it, unless you can find a deeper meaning in clicking a "Next leg" button sixteen or so times a day. It may not matter if there's a point, and I'm starting to think that's how you have to think to enjoy it.

As I explained when I first started playing, Trukz is an online trucking simulation where you basically have a truck and drive loads from city to city. You make money by delivering loads on time and carrying the most lucrative loads you can. You can join a company, which gives you better money-making opportunities yet has a more rigid driving schedule, or go it alone and do what you please. In the end there's not much of a difference since you're just clicking a button to advance to the next leg of the journey anyways, wherever you may be going.

Of course there are improvements you can buy: better trucks, extra trailers, super chargers, CB radio, fuel injectors, etc. Basically stuff to increase your efficiency at making deliveries. The exception is the CB radio which is used for in-game chat. But since no one is ever on long enough to carry a conversation, and with no profile information to help you figure out if someone would be worth talking to, it's essentially useless.

There are offsite forums available, and maybe those are a little more hoppin', but they're personally not useful to me outside of maybe some game-related info I wasn't aware of.

No, the main thing of the game to me, and this is because I get a little OCD with this sort of thing, is the rankings. Each time you complete a delivery your Driver Rating goes up a little bit depending on how far you went (but getting speeding tickets will knock your rating down, so obey the limits!). Right now my rating is 21.57 and I'm ranked 173 of 8793 drivers. That sounds good, but I've noticed recently that the total number of drivers is steadily decreasing.

On the home page of the site they say something like "14,570 Truckers Simulated to Date", which is true in a way, except almost 6000 of those 14,570 are not "active" drivers; I think that's shorthand for "quit the game". I have to wonder sometimes whether I'm a dedicated driver or just rising up through attrition.

I don't know at what point I'll be over playing it; probably when my ranking is maxed out and I'm just keeping up with everyone above me. Or maybe when I get the best truck and the best improvements, driving the best routes. I have a feeling, though, that my ranking will max out before I make enough money to afford all the top items.

Now, I could start a company in the game and that would raise the level of excitement somewhat. But it also raises the level of commitment (managing routes/drivers/buying terminals) and I'm not looking to be a manager. Plus, if everyone in the game started a company, who would they hire?

I know it sounds like I'm putting the game down, and I suppose I sort of am, but I am happy with the fact that it's never fallen below my expectations. I think a lot of people join and think it's going to be a wild ride: driving all night, poppin' speed pills, running people off the road, all that fun stuff real truckers get to do. But it's not that. The game is essentially quite lonely and requires a constant low level of commitment for you to get anything out of it.

So if you're the type of person who likes feeling alone and can't be bothered to do anything about it, I can wholeheartedly recommend this game.

Coming soon to a 50 acre plot near you

I was on the road for about six hours yesterday, driving to North Carolina and back with Rowan so we could pick up a pair of caiques which were being relinquished to us. "Relinquish" is probably a harsh word for the actual situation because the birds weren't being mistreated in any way, but saying "given up" doesn't sound so hot either.

Anyways, I hadn't been to central North Carolina before. My only experiences with the state were limited to the Outer Banks and I have a feeling that doesn't give a very accurate portrait of the rest of the place, unless all of North Carolina really gets a kick out of seafood-related double entendre on every second billboard.

No, apparently when you reach the central portion they prefer their billboards with a bit more Outlet Mallness to them. Straightforward, humorless, to the point. J&R CIGARS Exit 97. J&R DOLLS Exit 97. CIGARETTES AND FIREWORKS Exit 95. BURN WARD Exit 96.

It didn't really get to me though, except when I started to think about how similar certain things looked, in places, to Virginia. We only took the one exit and didn't travel around but a couple of miles off the highway, but every twenty or thirty miles, looking from the highway, there seemed to be an explosion of same-ness.

I guess I hadn't thought about it too much because I don't travel an awful lot, but it seems like whenever I do go on the road I run into these ready-made shopping installations. Usually they start just after some run-down, locally-owned places and end abruptly at an abandoned farmhouse. In-between is a compact collection of Target/Wal*Mart, PetSmart/PetCo, Dollar Tree/Dollar General and the rest of the assorted "boring and I hate them until I need something" places common to apparently everywhere.

And it's not even that these areas exist that bothers me. People need jobs and want to buy stuff, these places provide both jobs and stuff. It's a perfect fit. It's that when you drive just out of their reach and you see the countryside that you just know is not going to be there two years from now.

A few weeks ago I was driving through Spotsylvania, about an hour north of Richmond, when I hit one of these patches of commerce and the farmland which followed. Ten years ago the people out there were probably all singing to themselves "La la la, we're out in the country, it's pretty neat" and then bang!, chicken strips within walking distance.

I do want to eventually move to the country, but it's as if you have to give yourself a 75 mile buffer between your home and the closest Marshall's in order to ensure it actually remains the country until either a) you die or b) you hit the lottery and buy a small island.

Though if I did end up with an island it might be nice, I think, to have a small Target on there. Cheap flip-flops you know.

I feel like a new man

I had to go to the Virginia Division of Vital Records this morning to get a copy of my birth certificate. I accidentally let my driver's license expire last week and, in order to get it renewed, the DMV needs me to prove I'm a man born of woman, or something similar.

The interesting part is that in order to get a copy of your birth certificate you need to provide proof that you are who you say you are. Luckily for me, they'll accept an expired driver's license.

I hope this is making sense, because it's actually a quite brilliant money-making scheme. Instead of creating some strange, complex system which holds such arcane information as whether or not you were born, it was decided to be much more lucrative to keep all relevant and related information completely separate and priced just low enough to stop anyone writing their local representative.

So, off I went to pay $12 for proof I exist and then to the DMV to pay the $20 to replace the expired identification which, while good enough to prove who I am to the state of Virginia, is not good enough to prove who I am to the state of Virginia.

But it's not all bad; in fact, I can think of two good things that happened in order to counter-balance the trips I made around town. One, my new driver's license photo continues my run of 5 straight identification photos in which I look like a serial killer. And two, on the way to the DMV I saw a car with a license plate which read LICENSE and a bumper sticker which read BUMPER STICKER.

Moral of the story: I also need an oil change.