Flyover Country

Up is down! White is black! Cats and dogs living in sin! Program Managers doing graphic design work! The horror!

My friend Doug, one of our Product Managers on Visual Studio Express, contacted me in a bit of a panic a few weeks ago. It turns out that they were launching a brand-new Visual Studio Express website for 2008 release, and they really wanted to put a Popfly page on there.

Unfortunately, there was no one to do the graphic design for it. So, I got tapped. I think I did a decent job, given that I only had a few hours, but it’s still simply terrifying to think that people confuse me with a designer. hah!

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1. Girls who go “Woo!”

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Love it or hate it, Twitter’s obviously on fire. Even though (or perhaps because) the idea is so ludicrously simple, there’s clearly a great deal of momentum behind the site and platform. It’s always helpful to be reminded that such things come from very humble, plain beginnings. I only hope that I have the opportunity to claim the same at some point.

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The turkey is finishing up in the oven, the pie is made, the mashed potatoes are ready. I’m drinking a beer…Which means it’s clearly time to read TechMeme! My girlfriend (ok, she’s really the one who’s reading TechMeme, which is cool in its own right) noticed a post over on On10 about a "clock" vaguely like what the Weasley family have on the wall of the Burrow in the Harry Potter books.

This is cool and all, but where’s mortal peril?

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About two weeks ago, I made the decision to leave Microsoft. It wasn’t an easy decision for me to make, but the opportunity I had handed to me was one I couldn’t easily pass up. I’m really going to miss my team; working on Popfly for the past year has been a fantastic experience, and I couldn’t ask for a better group of people to work with. Even so…

Anyway, I’m going to be joining a startup here in Seattle as a front-end web developer, UI designer, usability guy and … well, whatever else needs to be done. This means my commute will be about 15 minutes long each way instead of 45, which is quite exciting. The company is still in stealth mode, so I won’t be saying too much about it for the time being.

In other news, I’m publishing iRooster 2.5 tonight, working on getting iRooster 3.0 out the door (still), and starting final feature development and shakedown testing for a web project that I’ve been mulling over and talking with people about for about a year now. I think it’ll be a big boon for parents, especially around this time of year, but it’s something I will find incredibly useful as well. More on that soon, too. It’s also somewhat stealthy right now

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So, for the past hour I’ve been trying to figure out why a website I’m working simply fails to render on IE 6. I finally traced it down to a rogue button element, which appeared to be well-constructed but was still making IE 6 barf spectacularly. In the off-chance this ever happens to anyone else, here’s a tip: ensure that your button elements are constructed with a real closing tag as opposed to the short form (or whatever the real name for it is).

i.e.: <button> </button> instead of <button />

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A friend just forwarded this link my way. It’s a collection of hand-lettered paintings (?) depicting spam subject lines. Absolutely beautiful and terribly entertaining.

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