This year is certainly my “coming out of the office” year in terms of public speaking. With three events down, and four more on the schedule so far, the year holds lots of opportunities to meet new people.

A big, huge thanks goes to the Sonoma County Web Developers SIG for hosting me on Tuesday night for a talk titled, Beautiful Interfaces with CSS. Except for getting out of the office late that afternoon, and getting stuck in over 2 hours of traffic on the drive up from San Francisco, it was really an enjoyable evening with a lively crowd. The smaller setting provided lots of opportunity for interaction and a good amount of questions mixed in throughout from the audience. continued

This must be the week — if not the day — to launch new designs of products and services under new ownership. Good friend, and former colleague at Wired, Stephen Blake played a large role in today’s launch of the new CNET-owned mp3.com redesign. XHTML, CSS, Sliding Doors, and rounded corners… oh my. continued

For those of us involved in the project, we’ve been waiting months for this day to come. At long last, I’m proud to announce the launch of a project representing the latest collaboration between Stopdesign and Adaptive Path: the redesign of Blogger.com. Congratulations to the entire Blogger team on completing hundreds of hours, and expending tremendous effort to fit so much into this launch. This is Blogger’s first major overhaul since getting acquired by Google in February 2003, and it’s a biggie. continued

As we approach the 6-year anniversary of the original CSS2 Specification that reached W3C Recommendation status on 12 May 1998, and as the major undertaking of CSS 2.1 rapidly nears Proposed Recommendation status, John Allsopp writes a very appropriately-timed post. Message To The Messengers – Props to the old school reminds us of those to whom our gratitude belongs for their early work and evangelism of CSS. continued

If you followed my recent mention of the installed wifi at SBC Park, you’ll also be interested in Michael Myser’s interview with Bill Schlough (the Giants’ Chief Information Officer) just published at Wired News. In the interview, Schlough discusses the decision to install wifi in the park, its effects, and their past and future implementations of other technologies. Apparently the relationship with SBC benefits the team and the stadium in more ways than one. He makes a statement that the Giants have the largest IT staff compared with other baseball outfits, and added that the fans in the Bay Area are not only comfortable with more embedded technology in the game-going experience, they expect it.

Benny Evangelista writes an interesting article for the SF Chronicle on the recently installed wifi at SBC Park. I read about the new wifi several weeks ago before opening day, but this is the first I’ve seen public mention about it in local media. Note: “SBC Park has been outfitted with 121 high-speed wireless Internet access points, making the ballpark one giant Wi-Fi hot spot.” continued

Peter and Keith and Greg and Jon and Shaun all told me to:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

continued

After a bit of drilling down through numerous folders of mailboxes, selecting all, then marking as unread, my unread message count is back to normal levels.

If anyone couldn’t glean my sense of humor from yesterday’s post? Yes, I found staring at the number of unread emails (27,385) on top of Mail’s dock icon to be quite funny. It’s nothing I was upset about, and was only a minor annoyance to go back through ~200 mailboxes to select-all and correctly mark the messages as read. continued

This one won’t follow the recent trends of people who’ve been writing about Gmail. Apologies for the back-to-back Mac posts, but I’m finding my situation interesting enough that everyone could probably share in both its humor and its pity. Enjoy.

Prior to last year, I’d been an old-school Eudora user for a very long time, on both Windows and Mac. That’s the email client the HotWired IT department installed for Mac users in 1996. I just kept using it, and never tried anything else. When I switched back to the Mac last year, I decided to start anew with email and to give Apple’s Mail.app a good try. (I won’t go into issues with the name, others have already covered the topic, but I will refer to the application as simply “Mail”, with a capital M, from here on out.) Unbeknownst to me, I somehow ended up importing seven years worth of email into Mail, with no idea how many messages that actually represented. continued

Saft is a Safari plugin that allows true full-screen browsing, kiosk mode, and type-ahead searching familiar to the Mozilla family. I gave Saft a whirl after reading a glowing review from Jon Hicks about a month ago. I’m quickly realizing the full-screen mode of Saft is handy when giving HTML/CSS-based presentations. I’ve been using Firefox and a fullscreen bookmarklet for my presentations, but some of the browser chrome and the menu bar still show when using that method. With Saft’s full-screen mode, the only piece of the browser still visible is the scroll bar, and that’s only if it’s needed. continued