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Reading Rainbow, Steely Dan, and the definition of torture

admin — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:25:07 +0000

Earlier this week, a passing mention of LeVar Burton speaking at a Twitter conference in LA launched me into hours of anguish, as I compulsively sang the theme song to the PBS classic, “Reading Rainbow.” You know the song, right? “Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high. Take a look, it’s in a book, a reading rainbow…”

Needless to say, my coworkers now hate me.

The “Reading Rainbow” theme is one of those catchy songs that is impossible to forget. We all have a few that get us going. Here are some of mine:

• “Copa Cabana” by Barry Manilow: “Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl…” I sometimes modify the lyrics of this classic to “His name was Barley, he was a schnauzer” to give my poor dog a thrill…because, of course, he understands English. This tune is painfully addictive and the lyrics are pure cornball. Just like Barry, actually.

• The “WKRP in Cincinnati” theme: I never actually watched the show, but the song is one of my all-time favorites. It’s a great song, but once it settles into my brain, it could be days or weeks before it moves on. “Baby, if you’ve ever wondered, wondered whatever became of me, I’m living on the air in Cincinnati, Cincinnati WKRP…” It’s gold!

• “Dirty Work” by Steely Dan: I blame this song for ruining at least one long-term romantic relationship. Love cannot survive when one person is shuffling about the house singing, in a bad falsetto, “I’m a fool to do your dirty work, oh yeah. I don’t want to do your dirty work, no more.” I blame myself for that one. I know almost none of the lyrics outside the ridiculous chorus, but once it goes on repeat, it can’t be stopped.

What songs drive you to madness? Please share in the comments section. Share the pain!

Book Suggestions

Andrew — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:24:35 +0000

I often get asked what books I recommend for learning or mastering (X)HTML, CSS, PHP, AJAX, etc, and I’m always at a loss of what to tell people. See, I’ve never specifically went out and bought a book for any of that. Everything I’ve learned over the years has been through experimentation, viewing examples, tearing down other people’s pages to see how they got things to work, and lots of reading, on the web.

I’m not sure it’s necessary to ever buy a book to learn web design and development, but I suppose it depends on how you learn. I think there are more than enough online resources to get anyone interested started in any web language. And there are even more tutorials and walkthroughs for the more advanced.

But, because I’ve been asked the question so much, I’ve decided to compile a list of sources I would recommend, both in print and online.

Markup

CSS

General and Usability

Tutorial Links

Tizag.com – Great reference for beginning HTML, CSS, PHP, Ajax, PHP, MySQL and more
HTML Dog – HTML and CSS tutorials from beginner to advanced
W3schools.com – Full tutorials on just about every language
W3c.org – World Wide Web Consortium

Inspiration

Smashing Magazine (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/)
Web Resources Depot (http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/)
Net Tuts+ (http://net.tutsplus.com/)

Industry Leaders

A List Apart (http://www.alistapart.com/)
Jeffery Zeldman (http://www.zeldman.com/)
Cameron Moll (http://www.cameronmoll.com/)
Veerle Pieters (http://veerle.duoh.com/)
Andy Rutledge (http://www.andyrutledge.com/)

Web Development Timeline

Andrew — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:52:28 +0000

Here is a web development timeline starting from 1990 through 2009 and how all the client and server side versions have evolved.

URL: http://tinyurl.com/cetjjp

Source: Wikimedia.org

The first blog post (and a weird pie analogy)

ahaines — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:08:55 +0000

If you’ve ever made a pie crust from scratch, you’ll know that there is fair amount of crust dough that gets cut off and made into oddly-shaped bits of non-pie dessert.. To me these are the best bits and the ones I can devour quickly without destroying the whole pie before the party.

My point is this: Think of this new blog as the bits of delicious crust that don’t make it into The PEN.

Regular readers of The PEN are used to seeing my mugging mug in the upper right corner, right above my Commander of The PEN column, every two weeks (monthly in the summer). Well, this blog is simply an extension of that small space in The PEN.

Here, you should expect to find the same mix of relevant and irreverent information from my little corner of Pierce College. You’ll find some college news, updates, random insight into what’s monopolizing my brain at any given moment, and, hopefully, a conversation about the issues that face Pierce employees.

I guarantee it won’t be completely serious and it’s meant to be fun, interesting, and reflective of “behind the scenes” life at Pierce. My goal is to make this as interactive as possible, so please make comments, send me emails, and let me know what you’d like to talk about here.

In the meantime, let’s get started…

I hate first posts

Andrew — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:20:50 +0000

First posts are terrible, if you’ve never written one, I suggest you try. The problem with first blog posts, is that they are never actually about what your blog is about. This blog for instance, it’s about what I’m doing with the Pierce College website, advancements in web technologies, things I find interesting, etc. But this post will be about none of that, except telling you what my next blog posts are going to be about. It’s truly amazing the worthlessness of these first posts, but we all inevitably feel we cannot just jump right in and start off without some sort of introduction, it just not natural. That being the case, you’ll read this, which has nothing to do with anything I will blog about later, and hopefully decide not to write my blog off the list of things to check, and will come back once I’ve posted something of (what at least I think) will be valid and interesting material.

Oh, and as typical with all first blog posts, here’s a few tidbits about me, which again, aren’t relevant to anything:

Spelling is not my strong suit, I’ll do my best to write things in Word first, but no guarantees
I’m not very good at keeping up a blogs, but I do plan to do better with this one – Outlook reminders will be my key to at least mediocre success
I find a lot of value in what others say, but not so much in what I say, but I will not let that disway me from posting (provided I remember to set the Outlook reminders)
I like parenthesis, semicolons, and hyphens, but likely don’t use them correctly, so you’ll have to deal with that
Oh, and code snippets, I might post them, and you can immediately ignore them if you’ve no idea what I’m talking about

And with that, I’m off.