There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose the ventures before us.

A lesson in procrastination: If you wonder to yourself “should I get my bag out of the car now or wait until tomorrow morning?” – you should go get it now, because in the morning your wife is going to leave for work and take the car, and your bag.

Now twitter powers my blog. I think this is how that Jesse James Garrett guy does it. I steal from only the best!

Graphic design is hard even when you’re a css blackbelt

I use Gmail for my work email, and Better Gmail 2 extension to convert mailto: links into handy Gmail-enabled links. It works via javascript and, until today, has never caused any problems for me.

Today I put the finishing touches on a client’s email campaign (using Con, and all appeared to be well. After sending the email out, we noticed a problem: all the email links were pointing to gmail.com. WTF?

Turns out that the editor in Constant Contact uses javscript to edit and save a DOM element on-the-fly; so, when Better Gmail changes the mailto: links to a Gmail-friendly URL, the changes the script makes are saved by Constant Contact.

I never noticed the change, because the links looked to me like every other mailto: link on the page: nicely changed for my convenience. The problem was obscured during the final testing of the email.

This is not a problem inherent in Better Gmail or in Constacnt Contact, but it sure makes me look like a jackass to have all the mailto: links broken on an otherwise perfectly good email.

Remember: Extensions are code executed on web pages and even though it’s not obvious, these scripts can interfere with other scripts on the same page!

Since writing a post that people actually paid attention to, my spam comments have gone up a hundredfold. Turning off the comments on the post didn’t slow it down. What am I doing wrong? Is this some kind of SQL-injection I’m not aware of? A flaw in the theme? I don’t know yet. I’m going to run some security tests and see what I can see.

Update:

This book is available from Amazon:

The world got a little bigger today.

On display at Yossi Milo in New York is a collection of photos titled “The Hyena and Other Men”.  I was fortunate to come across a couple of photos from the exhibit.

All of the images are directly from Pieter Hugo’s website.

Pieter Hugo created the series The Hyena Men while traveling in Nigeria with a troupe of animal charmers and their collection of tenuously domesticated hyenas, monkeys and snakes. The portraits feature groupings of men and animals surrounded by the barren urban centers of northern Nigeria. Taken during quiet moments between the spectacles of street performances, the photographs depict a stillness that subverts the tense physicality of the animals and their trainers.—Yossi Milo Website

Beautifully haunting.

Trying to figure out how to get twittr to talk to jabber. Eff.

Setting up twitter account

A brand new Peet’s Coffee finally opened in midtown Sacramento near enough to my house to acquire my patronage.  Hooray! 

So our vibrant little downtown has a new, great coffee house, appealing to the professional, cultured, and hipster crowds.  Umm, yeah, except that it closes at 8pm.

When I come back into town from visiting family over the holidays and need my caffene fix, I want Peet’s.  Until now, I just went to Starbucks (a burger when I want a steak).  Alas, I am foiled by the 8pm closing.

Tonight, New Years’ Eve, the place closed at 6pm.  Are you kidding?  The one night of the year you can guarantee EVERYBODY will be up and out until midnight and they close 6 hours before the main event.

So now my new favorite place is the Tupelo Coffee House.  The make a fantastic cup of coffee with a smile, have a great facility (with incredibly comfy furniture), and are open untill 11pm.

It’s in East Sac at 5700 Elvas (map). Go there after your next night out and get some great coffee.

corporate coffee sucks