Posts from November 2015

Throughout 2015, a few people who’ve seen me present “Designing for Crisis” at An Event Apart have noticed that, on the slides where I have filler text, it’s a localized variant.  In Washington, DC, for example, one section started out:

Andrew ellicott lobortis decima thomas jefferson vulputate dynamicus fiant kingman park sollemnes ford’s theater. Vero videntur modo claritatem possim quis quod est noma howard university consequat diam. Blandit ut claram north michigan park seacula judiciary square william jefferson clinton hawthorne millard fillmore iis…

This was a product of some simple PHP I’d originally written to generate Cleveland-themed filler text a year or so back, which you can find at localipsum.meyerweb.com, and which I’d expanded upon to let me generate text for my presentations at AEA.  The name comes from the original idea I had, which was to provide a list of cities/regions/whatever, so that users could pick one and generate some filler text.  That never quite came together.  I had a semi-working version once, but the UI was horrible and the file management was worse and I got discouraged and rolled back to what you see now.

I kept telling myself that I’d get back to it, do the city-selection thing right, polish it nicely, and then finally release the source.  I’ve told myself that all year, as I manually swapped in city information to generate the filler text for each of my talks.  Now I’ve finally admitted to myself that it isn’t going to happen, so: here’s the source.  I chose a pretty permissive license — BSD-ISC, if I recall correctly — so feel free to make use of it for your own filler text.  I’ll be happy to accept pull requests with improvements, but not package-management or complete MVC restructuring.  Sorry.

I know, it’s a goofy little thing and the code is probably pants, but I kinda like it and figure maybe someone out there will too.  If nothing else, we can look for a few laughs in the output and maybe — just maybe — learn a little something about ourselves along the way.

(P.S. Speaking of “Designing for Crisis”, look for a post about that, and more specifically video of it, in the next few weeks.)

• Local Ipsum was published on Monday, November 23rd, 2015.
• It was assigned to the Projects and Tools categories.
• There has been one reply.

Yesterday was the inaugural Rebecca’s Boardwalk, a fundraiser in support of Rebecca’s Gift.  About two hundred people joined us for soft pretzels, snow cones, bounce houses, carnival games, face painting, and temporary tattoos.  I saw former co-workers and even a high school classmate there.

Between the ticket sales (both admission and activity) and the money raised in the raffles and the silent auction, Rebecca’s Gift raised enough money to send another family on a healing trip.  None of that would have been possible without a huge community of helpers and volunteers, so many that I could never thank them all.  There are a few I’d like to specially note, however.

First, my wife Kat and our friend Karla, who are the co-founders of Rebecca’s Gift and the people who really put the whole Boardwalk event together.  With help, of course, tons of help — but they were the driving forces.  People often think that Rebecca’s Gift is something I put together, but I didn’t.  It’s all them.  The non-profit wouldn’t exist, and the event wouldn’t have happened, without their drive.

Second, David Leslie Johnson, who contributed signed scripts from The Walking Dead, a signed making-of book from Red Riding Hood, and a signed poster from The Conjuring to the silent auction.  If you’re a horror fan, you might recognize David as the screenwriter of Orphan, as well as his involvement in the upcoming re-reboot of A Nightmare on Elm Street and the sequel to The Conjuring.  He’s also one of my best friends, as he has been since late elementary school.

Third, Tattly, which donated a lot of boardwalk-themed temporary tattoos.  For example, this Ferris Wheel design, and this very appropriately-themed set.  If you’ve never seen Tattly’s tattoos, they’re really something.  Vibrant, detailed, and most of all fun.  If you’re looking for temporary tattoos, check them out first.

Fourth, Anshe Chesed Fairmount Temple, for providing us with the right space for the event, for giving us the support (and storage space!) we needed to pull the whole thing off, and for trusting us with both their facilities and their schedule.

And fifth, again, everyone who donated items and sponsored booths and bought tickets and came to have a good time, just down the hall from the preschool classes where Rebecca wowed everyone with her sparkly dresses and impish grin.  It was an afternoon worthy of her name and her spirit.  Thank you all.

(If you’d like to support the mission of Rebecca’s Gift, please feel free to use the Donations page.  And thank you.)

• Rebecca’s Boardwalk was published on Monday, November 16th, 2015.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

If there’s one thing that’s made it possible for me to learn as much as I have, and create as much as I have, it’s that my default attitude about things, especially technical things, is that I’m probably wrong about them.

When I first took up CSS and it didn’t do what I expected from reading the spec, I started creating simple, focused tests of each property and its values, to figure out what I was getting wrong.  Because I wanted to be sure, I built tests for all the properties, even the ones I was confident about understanding — and, in places, found out my confidence was misplaced.  Eventually, those tests became the CSS1 Test Suite.  Since I had discovered that, in a lot of cases, the browsers were actually wrong, I decided to document CSS support in browsers.  That became the CSS Mastergrid (long since gone).  On the strength of that resource, I started writing articles to explain how things worked, or didn’t, which led to writing my first book.  And so on.

But it all started because I assumed I was wrong about how CSS should work, not that the browsers were fundamentally broken.  Simple test cases seemed like the best way to find out.  One thing led to another.  In a lot of ways, you could say that my career was made possible by me assuming I was wrong, and setting out to determine exactly how wrong I was.

It’s not that I want to be wrong; in fact, I dislike being wrong.  But I dislike continuing to be wrong much more, so I try to find out how I’m wrong, in hopes of becoming less wrong.  It’s not even “strong opinions, weakly held” — it’s more “strong suspicion of error, strongly pursued”.  In public, when necessary.  (This is where it helps to be willing to look like a dork, or even a fool, as Kitt wrote about yesterday.)

When asking for help, this is the approach I take.  When I post to mailing lists or forums, it usually comes out as, “Here’s what I think is so, but results don’t match that understanding.  What am I missing?  Please help me get it right.”

How am I wrong?  Because I’m probably wrong.

This article was originally published at The Pastry Box Project on 2 November 2015.

• I’m Probably Wrong was published on Monday, November 2nd, 2015.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, Observations, Personal, and Tech categories.
• There have been no replies.