wheresrhys

An artist's impression of my perfect office

I’ve got a bad back at the moment. It’s been far worse in the past, so I’m not really grumbling, but I have however recently started my first office job in a long time, and yet again I’m faced with the perennial problem of having a chair and desk that force me to stoop. It’s not actually too bad at this place (the screen will allow me to raise it up to close to eye level, and the non-swivel chair I have is a lot more comfortable than most of the swivellers I’ve sat in), but it has reminded me of a point I’ve been meaning to make for a while.

Years ago, when attending health and safety training, we were told that you should be careful to make sure your seat is at such a height that your legs touch the floor comfortably. Why exactly this is good for your back I don’t know, but I presume somebody knew what they were talking about. For employees with legs too short to reach the floor (does Tom Cruise work in anyone’s office?) the advice is to put a box or, if you’re gullible, and expensive footrest on the floor.

However, at the opposite end of the spectrum you have those people who, like me, have legs so long that raising the chair up to a suitable position for the legs means the torso gets lifted up way above the table, almost as if a hot air balloon were involved. This means that I have to lean forward a lot to type, even more so if the screen height can’t be adjusted much.

The worrying thing though is that, because I am only a slightly taller than average man, these people consist of a sizeable portion of the population – a bit less than half of all men and some women too -  all of whom have no option other than to stoop and wreck any chance they had of making it to retirement without suffering a slipped disk.

And finally to my point; this situation is caused by the fact that desks are made at a height to suit the average person, which is fair enough for the general office. But what frustrates me is that in IT (and probably other male dominated professions too) you don’t get higher desks, even though the average height of men is greater than that of the population in general. All these bluechip IT companies spend hundreds, if not thousands, per employee on getting them the latest, trendiest, most ergonomic chairs, keyboards, mice etc…, but it’s all for nothing if the desk is still too low.

When I run my own multi-million dollar software company (based on the success of a random muffin recipe generating website) I will proudly place at the top of my ‘work for us’ page

OUR TABLES ARE A FULL 3 INCHES TALLER

Beat that, Google!

A friend of mine (whom I’ll be doing a website for shortly) mentioned last night that  she was impressed that I was able to learn all I know about web development from the internet (more or less)… and, come to think of it, so am I. There can’t be many careers where the internet enables you to become fully trained and, arguably, more informed than people who learn their craft just from courses and books.

But it got me thinking about how gradual a process it’s been, picking up all these skills. Starting with html, then on to CSS, then a little functional php and javascript, a slight detour into google maps, then on to fully OOP programming using jQuery and Zend framework. And I came to realise that for many of these, especially the early ones, the reason I’d started to look into them was because I worked with an idiot that didn’t understand what they were doing.

Indeed, there’s nothing like incompetence in somebody who should know what they’re doing to spur you on to learn how to do it yourself. If you’re dealing with an expert there’s very little chance your embryonic efforts will outshine theirs, and you’ll probably have little reason to want to bypass them anyway. But if you’re stuck with an idiot that constantly frustrates you with their incompetence and inability to do the simplest things, then it’s easy to convince yourself that you could do better, so you start to learn the basics, pretty confident in the knowledge that if you master these you’ll already be light years ahead of your resident idiot. Maybe all companies should have an official idiot hiring quota as part of their professional development strategy.

So here’s to you, idiots, for leading me, and probably many others, to a decent career.

One of the perks of working from home is that if for whatever reason (and, let’s face it, if you’re in a procrastinative mood, any reason is good enough) you feel like a break you can take one. I don’t mean playing facebook scrabble, or checking the definition of a drupe on wikipedia, all the while trying to look busy and keeping a watchful eye out for your manager; I mean a proper break, maybe away from your desk or doing something not usually allowed in an office.

I’ve recently turned to the latter. Long-term readers (all 8 of you) will know that I have been accompanying an Irish fiddler on the guitar for about a year. Just before Christmas I got the urge to have a go at an instrument more traditionally associated with carrying the melody, so I got a tin whistle.

I can’t stress enough how important it is for every parent to campaign for their schools to teach the tin whistle instead of the recorder.

1. It has a much nicer sound, particularly when placed in unskilled sounds
2. It’s got a much more fun, unstuffy repertoire
3. Last, but definitely not least, a tin whistle has no wrong notes on it! It has all the notes of the D or C scale on it (typically) and though you still have to hit the right ones to play a tune it’s much harder to sound as disastrously wrong as you can on a chromatic instrument.

But back to the point. My current preferred displacement activity from work is playing the tin whistle, and I reccommend any home-workers who read this to try it out. Just get yourself a whistle for a tenner or so, read brother steve’s website to understand tin whistle technique, listen to some tunes on youtube (Planxty are a good place to start as a lot of the pipe songs are in the same key as a standard whistle and not too fast to hear the notes), and try and copy them (or if you read music find the score on the session).

As a warning though, it does become addictive. For instance, during the writing of this post I’ve played two reels and a hornpipe.

And I’m about to have a crack at a jig.

This blog is meant to do two things:

1. Let the world know that I’m a decent front-end web developer
2. Be the focus for a new doomsday cult

Number two is progressing nicely as no-one has gotten wise to my subliminal messages yet, but what of number one?

Let’s evaluate:

• Design – it’s not finished yet (and never will be as I will hopefully do a redesign next month when I have a bit more time), which doesn’t look so good
• Javascript, CSS, HTML – apart from mentioning the odd bug/annoyance there’s very little to show what I can do with these… aside from my jQuery plugins which hardly have pride of place either

Over the last few months I’ve come across a few blogs which, unlike mine, really cut the mustard when it comes to being an extended portfolio, putting mine to shame.

jasonsantamaria.com and dustincurtis.com are a little bit twitter generation for my liking, but one can’t deny that their blogs, where every article has a different design, are great examples of showing off on your blog.

But my favourite, which I came across today, has got to be www.romancortes.com. Most of his most recent posts feature him achieving visual effects which simply have to involve Flash… only they don’t, and in many cases achieve quite striking results without even using javascript; just pure CSS/HTML. As he himself admits, most of the demos aren’t much use in a practical website, but they’re still pretty impressive in showing what surprising visual effects can be achieved, and figuring out how he did them is quite a good test of your understanding of CSS. My favourites are the coke can and the old master.

Obviously, when you see that someone has managed to animate a rolling coke can using just one static image of a coke can label and some CSS, and after the initial wow has subsided, a Peep Show quote springs to mind:

Super Hans: I think this is probably the best example of the sort of stuff we’d do we’ve ever had.
Jez: Oh yeah. ’cause sometimes it’s really hard actually to do your own ideas

Do I have it in me to produce a more stunning showcase of what I can do? Who knows, but having just learned The Mason’s Apron on guitar I feel invincible!!!

Being a font-end web developer is looking very interesting/scary at the moment. The web is awash with talk of html 5, how we should all be taking advantage of it now, and the various tools by Google and others for making it possible despite what internet explorer fails to implement.

It is, quite literally, mental!*

The last year of my web life has seen me learn more stuff (php, javascript, jQuery, Google Maps, Zend framework and more), more quickly than ever before, and there’s still a load of things uncompleted on my to-do list, Flash being the most prominent hole in my arsenal…

…until now.

My firefox has about 20 tabs open, most of them containing information about my industry that wasn’t very relevant until a few weeks ago. Now, if I’m to keep touting myself as a front-end developer of any quality I will have to learn about:

• Vector graphics and animation, which will mean getting to grips with Adobe Illustrator and some vector graphics oriented javascript libraries which make working with Scalable vector graphics and the canvas element easier
• The not inconsequential lengthening of the list of tags available for use in markup
• Consider using  lot more javascript libraries as my approach to getting websites to work in ie, which runs contrary to what I’ve always done before.
• And many more things, essentially revolving around the fact that so many things that designers would always have liked to do on websites have suddenly become feasible.

On the bright side though, SVG and canvas combined with some other subtler features of html 5 could make Flash relatively obsolete, which increases the value of the time I’ve spent learning javascript. The project I’m about to start working on was initially conceived as a Flash game, but as there’s very little animation involved I was able to propose writing it as a javascript game instead. With html 5’s new features there will be very little to elevate Flash above javascript any more in any context. Html 5 can even natively embed video.

Everything’s going to be alright.**

*I’ve been watching peep show this morning and feel constant urges to write a bit like Super Hans or Jeremy.

** or Mark

I won’t go into details, but I’ve had quite a tough month or so in the web programming side of my life. A lot of hard work and dedication leading to a very unsatisfactory ending – the first time in my adult life I’ve left a job with a bitter taste in my mouth.

So I thought I’d write this to say thank you to everyone who has, in the same time period, contributed to the small flood of comments relating to my two jQuery plugins – fullTextArea and crossSelect. Up until recently I had no idea anyone was even using them, so it really brightened the last 4 weeks to know that the free time I put into programming is appreciated (even if the same can’t be said for paid work all the time).

So thank you again for restoring my faith in the programming community. I’ll get on to incorporating the best suggestions as soon as I can.

A freelancing website I’ve just signed up to offers you a choice of adding yourself as a Native English speaker, English as a second language, or both.
Which makes me think of Geordies.