Yesterday I had another piercing done — a vertical eyebrow piercing sitting right beside my first on my left eyebrow. I wanted to get another piercing before I leave for Germany this Sunday. Being my second eyebrow piercing I knew what I had coming and all in all it was a fairly relaxing procedure, as far as piercings go. My latest metallic addition had me reflect over the topic of body modifications again — the image I present to others both at work and in my personal interactions.

These issues came up twice before — when I got my first eyebrow piercing and later when I had my Ashley piercing (an inverted vertical centered labret). Eyebrow piercings are simple to get, quick and easy to heal and generally bruise or swell very little. My Ashley piercing on the other hand left my lip swollen for several weeks, bruised and discoloured. Now that the primary healing is over I’m as happy as a clam; I love it. I consulted my employer, work colleagues, family and close friends about both of the piercings and received mixed responses. Work was open to the idea and didn’t mind whatsoever, family didn’t mind either way and accepted it was my decision whilst most of my friends were supportive and receptive to the idea.

Ultimately it comes down to an alteration of the body that can affect the impressions we leave upon others, particularly first impressions. First impressions are vital to good relationships; as much as we like to think we don’t judge books by their covers our first impressions of someone will shape our reactions and future interactions with that person.

The way we look during social interactions is influenced by many factors. Two that come to mind first include the way we dress (is she wearing a casual t-shirt or smart business wear) and personal hygiene (how clean are his fingernails). Body modification also affects the way we look.

I’ve found little issue with the piercings I have and the way they’ve altered my personal image. The only notable observations are that interactions with those several generations older than myself tend to be more conservative and prone to look less favourably upon visible body modifications. This is obviously something that I needed to weigh up — how much did I want to get the piercings versus how often I would have important business meetings with government types. I don’t want to make accusations that public servants are all conservative, but I think the example works.

On that note working in Canberra means I’ll probably run across a public servant just by walking out the door here in the City. I have a few colleagues who directly work for the government and themselves have a piercing or three, if not a tattoo or something else and have had no issues getting or holding their job. I’m glad that thus far I’ve had no problems in business interactions and happy to rarely hear of prejudicial treatment relating to body modifications, at least here in Australia.

In closing, I’ve also been told that as a “creative type” we’re given a little more leeway in this entire regard and sometimes we’re almost expected to be somewhat more outgoing and expressive.

Industry, page 8 of the report.

Now with KLEPAS.ORG resurrected I wanted to briefly touch on it and entice those who haven’t yet seen it to download a copy. The report is licensed under a Creative Commons license and thus can be redistributed freely. A print copy is on its way — again see the census page above for more information.

Emloyment status pie chart.

I worked with Waugh Partners on the report producing their bar and pie graphs over the last few months. The work was done entirely using open source tools — namely Inkscape and Scribus. Working with Waugh Partners was a sincere pleasure: I was actively encouraged to use open source tools and of course got to have a sneak peak at the report. Thanks Jeff & Pia.

I can see where Jens is coming from but don’t see any compelling reasons that would convince me they’re inherently bad. Below I’ve tried to counter some of the common arguments that get raised against reset style sheets.

Overriding the overridden

The addition of extra lines in the author’s style sheet to override reset sheet definitions can become a waste of time and effort. The amount of definitions that need to be redefined comes down to two things: how many definitions are made in the reset sheet and the scope of the website.

Some large projects may even demand for an optimized production set of style sheets with a separate commented and split development set. A designer will need to decide how many definitions are going to be made in the reset style sheet and weigh that in turn to the redefinitions that need to be made. This should be combined with the use of optimization tools such as CSSTidy and of course the removal of redundant definitions from both the main style sheet(s) and reset sheet. See Going nuts, below.

Latency

Another style sheet in the mix will definitely add to the full download size of a website. Again this is relative to how large the reset sheet is. It is possible to compress CSS, (X)HTML, and Javascript files. With the YUI reset style sheet sizing at around four kilobytes, the optimization of images and their are implementation within the design is a more prevalent issue.

Removing functionality and usability

Removing usability through the reset sheet and neglecting to implement it by other means or redefining it is not an inherent fault of the reset sheet but of the designer; the designer should look into what elements the reset sheet is defining — never copy and paste blindly.

Going nuts

Reset style sheets aren’t bad because some are all-encompassing in their definitions and this certainly shouldn’t be a case for never using them. Ultimately the number of definitions in a reset style sheet should come down to how useful each is going to be in your project.

I take Eric Meyer’s position on this whereby we should use the tools that suit us best:

“The key here […] is that you evaluate various tools by thinking about how they relate to the ways you do what you do—and then choose what tools to use, and how, and when. That’s the mark of someone who thinks seriously about their craft and strives to do it better.”

Thus:

1. Use what suits you best, even it’s just the age old
   * { margin: 0; padding: 0; }
2. If you use a reset style sheet make sure you know what you’re resetting and why.

• Slideshare;
• Slideshare as a PDF (requires an account);
• here as a PDF;
• and thanks to Nathanael, as a MP3 audio file.

I think I crammed too much into the 20-minute time slot — I didn’t leave time for comments and questions — on the other hand I’d love to give future iterations of this presentation so I can add many other tips and tricks I left out.

I’d like to add additional CSS examples and make more of a note of the YUI library’s CSS which almost anyone can make instant use of. A few screenshots of existing web applications and web sites showcasing the tips in action also can’t go awry.

In closing I should note that I owe thanks to a few type nuts – see the last slide in the presentation.

Two days ago, April 19^th we finally ended up kicking off BarCampCanberra1, here at the ANU. With over sixty people we had three streams going throughout the day offering a large range of topics, social networking and even towards the end a White Wolf Werewolf RPG session.

Some of the highlights included:

• Technologists as revolutionaries — stepping back and examining the potentials and power we have as users of technology, by Kate Carruthers who came down from Sydney for the event;
• Documenting open source projects — a detailed experience of one project’s documentation, by Paul Wayper;
• Ruth’s User Experience Nightmates — is Gordon Ramsay a UX expert in disguise? Ruth Ellison outlined the talk on her blog for those who couldn’t make it;
• Ajay Ranipeta also came down from Sydney and ran the famous two-minute speed networking sessions again — Ruth snapped a great photo of the event.

I also had to chance to present the first version of my talk on typography — Beautiful Web Typography: 7 tips to de-sucking the web. I was very pleased with the reception and especially happy to see new users of wp-typogrify (or similar).

Many of the presentations have been made available online at Slideshare. Flickr now features a good hundred great photos of the event. We also greatly utilized a Twitter stream during the event to post updates and status of presentations as well as links mentioned in talks. Audio and video of the talks is coming online slowly — see the BarCampCanberra blog.
Keith Lang presenting You want Grandma Certification.

The event was completely sponsored by both local companies and ones further abroad — thanks kindly to acidlabs, Web Directions, SMS Management & Technology, AussieHQ, Microsoft, Indigo Pacific, Maadmob and Kate Carruthers. This meant stomachs were kept at bay during the day, throats never got too dry and at the end of it all the ‘campers could chat excitedly over a pint or glass of wine.

A special mention should also go out to AussieHQ who fed thirty two of us at the end of the day at the Turkish Pide House. Thanks guys.

Overall a great turnout for a place like Canberra. It was a great success and I’m very happy to have seen BCC1 run before I leave for Europe.
Photos by Ruth Ellison (licensed CC-BY-NC-ND).

From left to right: myself, Stephen, Nathanael and Andrew — apparently now the “A-Team”.

So, a little about the design — I decided quite early I wanted to stick to a solid grid foundation. The website is built around four columns, each columns measuring 200 pixels with 25-pixel wide gutters. To ensure content doesn’t sit beside browser window borders I’ve also installed 40-pixel wide left and right hand margins giving a total width of 955 pixels.

I opted for a simple layout that was to be decorated by the content using beautiful typography. Type is set in Georgia and Helvetica with Times New Roman and Verdana as respective fall-backs. For those who run Mac OS X or have Minion Pro or Adobe Caslon Pro in their font libraries will also see the more stylish ampersands (i.e. Jack & Jill…), thanks to wp-typogrify.

wp-typogrify is a brilliant WordPress plugin that parses text replacing primes with proper quotation marks and apostrophes, transforms dashes and minus characters into proper en and em dashes, with thin spaces or without, and more! It is a port of the original typogrify — a set templates for Django by Christian Metts. PHP and Perl scripts also exist — just call the function when parsing text.

There are a few issues with Internet Explorer I still need to iron out — currently the navigation bar is displaced a page-width to the right and some of the selectors aren’t being recognised. On a separate note, I will also be adding a portfolio in the coming month.

The CSS and XHTML is fully valid about to be fully valid — gimme five minutes. Other than that, there’s not much more to say, it’s just really nice to be back.

1. Hot Fuzz
2. Things I Hate About You
3. The 5th Element
4. Dark City
5. Die Edukators
6. The Machinist
7. Shaun of the Dead
8. Serenity
9. Pitch Black
10. Fight Club

Secondly, am I the only one that finds the fact that I can’t possibly mix something like GFDL-licensed texts with CC-BY-SA texts stupid? Both licenses essentially mean the same thing: take my content, do what you like as long as you a) attribute and b) all derivatives are licensed under the parent license.

Someone please correct me if I’m getting this totally wrong.

*end rant*

Blargh. Fucking great.