As Far As I Can Tell

In March I’ll be attending the SXSW Interactive conference for the first time. I’ve wanted to go for years but either the money or my schedule always stood in the way. I don’t personally know anyone else who is going but hope to meet lots of new people. If you’re attending and want to meet up let me know. I’ll only be there through the interactive portion not during the music festival.

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Last weekend I taught a Dreamweaver workshop for graphic design students at Western. We went over the basics and worked together to build a small website, which I based on The Gates. It doesn’t offer much beyond the learning exercise, but there are a few extra Gates photos that I took if you’re interested in seeing them.

In preparation for the workshop I scoured the web for free sample chapters from Dreamweaver books. I’ve compiled them alongside tutorial links, sample files, and extra PDFs. I think I’ll leave that page online for a while in case anyone else is interested.

It’s funny how I’ve taught a semester long course and a workshop on Dreamweaver when I don’t use it at all in my personal or professional work. It’s not that it’s a bad program, it’s actually a really useful tool. It’s still quite cumbersome to make standards compliant CSS layouts with it though, and once you understand the markup it’s oftentimes just easier to write it by hand. If you’re curious, my main development program is TopStyle.

Where Dreamweaver really shines is letting non-technical people make websites. They won’t have the cleanest code or properly validating pages but it lets them get their ideas out there, which is to me is very much the beauty of the web. It’s also a halfway decent way to learn the markup by watching what Dreamweaver writes as you make changes.

I’m the only Simon I personally know. There are lots of others, and even plenty of Simon King’s, but in my immediate world I’m the only one. My friends have never had to use modifiers or nicknames to distinguish me the way they do Josh’s or John’s. That might change soon since it seems my name is becoming popular.

According to The Baby Name Wizard the hot new names abroad include Oliver, Hugo, and Simon. It’s only a matter of time before American couples copy the European trend and then where am I? Without a unique last name to hold me up I’ll be a regular Joe Smith.

In all serious though the Baby Wizard site has an amazing piece of information design where you can visually see the trends in names throughout the last century. It breaks down usage by male and female which allows you to see when certain names like Meredith switch from one sex to another.

It’s a lot of fun to play with, but be warned that it’s a Java applet so you’ll need the latest version of Java installed in your browser and it might take a while to load. Once it does though it’s quite speedy.

Found via stevenberlinjohnson.com

This weekend Meredith and I went to NYC to celebrate Valentines Day and our 4th anniversary. One of the key reasons I chose New York for our trip was to coincide with the opening day of The Gates, a giant public artwork in Central Park by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Twenty-six years in the making, the installation was awe inspiring and draped the park in a calm, magical feeling.

After walking around for nearly four hours it felt strange to leave the park. As exciting as the visual overload of Manhattan is everything was dulled in contrast to The Gates. This artwork isn’t about pure aesthetics, but that direct and fleeting experience. Augmenting that is it’s temporality since it’s only up for 13 more days.

Besides walking in the park we at delicious food, did some shopping, visited friends in Brooklyn and soaked up the city. I ♥ NY.

More info:
New York Times coverage
New York Magazine, The Passion of the Christos
The Gates in QuickTime VR

Flickr Tags: christo, thegates, gates, centralpark
del.icio.us: thegates, christo