Technical difficulties

While I felt really accomplished to design the perkinsyamane.com website, I did all my editing and testing in Google Chrome, which, unfortunately, does not handle web pages the same way as Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which still has the greatest market share of browsers. So when I open www.perkinsyamane.com in internet explorer, I get the photo of Saori, but nothing else, since it moves the white text to jammed up in the top left corner of the window, and since its white text, on the white background, it simply dissapears. Also, Internet Explorer adds blue boxes around any image which is a link, so now there are these ugly blue boxes everywhere.

And silly me I thought the point of having a universal language was that it would be understood and interpreted universally.

Back to the drawing board.

Miscellany from the weekend

This morning, I got up relatively early, dropped a load of stuff off at Goodwill and hit the grocery store. While I was there, I noticed there was some beer I liked on sale, so I picked up a six pack. Unfortunately, I was a little too early. Arizona has a law that prohibits the sale of alcohol on Sundays between the hours of 2am and 10am, and between 2am and 6am the rest of the time. In fact, the laws are so rigidly enforced that when I got in line at 9:54, I was informed that the register computer would not ring up the purchase until 10am. Maybe bullshit, maybe not. It made me mildly irritated at the state legislature. I think that people of legal age and condition should be able to drink whenever they want, and after heavy restrictions on WHO can drink and WHERE you can drink, it seems unnecessarily nanny-state to say WHEN you can buy alcohol.

For the record, I am going to be moving from one of the more restrictive alcohol states to one of the least alcohol restrictive. For example, Missouri has no open container laws. Also, as long as your driver doesn't partake, the guy riding shotgun is allowed to shotgun along with anyone else in the car. There's an area of Kansas city that lets you wander from bar to bar or liquor store to liquor store clutching whatever booze you choose. In case you were getting concerned, at this point of my life, a real loose night is one where I have more than one beer. And that's only if I'm not working the next day.

Anyway, after dropping the groceries off at my house, I washed my car at the coin operated car wash, which is actually a lot of fun. The foaming brush, the high power rinse which threatens to leap out of your hands. When its dry and hot, its kind of nice.

Watched another stupid movie this afternoon- Mortal Kombat. Or at least part of a stupid movie since it got to the point where the stupidity factor overwhelmed the fun factor. It's got an enjoyable setting and the martial arts is fun, but the wooden acting and dialog is a shade beyond campy. Great theme song though.

Spent a long time this afternoon working on the Perkins-Yamane Design website, which you can see here: www.perkinsyamane.com. I learned the basics of HTML in middle school for a computers class where we had to code basic websites about the solar system. Really really simple stuff. I could show most people how to make a basic website in about fifteen minutes. Actually, if you want to see how I did Saori's and my website, follow the link and click the right handed button, and then click on "view source." As you can see, it's pretty simple stuff. Ok, there is CSS but you don't really need it for a website to work. 99% of what you see on the website is the stuff below
.

I'm still working on it- I'm not happy with the way we're presenting our projects, but its going to take a lot more effort to change it to a logical and internet-ready form. Also, some the links are dead, like our resumes.

On Tires, a bit about the website, a two paragraph rant on the oil spill followed by a slightly paranoid exhortation

My bike tires are shot. Four years of sitting in Phoenix sunshine, countless miles over less than ideal surface conditions have taken their toll. I've got pretty big wheels so I needed to go to the bike shop to find tires, and I was directed to the $47 tires that are so primo, they went all the way around. I asked if they had anything cheaper and picked up the $14.

I've always been happy that I've learned the basics of bike maintenance. I know its nothing to brag about, but I can change my own flat tires and adjust the derailer. It's a nice feeling to occasionally get my hands dirty from the rust and oil and street gunk that's accumulated on my bike. It's not such a nice feeling to have my attention directed to my sandaled feet by a bite and the sight of dozens of ants swarming over them. I need to remember to not stand on an ant hill while working.

I've made more revisions to the website. Still a work in progress, but its a step further than the holding page. Check it out here, at www.perkinsyamane.com. Pretty basic stuff actually. One of the trickier things was putting the links on the side with the main stuff in the middle.

The gulf oil spill thing is slimy, disgusting, and revolting. And that's just the business and political maneuvering. Up until a few days ago, BP and the US government were telling everyone that the spill was just releasing 5,000 barrels of oil a day. When they put the second small tube in to siphon what some estimates say are a fifth of the total, that pipeline is siphoning off 5,000 barrels of oil a day. BP has admitted that their estimates may be slightly off. They don't want the world to know how much damage they have caused. I can understand that, if the police pulled you over for speeding, and asked you to report on what speed you were going, unscrupulous people are going to lie, or say, "Gee, officer, I don't know."

I think BP is probably doing everything they can to stop the gusher. It's been nothing but a PR and financial nightmare for them. At the same token, I've heard rumors that BP is the laughingstock of the refining world for their lax approach to safety and security. It was their contractor, after all. The oil runs deeper too. The US government is also partly to blame for allowing the industry to largely self-regulate, and for giving carte-blanche sign off (categorical exclusions) to the Deepwater Horizon rig, and many others, because BP told the department that it was a "low-risk" endeavor. It's time to put a bright spotlight on the department of mineral management, as they are way way to cozy to the industry. Shame on the political machine as well, which is defending BP, clamping down and covering up reports emerging from the spill, and in general supporting BP more than their own constituents. In congress today, Republicans argued against a higher cap that would have made BP liable for up to $10 billion in damages. This is still less than BP's profits from last year. Not that the money would be able to repair the damage.

Don't trust the government, and don't trust business. Work with them, work for them, and while we need their systems and they need us, keep an eye on them and hold them to account.

Dude, I should totally start a webpage

I've been kicking around the idea of making a website. The idea is that when I am in graduate school, I'm going to be meeting a lot of people and making a lot of contacts, both professionally, personally, and academically (and a fusion of all of the above), and I think it would be useful for someone who has my business card to have a website to go to that tells them "ok, so this is what Alec is about." Specifically, potential future employers and design / social collaborators. It would have:

• Professional work
• Student work
• Competitions
• Nonprofit work
• Resume
• and maybe even a link to my blog hidden somewhere in the site for people who really read every little detail on every page.

One issue is domain name. I can get www.aperk.us.but I'd really prefer a .com domain. I could go with studioap.net or apworks.net as well. I can get a domain for two years for about $7 a month. And that's with a premium 'eco' provider who run their servers on wind power.

One of the problems with working in the field of design is that your website needs to look and feel designed. No one is going to hire you for serious design work if your website looks like crap. This is an example of how my classmates are representing themselves on the net: http://www.patrick-riddle.com/ This is my aunt and uncle's website: http://scheerandscheer.com/. One's a little more flashy, ones a little more simple, but they're both really slick. I think if I create a site, I'm going to go for few elements and clean design with the hope that it will be read as "minimalsist" instead of "didn't want to shell out the bucks for a professional webpage designer." 

Thinking about that now, what kind of statement does THAT make? Please spend money on me to do design work for you, but when I needed a professional designer for a different trade, I cheaped out on a DIY website. This would bear closer inspection. Hell, talking about starting a website is like talking about starting a band.