arkitrave :: log

My wife and I are leaving for a vacation with my parents and two sisters, so I will be offline for an entire week. Since my mom’s response when I mentioned perhaps taking the family to the south of France was… “I don’t understand why anyone would want to go to Europe,” (we are very different, my mother and I), we are going to do what all self-respecting American families do. Or at least that’s what the TV ads say. We’re going to Disneyworld! We were there once before, when I was, oh, about 10. So, it’s been awhile, and it will be good to spend time with them and get out of Buffalo for a little while. Kate just graduated from the University of Iowa, and I’m wrapping up grad school in (hopefully) 6 months, so it seemed like a good time to get the whole family together again.

I hope the comment spam doesn’t get too carried away while I’m off enjoying the rampant commercialism and fake European cities. EPCOT isn’t quite how Walt initially imagined it. (For another take on the circular city, check out Bucky Fuller’s scheme. Probably predated Disney’s idea.)

Now it’s just a different kind of escapist utopia. In fact, EPCOT as it is now kinda looks back at the original idea and laughs. What we really want in America is just to visit utopia. And all the “higher social good” hoo-ha of the Modernists isn’t really necessary; that takes too much effort to implement in everyday life. Better to castrate the original idea and make it palatable to the masses.

All that said, I am looking forward to the trip; I will try to not take anything too seriously and to enjoy myself and time with my family. And I’ll post a picture of Mickey for ya when I get back.

I hope my non-musician readers (all, what, two of you?) will indulge me. My wife is the Associate Principal Second Violin in the Erie Philharmonic in Erie, Pennsylvania. Saturday was the last concert of the year (Sibelius Night Ride and Sunset, Sibelius Violin Concerto, and Beethoven 7th Symphony). Good music, good concert, good violinist. The violinist was so good, and the Sibelius concerto first movement so difficult, that (horror of horrors) there was applause after the movement.

If you are “uninitiated,” it has become custom that applause in between movements is taboo. Something about the zen of the piece being unbroken by the audience, maybe. For years, I didn’t question this custom. But with very superficial research, it becomes obvious that the concert experience was very different a century or two ago. Applause happened not only in between movements, but even during the music, if the audience was impressed. Movements were repeated if they were well-received by the concert-goers. And sometimes, musicians or composers were openly booed and derided. In fact, Sibelius’s violin concerto was a flop when first performed. All in all, a much more colorful concert experience than we enjoy today.

So, at intermission, I overheard some blue-haired folks talking about what a shame it was that the audience clapped between the movements of the concerto. They were upset that the younger attenders didn’t “know better” than to do something so uncouth, and that life was, well, just better back in the good old days.

The problem is that it is natural to those not in-the-know to applaud when they really like something. If you’ve ever been to a jazz show, or many other contemporary musical programs, applause happens when the audience is moved by the music, especially after solos. Whether the old folks like it or not, modern society has no real reason to follow the rules of the halcyon days of classical concert yore. Rather, we should welcome the fact that not only are people who are younger and less classically experienced are coming to concerts, they are liking what they hear enough to express their appreciation for the solost and orchestra at breaks in the music. This is a good thing.

To his credit, the soloist was gracious and acknowledged the applause. I have seen soloists look rudely at the audience when they have clapped at the wrong place, and was glad to not see that Saturday.

I felt liberated. I clapped with enthusiasm with the rest of the people who were more excited about the music than they were aghast at the gauche-ness of the modern audience.

As a sidebar, I also hear Michael Tilson Thomas threw a hissy-fit this year at a benefit concert, of all things, when the audience was too distracting for him. My anecdotal source says that he stopped in the middle of a Mahler symphony and stormed off the stage. That’s a way to encourage those rich donors to continue their philanthropic tradition…

These kinds of attitudes hamper the cause of classical music in our society. We should be glad that it is being received, and not condemn those who aren’t inculcated in the culture enough to know what is right and wrong to do in a concert setting. If we don’t, classical music will continue to live in its ivory tower until it is so divorced from society that it decays and dies for lack of any relevance whatsoever.

What do you think?

I don’t know Javascript.

That said, I’m trying to implement the recent ALA technique to split up some long pages into chunks. Whether this is a good idea or not, I can’t decide, but I’m going to do it for my udp site for a particularly long publication that requires three levels of navigation. The site as it is set up really doesn’t allow three levels very well, so I want to do something like this to allow access to the sections.

The problem is that I don’t know what I’m doing. I can figure out well enough how to modify the script as is on the site. But, I have a div class = “photo” that nees to show up, and the script as it is hides the photo div, because it’s a class and not and id. The script basically hides everything that isn’t div id = (specified in the loop in the script).

Read more if you dare…

(more…)

So, it seems to be the popular subject to write about lately. I’ll get on the bandwagon.

Yes. Drop shadows will be the ugly horizontal rules of the current generation of web designs (however long a web generation is…) We will think they are ugly and over the top in not too many years. But this is really not a problem, people. Every generation needs to define itself somehow, whether it’s with tie-dye and the Dead or that guy Marilyn or Linkin Park…

There were web design ideas that were the cutting edge in 1995. It was all we had. All we knew we could do. And it got published (damn you, Dave Siegel). The publishing bit is too bad, as people get the books after the trend has run its course, and a new trend had taken its place. This, of course, led to really bad sites way beyond when we should have had really bad sites, and a very slow implementation of CSS for presentation.

Please, don’t fault trends, however. Design lives by trends. They are not evil. They allow companies and individuals to define themselves and be contemporary.

For my two cents, subtly done drop shadows still look good. The trick will be knowing when to stop using them, and not being so enamored of our own work that we can’t recognize when it becomes dated. I don’t think that time has come yet. Fortunately, with CSS layout, we can change a graphic on a site pretty easily when the time comes to move on to different graphic techniques.

I am the proud owner of a new 17″ PowerBook G4. Not as much an impulse buy as Shaun’s, I decided that I really needed mobility if I was going to be spending a lot of time building websites. That left the PC laptop option (decidedly uninspiring), the cheaper Mac option (nice, but…) or going all out and buying the best darn laptop on the market. Not one for mediocrity, I chose the latter.

In the end, it was the screen that sold me. You just can’t argue with a 17″ widescreen on a laptop. Apple has always made great displays, and this one is no exception. I have been doing Photoshop and web work on a 15″ CRT for years, and the widescreen is really revolutionary. I have never worked without windows maximized before - having two documents side-by-side on the screen is a new experience for me. It’s interesting - good photos look really good, and bad photos actually look worse.

The speed isn’t bad either. I caught the latest rev, up to 1.5 from 1.33 GHz, though I do wish they had bumped the really slow front side bus up a little bit. Still, it’s a pretty fast machine, and with 1.5 gig of RAM, I will be able to handle some pretty large files.

The household specs:

PC: AMD Athlon 1800, 512M, 15″ Sony Trinitron, Lian Li aluminum case, 20GB Maxtor ATA100 drive.

Apple: G4 1.5GHz, 1.5GB RAM, 17″ flat panel, aluminum case, 80GB drive

Wireless Apple AirPort networking for the PowerBook (too bad batteries can’t charge over the airwaves…)

(oh yeah, there’s an old Compaq laptop too…maybe 100Mhz.)

I’m having problems with the AirPort - I have a strange hanging thing happening on websites - it will begin to load and freeze. If I stop loading and hit reload, the page loads immediately. This happened with Apple software update too. The tech support boys don’t know what is going on. It’s starting to become annoying, and has been responsible for a couple double posted comments, so I hope it will get resolved soon. At least I have an Apple store 5 minutes away.

And I second, or third, all the comments on the shopping bags people have made recently. It’s nice to have the smallest details taken care of. They are really elegant, and one can be used as a backpack.

Now I have to get used to OSX from Windows. That’s going to be an ordeal, I think. I haven’t used a Mac OS since OS7 on the LCII in 1991. Things are different now.

Bruce Mau listed this phrase in his Manifesto for Growth, which I mentioned a couple weeks ago.

Recently, my wife and I ate at Carrabba’s, an Italian chain that just opened up in Buffalo. I am always ambivalent about chain restaurants. On one hand, you know what you’re gonna get. On the other, it’s rarely the quality or unique experience you find with small locally-owned restaurants. And sometimes, it’s downright bad food. So my expectations weren’t very high, especially considering the almost comical use of stone and Dryvit on the exterior. I think it was supposed to look like it was set in the side of a rock wall, in the hill country of Italy. Except for the parking lot and Best Buy next door, it might have worked.

However, I was amazed by many things about my visit. The food is wonderful, really. A good step up from the aforementioned “When you’re here, you’re family” joint, and better than even Macaroni Grill, which I love for the Bellinis and the awesome bread. The service was impeccable - our server was extremely knowledgeable about the food, and was more attentive than any server I have had in recent years, save maybe Opus on Prince Arthur, which costs about $200 more. And they had salt and pepper grinders on the table. Every restaurant should have salt and pepper grinders on the tables.

That said, the architecture is simply atrocious. Now, all chain restaurants suffer a bit in the built environment department, but some, like Chili’s, make good use of materials, contrasts in color and surface, different ceiling heights, partial partitions, etc. And the exteriors, though a little watered down, are at least well-composed and well-proportioned.

Carrabba’s building is, at the risk of repeating myself, atrocious. The light level was good. But it is one open room, divided with an entry in the middle. The booths have turqoise vinyl seats. The tables are a fake-marble-look laminate. The ceilings are suspended acoustic tiles. The open kitchen visible at the rear of the dining room has harsh fluorescent lighting that is a total disconnect with the dim light in the dining room, so it stands out like an injured thumb. There is no hierarchy of spaces, no interesting material usage, and the materials you come into contact with most often (seats and table) are synthetic material that really has no character.

And bringing this back around to the Bruce Mau comment I started with, the bathrooms use, I think, entirely standard Home Depot-look materials. They are not totally generic, like white square tiles (that would have been better as it wouldn’t have drawn attention to itself), they are just non-generic enough to show how generic they are, if that makes any sense. There is even a silly floral-print curtain thing across the vanity.

The problem with standard Home Depot materials is that everyone has them. You have to actually put materials together intelligently, not just select them because they look fancy and throw them together. Standard details only work if there is a greater architectural agenda that makes use of those materials, rather than letting the materials dictate the architectural agenda.

The same goes for software in the visual design world. But I didn’t need to say that.