CSS · Grey Nicholson

Into the Fire

2009-03-06T15:07:00+00:00

An entry at Illuminated Mind has struck a chord with me. It's titled “If It’s a Good Idea… Don’t Do It”, although “If It's Just a Good Idea…” captures the message more clearly.

One of the reasons I petered out of university was that I was doing it only because it was a good idea, and not because I was still passionate about understanding the physics. Even the dead-centre-of-my-field-of-interest module of Cosmology was failing to inspire me.

It wasn't at all arduous: I still came upon flashes of epiphany every so often—one such I recall involved the insight that the constituent particles in atoms' nuclei are also arranged in shells, like the orbiting electrons, and that shell boundaries could explain some discontinuities in each element's differing physical properties—but they were too few and too far between to hold my interest.

I also realised that I wasn't especially good at maths, and the solid intuitive understanding of maths needed to grok the physics I was learning was just slightly beyond me. Perhaps I stopped caring about maths too.

I realised that I only cared about qualitative trends, and not about the process of calculating results from formulae, or being able to properly derive a formula from memory and a set of more fundamental equations. Once I knew that formula C necessarily followed from formulae A & B, I was happy. I still like unscaled graphs as qualitative illustrations.

The main thing I cited at the time was Six Feet Under. More4 were showing repeats of the later series late each weeknight. I decided that the characters' philosophical discussions (perhaps combined with the late hour of the broadcast) were expanding my mind more than rigorous study of science.

I never particularly wanted a degree—I just wanted to learn about the universe. And I found myself gaining more insight into the universe by following the fictional escapades of a family of intelligent undertakers than by computing physical quantities.

So I was doing what was a good idea, rather than what inspired me. I'd made a similar decision before, when I chose to carry on Religious Studies to full A-level in college, instead of continuing to study Chemistry, despite doing slightly better at chemistry in practically every respect.

The difference was that in that case there'd been a fire for me to jump out of the frying pan and into. Watching Six Feet Under is not a full-time occupation.

So I bummed about a bit, not even looking for a job for the next few months as I had some spare student loan and overdraft to play with.

I eventually happened upon a desk job that suited me down to the ground: opening letters, filing, sorting and being a general administrative office bitch, for the customer relations department of a train operating company.

The work itself was easy and almost entirely stress-free, as I always had someone to turn to when in doubt. I continued to devote much of my mindshare to the day-to-day happenings in software and technology news (an interest I can trace back to the buggy implementation of CSS in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6).

I did, of course, think about my job as and when required. As is my wont, I came up with a couple of suggestions to do things better in the office, but anything beyond keeping tidy, labelled piles of stuff was stymied by being stuck with a particular set of tools.

This was OK. After all, I didn't really care that much. Yes, it'd be nice if Mrs Smith from Glasgow could receive a response to her complaint about delayed trains a day or two sooner, but.

I was rudely awakened from my employmentary coasting when my office was relocated to Newcastle, a 60-minute (free) train-ride each morning and evening, on top of the twenty-minute walk. This gave me plenty of time to read some books for a change, and I sped through The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein and the original Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov (in full this time) over the course of a couple of weeks.

But co-workers and my genial manager were leaving because of the move, and the immediate vicinity of Newcastle Central railway station is no match for the lunchtime scenery afforded by York's River Ouse and Museum Gardens, especially in summer. Though I couldn't see myself leaving, I couldn't see myself staying there either. And so I jumped: I handed in my notice (metaphorically—I actually just told the outgoing and incoming managers when I intended to leave).

Technology news was replaced by job-searching. I recall one Tuesday in Newcastle spent, by all three members of the administrative team, primarily looking for other employment.

Astoundingly, it worked, and two weeks later I was staying in a hostel in Bristol about to be trained to be a charity street fundraiser.

Thirty-six hours after, I found myself standing at the side of the main street in Leeds, nervously sipping at a cup of tea, trying to dilute the adrenaline.

That day went unexpectedly well, propelled largely by my frequent self-reminders that I was talking to random people on the street and trying to convince them to donate to a charity, for a living.

Three months elapsed.

My old teammate had often told me that the day's outcome could be influenced by my expectation of what would happen. I expected to come back to work and do solidly well. I expected that I knew what I was doing. My old team-leader had said he firmly believed that if you wanted something enough, you'd find a way to attain it. I believed that I wanted to be a good fundraiser. The team's coach insisted I had it in me. I deferred to his superior understanding.

It was starting to become apparent that I wasn't meeting targets. Not just the actual targets, but the minimum ones too. I wasn't earning my place on the team.

This came into focus one Wednesday evening in York when, after applying every technique I could muster—level thinking, playing the long statistical game, appropriate body language, concision, knowledge, friendliness…—I found myself walking home without having signed a single person up.

I realised I didn't actually know what I was doing. I was doing a good impression, much of the time, of someone who knew how to go about street fundraising, but in reality I was winging it. And not well enough. An awful day should yield no fewer than two sign-ups; the remainder of the team had signed people up.

I arrived largely undeterred the following morning in Newcastle, after a journey that was equally oddly familiar and strangely different. It was drizzling—not supposed to affect a fundraiser's performance, but not especially conducive to it. As it was November, there was an almighty racket accompanying a department shop's Christmas display, rendering a decent swathe of the street useless for talking to people. I was deterred.

Despite this, I signed two new donors before lunch, a decent tally for the morning session. Briefly, I convinced myself that I'd remembered how to fundraise. I spent most of the afternoon mulling over the decision to quit, safe in the knowledge that soon enough a decision would most likely be made on my behalf anyway. I even signed another person up (though I'm told he's a serial charity-joiner).

The following morning's news headlines centred around the deepening recession: specifically around new figures for job losses, and the recession's stifling of charitable donations. I have a wry sense of humour.

Jonathan's blog post reminded me strongly of when I left both university and fundraising. Both times, the initial spark of enthusiasm for what on paper is a pretty awesome idea had dwindled, leaving me merely going through the motions.

University lectures were not a chore, so the twenty-or-so hours of every week of term that they occupied weren't sorely missed. Even spending a day in labs each week was OK. Attaining a proper quantitative understanding of physics, though, required plenty of off-timetable study—time I was loath to put in since in truth I cared little for the specifics. It showed: each week's problem questions seemed more and more daunting, which only increased the resolve needed to actually study.

Fundraising had me leaving home each day at around 07:30 and getting back at about 22:30—albeit typically due to healthy after-work socialising. (And I should point out that everything that went with the job was wonderful: my teammates, and our adventures together—even running for a train back from Harrogate with one minute to spare felt like an adventure—were each uniquely brilliant).

I now know that I'm not capable of devoting my time to something that I'm not enthralled by. It doesn't have to be actually important—I just have to care enough to want to take control.

I suppose part of it is the knowledge that someone else could be doing a better job instead of me. My demotivation in physics and fundraising alike roughly coincided with the dawning that I would be neither a brilliant cosmologist nor a legendary fundraiser respectively.

I have this need to correct things and improve upon what's there, and if I can't make something better I tend to leave it to someone else.

So I agree with Jonathan that something just being a good idea doesn't make it a useful application of my time.

Vega 2

2005-08-20T16:23:00+00:00

The process was bloody tedious but the site's now even colourfuller - this is Vega 2.

Grey's now an endangered species about these parts. ...Well, proper grey - all of the “black” text is actually grey, bar the main title. But you see my point - more colourifficness. Yay.

The aforementioned tedium came from having to calculate several background colours for each hue - 60 colours in total. It was just a matter of typing one number into Inkscape and copying out the colour code generated by it, but it was somewhat boring to do sixty times.

Just too much dedication - that's my problem.

Vega

2005-07-30T17:55:00+00:00

Yesterday I changed the site's design. I decided a while back that I didn't want multiple styles any more.

The main idea behind Sirius, an alternate style that never got off the ground, was to add a bit of colour to the site. Of course, being me, I couldn't decide on which colour to use so I decided to have them rotate per page. I picked some colours and applied them as background colours in Sirius; here I've used them mainly as text colours but also as the colour of the background image. And the background colours. I'll let you figure out the criterion for each page's colour yourself.

The overall design of Sirius was mainly inspired by Stopdesign v3, but my GIMP mojo is far too limited to match that sort of detailed quality. So I've decided to stick with the more minimalistic style that I'm reasonably good at.

I call the new style Vega. Yes, it's very similar to Arcturus (it's actually just a modification of Arcturus) but it is a distinctly different style. Arcturus' “starburst” logo has been kept as the background image. I was going to also use it as the site's icon thereby making it into an all-out Mooquackwooftweetmeow logo, but it doesn't look very distinct at 16 pixels square. Besides, Mooquackwooftweetmeow is just a collection of stuff by me so it's OK to continue using the “GKN” emblem.

The Style Switcher is Dead; Long Live CSS

2005-07-29T04:11:00+00:00

I've killed the Style Switcher - see? It's just an empty shell of a page. This is mainly because I've killed the multiple styleage.

There's no need for random websites to evangelise the capabilities of CSS-driven design any more - total style-switching like that's just plain goofy nowadays. And it allows me to come up with some sort of consistent visual identity. More on that shortly.

For posterity's sake (and because I spent a little while creating them), the styles' logos:

Slight Delay

2004-07-30T01:06:00+00:00

OK, so I spent the last hour designing Sirius' logo. It is quite difficult to come up with distinct designs that look like stars and are viewable on a light background... so I've slightly cheated.

Anyhow, I might start writing some CSS soon.

Work-in-progress

2004-07-29T23:57:00+00:00

I've just been visiting Stopdesign; naturally, I'm inspired to do a bit of CSS design, so I'm setting about designing a new style for the site, Sirius.

It's a work-in-progress and probably will be for a while, but it'll be live on the site as I work on it. You may observe via the style switcher.

Proper Multiple Styleage

2004-07-11T23:30:00+00:00

After several days' absence due to various combinations of inarsibility and drunkenness, I've returned, and finished up the site's restylifier. Observe hither.

Update: The Style Switcher is Dead; Long Live CSS

In partially-related news, I've also hooked up a meta-link for the site's Atom feed, for the purpose of playing nice with the Live Bookmarks feature in new Firefoxen.

Style Switcher

2004-07-11T22:50:00+00:00

Update: The Style Switcher is Dead; Long Live CSS

Print Away

2004-07-04T22:06:00+00:00

In a half-arsed attempt to provide some sort of styling for printed copies of Mooquackwooftweetmeow, I've tried to use Toliman when printing, even if you're viewing Arcturus.

I couldn't figure out how to make this work so, reluctantly, I've now spent the half hour necessary to add proper print styling, to both Arcturus and Toliman.

In fact, I've added an extra stylesheet, only used when printing, to do things such as appending URIs to links and removing useless sections (the recent entries list, for example). This stylesheet is called no matter what style you use, to avoid my having to repeat myself for each style.

The layout for Toliman is just left as is - it's already very plain (that's the point) and is thus already suited to printing. Arcturus is tweaked a little for printing. The content column is wider; conversely the blurb is thinner. The link boxes are forced below both the content and the blurb, so they can both be made wider, to accommodate the appended URIs.

See for yourself - print stuff out; report any deliberate mistakes to printaway@gkn.me.uk.

And finally, Toliman is no longer labelled “(beta)”. Although I think I might want to tweak a bit of the spacing at some point, it's good enough. Having said that, Google News is still labelled “beta”. Crazy Americans.

Toliman

2004-07-03T23:26:00+00:00

I've just uploaded a second stylesheet for Mooquackwooftweetmeow. As promised, it's a vanilla, lightly-styled, use-your-browser's-default-settings-fest.

It's not finished yet, but it's not too far from. I haven't written (by which I mean imported and modified) a style switcher yet - I probably will soon. Until then, just use your browser's built-in style switcher, which will generally only stick until you leave the page.

Ironically enough, the only mainstream graphical browser that really needs to use Toliman cos it can't handle Arcturus - IE for Windows - is one of few without a built-in style-switcher. Good, eh?

I'd appreciate any Toliman-related suggestions - for example, cases where I've inadvertently modified a default, to adverse effect. You can send them to me at toliman@gkn.me.uk.

Chameleon

2004-05-23T00:41:00+00:00

The Twaddle v0.21 is up. It now has multiple, user-choosable themes; the current options are the three (“modern”) themes that have already been published - Forest, St. George and Yellow Sky, plus the Default theme, currently Yellow Sky.

I've already created three more themes that have never been published - Mars, Ocean and Sphinx, and I have a nice photo of a sunset from which to create a Sunset theme. A now-revised version of Mars will be made the default theme some time in the coming week.

Stop! Thief!

2004-05-21T01:07:00+00:00

I've read articles about CSS design theft before - I never thought I'd be a victim.

Check out these beauties: 1, 2.

2 is obviously related to 1; I'm reliably informed that 2 is 1's brother. I pointed 1 towards my CSS for The (excellent) Twaddle (which we've just vamped once more - take a look) in order to help him learn CSS. I explicitly (although friendly...ly) told him not to nick it - to make his own. What does he go and do?

Some of the CSS can only have been nicked, as it's both identical to (a former version of) mine, and a bit daft (i.e. it'd be an hellish coincidence if any brain other than mine came up with it).

e.g.: in 1's stylesheet, the font declaration proceeds thus: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Treb, Helvetica, Helv, Arial, sans-serif. I don't know of any fonts called Trebuchet or Treb; I just threw them in on the off-chance that there was a non-MS version or an incredibly old version (I know Helv does/did exist); I recently removed the extraneous fonts.

#content {list-style-type: none}?! I'm sure that was a daft cut-'n'-paste error I once made. Otherwise it's just stupid. .leftbox, .rightbox, .box-caption, .contentbox...

Thief! Get off my CSS!

He even has the audacity to include a Copyright Policy link to FACT! OK, so maybe The Twaddle isn't exactly the least copyright-infringing website in existence (we've used photography found via Google), but we recently (very recently) switched the main site header to original photography and plan not to borrow from others if at all possible.

In his defence... he's given us a link. That makes it OK then. Soon, I shall be providing a link to www.coldplay.com and creating a lot of original music.

April Fool!

2004-04-01T20:40:00+00:00

Only kidding - it's not really.

Last Wednesday (the 24th) we “relaunched” The Twaddle. In fact, the only change made to the XHTML was the addition of unique page id's - something I've always done on Mooquackwooftweetmeow but never used. The rest of the jiggery and/or pokery was accomplished using just CSS and a few Google Image Searches - a testament to the power of CSS and the excellence of my XHTMLing.

We've also got some nicely foolish spiel on the front page about The Twaddle shutting up shop. In case the date of March 32nd, and the Can you say April Fool? message at the bottom of the page didn't tell you: it's an April Fool, fool. And finally, we've screwed with the forums' word filter, replacing innocuous conjunctions with words such as cheese and Alan Shearer - see http://thetwaddle.proboards27.com/index.cgi?board=atrium&action=display&num=1080773096 for the complete damage assessment.

The Twaddle is now printastic, and other web-authoring-related digressions

2004-03-08T19:30:00+00:00

A while ago I added a print stylesheet to Mooquackwooftweetmeow; now, The Twaddle's had the same treatment. On Saturday I also gave The Twaddle a site icon, so the site's now approaching Mooquackwooftweetmeow in completeness. Does this mean v1.0 any time soon? Probably not...maybe.

I've been meaning to overhaul Mooquackwooftweetmeow's underlying XHTML/CSS for a while, mainly due to unnecessary over-id-ing in anticipation of some sort of use in future. My approach to The Twaddle was exactly the reverse - things were added in as and when needed. The Twaddle went from idea to reality in two days, and from blank files to website in one evening, so I didn't really have time to consider what id-s might come in handy later.

The Twaddle was initially based around some content - the website only existed to purvey the content. By contrast, Mooquackwooftweetmeow has only ever existed “for the hell of it”. The approach taken with The Twaddle seems to have worked better. Mooquackwooftweetmeow seems perhaps over-designed now; the Georgia font probably didn't help as it prompted the small-caps for the “UTC” at the foot of each item; this is titled with “Co-ordinated Universal Time”... all of which seems rather over-elaborate.

Another source of much annoyance is the fact that the menu items aren't centred; I might have another bash at centring them nicely...