Racing to the center of the earth Extreme caver, Bill Stone discusses risk, robots, training and other issues involved in the world's most dangerous sport. "It is shorter, time wise, to reach the moon just to get where we reached in 2003. To go all the way will be a 30-plus day journey in total darkness, beyond all hope of rescue. That call of the raw unknown has a certain subliminal beckoning to a rare few true explorers."
Here's a long exerpt from Stone's book, Beyond the Deep
Since it seems that website redesign is much more common today than website design, I've collected a few articles with some relevant concepts.
Building a Vision of Design Success "Redesigns are as often crucibles of group anguish as they are opportunities for invention and rebirth. In the entirety of my career, I’ve definitely seen both. So what is the difference that allows one redesign to work and another to turn into months of tail chasing? Fortunately I've been part of several post-mortems as well, and I think the key difference is vision."
Because redesigning is always assumed to be less expensive than building from scratch we should have some knowledge in Designing for Limited Resources
"Unfortunately, however, designing for limited resources often means designing with limited resources. Over the years, I have come up with some shortcuts that allow useful requirement definition when there is limited time or money. None of these shortcuts are ideal, but they often allow a bit of consideration on projects which would otherwise just skip over requirement definition altogether."
How should we anticipate future changes when redesigning? Progressive Enhancement and the Future of Web Design. While this June 2003 article needs some updating, it covers many basic concepts that should be included in any upgrade, such using CSS for performance enhancements, browser targeting, print-only pages etc.
If you decide to redesign using CSS fully, you should read Colored boxes - one method of building full CSS layouts which has some good start to finish tips.
While we're upgrading, we may want to learn some of these javascript workarounds to handle the Web Code Fixes Required by Internet Explorer in Early 2004 "...web developers are the casualties and bear the brunt of the collateral damage in the intellectual property wars. In short, you have some unscheduled repairs to make if your programs use the <applet> (Java applet invocation), <embed> (Flash and other rich media invocation like Apple's Quicktime) or <object>tags (ActiveX and other active or dynamically invoked content)."
Some weblogs I've been wanting to point to for awhile:
Martian Soil "a daily blog dedicated to Mars, bringing the exploration of the Red Planet closer to enthusiasts and little green men alike." Found on another good weblog- A Voyage to Arcturus
Chicago moblog "urban snapshots chicago's downtown and neighbhorhoods are taken with a LG VX6000 cameraphone and immediately posted directly from the phone. "
Tech-Knowledge Technology reporter for NBC-TV and The Detroit Free Press, Mike Wendland's weblog
The Map Room A Weblog About Maps
Surprise goes Zen! A weblog worth reading through.
It irritates me when I see essays and articles about how we should be spending money here on earth on social problems instead of spending money on Mars just so the news media can show a few images.
Nobody mentioned the millions spent to send reporters, photographers, technicians and satellite equipment to Vegas, along with paying technicians to sit in control rooms to receive, analyze and edit the Britney Spears marriage.
Personally, I think it's more important to be reminded that we're not much more significant than some fungus on a rock, and could disappear in the time it takes a meteor to become a meteorite.
What's a proper blog without some Tolkien comments?
I was looking around to see if anyone else had the same opinions on Return of the King, since I thought it was obvious to anyone who read the book could see that many compelling storylines from the book could have been squeezed in, or at least touched upon in the screenplay. Maybe just a look between Eowyn and Faramir? Maybe they couldn't afford Christopher Lee for a few more minutes to do the Sharky's End scene, but would they have gone over budget to throw in two minutes to show the Mouth of Sauron?
I didn't have to look to far, fellow Chicago bloggers bigoldgeek (with comments from Paul) and Adam all have similar comments.
Some additional relevant links-
Also from Adam -Why do Frodo and Bilbo leave on the ship at the end of Return of the King?
Sauron: Offer and Acceptance What happens when lawyers start over-analyzing the LOTR.
You'll note that I have several photographs from the Museum of Natural History in my last post. While standing in line to get in, 2 women and a man, all wearing some sort of Dean paraphenelia were discussing Teddy Roosevelt, since the front hall has several of his quotes on the walls. They started discussing the assassination attempt on him, and the 90 minute speech he gave immediately afterwards, with the bullet still in him. "...it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose" The man seemed to think Teddy was shot before a speech for the Pan American Exposition, when it was actually McKinley who was shot at the Exposition, which is when Roosevelt became President.
Missing these details didn't bother me, it was when one woman said "This damn country has so many assassinations. That doesn't happen anywhere else. They don't do that in Europe. It's because of the guns here." And then she went on to blame Bush for all of the gun crimes in the country. The other two whole-heartedly agreed.
I can see not agreeing with Bush's policies. I can even understand people who are seething with anger over him being our leader. Maybe I can even see how so many people have developed an irrational hatred for the man. But why is it making so many people so STUPID!
It would have been really funny to throw some quip about Italy's long list of political killings since Ceaser, or the 31 attempts on Charles de Gaulle, or the whole Gandhi family. But I didn't really have an assassinations and attempts chronology at hand. I at least should have mentioned to her that Dean is not anti-gun.
By the way Ms. Dean supporter, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was Teddy's fifth cousin, not his son.