News flash!
Check out this Video of Keith Olberman Ripping George W. Bush down to the ground! deprogrammer.com/video
What's this all about?
At some point I became interested in web design mostly for the massive expansion of human communication that it represents. It was during one of my political phases and I was writing articles about what I thought was going on in America at the time... You can read those if you visit my past articles page.
My theory has been that people all over the world are able to communicate through the internet and that they use whatever they can find laying around. This means they may be using very dated computers (like I was in the beginning) and tiny monitors. So that led me to the Accessibility / Web Standards movement. I always seem to end up in some movement. I just wanted to be sure that people using old equipment would be able to view my websites.
And Furthermore...
Many of us have expressed our concerns regarding the effect of technology, in some cases, having an overall negative impact upon society... Specifically the "Big Brother Effect". I quit watching television years ago yet I'm still forced to watch it in every conversation I have with people. The influence that television has upon our lives warrants a very active stance against the conglomeration of the media into very few hands among other things.
I'd like to talk about a little known or talked about principle. Countering the Big Brother Effect there is an equal and opposite effect... I call it "little brother". Little Brother is the sum total of everyone out there fighting the beast one by one. We see more than we've ever seen before as a society. We know about things now because we saw it on Youtube. Politicians have felt its effects. It matters what you do and say. Our word is our magic and we can use it to liberate or imprison ourselves.
Web designers were there early on thinking about these things and putting some practices in place that would ensure that the world wide web remained a truly free place. We know corporatioins want what we've got in the open source world but we've gotten smarter. Corporations tried to patent the human genome for gods sake! A small group of selfless individuals worked tirelessly so that the human genome could be released under the public domain... kind of makes me a little sick to think about these things...
It has been important to me that my webpages load on virtually any computer because I know what crap the real freedom fighters of the world must be using to forward the cause of humanity, justice, environmental awareness... Little brother is out there with a cell phone and a laptop that we threw away because we wanted the latest greatest toys on the market...
So..... I say; "Keep It Simple!"
I design my sites using server side includes, css and xhtml 1.0 strict. I do the best I can at adhering to current web accessibility standards.
Out of complete boredom I started having fun using a tiny piece of java I got from A List Apart ,Paul Swoden's styleswitcher. You can see the results of my playing around at One Sky Media
Other Stuff
I'm also interested in cosmology. Two of my favorite resources for that are the Asronomy Picture of the Day and a great site on Stellar Evolution.
I also happen to like taking pictures (and tweaking them), playing guitar, eating at great restaurants, and drinking good beer. It is important that all these things are locally produced as well. This blog may drift into all those areas.
Home Brew? or Wordpress?
This website is also an attempt to determine which platform I like better, my own home brewed site www.qcmississippimud.com or the wordpress generated blog, mississippimud blog
I also think that you should live locally. What's that mean? Well, most of our food comes to us from 2000 to 1500 miles away. Meanwhile local growers are forced to sell their produce to large distributors that send it who knows where. Thinking about how much oil it requires to produce and deliver my food is a little frightening.
So there are these local farmers, they grow organic food and sell it directly to the public. Sometimes this is actually illegal. There are what they call CSA's (Contract Service Arrangements) where a family might pay a yearly fee and in return they recive a "box" of food once a month or every two weeks. Lots of CSA's get the families involved in picking, canning, planning, and other activities. So poke around and find that farmer and start buying your food from someone you can get to know and trust. See; www.susatinablequadcities.org for more info.
All things are connected.
As we enslave the world for cheap goods it is important to note some third world nightmare keeps our American dream propped up. Each purchase we make, depending upon whether it is made with virtual slave labor or not determines the state of the world that we live in. Much of the evil we find along the way is rooted in our daily lives.
Please think about how your spending effects the world.
