Learning To Be Silent

We’ve been doing a bit of house cleaning here online.

Actually, “house cleaning” isn’t the right word. More like, “Totally disassemble the house, rethink what we’re trying to accomplish with our online presence, test to see what works, and rebuild the whole shebang from the ground up.”

Let’s just call it house cleaning.

The first thing you’ll notice on our new website is that we’ve changed everything. Every single page was rethought and rewritten: our navigation, our content, our downloads, and of course, our design. Our goal was simplicity, a sense of energy and movement, and beautiful typography.

Our design was spearheaded by Karen Klefman, the resident genius at Klefman Creative, Inc. She conceptualized the new look of the site, including our logo and newsletter. (And by the way, you’ll be seeing a lot more of that logo in the future. Stay tuned.)

And as beautiful as Karen’s design is, the programming behind the site is just as well thought out. We’ve created a tableless site that is fully HTML5 and CSS3 compliant, all without the use of Flash. The site makes use of microformats and semantic markup, and is PHP compressed for a lightning quick response on your mobile device. (To help with our programming efforts, we looked to Dan Durski at 3Design Studios. Great guy, tons of experience, and a CSS and HTML wizard).

I could go on and on, from the new functionality in the site map (go ahead, click on those XML files), to the expanded payment options, to the stunning pictures (thank you, Kathleen) that are now accessible on your computer and smartphone.

But, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

We hope you like the new look.

A brief digression.

Apple Computer was my childhood. My dad bought my first computer, an Apple II+, in 1981. It cost a whopping $4,000, give or take, and for the money included an Epson dot matrix printer, two 5 1/4 floppy disk drives, 64 kilobytes of memory, and a lifelong obsession with Apple.

It’s my most precious possession.

I learned to program by mistake. Through some sort of osmosis I discovered the ctrl-c command, which when pressed would interrupt a program’s runtime. Once I knew that, and after I realized that all those funny lines of text represented actual programs, I was off and running.

In a sense, my teacher was Steve Jobs himself, and all the other wizards at Apple. Since the world wide web hadn’t yet been invented, all I had to go on were the disks that came with my computer. (Although I do remember CompuServe, and before that, The Source. I have, in fact, a very clear memory talking to a chap in Australia via my 300 baud dial-up modem, eight years before America Online.)

I practically memorized the code to Lemonade Stand, and spent my afternoons playing Adventure. When I later wrote my own text adventure game, (which, incidentally, filled an entire floppy disk), and showed it to my high school guidance counselor, I could almost see his jaw drop. To this day I remain convinced that it put me over the top before the Vanderbilt admissions committee. (It also, earlier, scored me a summer apprenticeship teaching computer programming at the University of North Florida.)

Alas, my budding career as a programmer was cut short by a brutal comp sci course my freshman year. I realized only later that I programmed then like I write now—by telling a story. Simply put, the cold logic of modern programming had left me utterly bewildered. Qué será.

****

I’ve followed Steve Jobs, I think, since the very beginning, when I imagined I could actually be that guy, that cool kid out to change the world. Of course that was years ago.

The news of his passing has hit me especially hard, more so than I would have thought. It feels, oddly enough, like a piece of my own childhood passing. I imagine a lot of people feel this way.

It’s easy to be cynical when confronted with greatness, or to mock achievement, and belittle accomplishment. Steve Jobs’ life was testament to the contrary.

We live in an age of wonder, always.

Rest in peace, Steve.

The September 2011 newsletter has been published.

Please post any feedback, comments, or questions below.

Dee and I had a wonderful time.