The Chris Casey Experience

I’ve come to realize that my whole thing, my reason for getting out of bed in the morning, my soul, my whatsis, my very dealiewhopper, is to make things. Doesn’t matter what: writing, music, sculpture, philosophies, drawings, web pages, programs, bad jokes, sandwiches, wooty noises on my theremin. If it has no practical value, I’m there, baby.

Meanwhile, I’m loath to get rid of anything with sentimental value. Just ask my wife, as long as you have several weeks to hear a litany of her discontent. I’m not, you know, to “intervention” status or anything. There’s still a path nearly 18 inches wide between the stacks of newspaper lining our living room. I even caught a glimpse of the kitchen table under the mountain of unwashed Burger King cups. We’re good for now.

My house is already chock full of memories, yet I keep making new ones. In this way I’m connected all the way back to my origin by an unbroken strand. If I were any more anchored I’d have Panamanian registry. If I were any more grounded I’d be Braniff International. If I were any more rooted I’d need to be watered twice a day. (Alternate joke: If I were any more rooted you could run any app on me at all.)

But then the argument pops up: Do people need to be rootless to grow? Do you have to drift to create? How can you know the world if you haven’t been out in it?

These questions are indeed relevant … for a certain value of “the world.” But beyond this world of hate and love and crime and justice and matter and energy is another one, a much larger one, still unformed. Many people seem to think this area is bleak and frightening, but I visit it often and do so without fear because I’m always anchored. Not stolid, not steady, not stagnant: anchored. Though the winds of this outer universe may blow me where it will, I can always return home by following the slender golden chain which I have forged in life.

Every creative person in history has led a full life outside of their books and paintings and symphonies. They define their works, the works do not define them. They are human; they scrape their shins and feed the dog and need to pee. But all of them track the formless void of creativity. Some of them wind up in sanitariums or rehab or the gutter. Their anchors fail them.

My true roots are in my family and my pride of self. Without them, I could not travel so far or so boldly through the recesses of creation. The things I retain are reminders of these. If I didn’t travel so far and wide, I would have less desire for these beacons to guide me. They make it easier to come back, shake off the chill, sit by the fire, and set about to record where I’ve been.

Another word is written. Another note is played. Another image is drawn.

Another link is forged.

Hello from my new Droid phone. George Lucas eat your heart out. It’s funny though that the on-screen keyboard is somewhat easier to use than the physical one.

Oh well. Fun awaits with my new toy!

I just upgraded to Windows 7. Hello from a desktop that has a big picture of a bale of hay on it!

Mostly this post is to check that the Windows Live Writer is working. Cross your fingers! The suspense! The nail-biting thrill ride! The obvious success I’ve already had if you’re reading this!

As you may be able to see if you actually go to my blog instead of gathering the pathetic crumbs off other, lesser media, I’ve added a little weirdness. Not a lot, just enough to be mysterious and exciting.

What I’ve really done is discover the joy of CSS’s new @font-face declaration. At last, they’ve given us a real method to choose whatever overly ornate fonts we want for our web pages, rather than labor under the eight or ten fonts that everybody has installed: Ariel, Harmonica, Roman Times, Tugboat William, Casio Pro, Verklempt, etc. Now, at last, professional well-designed fonts like 420 Weed, Killer Klownz and Bleeding Cowboys can take their rightful place on everybody’s sites. The Future is Now. The Revolution Will Not Be Legible.

Yeah, I said it. SEO can kiss my grits.

For those out of the know, SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” It’s essentially a way to monetize the Web by making sure your site is laser-targeted for an audience. So when people search Google for, for instance, “camel fucking” it takes them straight to your camel fucking blog. Then you can turn around and sell ads for camel fucking products which are targeted to camel fucking enthusiasts who are drawn to your site about camel fucking.

SEO has become a big business these days, mostly because it’s essentially easy money. Just make sure you follow the rules, write about the right topics, and once page views start pouring in, sell ads. It’s about the only way to make money off the Web, really, besides porn. And some of us just don’t have the body for that. Oh lordy lord above we really, really, really don’t. I feel a bit ill just thinking about it.

And so the Web has become heavily monetized by people who are trying to make a living off of a free medium. I guess that’s okay, but SEO has the potential to suck all the soul out of the Web. After a while people don’t produce a camel fucking blog because they particularly like camel fucking; they do it because camel fucking is an under-represented niche and YAY they’ve found their cash cow (or camel, as the predictable joke may be). Eventually you get huge networks of blogs that churn out sites with names like “hothornycamelsluts.com” and constantly compete with one another to claw up that one last slot on Google that’ll get them on the front page.

Ohh, yes, the Google front page. The Big Time. Apparently people who visit Google have the attention span of a peanut (widely regarded the most ADHD of the legume family) who skim the first page of every search and then go OOO SOMETHING SHINY and forget what they’re doing, where they are, who they’re married to, that they’re bipedal endotherms, etc. You gotta GRAB ‘em, which means you gotta be in the Top Ten for your Search Terms or you’re nothing! NOTHING! You WORM!

Yeah, well, bite me (on the side opposite where I invited Apple to bite me earlier). Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I liked it better back when the Web was populated by enthusiasts rather than opportunists. I admit it’s nice to make money, but it’s worlds better for the human soul, I think, if you just do what you enjoy and let people find you organically. If you maybe a few bucks, that’s great, but any money you lose for being casual about your site is made up for by not killing yourself to raise your Google rank.

You’ve probably noticed that I don’t advertise here. I might, one of these days, but I won’t bother to optimize my whozis to get page views. If you find me, good. If you don’t, lick me. It works either way. See?

(P.S. Hello to all you camel fuckers who came to my site because all the repetition of the term pushed it up in Google’s standings. This site isn’t really about illicit sex with hot juicy underage camels. Sorry. Didn’t mean to mislead you dromedophiliacs. You can go away now. Thanks for the boost to my PageRank, though!)

So Adobe and Apple are in a sissy slapfight about Apple hating on Flash. Steve Jobs seems to think Flash is slow and bloated and buggy and just generally skanky and awful.

Well, yes, it is. Sorry Adobe, but Jobs has a point here. Admittedly the lion’s share of Flash’s problem is the people using it. Preloading your Flash movie with 100 megs of kitty photos is a good way to make most computers poop all over themselves. But rather than add in a tooltip that says “Hey, developer person, your compiled ‘movie’ is larger than your World of Warcraft install directory. Maybe you could dial things back a little there, Bunky,” Adobe just assumes people know what they’re doing.

BAD MOVE ADOBE. Nobody ever knows what they’re doing, least of all programmers. We just try different things at random until they work, then never touch that code again for fear of jinxing it. It doesn’t help that ActionScript since version 3 has taken what was a language built specifically for what Flash does and turns it into some weird version of Java with all-new lists of types for my feeble mind to memorize. Dammit, not another OOP-oriented C-like, I thought, my fists clenched in rage, when I saw the specification. Please, no more prototyping, I pleaded, to deaf ears. Nobody likes taking an hour just to set up the framework of a program before you can start working on it, I raged, but no, Adobe resolutely turned its back to my protestations. What a bitch.

(And yes, I know, they created a new language SDK so they could develop Flex and AIR and so on. It’s still way more verbose and encapsulated than it needs to be. In the olden days, before there was hair, most programming languages would actually support writing a one-off straight-ahead program to do something simple and could do it in ten minutes. Now, blech. BLECH I SAY.)

So Apple has a point about Flash. According to them, who needs Flash when you have HTML5 galloping in like a white knight. At last, a completely open system which uses JavaScript (or “ECMAScript” if you’re concerned about the open-sourced-ness of the language to the point of being obnoxiously pretentious) alongside new HTML DOM elements for audio, video and drawing. At last, Our Long National Nightmare is Over.

This is great and all, but, er, psst, Steve: HTML5 isn’t any easier on a computer. In fact, it seems to be a lot worse so far. Part of this is because HTML5 isn’t an accepted specification yet, and implementation is spotty in even the best current browser. But right now, drawing to a Canvas element (the HTML5 version of a “drawing surface” on a web page) is heavy on the CPU compared to Flash.

Most browsers’ JavaScript engines aren’t really built for speed. They were originally designed to make hamsters dance, which doesn’t require a lot of optimization. But now developers are building whole operating systems around them, and they’re getting a bit … creaky. The recently rewritten WebKit engine has the fastest JavaScript interpreter I’ve tried, but a simple mouseover script I wrote still took up 66% of my computer’s CPU and eventually locked up one core completely. Now that gives a developer confidence.

We have a way to go yet for HTML5 to gain widespread acceptance and even further before it’s a real “Flash killer.” In the meantime, much like democracy, Flash is the worst system in the world except for all the other ones.

(Incidentally, in the interest of full disclosure, I’ll probably dig deep in my pockets and get a copy of the Adobe CS5 suite when it comes out. One of the features of Flash CS5 is the ability to export a Flash movie as an iPhone app. Meanwhile, Apple just changed their iPhone OS 4.0 EULA to specifically forbid anything developed by third-party applications, including Flash. So in conclusion, Apple can bite me. Hard. Right there. I’m pointing at my butt.)

This WordPress for Blackberry app is pretty neat. Now I can update with whatever stupid crap pops into my head. And crap pops into my head a LOT. “Crappopperhead,” they used to call me at finishing school.

So here begins another era, an era of stupidity the likes of which has rarely been seen by mortals. And away we go! Into the future! To infinity and beyond! Shut up and write!

Hey campers! Guess who just downloaded the WordPress app for his Blackberry! Besides Cory Doctorow, I mean. Yep! So let’s see how this inaugural phone post goes. Whee doggies!

WARNING: This update is actually somewhat serious despite my usual impish tone.

Recently it’s come to my attention that you, every person reading this, are desperate to know my philosophy of what I do: Web design and development. Well, settle in, Chuckles, because I’m about to drop a screed.

1. I am an experienced corporate Web designer/developer. This is different from a person who makes a site for his band or can set up a blog or knows how to change his Twitter background. I can do all that, too, but that’s not how I make a living. Over my 14-year career, I’ve set up Web servers from scratch in many varieties of Linux and Windows, using IIS and Apache, and learned a veritable alphabet soup of programming languages. I can make a fully functional database-driven site (and have) using nothing but Notepad, CuteFTP and a $50 art program. I design for ten-year-old browsers as well as the bleeding edge and know how to gracefully degrade from one to the other. I understand that Web sites are a blend of art, technical knowledge, and psychology. Which leads to …

2. The best corporate sites align with the company both internally and externally. If I’m to create a site for a company that touts loyalty and service to its customers, my first thought is to make a site that promotes and rewards customer loyalty as well as providing service to the customer. Meanwhile, and there’s no reason to whitewash this, if I’m working for a for-profit organization, I always try to build trust and legitimacy so visitors can feel comfortable spending money. This requires a solid layout and easy-to-navigate design using Web standards. I do NOT immediately think about what sort of stupid-cool effects I can do in Photoshop and Flash, because …

3. Special effects can be great … once. And they have to be REALLY great that one time to make them worth the time and effort. After that, though, they’re annoying; they add to loading time and require patience from the customer even if it’s the 200th time they’ve come to the site. And we do want the customer to come back again and again so they can give us money again and again. There’s no percentage in making someone wait even five seconds, which is an eternity when you’re sitting there just trying to click something.

Point 3 doesn’t count for personal sites, incidentally. If I annoy you with my personal stylings then you can just leave. I’m not asking for money or customer loyalty. Only your UNQUESTIONING OBEDIENCE. (I just wanted to make that distinction because I’m working on some HTML5 stuff for this blog that’ll turn you WHITE. </zeddemore> )

4. Corporate Web sites must be easy to change. This is absolutely vital. Bosses are the most fickle creatures in the Universe, even edging out cats and Glenn Beck supporters. The very best sites don’t require whoever maintains the site to have to bust out Photoshop to add a new header. Some designers will argue that this limits what is graphically possible, to which my answer is: Yes it does. So? Forget about it. Dump the gimmicks and browser plugins, learn CSS and how to organize a site, and build something for the future.

I’m 44 now. Yes, I know, congratulations for another year of not accidentally inhaling something bigger around than my trachea, well done.

I’m also halfway in my working career toward retirement age. This freaks me out a bit, since I haven’t been very careful with my finances so far and I’d much prefer not to have to build Web sites for the rest of my natural life. Which would be significantly shorter than it would be if I didn’t.

So we’re seeing a financial advisor, which is sort of like seeing a marriage counselor in that after we talk to him we say “Good meeting! Glad we’re doing this!” while still feeling vaguely uneasy about the future. I think we’re about to turn our nest eggs over to this guy. I’m sure it’s a good idea but it just seems like we’re failing somehow. “We give up, we can’t secure our financial freedom. Hey, here’s a guy in a suit, let’s let him do it.”

I suppose we’ll be glad we did it 20 years from now, provided President Palin leaves any of the planet habitable. And even then, air purifiers and shotgun ammo ain’t gonna buy themselves.