So, like… Vote Texas? Okay?

I've been watching quite a bit of television this week. It's “National Stay At Home Week”, so I pretty much had a gun to my head. Maybe that's why I'm just now starting to see the adverts for Votexas.org (a URL so clever that my well-trained fingers find it difficult to type). So far, I've seen half a dozen of the TV spots and heard a couple on the radio. Of these, one depicted a male quadriplegic in a motorized wheelchair, urging people with special needs to visit Votexas.org where they can learn about their voting options. Good advice. Well done.

With that one exception, all the rest of the spots have featured young women who, based on what they say and how they say it, seem to have the intellectual horsepower of a mango. I keep expecting one of them to blurt, “Like, omigawwd! That Baraahk Obaahma is so. Sexay.” None of them does, of course; I'm pretty sure that “omigod” as an expletive is, like, totally 20^th century.

All of this leads me to wonder: Are these really the people we should be encouraging to vote? With so much on the line for our next president and the country he will lead, wouldn't it make more sense to let the clueless and the uninformed quietly sit this one out?

Meanwhile...

I'm intrigued by the design of the Votexas.org (Gah! Mistyped it again!) site. The web designers among you may find it interesting to ponder how the image map navigation bar has been designed so that a drop-shadowed check mark appears over the last campaign button clicked. Clean, minimalist, and effective – just the way I like it.

And now, the segue

Speaking of politics and web design, I found a real doozy of a post at Design View, the personal site of Plano web designer Andy Rutledge. I consistently enjoy reading the web site design makeover articles there, but the makeover of the USA.gov is, as John Cleese often said, “something completely different.”

Never reticent about making his opinion known – whether in the realm of web design or life in general – Rutledge has really outdone himself this time. The design analysis is informative, as usual, but is kicked to the curb by some pretty caustic political satire. Based on the couple of Rutledge's favorite comments following the article, it has succeeded in infuriating some readers – which, I'm pretty sure, is exactly what he was after.

I wonder if the young women in the Votexas.org adverts would get the point?

Now playing: Soundgarden, Down On The Upside

Welcome to The Matrix

As a consequence of our latest acquisition, we'll be pulling up stakes and moving to a new office again, in a couple months. The facilities manager for our region came and did a presentation a couple weeks ago and did her best to reassure us that the new quarters were going to be “really nice” – but I don't think my subconscious is buying it.

When my alarm went off this morning, I was in the middle of a dream. In that dream, I was being instructed in the use of my new work space, which looked very much like one of those video arcade games where you sit in a 6'x4' (roughly) enclosure and pilot some sort of vehicle. Rows upon rows of these enclosures were packed side to side, back to front with only enough space between to allow some ventilation. The tops were open to allow employees to be lowered from above using a winch that moved freely from the entrance to any point in the room. To exit, the employee summoned the winch by pressing a small red button inside the enclosure. Once the employee's work day began, the button would not become operative until a minimum of 10 hours (less a half-hour lunch break) had passed, or the employee expired.

This enclosure was, the presenter explained, the very latest in ergonomic design:

• Its ‘compact’ design ensured that everything a developer might need was within easy reach.
• The oblong hole in the seat saved time-wasting trips to and from and in the washroom.
• Nourishment and liquid refreshment were provided by means of plastic tubes that extended from the side wall to a convenient position next to the employee's face.
• The sides of the enclosures were open so that the employee would have constant companionship of the employees on either side.
• Telephones were build into the enclosure and were conveniently designed to work only as speaker phones, thus avoiding the inconvenience of having to cradle a handset on one's shoulder to talk while typing. These devices had no volume control, the volume having been pre-set to an optimal level to ensure that any (and every) employee would be able to hear.

Meanwhile…

The large thermos-style coffee pot we have here at the office was empty, so I started a new pot. When it's brewing, the coffee maker turns on the water feed for about two seconds, shuts it off for about four seconds, and repeats. Two on. Four off. Two on. Four off.

It occurred to me that it kind of sounds like a hospital ventilator, which – at this time in the morning – seems entirely appropriate.

Now playing: Jet, Shine On

Yarrr! (A Timely Apparition)

I arrived at the office this morning, docked my laptop, and booted up the coffee pot. I had barely begun pulling down the day's latest code changes when I heard a noise – kind of a creaking screech, and only once. About 15 seconds passed before I heard it again.

Great, I thought. The A/C system's about to start making a racket again.

The third time, I stood up to try and locate the source of the sound. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed some movement over at the window and stared in disbelief at the parrot staring back at me. A parrot, sitting on the narrow lip outside the window of my office building.

Inconceivable!

You just don't get a lot of that sort of thing in Frisco, so I grabbed my phone/camera and snapped a couple shots. They didn't come out particularly well, what with the glare from the fluorescent lights inside; but it's kind of a moot point since I don't subscribe to the value-added phone service that would allow me to upload them to this blog. However, thanks to Google, I was able to browse parrot pictures until I found a couple that looked like “my” parrot. As near as I can tell, he's a Jenday Conure and looks very much like this one.

By the time I'd ID'ed my little friend, he'd flown off. Later still, I recalled hearing somewhere that today is annual Talk Like A Pirate Day. How cool would it have been if I'd been able to make contact with my little friend and get him/her to ride around on my shoulder while I squinted one eye and announced to anyone within earshot, “Yarrrr! I'm a software pirate!”

Yes, there's a special place in heaven waiting for long-suffering bride as a reward for putting up with me.

Now playing: Zero7, Simple Things

Out of the loop

Jeepers! Blogspot hasn't deleted this thing yet?

When I recently came up for air and poked my head out of my cubicle, here are a few bits of interesting news that had transpired while I wasn't paying attention:

• Large Hadron Collider. Wait. There's a machine that could create an earth-devouring black hole? How did this happen, and why wasn't I notified??
• Lance Armstrong. Come on, now. You didn't really believe he was going to stay retired, did you? Although part of me suspects this may be a his way of capitalizing on the wave of interest in cancer research, the truth may be that he's just bored and hasn't enjoyed being so much out of the public eye.
• Changes at Dell. Some of this came as no surprise. I've been too lazy to bother changing the IE home page on my work laptop, so I've seen some of the stylish new desktop and laptop designs Dell is coming out with. What bothers me is that the next time I decide to order a new desktop machine, I may not be able to tweak the components like I've done in the past. Then again, by the time I reach that point, I may have decided to just invest in a good dockable laptop or… no. No, I don't think I could ever afford a Mac.
• Chrome. Another browser? Where do I sign? I installed this just the other day and really haven't had much opportunity to play with it, except to take a look at my web sites and verify that they render correctly. My initial impression is that it's a sparse little thing with not much in the way of extraneous buttons and toolbars. But that's Google's style, isn't it? I do kind of like the "incognito" feature, which is a browser window that supposedly doesn't keep track of history or cookies once you shut it down. I guess that could be handy for keeping things tidy on one's work computer.

Meanwhile…

Things are starting to settle down at work. We spent August in a kind of limbo, where we weren't the company we used to be but hadn't gone through legal entity combination and weren't yet the company we were going to be. But now (as of 1 Septemb3r), we are.

Most of administrative hassles involved with getting signed up for benefits, rolling over my 401K, signing up for a dozen or more new network accounts, etc. has been completed. There's still a bit of confusion as we try to figure out the culture of our new masters, and the future directions of some of our projects are still to be decided. But we're getting there.