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A while back, Douglas Bowman wrote an awesome pair of articles for A List Apart called “Sliding Doors of CSS”. The articles described a CSS technique for making a tabbed interface where the tabs scale gracefully as the user changes his or her font size.

Bowman’s sliding doors provided elasticity based on the size of a container’s content. But it’s also desirable to achieve elasticity based on a container’s external constraints. This paradigm is particularly applicable to data sets, where we want one column to expand or contract dynamically to fill the available space.

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I wanted to watch Michelle Obama’s speech last night because I was curious to see how she decided to portray herself, her husband, and her family. Obama is, relatively speaking, unknown to many of our nation’s voters. Further, his background falls far outside the American norm. All this has given significant fuel to the Republicans, who have painted Obama as nothing more than a sweet talking celebrity out of touch with core American values.

So I expected Michelle Obama to communicate her family’s values on her terms. But I was surprised and delighted to find something I didn’t expect: as a speaker, Michelle Obama rivals her husband! Her passion, her thoughtfulness, and her candor all shone brightly last night. She delivered the kind of speech rarely seen from most mainstream politicians these days—let alone from politicians’ partners. (Indeed, I would argue that we won’t see anything as inspirational from the Republicans during their convention.)

Let’s hope that, as Michelle put it (I’m paraphrasing here), we can come together as a country and listen to our hopes this time around, rather than our fears! If we can make this happen, then maybe, finally, we can get out from under the thumb of corporate America and set our own agenda for once. A big thank you to Michelle Obama—your speech thrilled and inspired me.

The ski magazines arrived the other day. I have been thinking about skiing almost every day for weeks now. You might be able to tell that I am super excited!

But before I can ski, I need to get my legs in shape. Which leads me to hiking! Fall is hiking season. The days are crisp and not too hot, the leaves are beautiful, and there aren’t many bugs. I didn’t get out that much last fall, though I did get to Katahdin, which was a blast.

So this fall, I’m committed to hiking four or five times. To help me follow through, I’m trying to start a little hiking “club” with some friends. I figure not everyone will be as into as me, but hopefully I will find a cohort or two for each hike. We’ll see how it goes!

Katahdin in 2007

My friend Jeff just came over for dinner and brought up NBC’s role in the Olympics.  NBC controls which events to televise, and thus which events most Americans know about.  As an example, the network has seriously emphasized beach volleyball this year.  Meanwhile, sports like crew have received litte coverage.  Show me some fucking table tennis!

In fact, NBC’s influence goes beyond scheduling.  According to Jeff, NBC played a huge role in moving the IOC to ditch one or two track cycling events and replace them with BMX.

We see the same phenomenon in the news media.  Newspapers, news networks, and news radio stations have complete control over which news we get to hear about.  This is no subtle role! It fundamentally affects our understanding of the world.

Adrian and I agree—there must be a better way. But what is it? Even with on demand television (for example) or the Internet, there is some provider deciding what is available.

There is at least one answer, at least one unbiased group that can provide unfiltered content.  What is this great, omnipotent, honest source?  It’s you; it’s me.  You, me, and everyone else who is connected to the Internet.

Can it be done? Would the world accept a radically different mechanism for information distribution? Am I (is anyone) brave enough to try? Open questions, for now. I’ll tell you this: it is most definitely an intriguing challenge.

That would be the caption on a photograph of me when I’m at my best (professionally speaking, that is).  Finally, this happened to me today while using Cocoa!

This is exciting.  It means that instead of stopping to be confused, now I can stop to think things through.  Instead of stumbling over new API’s and design patterns, now I can hold my program in my head.  In short, I can program effectively in my new environment.

Watch out!  As of today, we’re cooking with gas.

Oh, and I redesigned my blog, too.