Anyway, what I lacked in actually skating, I like to think I made up for in shooting pics. (I know, I know, Freddy, it’s not the same thing, but let me have this! :-) I have boxes and boxes of pictures. Pictures of both FDR skatepark’s birth and at least half dozen years of it’s development. And also from that era, I have probably equal amounts of pictures of a private skate warehouse (Props to Danny Dansak!) that was, alas, not destined to live as long and as strong as FDR skatepark. (It was converted to, eek! luxury studio condos a bunch of years back) So anyway, it was a big task to gather all the thousands of photos, sort through them all… but I figured FDR makes for a great story, and if I didn’t even try, I knew I’d kick myself later. So in between all the craziness of my wife being pregnant and all the nesting activities that come along with that, I found time to gather all my skate photo stuff together and go through it with a couple of the book’s authors. We came up with some selects, and then I had to find the negatives, which was probably the hardest part of the whole effort. (none of the pictures, negatives, and their envelopes seemed to have retained any proper associations over the years) But all that said, it’s all done, and last week THE BOOK CAME OUT!! Below is a description of the book, and below that are my pics from the book!

This is the cover. I totally didn’t take this shot of Joey P trying a sweeper… but I figured it would be good to include just the same.

This is my little out-of-focus pic of the birth of FDR’s first skater-built construction, the CIA pocket. They blew it up to a full two-page spread! As far as I know, and the authors could figure, this is the earliest picture of skater built construction at FDR. (I wish I’d realized how out of focus it was when I took it, but this was before DSLRs, and I didn’t have a wide-angle lens back then, and had to get pretty far away to get it all in… blah, blah, excuses, excuses. It is what it is.)

FDR Skatepark is famous for it’s 4th of July party… horizontal fireworks were a predictable mainstay right from the beginning. This shot is probably from 1997.

This shot is from the same 1997 4th of July party. Bands and punk rock are a staple of FDR 4th of July celebrations, along with a whole lot of beer, and more kooks than you can shake a stick at. You never know exactly what will go down at these 4th of July jams.

I don’t remember exactly what is going on in this pic, but if I had to guess, Daily Dave of probably telling Mr. Rogers how it’s gonna be, and Carlos & Wes seem to be getting a kick out of the interaction… as Fernando looks pretty fed up with the whole process. :-)

Darren Menditto blasting some head-high air, with seeming ease! And George Draguns holding onto an inverted view of the world, which he rightfully is proud to do.

If I find time, I may post more pics that didn’t make the cut for the book. Look for that sometime around Marchtember Oneteenth.

So here is my re-creation of her slide from my pot-hole filled memory:

I’m really not sure about the title and labels, or even if she had any labels on the slide, but you can probably get the idea. She was driving at the concept that as a designer gets older, they have less new and exciting ideas. (I don’t remember her exact phrasing, but the “Good Ideas” concept is what I remember/interpret from how she was talking about the diagram) So I looked at that pretty simplistic, made-up infographic, and thought about my ever approaching 40th trip around our sun, and that diagram struck me as pretty darned depressing. I thought, “This must have been a diagram she made in her 20′s or early 30′s… and I wonder if she still feels this way?”

So I worked up a couple additions to here diagram. The first, well it speaks to something that can be variable depending on a designer’s engagement, but can be imagined as a pretty straight and inevitable line… Experience:

And while that’s a little comforting to think about the inevitable collection of “experience”… that can be defined in such a way that any lump-on-a-log designer could ride that line up and up. So that’s not gonna quite cut it for me. I need more.

I’m going to settle on something a little less concrete, but infinity more comforting:

Wisdom. Not all folks become wise, but I’m going to hold on to this last diagram in my thoughts as I try to go to sleep tonight. I’m not thinking about riding that arch up. I know you have to climb it. But that idea leaves the power and choice in my hands. And that’s a lot better than where the first diagram leaves me.

You’re welcome for the revisions Paula. Thanks for a great lecture. :-)

The Basics

Previously, if clients were concerned about how their site was viewed on mobile devices, firms would build separate device-specific sites for the more popular devices for their users. Typically the iPhone, for the clients that could worry about and pay for the extra design and development.

So, “Responsive Web Design” is basically creating CSS for your HTML pages that listens to what sort of environment the end-user is using to view the page, and serves up typography, graphics and layout that is best for that environment. What do I mean by “environment”? Well, it’s the difference between viewing a site on your maximized 1600×1200 desktop browser, 1024×768 laptop, or maybe viewing the site from your iPhone oriented vertically. Those are some very different environments, and can be treated differently to make for a better viewing experience for your end user in any of those viewing environments.

The first article I took notice of for this technique was, of course, from the folks at A List Apart:
alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design
(Specifically, this article was written by Ethan Marcotte from the famous web blog unstoppablerobotninja.com)

And he even created an example website that had pretty good cross-browser adaptability even for May of 2010. It can be viewed here:
alistapart.com/d/responsive-web-design/ex/ex-site-flexible.html
(If you are on a non-mobile device, try resizing the browser, and watch the page completely respond to your changing environment. If you are on a mobile device, you can rotate the orientation of the device to see 2 potentially different layouts.)

If you’ve ever been tasked to make a beautiful and usable website for a client, and then asked as an after-thought to make an iPhone version of the site, this new methodology can be amazingly exciting.

My Experiment

Just as an experiment, to try and play with this a bit, I made a page using my usual technique of cobbling together other people’s online tutorials and examples and then bashing it into something close to what I want it to look like. I need to read up more about Fluid Images but here is what I have so far:
rizzio.net/home/wp-content/uploads/experiments/responsive/index.html

Some Light Reading

If this is as exciting to you as it is to me, here are some additional links to get more details:

The Basic Concept
webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/responsive-design-in-3-steps

Lots more details and examples
coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/12/guidelines-for-responsive-web-design/#more-75660

A great grouping of additional articles that would prove quite helpful
catswhocode.com/blog/awesome-tutorials-to-master-responsive-web-design

What about applying this to Email Newsletters?
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/3163/optimizing-your-emails-for-mobile-devices-with-media/
(Not sure about the cross-browser/email-browser support of @media queries, but this is potentially a powerful application of Responsive Web Design)

Enjoy!
Dave

First, I had no idea it was originally called the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” … Jobs and Freedom? Jobs? I had no idea at all that jobs were even part of the March on Washington? I mean, I was never a huge fan of American history class as a youngster, so I can’t completely blame the school system, but I think I would have remembered something that significantly different than all the focus on the “I have a Dream” part of the March? When do you think the “Jobs” part of the March disappeared from the discussion?

Anyway, there’s a “WHAT WE DEMAND” section, with a numbered list of “DEMANDS”. And I was struck by #7 in the list: “A massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers – Negro and white – on meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages.”

Wow. Lets set aside for a second, the whole concept of people wanting their government to train all of it’s workers, (What a crazy concept huh? We’ve got private trade schools and private colleges to fund with our private money for that! Why would we expect our government to fund that for us? That would be communism to make job training publicly paid, you pinko fascist socialist commi! :-) but look at how it’s phrased, right at the beginning: “A massive federal program”! Right there in black-and-white! Can you imagine any public officials rallying around demands phrased like that now-a-days?

More importantly, I often wonder how far to the Right this country has moved in the last 50-60 years… and then I see something like this and it comes into clear contrast for me. I’m not saying that all of our country’s problems should be solved with “massive federal program”s, but it’s such a contrast to today’s environment of slash-and-burn everything but “3rd rail” issues… and even those “you won’t get re-elected” issues are becoming vulnerable to attack because of their “socialistic” implications. Just look at the Presidents bi-partisan debt panel. (nothing in that name about the fact that it was stacked with pro-big-business types… not a labor representative or academic-type looking out for small business or social concerns in the house) They’ve come back recommending, among other things, raising the retirement age and having “less generous” annual cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security! My grandmother, were she still with us, would be quite unhappy with these prospects, that’s for sure… and she was no socialist.

It just makes me sad that so many people believe things that are, and vote directly, against their own interests. Government isn’t good for everything, but it sure works in that gap between individual self-interest and Corporate self-interest. People need to remember that they are not indistinguishable from Corporate interest. It’s good to have a healthy economy, but it’s also good to have a reasonable level of protection as individuals, against being trampled by Corporate interests. We need to remember that we, as American citizens, can ask for our government to do a wee bit more for us than just “getting out of the way” of Corporations and Industry. We as Americans, deserve more than being left to fall with nothing to catch us but a safety net shredded by Corporate interests to make more and more, by giving out less and less. I would have hoped we’d be past begging simply for Jobs and Freedom over 45 years later, but I guess that was just a dream after all.

And there are some seriously nice positives.

1. Generally, once you get to know your neighbors, they can really be very sweet and considerate.
2. There are corner stores peppered everywhere, so if your wife is wanting to cook something and finds she’s missing an ingredient, most likely the Italian corner store on one side of the block, or the Mexican corner store on the other side of the block will have what you’re looking for. (and I say “your wife” in a non-sexist way, because in our house she really enjoys cooking, and I’m more than happy to handle the clean-up, which she HATES… so we see it as a perfect harmony situation).
3. There are many delicious places to eat out or order in, and they’re mostly within a 10 minute walk!
4. There are multiple forms of mass transit crisscrossing and zig-zagging through the neighborhoods.
5. Ah, Hello? HOLIDAY LIGHTS!!!
6. Valentine’s Day Window DECORATIONS?
7. Pretty cool row house construction sometimes.
8. AND… an ever increasing number of cool new residents. Just to name a few of the positives.

But I want to focus on the first two items on my positives list. This Valentine’s Day morning, my lovely wife decided that she wanted to make waffles from scratch, and at about 8am she started to gather the ingredients together. But wait a minute! We don’t have enough butter?! No problem. Let me (as the assistant to the chef) throw on a jacket and some shoes and take a walk to one of the corner stores and buy some butter for my wife and her cooking proclivities.

So I tried the Mexican corner store first, because they usually have more regular hours of operation… but 8am on a Sunday seems to be a little too early. Ok, how about the Italian corner store? Sometimes they surprise me. Nope, not this time. Ok, lemme walk half a block east and see if the Indian corner store is open yet. They’ve come through in the past for some milk for my morning cereal. But no. They too are closed this fine slush filled Sunday morning.

So coming up with 3 strikes, you’d think this Philly is out… but then I think, “Who knows, it can’t really hurt to ask.” So on my way back from scoping out the Indian corner store, I step into Varallo Brother’s bakery. Italian bakers use a LOT of butter, right? So maybe they’ll take pity on me and sell me a stick of butter? It can’t hurt to ask, right? So I walk up to the counter and hope that it’s one of the nice ladies that know me. (I’ve been known to stop by on occasion for their award winning cannoli or other tasty treats.) But it’s not my familiar ladies… it’s 2 new faces that I’ve never seen before, but more importantly have never seen ME. And I almost chicken out, but I muster my south philly bravado and just say, “Hi, this is gonna be a strange question, but, you wouldn’t be able to sell me a stick of butter could you?” (I know, I know, it’s not exactly “bravado” but it’s all I could muster! My momma raised me to be polite to strangers.) I get a funny look from both ladies, and I clarify that “My wife is wanting to make waffles, and we don’t have butter, and all the corner stores are closed.” Their skeptical looks give way to a half smile each, and the lady that greeted me says that she’ll go ask, but doesn’t think they have just “sticks” of butter.

Not sure what that means because I’m unfamiliar with the inner workings, and purchasing patterns of an Italian bakery, I just wait patiently. I figure at the least, I can tell my wife I’ve exhausted every possibility other than walking all the way (4 blocks) to the local Ack-ah-me. But to my complete and total surprise, one of the Varallo brothers comes out from the back, and in his hand… a 4-stick BRICK of butter still wrapped in its wax paper. He tells me it would be less trouble to “just take her out for breakfast”, and I joke back with him that it would require us to actually go “out”. And we chuckle a little. He puts the brick of golden tastiness in a brown bag and simply hands it to me and waves at me to take it, and scoots back to his kitchen before I could even adequately thank him for his wonderfully generous and nice act.

WOW?! I mean I’ve always felt that the Varallo family is genuinely nice after you get past the oh-so-thin veil of gruffness that seems to mask all the older Italian shopkeeps in the area… but wow this was something else! I felt that I couldn’t just walk out of there with my free butter brick and not give them ANY money at all. So I asked the now surprised and amused looking ladies behind the counter if I could get a couple tasty looking danish and a couple of these little chocolate topped cookie pastries things that I’d never seen before.

I mean, c’mon, like I said… I couldn’t just walk out of there without giving them ANY of my money, right? It’s the neighborly thing to do! :-)

South Philly, sometimes you truly ROCK.

First, we have “RSS in Plain English” presented by leelefever of http://commoncraft.com. It’s a fun little run-through of the basic concept of Google Reader and utilizing RSS feeds …and it’s less than 4 minutes:

And next, we have “Google Reader in Plain English” presented by Google. Again, it’s basic and clear. And it’s just a smidge larger than a minute long:

So, basically Google Reader is a relatively easy way of taking advantage of all those RSS feeds out there. And if you don’t know what an RSS feed is, don’t worry about it, just start using Google Reader, and it won’t matter that you do, or do not know what Really-Simple-Syndication means. Just be content that it can bring all your favorite daily interweb perusaling to one central place that’s easy to sift through and consume. But here are couple additional tips from me:

1. In your Google Reader page, there is a little text link area at the upper left corner of the actual feed called “Show:” and the choices are “Expanded” and “List”. (Please see image to the right) It’s pretty self-explanitory what these 2 text links toggle between, but I wanted to call them out, because this feature is GREAT!

2. There is a little Google drop-down-button under the blue title bar that has “Mark all as read” as a default selection. (Please see image to the right) Get to know this button. It can be your stress relieving pal when your “All items” is showing 1000 unread blog posts. (maybe it’s me, but I feel like I’m “falling behind” when that number gets up there like that, and just selecting a couple prolific blogs and nuking their “unread” status can do wonders for my ability to TURN THE DAMN COMPUTER OFF at night when I get home… or at least at a reasonable hour.) Don’t worry, the articles are still there if you want to read them… they’re just no longer marked as “Unread”. Also, when you’re getting familiar with this great little tool, get to know the other choices in the drop-down, as they allow you to apply a time range for your nuking.

3. And guess what? There’s a supercool SHARE BUTTON TOO!

Here is a little YouTube diddy that walks you through sharing items and how to add friends and what-not:

What that video didn’t cover, is the fact that you can make your shared items completely open to the public if you’d like! (There’s a small text link at the bottom of your “People you follow” area of your left navigation area, click that, and the first item on that screen is a drop-down that will allow you to set the Public or Protected nature of your sharing.) Setting your shared items to public is essentially like starting personal google blog that requires no blog maintenance! WARNING: Depending on the type of daily interweb perambulations you make and decide to share with your friends, you may not want to share these things with the whole world wide webs… but that is entirely your call… I’m just alerting you to the setting’s existence, which by default is set to NOT make all of your shared items public knowledge… just to the people you follow.)

So in conclusion and review:

1. You can use Google Reader to consolidate your daily web travels into a single, easy-to-browse happy-fun-time.

2. Don’t be afraid to nuke stuff when it all comes flooding into your little Google Reader corner of the webs. Sometimes you just gotta say UNCLE. Do it. It’ll make you feel good in the long run.

3. SHARE! Get your friends to start Google Reader accounts and add them to your “People you follow” list! And if you feel so inclined, open your share up to the public masses… like I did here: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/rizzionet

Enjoy!

But I tell you this… to create a magazine like this would be no small endeavor. To have content that runs this deep would require a whole lot of people working real hard, probably around the clock. But imagine if Wired magazine were like this? Or how about US News and World Report? Or maybe online news magazines? Like the Huffington Post?

To see all three videos (and a crap-load of awesome stills, go HERE.)