As many of you already know, I fell down some stairs and broke 2 bones in my hand a couple days before before SXSW. Well, now it’s the 21^st of April and I just got the cast off. That’s a long time. I thought I’d break it down for you a little bit. Pun intended.
Warning: The last picture w/ the cast off is a little gross.

March 6^th, 2008

I was coming down the stairs with a basket of laundry at night on March 5^th. I tripped near the bottom and landed on the tile floor. Hand looked pretty funky, so off to the emergency room we went. Whee. The next day, they put me in a cast. Amy never approved of this color.

March 7^th, 2008

The very next day I flew out to Austin for SXSW, barely making it to the convention center in time for my book reading. I’m sure I sounded a bit nervous/unrehearsed because I hadn’t even looked at my slides for the 3 days prior to my presentation. (Thanks to Veeses for taking this photo.)

March 13^th, 2008

I went in for a followup Xray the day after getting back to Columbia and the Doc said my bones had shifted and that I had 2 options: I could have surgery, or he could rebrake it and put another cast on it. Epic Fail. I opted for the rebraking, and the rest of that day was a pain-pill haze. Ugh. The next day I was feeling well enough to go back to work and started learning how to code with one hand and a pointer finger. Amy was much happier about this cast color. So much for Cyberwoven Orange.

March 29^th, 2008

On March 29^th I served as a groomsman in Brian & Colleen’s wedding. I couldn’t drive go-karts at the bachelor party, and Amy had to un-stitch the arm of my tux jacket, but it was great to see old friends and former college roommates.

April 21^st, 2008

I had an 8am appointment this morning to get my cast sawn off and this is what my hand looks like right now. Gross. I have very little movement in my little finger and ring finger, but it feels great to have that thing off my arm. The xrays looked good, but it’ll take 3-6 weeks of physical therapy to get my hand back to full-functionality. In the mean time, I look forward to taking showers without a plastic bag, sleeping without a sledgehammer, and getting to exercise again.

The moral to this story is NEVER BREAK YOUR HAND.

The image above is the third in a series of collages from a childhood sketchbook.

A few weeks ago, Ames and I drove down to Orlando to see one of my best friends from college get married. While I was in town, I managed to find time one morning to head over to the UCF campus to check out my old stomping ground. A lot has changed in 5 years. The stadium is AWESOME, roads have been completely moved, and construction is still going on everywhere. The Visual Arts building however, where I spent the better part of 4 years, is eerily the same. I checked the schedule in the department office and saw that my favorite graphic design professor, Chuck Abraham, was in the middle of a full-day Digital Illustration class, so I decided to rudely pop in and sit down. I’m glad I did. He was talking to the class about the illustration work of Burne Hogarth, which was fascinating and new to me. After the lesson, he left the students to work on an Illustration assignment and took some time to show me around and talk about what’s going on in the art department.

One of the stops in our impromptu tour was the UCF Art Gallery. Seeing the type and calibre of work that was displayed in the MFA Thesis Exhibition really made me miss being in such a focused, creative environment. If you ask Amy what I want to do when I grow up, one of the many occupations that she’ll list - some more ridiculous than others - is a college professor. My experience at UCF had a lot to do with that, and being back on campus made me seriously think about getting my masters. It probably won’t be while Amy is still in school, and I have a lot of other competing life goals, but getting to teach people about something I love to do is just as fun as doing it in my opinion. In the mean time, I’ll just keep doing what I love and loving what I do and I’m sure everything else will fall into place.

As with most trades, there are some tricks about web design that you only learn through experience. Building complex layouts that avoid browser-specific hacks is certainly one of those tricks. Yes, there are some hard and fast rules you can teach new designers - like how IE version 6 and below screw up the box model - but there are some pitfalls that will just drive you batty until you’ve expended countless, agonizing hours muttering under your breath as you write and re-write your CSS.

I’ve been there, done that, and built out enough standards-based designs to diagnose (and/or avoid) just about any rendering anomaly. As useful as that skill is though, I still occasionally find bugs that leave me completely bewildered. Last week for instance, I had the same mind-melting problem pop up on two different sites. While the individual cases were very different, the common denominator was that they were absolutely-positioned links that weren’t clickable or hoverable in any version of IE. I didn’t write the code in question on either of these sites, but there was nothing wrong with it. Here’s a quick example:

HTML

<a class="clickme" href="#">Why can't you click me? :(</a>

CSS a72c5a68e8154da099cd70b2c61f3374

If I were doing something like the above example, I would typically put a background image in the link because, well, that’s what text-replacement is all about. This particular link was placed over an image with a clickable area and therefore needed to be transparent. No problem in Firefox, Safari, or Opera…but when I checked the site in IE, the link wasn’t working.

In troubleshooting the issue, I put a border around the link and there it was in the right position with the right dimensions. Next, I added a background to the hover state and attempted to hover the link area with the mouse. Nothing happened, so I added a background-color to the non-hover state and it worked fine. I took the background-color off and it was broken again. Of course, the block needed to be transparent so at this point i was getting irritated. That’s when an idea came to me that I’m sure I’ll catch a lot of flack for: that’s right, I used a spacer gif.

I can think of several ways to avoid doing the link this way, but given the constraints of it having to be a transparent, absolutely positioned link, this seems like a good solution. Please check out the demo in IE and let me know if I’m crazy (you probably already knew that) and what you might do differently.