dan-menard.com

I dislike doing meta posts, but I have a lot of news related to blogging and myself, and since this is my blog, well… Let’s get started:

I’m now blogging regularly at work.

More specifically, I contribute a post to our company blog every two weeks. I’ll mostly be writing high-level technical pieces (like the kind you would find on A List Apart) and posts about how to work better with others (something I’m surprised I know so much about). In fact, I’ve already written two such articles:

• Detecting Mobile Browser Properties with CSS3 Media Queries
• How Designers and Developers can Work Together

I’m experimenting with video blogging.

Speaking of my job, I’m working on a rather exciting internal project. Not just exciting in that “we’re making something awesome”, (because that’s almost always the case), but exciting in how we’re documenting it.

With this project, we wanted to try to capture the essence of our development process. So every few days I sit in front of a camera and talk at it for a few minutes, trying to maintain eye contact with the lens and hopelessly attempting to stop saying “um” all. the. time. The rest of the team is doing this as well, albeit without such ineptitude, and I suspect eventually I’ll suffer the humiliation of having my awkwardness posted online, ripe for ridicule.

This has actually been surprisingly fun, and I might start a video-blog segment here someday. You know, like the glorious day when I finally upgrade my iPhone 3G after my slavery-like contract with the devil my wireless carrier ends — in July.

I’ve been thinking about writing a series of posts about blogging.

It’s not hard to find blogging advice online, but it generally comes from people that really know what they’re doing. I’ve always thought it might be interesting to see some moron with hardly any real experience try to explain the meagre lessons he’s learned from posting words online. Less authoritative, but no less valuable (hopefully).

Essentially, my struggles are more fresh and I have plenty of mistakes to share, so that should make for some interesting stories, right?

Please let me know if this is something you might want to read.

Finally, Dave is posting again!

Part of the reason I started blogging was so that Dave would stop nagging me about how I “should totally start a blog”. At the time, he had a blog and actually updated it. Then his post rate slowed to a crawl and I started to nag him about blogging, and apparently this is a really great strategy for encouraging people to write because he has a new post up and I think there are more to come!

Anyway, thanks for sticking with me through the entire post; I’m pretty psyched about all the things I have going on right now. Maybe you can share some of your own fun projects that you’re excited about in the comments?

Oh, and happy Friday!

I’m kind of picky about my browsers.

Alright, that might be an understatement…

I’m a browser whore.

I use three different browsers every day at work, and several others at home. Two of them are beta versions. Even though I use Firefox at home and at work, I have completely different addons for each install. And I use different browsers on my iPhone and my iPad.

I’ve probably used about two dozen unique browsers in my life to date.

That’s not even the worst of it.

I’m also a browserphile.

I’ve memorized the market share of all major browsers, just because I hear the numbers so often. I’ve been following the progress of the HTML5 spec for about six years. I’ve installed (and used) nightlies.

I can tell you exactly which CSS attributes and selectors are supported by every version of Internet Explorer since IE4.

How did I get like this?

I blame my condition on a few factors.

First and foremost, I was a Mac user for much of my learning-about-computers days. This was long before Safari was an A-list browser. You just got to know about the Shiiras and the Caminos. The features varied so wildly that it really encouraged experimentation. That part just stuck with me.

Then there’s the internet/computer synonymy. I don’t really remember what computers were like before the internet, because I was in grade school when the web started to take off. To me, a browser has always been an essential part of a computer.

Finally, I do a lot of web development. Knowing what each major browser can handle is practically a job requirement for me, and if I have to have them all installed for testing anyway, I’m going to find things I like that are unique to each one.

Here’s what I use at work.

My primary browser is Firefox. I need this for Firebug, and a handful of other useful web-development extensions (Fireshot, Tamper Data, Window Resizer, and FireQuery, which is actually an extension for Firebug). I’m also a huge fan of app tabs, because Chrome got me enthralled with that feature, and I’ve experimented with some tab-bar modifications here and there, but not found a working combination that I like just yet.

The half-dozen pages I keep open all the time are app-tabbed, and other than that Firefox is used for relatively-persistent browsing; stuff I’ll want to keep open for a little while.

Chrome is my secondary browser, and I use it for more instantaneous needs — like when I can’t remember jquery syntax, or looking up spelling, or when I need to grab a url for an obligatory xkcd reference. This is because Chrome is extremely fast, especially compared to Firefox with 18 tabs open, half of which are running AJAX in the background. Chrome fires up instantly, I punch in whatever query I have, and moments later I have my result and close the window.

I also use Internet Explorer at work, because our archaic timesheet software only renders properly in IE (I know, right?). Right now I’m running the IE9 beta, so that I have an excuse to play with SVG in all its GPU-accelerated glory.

At home is a different story.

I’m actually pretty good about sticking to one browser on my desktop machine. It’s been Firefox for quite a while now, ever since the novelty of Chrome wore off, and I’m currently running the latest FF4 beta release. Unfortunately, that disables most of my plugins, but with built-in app tab support I’m not too broken up about it. Also, when I experiment with Opera/Flock/anything else, this is the machine I use.

In the mobile world, I’m still using Safari for iPhone. I find that with the screen being so small, there’s not much room for fancy features, and they’re all webkit anyway so there’s little reason to stray from the default.

My iPad is a different story, though. One of the first apps I downloaded was Life, a browser with some neat multi-tab features. It’s non-free ($3), but I like it quite a bit. Besides, how many people do you know that have actually paid for a browser?

Why am I telling you all this?

Honestly? I don’t have an answer. Some days you just feel like writing about what you love, and you’re not going to let the fact that it’s a total rant that doesn’t really go anywhere stop you.

Am I the only self-confessed browser-nut out there? Or are you passionate about something completely different?

I’m here to listen, too.

Fitting that on the last day of 2010, I have a few loose ends to wrap up.

There were publicly-set goals that expire today, and ideas and targets that are currently in limbo. So let’s address all that:

One Post Per Week

A few days shy of a year ago, I decided to start posting on a regular, weekly schedule. There was a big announcement, and then off I went, not knowing if I would be able to stick to it or not.

To date, this was probably the best decision I’ve made for this blog.

Forcing myself to post every Monday has made me a much better blogger. Having a weekly opportunity to try something new or hone my writing skills has been fun, and I’m going to keep doing it. For the curious, here’s how my posting schedule looked in 2010:

• There were 52 Mondays in 2010.
• I successfully posted a “real” post on 44 of those Mondays (not bad, but not great).
• The only time I missed more than one consecutive week was when I missed three back in August/September (yuck).
• Overall, I posted 61 times this year (slightly more than expected).

The Karma Experiment

This idea, which I posted about last month, was something I was really excited to try. Unfortunately, it never got off the ground.

December was a busy month for me, and I was starting to burn out a little (not a lot, and I’m getting better). It turns out that being pressed for time and lacking energy really aren’t optimal circumstances for writing heartfelt messages to fellow bloggers. In the end, I didn’t send a single message (though I wrote and discarded more than I care to count).

I really liked the idea (I still do), and I really wanted to do it well, but that wasn’t possible this month, and I didn’t want to half-ass it. Going forward, I’m going to put this on hold for a bit and get back to it when I’m capable of doing it right. So if you were holding your breath waiting to see how this turned out, start inhaling again and I’ll get back to you in a few months, k?

OCRI Updates

The original plan was to post these every two weeks. That sort of fell through when the schedule shifted a bit from what was originally planned, but I’m still one solid post behind. I’ll get that up soon, and after that the updates will be more sporadic (but I’ll try to keep them on Fridays).

Going Forward

I’m still going to post every Monday. I’m still going to use Fridays for smaller posts or additional content, and probably still the rare Wednesday when necessary. I’m still going to experiment. I’m still going to set goals and then try to hit them, and I’m still going to fail every now and then. In short, I’m still going to learn.

I have plenty of fun ideas in store for 2011, so thanks for joining me in 2010 and I’ll see you in the new year!

I didn’t post anything about OCRI last Friday because I missed our OCRI session which was on the Monday (somehow I had Tuesday in my calendar). Anyway, next Friday we’ll be back on schedule with our every-two-week updates.

Also, I wrote a post for the company blog today that you may find interesting:

Why I Love Working Closely with Designers

Have a good weekend, everyone!

Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of this blog. If you weren’t around in the beginning, you probably missed some cool posts. And if you were around in the beginning, you’ve probably forgetting about some cool posts. So here’s a recap of the past year’s highlights and my plans for the next twelve months:

The Highlights.

Did invites for Google Wave cause a slew of phishing attacks?

This was one of the first posts I wrote for the blog. It was based on the true story of how I fell for a (thankfully harmless) phishing scam, and some thoughts on phishing in general. It’s probably my favourite post from 2009.

Opera vs Reality

This post, from January 2010, is what I often describe as my favourite post. I’m a total browser-geek, so it was nice to let out a bunch of thoughts about what makes some browsers more successful than others. This was also the first post after I decided to commit to a weekly posting schedule.

Improving Performance in Flex and Scaling BlazeDS

This is my most popular post. It’s the first post I wrote for this blog that pulls in a consistent amount of Google traffic, and it’s easily the most niche piece I’ve ever written. Let that be a lesson to you other techie blog-newbs: specs sells.

The Breakfast Experiment

This was the first “experiment” post I wrote, where I tried to cook a full breakfast for myself every morning for a month. I’m planning on running more posts like this next year, because it was fun and I learned a lot from doing it. Stay tuned!

Make Every Day New Year’s Eve

This was the first post I wrote on the subject of motivation, and it’s right up there with that piece on Opera for the title of my favourite post all year. I really like my “voice” in the post, I came up with a great title, and hopefully a few people found it useful.

How to Promote a Mall in the year 2010

This is the first post I wrote that went some (extremely minor) degree of viral. It’s about a mall near my house, and how their marketing team is way, way better than the marketing team at every other mall in Ottawa. It was neat seeing my post shared on a couple of social networks, and this is another one that gets a bit of search traffic.

The Vegas Photo

This “post” triggered the highest single-day traffic burst in this blog’s short life. If you haven’t seen it already, you might want to check it out.

Find Yourself a Canary

It’s difficult to include such a recent post, because I haven’t had a whole lot of time to reflect on it. But it appears this story about my passive interactions with a coworker has resonated with a lot of people, so I thought it warranted inclusion. This post has made the most people tell me in person that they really liked it, which always makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

The Next Twelve Months.

I ended up being a bit busier than I expected in 2010 (most notably, I’m now married) so there were a few things I meant to do that got pushed back a bit. Here’s what I’m going to try to do before October 2011:

Write a short ebook.

I feel like I’ve picked up a lot of knowledge about blogging over the past year, and I thought it might be fun to wrap that up in a quick ebook and share it with the world. In particular, I’m thinking that other small-time bloggers that are just starting out might find something like that useful. And if they don’t, well, that’s ok too.

Run more “experiments”.

I thought the breakfast experiment was a lot of fun, and that I could turn it into an infrequent series where I commit to doing something a bit unusual for a while and let you know how it goes. Look for the second installment in a month or two.

Share more “hacks”.

The canary post was listed as a productivity hack, which it is. I have a bunch more of these that I can share (apparently I do a lot of little quirky things to get myself through the day). I might start doing them on the occasional Friday as quick half-posts — we’ll see how it goes.

Re-design the blog.

A confession: I’m not a horrible designer, and I’m a veritable wizard with html/css. When this blog launched, the theme I chose was just a placeholder until I got around to designing my own theme (which I am entirely capable of doing). I’ve been taking notes about ideas for months, but due to various other commitments, I never found time to put any of them into action. So, (officially) sometime in 2011, this blog is going to get a whole new look and feel.

Any feedback?

If I didn’t mention your favourite post in my summary, I would absolutely love to know what it is (and why). Please leave a comment. Similarly, if you would like to see more of something or have some other suggestion for the future, a comment would be a great way for you to share that with me.

I’ve done a lot of writing in my life, but I’ve never written anything quite like this.

The words I’ll speak tomorrow are words that I’ll remember forever. They must be perfect. There’s no room for fluff or big words, clichés or anything else that might be less true in fifty years than it is today. They must be timeless — clear, concise, honest, and true.

The lines must be crafted — tied together, with ideal weight and pause. Combining those deliberate, purposeful words that convey as closely as possible my feelings for her.

It’s a daunting task.

I’ve not spent a single day with her that I don’t want to relive, and knowing we’ll face whatever tomorrow brings as one is more than I could ever ask for.

But how to choose such words?

Well, that’s a silly question. These are words I’ve known all along; all I’ve left to do is write them down.

Written October first, twenty-ten.

…Stays there for a reason.

(click image to enlarge)

Back in early February, I lamented about how hard it was to decide if I wanted a Macbook or an iPad. At the time that I wrote the post, I had already waffled quite a bit on the issue, but the discussion in the comments led me to think that a Macbook was probably better for my needs — a position I held for a long time. Eventually I made my way back to wanting an iPad, though, and I finally picked one up a couple of weeks ago. What changed my mind? Several things:

The Macbook update was less than stellar.

Before the Macbook update, I often claimed that if it included a price drop, I would pick one up the next day. Unfortunately, there was no such price drop, and the update itself was pretty weak. Furthermore, the Macbook Pro update that had happened a little earlier was actually considerably more appealing, and I likely would have gone with a low-end MBP rather than a Macbook + RAM upgrade due to how the pricing worked out. Overall, this was a big turn-off for the Macbook.

The iPhone gained multitasking through a firmware update.

This was pretty big news because it meant that the same thing could easily happen to the iPad. Multitasking was my biggest concern with the device, but knowing that it might not be an issue forever was enough to quell that fear and give the iPad another chance. Granted, the multitasking on the iPhone isn’t the same as the freedom inherent in a full OSX install, but it was certainly enough to get me looking at the iPad’s oh-so-gorgeous screen again.

I was able to get my hands on an iPad through work.

Due to the exciting work we do at my day job, we got an iPad well ahead of its release in Canada. I was slated as the likely candidate for developing an app for it for one of our larger clients, so it was left in my care. I may have borrowed it for a few evenings… and possibly a weekend. I actually read a full book on it in about 3 days (easily a record for me), at which point I realized I was kind of in love with everything about the interface. Spending some time with an iPad really helped me fall for its charms, and this was what probably sealed the deal for me.

There were other miscellaneous factors as well, (price became more of an issue when the wedding costs started to kick in) but overall it simply felt like a bad time to get a Macbook and a good time to get an iPad. And so far, I’ve been very happy with my decision.

I set a different kind of goal for myself this month, and it was pretty unconventional. It made me think of how we set goals, and more importantly, what kind of goals we’re encouraged to set. I’ll tell you about that goal a bit later on, but let’s start with the stuff you probably already know:

If you’re at all familiar with planning and motivation, you probably know that it’s a good idea to set goals for yourself. If you’re up on the latest trends, you probably know that you should set SMART goals. That stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. Basically, it means you should make goals that are challenging yet possible, as specific as can be, and with a deadline. “Get 10 accepted answers on Stack Overflow before my performance review in November” is a SMART goal (I’m at two so far).

That’s all well and good, but today I want to talk about a different kind of goal. It doesn’t have a fancy acronym, but for short I like to call them Varied goals (the name will start to make sense soon). As you are about to learn, Varied goals are not at all SMART goals:

• Varied goals are intentionally vague.
• Varied goals are not easy to measure.
• Varied goals are never meant to be fully accomplished.
• Varied goals are extremely idealistic.
• Varied goals don’t have a specific deadline.

…but that doesn’t mean they’re not useful.

Varied goals are all about fine-grained motivation.

We’ll get to what Varied goals are all about in a moment, but first let’s look at an example of where SMART goals fall short:

Suppose I want to get better at soccer. It might help me to set a few SMART goals like “make a really solid pass every shift” or “score a goal in the next five games”. These goals give me specific tasks to fulfill that will help me improve important soccer skills. However, they’re pretty course-grained goals, don’t you think? Every game I’ll probably perform dozens of other actions that don’t impact those goals at all. What is pushing me in those cases? None of my goals apply, and my general desire to get better at soccer is far too general and not particularly inspiring. The idea of Varied goals is to fill that gap.

A Varied goal would be something like “Run harder than last shift”. This is something I can try really hard to do every shift, even though it doesn’t really satisfy any conditions for SMART. If I run into an unexpected soccer-circumstance and don’t really know what I should be doing, I can revert to my Varied goal; running harder is probably a good idea in a lot of situations, so this is something I can depend on. Best of all, it’s quite inspirational. When I’m running to get back to help defend my team’s net, I can think “Remember how fast I did this last shift? I’m going to be even faster right now”.

More formally:

• Varied goals are meant to complement SMART goals, not replace them.
• Varied goals are meant to be striven for, not attained.
• Varied goals favour what’s possible over what’s practical.
• Varied goals should be applicable to many general situations.
• Varied goals should be inspirational. Something that really fires you up.

Now, about the name.

I call them Varied goals because it’s very important to keep variety in mind. For starters, as mentioned above, Varied goals should apply to a variety of situations. But even more importantly, it’s a reminder that you should maintain a variety of goals — some Varied, even more SMART.

Back to our soccer example: running harder than my previous shift will apply to a lot of situations, and it will complement a lot of SMART goals very well. How am I going to get that first goal in the next few games? Maybe by outrunning a defenseman when I have the ball, or sprinting up the field so that I’m open when my teammate is looking for someone to pass to.

So, what’s my Varied goal for this month?

Be unstoppable.

That’s it. I have it starred and highlighted at the top of my todo-list, which I check several times a day. It’s a frequent reminder that for this month, every instant of every day, I want to be unstoppable. Am I going to let that IE6 bug slow me down? Not a chance. Am I going to get overwhelmed when my already-overbooked schedule fills up even more? Definitely not. After a long day, when I have to decide whether I should sit on the couch and watch TV or go to my desk and pump out an epic blog post, what’s it going to be? I’ll give you a hint: it’s barely even a choice.

I suspect this sounds a bit crazy, but it’s just what I need right now. I’ve been early on all my deliverables at work so far this month. I’m a wedding-planning machine. I’m out of a so-so slump in softball, and I’m finally getting better at soccer. I wrote this post six (!) days early. Obviously I can’t attribute all of this to a bland, over-arching statement, but I feel it does really drive a lot of small victories that are helping me accomplish my SMART goals more effectively.

Does any of this resonate with you?

I’d love to hear some reactions to this. Are Varied goals something that could help you, or is all this wishy-washy idealism stuff total nonsense to you? I’m still very much figuring this out as I go, and your opinion means a lot.

Yes, I missed this Monday’s post. This is only the second time since my New Year’s resolution that I’ve missed a Monday! I just wanted to assure all of you that I’m fine, it was just an exceptionally busy 7-day period from last Thursday to this Wednesday, which did not allow for a post to be written. We will resume a normal weekly schedule in a few days.

Furthermore, I’ve written a lovely iPad interaction post on my company blog based on some thoughts from the parody I posted last Friday. Enjoy!