After a week of casual dress, I went to my closet this crisp Monday morning to put on a pair of my usual slacks. They felt entirely too loose, so I went to put on my belt. The belt went all the way to the last hole. I felt triumphant that my spare-tire from the last ten years was finally gone.

But what happened after that is making me wonder if I wasn’t abducted by Aliens who singled me out to perform a useless medical experiment with no value except to make me question my own sanity.

The loose belt was one thing. But as I continued to get dressed, I realized that my slacks were about three inches too short. “Okay, weird.” I thought.

I put on a second pair, similar, a similar style, and they were too short. “That’s just freaking bizarre!” These are from the same set of slacks I purchased three years ago.

“Third time’s the charm,” only, in this case, it wasn’t. “Dammit!”

Five pairs of slacks later, going through all the usual suspects, I finally found a pair that fit — a pair that were at the top of the closet waiting to be altered for my short legs.

Now, I’ve been five-foot-eight for twenty years. I had completely resigned myself to the fact that I would forever be one of those feisty, vertically challenged men who people quietly snicker, making comments like, “Short man’s complex,” whenever the Starbuck’s cashier just won’t get it right.

I pulled out the tape measure and a book — held it vertically so there’s no mistaking it — and what did I find? That I’m suddenly 5’11! Sure enough, I can reach the coffee filters on the top shelf in the kitchen without the step stool!

I Googled and Googled, and came up short (no pun intended). I couldn’t find anything on mid-life growth spurts. Pretty much everyone stops getting taller by the age of twenty-seven, most many years before that.

In the immortal words of Sherlock Holmes, by way of Sir. Arthur Conan Doyle,

“That process,” said I, “starts upon the supposition that when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

In finding no evidence of the scientific possibility that I could have grown three inches over night, my improbable conclusion must be true.
 

I figure it must have happened some time after the local news, and just before the Infomercials started. I was falling asleep on the couch, watching the news, and faded during the last fifteen minutes. I awoke with a fright, checked all the doors, looked out the windows, and went upstairs to bed.

Some time in that foggy fifteen minutes, the Aliens must have shown up, transferred my consciousness into a body of their own making, and left me in exactly the same spot on the couch where I would awaken to another annoying infomercial.

So maybe I’m off-my-rocker. Aliens are the only way that I can explain three inches of growth, all in the legs, when I’m pushing forty.

Damn Aliens. If they were gonna give me a new body, they should have given me some replacement hair to go with it. Or, perhaps they put me back just at the right moment, when the informercial that I so hastily switched off would have shown me a revolutionary hair-regrowth technology.

If they’ve been studying us for five thousand years, surely they know that nobody likes infomercials.

According to a December 9th article at World Science, your average honey bee can be taught to recognize a human face for up to two days. That’s better than some people I know!

The article is rather inspecific and quotes dates in the future (we assume they meant December 15th, 2004, but who can be sure?), so it’s still a little suspicious. However, if true, I can think of literally hundreds of applications for this particular discovery.

Imagine, the perfect home security system which causes anaphylaxis to anyone they don’t recognize.

What an incredible and inexpensive alternative this could be for the costly Biometric Analyzers used at large public events!

How about a new Where’s Waldo? lawn game, with a mail-in certificate for your child’s very first set of bees? Great for cookouts and Family Gatherings!

And maybe they could find Bin Laden.

On Monday, Adobe released a press release that it had completed its acquisition of Macromedia, Inc. on December 3rd, 2005. This week, they’re starting to actually integrate their product suites, Creative Studio and Studio 8.

So today, it’s time for us to reflect on a few of Macromedia’s crowning achievements…

They single-handedly destroyed ColdFusion after purchasing it from Allaire by forsaking the “small, robust footprint” mentality and adding an antisocial, schizophrenic feature set which didn’t like to get along with itself. This they did instead of fixing its core issue: instability, which prevented its widespread proliferation and acceptance in Enterprise environments. Not to be outdone, they eventually scrapped CF, and released a new “MX” — no doubt a short-hand version George Carlin’s sixth dirty word, adopted by its developers who typed “I hate this new mx!!” in company e-mail — version based on Sun’s ill-gotten, red-headed, bastard-child: JavaServer…

Machine after machine has succumbed to the quagmire that is Macromedia Studio: an obese application which insists on digesting more than its share of the file types you use most — from the tiniest of GIFs and JPEGs to the simplest of JavaScripts and HTML files that you’d quickly open in the Picture Viewer or Notepad — into its esurient entrails, not to be seen for up to ten minutes while its associated application finally opens with a multitude of windows asking you what you’d like to do next. I’d like to see the damn file I tried to open, thank you…

They destroyed a number of popular websites by creating chromeless Flash animations which give you full-page Advertisements inside your current browser window, effectively blocking the majority of content you’re trying to read, and not even your pop-up blocker can stop them…

Good riddance.

It’s pretty clear that Adobe’s going to focus on the creative side, especially merging PDF and Flash. With any luck, they’ll get rid of that ravenous, mangy dog, ColdFusion-MX, and open the door for someone else to write a real CFML server (better yet, a binary interpreter like CLI-PHP!) that doesn’t cost upwards of $1300 Startup and $90K/year in staffing to support it.

Seems James Lileks released another book last month, and I didn’t even notice until today…

Man! While Monty’s on the subject of zealots (which, let’s be honest, is always a great topic), why am I getting so many e-mail complaints and comment spams dogging this site for nothing other than its lack of CSS?

Firstly, I simply don’t care if you’re running the latest piece of animal dung with a name stolen from a deplorable 1982 movie starring Clint Eastwood. You’re a 7% minority by our statistics.

Secondly, if you consider yourself a web designer and you can’t make a page that looks right in all browsers, you need to find another form of employment. Or maybe find a form of employment — the real world detests your kind of attitude.

Thirdly, we have no intention of validating with XHTML 4.01 Strict. Why bother, when what we’re doing works? The page you’re looking at looks exactly the same in every single browser that comes here save for Lynx.

Fourthly, if you have no other complaint about this site than its lack of CSS, then obviously we’re doing something right.

CSS has become the Whine of the Uberdork: “Technical people can be creative, too!”

Regardless of what an Uberdork can do making a Round CSS Layout, it still won’t give them any sense of design skill or color coordination. It expands their possibilities, yes, but for the most part, their sites are still going to be ugly. Form & Function will most always be at odds.

It’s a fact that the *vast* majority of sites carrying those “CSS Certified!” banners DO NOT conform the specification they’re carrying the banner for. I’m one of those freaks who clicks it on every site I see it on, and I rarely hit a single site that conforms with no errors — and I’ve only ever seen two sites at all that got no errors, and no warnings.

With the majority of the published Templates, Skins and Designs out there using CSS, at least 50% of them will not work in one browser or another. Commonly, those designs carry the banner, “Your browser sucks! Download TPFKAN Now!” Logic dictates that they should instead read:

“I don’t like your browser because I’m too much of a zealot to believe real-world statistics showing a super-high IE market share, and thus the entire market share is using an inferior product which does not conform to specifications, and even though 50% of the people in the world are using IE, the specification is what is standard and not what people are using. Therefore, you should go and download TPFKAN because I’m too much a lazy prick to fix my code which is most probably based on an RFC rather than an actual, certified standard.”

Thus far, the majority of the CSS styles you see out there are written by Technical Programmers who do it just so they can complain about the limitations of the most popular browser by far (kudos to Mr. Bill).

I have no problem with CSS, but some common sense needs to be used when designing pages with it. We do make use of CSS — a lot of it! We have a tabular structure, all decked out with CSS inside. It’s relatively tidy, and people seem to think it’s a decent design, aside from complaining that it’s not in such-and-such DTD.

As for TPFKAN, I hate it. The best way to screw up IE forever is to install TPFKAN. Actually, an even better way is to uninstall TPFKAN, which will take half of the settings and HKLMClasses with it, just like its mother product did.

People love to complain about how bad Netscape was, and forget that Firefox is just a new version of the same old junk.