The Big and the Small
This week has been an interesting one for animalia and the Arbogast family.
This week has been an interesting one for animalia and the Arbogast family.
You know you’re in trouble when Vic Chesnutt perfectly sums up your mood. My motivation is gone, and I have too much to do. Today I had two cups of coffee, then went out to breakfast and had three more. When we got back, the dog had eaten all the cat’s food again, and I couldn’t even yell at her, because I had big plans to take a nap cuddled up with both of them. Which I proceeded to do for two hours. Now I am drinking more coffee. It has seemed like dusk all day, which isn’t helping. I need to be working. I have to give a talk in about a week, and have no idea what I’m going to say. I am dealing with this fact by avoiding it entirely. The amount of crap I have to wade through at work before I leave for the wedding is inexpressible. I was supposed to be creative today, or at least get the talk together. I just can’t make myself care.
Well, now that I have your attention, I’m going to wow you with my full-on bio geekiness.* Some of you know that in a former life, I was a biologist. I have a Master’s degree in Biology, which I earned after 3 grueling years studying charismatic birds (masked and blue-footed boobies) in a tropical paradise (the Galápagos Islands). I also happen to have a scientific publication about Waved Albatrosses. Then for some reason I morphed into a web designer. That, however is a post for another day. I also married a biologist who makes his living studying mammals, preferably rodents. I think that we are probably the only two geeks on the planet that have a Tivo box full of Nova, Discovery Science, and National Geographic Explorers. I recently had to ask a bunch of Brits what the good American shows are… but that’s another story. Last night we did watch the Bob Dylan documentary, right after finishing up “Marsupial Madness”. Our friend Terry featured in a show called “Nature’s Nightmares: Eaten Alive”, proudly showing off the flesh-eating bacteria he picked up in Peru. You can also hear our friend Joe on public radio, discussing the bat detecting software he wrote. So maybe you could humor me as I share my extreme excitement over the first ever photos of a live giant squid that were published yesterday. Think about it— this is a huge animal that is a major food source for other huge animals, such as leatherback turtles and sperm whales, that no one had ever seen alive. This is almost as big as the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker earlier this year. What I love about these kinds of discoveries is that it reminds me of how little humans matter in the big scheme of things. Despite our best efforts to mess up our planet, nature is still able to give us the finger and go on with her own plans. We think we know all there is to be known, and are cocky enough to think we know how to “save the planet”, but in reality there are whole universes of stuff out there that we don’t know the first thing about. This is an important thing for me to remember periodically, when my ego gets the best of me. Anyway, I’m excited about the squid.
At the risk of starting a font size holy war, I wanted to take a little survey about your browser’s default font size. The first thing I do whenever I update or download a new browser is go into the preferences and change the default font size from 16px to 14px. I don’t even think about it— it is a hard-wired behavior for me. I started thinking about whether this affects my view of the web world. I make sure my designs work at default font sizes, but after checking and verifying that things are acceptable that way, I am back to my world of smaller fonts, which are more comfortable for me. However, I realize that the way I’m viewing the web may not be the way most folks are. Most folks at my university, for example, use default sizes. So I wanted to ask you all, do you change your browser’s default font size? Why or why not? And no flames, please. If you didn’t know you could change your browsers default font size, you are as welcome here as everyone else, and please respond. Also, I don’t want to get into what font size we should use in our designs. That is a different question that is likely to lead us down a path that is too murky and controversial for this sunny Saturday.
The new design of this site relies heavily on boxes of equal height. I did a lot of thinking about how to accomplish this, and a lot of playing around with different methods during my design process, so I thought I’d share with you the ones I chose to use and why.
I am about to embark on a project that to me seems a little hard to grasp: blogging at work, as part of my job. I am so used to blogging being a personal project that I go to great efforts to distinctly separate from my work life, that I have a feeling it will be difficult to switch gears. We have recently decided to increase the avenues of communication between the Web Office and the rest of the university, so folks have a better idea of what we’re working on and a way to give feedback. This naturally lends itself to a Web Office blog. We haven’t gone this route before, because while “Web Office” is a nice optimistic name, ours consists of one person: me. We always figured it was more efficient for me to do work than to talk about doing work. This, however, is not always the case. So, the Web Office blog will be born in the next couple of weeks. This concept is not a new one— I have seen several work blogs, and some blogs used to communicate about specific projects, such as Ohio State’s Redesign Blog and A New Arizona.edu. I have a few questions for those of you that have experience with work blogs, and for those of you like me who may be contemplating setting one up for the fist time.