Altered Prose at Pif’s Corner

Several people walk into the frigid room,
black jackets and black dresses sucking up
yellow dim light over static flower arrangements.
They come in with straight faces and cast
slow moving looks into the casket.
They all kneel before him, even the agnostics
assume my grandfather’s religion.

They form a line before my father,
these same people in bright clothes last
October lined up after my sister’s wedding, and ask
my father how he feels, like family media moguls.
Some cry and I wonder if they cry
for Grandpa or my Dad or themselves.

I hear muttered sniffles around me as they take
their seats in the middle of the cold room,
cold best for preserving the dead
flowers arranged above my grandfather.
These people then relax, like last Christmas Eve
at Grandpa’s house in Malden where martini
smiles spread on everyone’s face while voices buzz
with the latest news of Betty and John’s new house.
Laughs ring out, to me nails on a blackboard
and horribly misplaced in this dim lit room,
as someone relates a story about how old
Mike stowed away to America with toy snakes
to scare the immigration officers.
“Poor Mike, he’s with Francis now” they say
to ease their own souls.
I do not understand these people
how they mix death and life
like gin and vermouth; to laugh
in someone’s death is a sin
in my atheist mind,

so I stay staunch. I will not give up my vigil
for my grandfather, I will not smile
nor talk nor cry. I will respect that man who gave
my father life, who voicelessly caressed the old
tired skin of a wife who could no longer recognize
him. I will not forget him like all these
people around me must have, talking about
dinner tomorrow and next summer’s vacation.
I will stand here and give respect for them, even
though they laugh when they should
cry.

I walk to my father and see the redness grow
around his eyes, his swollen damp nose.
“I miss him Dad.”
He takes my hand and looks
into me. Two days ago I saw him
cry for the first time in my life.

In memory Michael Pifalo, 1901-1993

The man sitting at the bar motions for me to give him another drink. He is drinking whiskey and water. He has been here since my shift began two hours ago. Every once in a while he looks up from his glass to watch the people coming in or to look at the television.

Alex Trabeck is introducing the contestants. Before Alex it was the news about a murder and an accident on the interstate and a battle somewhere over there where apparently a lot of people died. The newswoman, the one who wears too much make-up, said the fighting was the worst since it all started. I guess that makes sense. The only good news was that the rain was going to end tonight.

Every once in a while the man at the bar would look up, but mostly he would stare into his glass, which I just now replaced with another whiskey and water, and mumble. I think he was talking to himself but to me it sounded like mumbling.

I try to talk to all of my customers ever since John told me that he never saw any people walk into a bar, just problems. He said that he likes to talk about his problems, and so don’t people in bars, at least always after they have drunk a little. John told me that problems walk in, but people walk out. John minored in philosophy so he gets like that sometimes.

I asked the man at the bar where he was from and he said “away.” Just like that too. He didn’t look up when he answered, so I guess he was expecting me to ask him. I didn’t say anything else immediately, and soon he raised his head to stare at me. He had a far away look in his eyes, as if he was already a long distance away from the bar.

“Thanks.”

“Uh, sure.” I started to wipe down the dry counter. “So, you need anything else?”

“Time.”

I gave a little laugh, trying to be non-committal without the rudeness. “Yeah, don’t we all, huh?” The man sighed. Slowly he stood, wobbled a bit and steadied himself by grabbing the seat of the bar stool.

“You don’t get it.” He then walked, three steps-pause, three steps-pause, and left the bar.

“Who was that?” John asked coming behind the counter carrying a rack of mostly clean glasses.

“Just some man who left with a problem.”

I looked up from my newspaper and glanced upon a dark man in a dark overcoat. Our eyes met and we stared at each other for a few seconds. I looked away self-consciously, but I still gave several furtive glances at him as I pretended to read my newspaper. He lit a cigarette and peered into the bank’s window. For an instant our eyes caught again in the window reflection, and I turned immediately back to the newspaper.

Finally, he flicked his half-spent cigarette onto the sidewalk and faced the doors. A woman exited the bank and joined him. Comfortable at last, I began to read my newspaper in earnest.

Somewhere there has got to be a great universal formula that can precisely indicate how much creativity a web page can take before your visitors go from Oh wow to Ah shucks. I will attempt to begin that journey now, here, in full naked view knowing that few will agree with my presumptions and fleeting conclusions. I expect, however, that there are a few of us out there who agree that this is a journey necessary to take. We are, after all, geeks in a professional body suit.

Rules and Regs

First, some ground rules. I’m not trying to tell you what to do. I’m not even trying to convince you of anything. I am, though, attempting to breach some sort of understanding between when and why creativity is sehr important, and when accessibility (useability, standardability, whatever) rises supreme. I suspect at this point in my thinking that both needs (the needs of aw pretty and the needs of yup, that’s what I want to click on) can be satisfied simply through understanding.

The Skeleton in the Closet

Disclaimer: I love standards. I love predicable rules with predictable results. I come from a background of development, not design. My experience with Photoshop and the Gimp is taking the designer comp and rendering out the best approximation of html and css code. I’m much more comfortable using Textpad than Dreamweaver. I’m trying to use more standards; take a look at my front page and you can see that I’m following standards as best as I can.

I create web pages for a software/hardware manufacturer who sells to businesses and consumers. But these customers tend to be pretty cool folks; after all they work anywhere from Hollywood to WCVB and all the nooks in between. They tend to gather at our community, in case you’re interested.

Why Design?

I think it’s important to understand why we use design. Sure, this seems common sense, but I suspect many of us lose sight as to why we’re trying to leverage design as a tool to reach an end.

• Entice – we want to interest and entice the visitors to follow some course of action (watch to learn from a video or flash piece, read to make a decision of an action – clicking a link most likely)
• Focus – we want to somehow control where the visitors will focus, or at least the order in which they will focus. Some folk look fast and then either do an action or leave, some other folk will take a few more seconds to look for a bit and then follow a course
• Comfort – we want to immediately let the visitors feel comfortable with the web page, through consistent brand elements, recognizable design features, etc.

I’m sure there is more to the basis of design than what I’m mentioning, but as I stated earlier this is a start. I expect to evolve my own thinking as I articulate.

Why Standards?

Allowing as many visitors as possible in your intended audience to hear your message allows for more people to take the desired course of action. For some pages this could directly relate to revenue. After all, if only 80% of the people going to a page and intending to give you money for a product can actually complete the online order, then technically you’re losing 20% revenue! An extreme example, of course, but ask any sales guy what percentage of sales they would be comfortable with throwing into the trash.

• Access – It’s math. The more people who can hear your message increases the amount of people who take the action you desire.
• Browser support – I can’t think of any browser that isn’t trying to follow standards. Sure, not all browsers have the same degree of standards compliance, but they attempt to follow as best as they can. Simple reason is that people want to be able to go to any site of their choosing with the browser of their choice and do whatever it is they do on those sites. If their browser doesn’t work on 25% of the sites (random number) then they very well might start using a different browser.
• SEO – ah, the old search engine optimization excuse. It’s probably the one element in designing for accessibility that most people don’t understand – myself included. Sure, it makes sense that if you put all the important bits of the web page as high up into the file as possible, and you keep repeating the same keywords in the text then search engines will rank your page higher than if you didn’t. But no one has yet been able to clearly state to what degree of importance each seo tactic is for the rankings, since no search engine will give out it’s formula. The best method I have found to leverage decent seo is to presume that your web page is being read text-only. Strip out as much code as possible and make it so that the visitor can read the text uninterrupted from html bits and chances are not only are you close to Section 508 compliance (government standards) but you are also at the very least not hurting your search rankings.

So now what?

Well, now I’m going to stop here and let this sink in for a bit. The next step would be to start applying some real virtual world examples and to look for commonalities. Trends. I should probably define more the elements of each contender (what makes up design and the appearance of creativity, and what makes up slick, easy to use and read code). I’m purposely going to avoid javascript from this discussion, as javascript has evolved into more than just a developers tool; AJAX and js libraries are being used more and more to solve, or even extend, design complexities. But that’s another blog post of it’s own.

As always, thanks for your time. Remember, never code alone.

This past Sunday we re-launched the Avid Community site. Since we were finally able to start the development of it about a month ago, we’ve had quite a hectic time. Sunday turned out to be a planned 3-5 hour launch cycle to a nearly 12 hour marathon. So, I grabbed a few photos, put them into animoto, and now present to you the following video: