Here is a nice article examining the typefaces used by the various presidential campaigns, and what those typefaces communicate. I love good typography. The web is plagued by abysmal typography, but there is a lot of evidence that many people, especially standards-aware designers, have really begun to care about this kind of thing.
Anyway. I think the article analyzes the various typefaces and what they represent very accurately. Worth a read.
The other day, I had to buy a new monitor. The one I had been using for three years finally croaked, and so I turned to eBay to get another one. When it came in, I hooked it up (after complaining that my desk hutch was too small for the larger monitor) and started up the computer. I received the message: “Out of Range,” on a black screen.
After some Googling, the answer came up that I needed to reconfigure the monitor’s drivers. I didn’t really understand how to do this (until later), so I thought, “This is the perfect time to upgrade to Gutsy Gibbon. For what it’s worth, though, the monitor could probably have worked with Feisty Fawn had I done the following:
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
I tried doing this, but I went into the Advanced settings instead of the Basic ones. My belief is that I don’t know enough about the new monitor to correctly fill in the values, so things didn’t go very well and the monitor still didn’t work. Should the issue arise again, though, I’ll try Basic first. The reason is that later, after I had already gotten everything working, I ran into the error again and fixed it through the Basic configuration.
Anyway. To upgrade, I first moved the /home folder to its own partition, which I should have done in the beginning of my Linux experiences. But, understandably I was too confused at the time to do anything beyond get things working. This partition move was achieved through this article, and will allow future upgrades to happen without losing data (websites, documents, etc.).
After this, I was still incredibly worried that things would go as badly as they did on my first attempt to install Linux. I burned a CD from the Ubuntu website, loaded it, and started to install things. I selected each partition, choosing to format the root (where the installation of the operating system resides). This allowed me to keep /home unaffected.
Things went very smoothly from there, and Ubuntu booted perfectly and I didn’t lose my Windows dual boot, and all was well with the world. Because I have an ATI graphics card, I needed to follow these steps, but I was even able to get Compiz-Fusion working with all of its eye candy goodness.
In essence, my upgrade experience has gone much smoother than the initial installation. Gutsy Gibbon seems to have a lot of nice changes, and I’m enjoying it thus far.
A couple of days ago, the Charlotte Observer had this interview with Brian McLaren, in preparation for his visit to the city this weekend. It covers a variety of topics that he has discussed, or questioned, or looked at, in his various books.
I took note of the fact that many of the questions that were asked in the interview are questions for which many in the evangelical world have already decided what his answers are. If one reads his books, there is a constant willingness to question things, far more than there is a willingness to give answers. Typically, the evangelical world doesn’t like this.
When he talks about the idea that we should question our doctrines and our theology, he automatically wants to throw out everything that we consider to be non-negotiable. For example:
Q. You say that many Christians should start by replacing the idea of getting themselves and others “saved” so they can go to heaven — the evacuation plan, I think you call with — with this idea of getting out there, in the here and now, and healing the hurts of the world. So when Jesus said, “As the father sent me, so I sent you,” he was talking not really about conversions but about tackling the world’s crises — Is that right?
In this example, because he questions the idea that Christians need to be telling everyone that they’re going to hell and need to be saved so they can go to heaven (the classic, “If you died tonight, would you go to heaven?”), he apparently doesn’t want people to meet Jesus. His answer, though, is great:
Actually, I would put the two together. If we keep recruiting people to evacuate the earth, then every person who gets saved is, in some ways, taken out of the action. It’s like going to the bench of people who want to play in a football game and trying to recruit them to leave the (stadium) altogether.
A better image would be: What Jesus is asking us to do is go into the stands and recruit some people to come on the field and join us to play. The recruiting of new disciples is really connected to wanting to make a difference in the world.
And this is a perfect example of the misunderstanding that is often applied, not just to Brian McLaren, but to all things involving the emerging church. A similar thought is later in the article:
Q. What do you say, though, to conservative Christians who say, “What about the Great Commission? These (non-Christian) people are doomed and we need to save them through conversion.”
His answer:
First of all, I love to help every person I can to become a follower of Jesus Christ.
A lot of people don’t want to become followers of Jesus Christ. And when they don’t want to, they are not disqualified from being my neighbor. In fact, they still are my neighbor.
Because it looks for something different than what most of modern evangelicalism is looking for, it boils down to modern liberalism. Things like this show that the idea is really far more significant, and that it offers a challenge both to modern liberalism and modern evangelicalism.
The above examples are only a couple of the things in the article that, I feel, show more of a look into Brian McLaren’s own answers to his questions. He deals with issues of sin, basic doctrine, the prosperity gospel, and a number of other things. In various books and articles, he’s questioned many of these things in brilliant ways, and it’s nice to see a little bit of his own thinking about them.
Great little letter to Bill. Worth a read.
Craig Gross of xxxchurch.com writes The Gutter. I’ve followed his ministry for some time, and admire the places he goes and the things that are accomplished through him.
This book is a great introduction to ministry outside of the methods that are typically considered to be normal. It strikes me as though it is written to Christians who are in a comfort zone of some kind. Maybe they are Christian college students, or part of traditional churches, or whatever.
The book is designed to show some things outside of that comfort zone. There are some amazing stories and brilliant thoughts, regardless of what comfort zone a person might fit into. Everyone has a comfort zone.
There are several things that really gripped me.
Imagine what must have been going on in her mind [here, he is referring to the woman in John 8 who is brought to Jesus after being caught in adultery]. Maybe that’s a difficult request, but I’m not asking you to imagine yourself as a scantily clad adulterer. I’m asking that you think about being a person who has missed the mark, maybe for the hundredth time. Someone who has a perpetual problem with that thing that always trips them up. Not necessarily committing adultery or even having sex, but something else. Something like (this is where you fill in the blank with whatever secret sin you may or may not have, the one you never talk about. You know, that thing.)
I don’t think this necessarily expresses the depth of the situation where the woman found herself (or where many people find themselves after encounters with Christians today), nor that it is supposed to, but I think this is a brilliant way for us to engage with these kind of thoughts. To teach us to think about ourselves along those lines.
I believe that if we are ever to become people of reconciliation, we have to learn how to see ourselves differently. Much of the issue with the way Christians see the rest of the world, which I want to talk about with unChristian in the near future, is derived from how we see ourselves. So many of us see so much of the world as scum because we see ourselves as so amazing. As being better than the gutter, and better than the people in it. None of these, if one really sits down to think about it, are true at all.
I don’t write about CSS as much as I’d like to. I spend a lot of time working with them on an advanced level, however, both in my day job and in any side projects.
I spent a few minutes looking around on Google for issues that arise when designers need to work with and use CSS within the confines of a CMS that does not allow access to things inside the head of the document. Apparently, this is not a rare issue, so I’d like to post a few solutions that, while they are not ideal, do work.
Disclaimer: these options do not validate. The only valid way to include a CSS is inside the head of the document
<div id="myDiv" class="myClass">
<p>foo. I'm a div with an ID and a class, but my ID
and class don't do what I want them to do.
Bah.</p>
</div>
If the div is, for example, defined with its ID or class as a very small div floated to the right, but it needs to be a very large div floated to the left, a designer might do this:
<div style="float: left; width: 500px; margin: 5px;">
<p>foo. I'm a div without an ID and class, and I have
ugly inline styles.</p>
</div>
head of the document through JavaScript. There are a number of techniques for doing this, but they have significant issues.
<head>
<link href="a stylesheet I cannot access"
rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
media="screen" />
</head>
<body>
<div id="myDiv">
<p>foo. I'm a div that needs some styles. I might be on
thousands of pages across this site.</p>
</div>
</body>
<head>
<link href="a stylesheet I cannot access"
rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
media="screen" />
</head>
<body>
<link href="mycss.css" rel="stylesheet"
type="text/css" media="screen" />
<div id="myDiv">
<p>foo. I'm a div that has styles, even though
they're not where they should be. I might be on
thousands of pages across this site.</p>
</div>
</body>
The benefit of this is that it works in all major browsers and on all major platforms and, at least, mobile devices (this statement counts Linux and the iPhone as major platforms, for what it’s worth). Also, of course, there is the benefit that the given stylesheet can be called throughout the site, which inline styles do not allow.
There are a few downsides to this technique. Browsers, for one, have to work a bit harder to do this kind of thing. When they encounter style information outside the head, whether it’s in an external file or in the page, they have to break their normal flow of rendering content, and thus this causes pages to be slower. This slowdown, however, is not usually noticeable.
Of course, because browsers have to work harder to do this, and because it does not validate, it is possible (though it is highly unlikely) that future versions may not support this kind of functionality.
So, at long last, I have taken a couple of tentative steps in designing my own website. Yes, this website. http://jonathanstegall.com. Typically, I don’t blog about projects until they are finished, but I’m thinking I’d like to blog my way through this one. To encourage myself, and document the reasons that I do certain things and do not do certain other things, and so on.
This site has existed since I was in art school and had to create a portfolio for myself. I did so. It was not one of my best sites. It wasn’t a horrible site, but it certainly wasn’t very good. The best part about it was the fact that the entire thing (a Flash site) was controlled through ActionScript: the colors, background images, content, animation, etc. Which was fun.
Anyway. When I moved to Atlanta and got a job, I didn’t see the need for a portfolio. I don’t have a whole lot of free time, and typically I have a lot of things that I would like to be doing and don’t have time to do them. Thus, freelance isn’t a high priority, and I don’t have a whole lot of need for a portfolio. So, I turned http://jonathanstegall.com into a blog.
I enjoy blogging. I have opinions about almost everything, and I like to share those opinions. It helps me think, it helps me grow, and it even gets me a bit of random traffic from Google and Technorati and so on.
So, this site is currently built in WordPress. I like WordPress. I used it a bit in art school, and have used it a bit since then on other sites. I enjoy building themes, and working with the code. I know php well enough, and enjoy it well enough, to do what I want with it. It’s extremely customizable, and extremely powerful if one knows how to make it powerful. At this point, the site is using the default WordPress theme. I haven’t changed it, mainly to motivate myself to, whenever there was time, get busy and create something for it.
Here is where it gets difficult. Designers are often their own worst clients. I have had some odd clients, but I have to agree: I am the worst. It takes me forever to know what I want, I’m rarely satisfied, and I always think I could do better. This is also part of the delay, and it’s part of the reason I want to blog my way through the process. I want to see if I emerge as a satisfied, or even close to satisfied, client of myself.
I started in a sketchbook. I like to begin websites with a sketchbook. I sketched out a basic layout and structure, and a small navigational structure. When I design layouts for WordPress, I do not treat them as though they are WordPress layouts. They are websites. They don’t need to look like they are made in WordPress, necessarily.
Then, I moved to Photoshop, and started a grey box layout. So far, so good. But then I started playing around with some colors. And that’s where I started to be a bad client. I’m not yet satisfied. We’ll see where this goes.
If you remember when the Chicago Bulls were the best thing ever, and basketball was worth watching, have a look at this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc11-pt_X6g (I’m not a big fan of embedding videos into my site; I’d rather provide a link).
With part three of This Beautiful Mess, I decided to write a post about the rest of the book by section, rather than by chapter. This is mainly because of lack of time to read while not sitting in doctor’s offices, or in front of monitors that don’t work. I mean come on, I don’t even have time to design this website.
So in part three, Rick McKinley begins to apply his ideas of the kingdom to the way it plays itself out in the world. He stands against the all-too-common idea that the kingdom of God is all about waiting around for death so we can sit around in heaven.
As a personal aside, I don’t like thinking about heaven. At various times in my life, because I’m a nerd, I have sat down to think about it. To think about a time period that never ends. I don’t like the idea. It freaks me out. In the way that quantum physics will freak you out if you sit down to think about it.
In any case, the only times that the idea of heaven really strikes me is when I have significant encounters with the presence of God. Then, I can point at something that is tangible to me and say to my self, “Self, that’s what heaven is like.” And that’s a great thing. But that’s not the kingdom of God, or at least not all of it; the kingdom of God is bringing those things into the world, and that idea is part of the core of what God is doing in our culture with things like the emerging church.
So, in this section, which is the last section of the book, there are a lot of stories about the people of Imago Dei, and the causes they are part of and the people they touch. And this is what it’s about: they are taking the relationship they have with Jesus, the knowledge they have gained of his heart, and taking it to the poor and the marginalized, and to all the hurts of creation. While being willing to sacrifice, share, and try to learn how to “strategically suffer” and learn from those who do strategically suffer in order to do so.
The part about strategic suffering is what grabbed me. One of my favorite books of all time is called The God Chasers. It spoke, and continues to speak, to me in ways that few books have. In one part, there is a discussion about the Western church, with all of our facades and selfishness and consumerism and struggles for useless political power, compared to the church in the rest of the world.
The rest of the world faces countless issues. Pain and suffering and torture and death. Some of it is caused by us in the West, and some of it is not. Even as it faces these issues, though, it is not stagnant. Culture in the two-thirds world is changing. It is moving into a post-colonial age, and parts of it are skipping the modernism that has so bogged us down in the West. This is a powerful thing for the message of Jesus, and for the power of God to move in the church.
But in that discussion in The God Chasers, there is a part where world leaders who strategically suffer for the Cross pray for us in the West.
The idea, there, is this:
They see our arrogance toward the rest of the world, our addiction to pleasure and comfort, our culture of sensuality and excess, which make it hard to fathom many of Christ’s teachings - they see these not as evidence of superiority, but of disadvantage and poverty. They mourn our deep losses and have told us that they pray for us about these very things.
They pray for us in our affluence, because in our affluence we are poor. We don’t get it. We are so busy fighting for the Constitution to fit with our theology that it doesn’t occur to us that we might gain something if we lost our power and our sense of superiority. If we learned how to suffer with others.
When I was in college, I had an English teacher that told us regularly to, “Take on the pain of the world every day.” This touches me every time I think about it, and it’s an amazing thing to try to grasp the power of that statement. To try to be changed by it.
Today, Sun Microsystems announced an agreement to acquire MySQL AB, the developer of the open source MySQL database that powers Google, Facebook, and any number of other websites around the world. Interesting news.