Shortly after I started college, a man by the name of Hy Kaplan contacted me. Mr. Kaplan wanted to pick my brain about video equipment for a new business he wanted to startup recording valuable personal belongings that the client could keep for record insurance purposes. He found me through the forums at Videomaker.com where I would frequently help answer people’s video-related questions. It was the first time someone sought me out for my specific knowledge.

We met at a local restaurant where he treated me to breakfast. I gave him my honest advice about video gear and gave me some nuggets of wisdom. The one that stuck with me the most was about how being in the middle of competition, no matter what the activity, is just as good as being invisible. Let me break it down further.

There are only three levels of expertise: the best, the worst, and somewhere in the middle. Being the best has it’s obvious benefits. The perks of being better than the competition provides leverage to charge more for goods or services. Our culture is groomed to value the best the world has to offer through the way we worship celebrities to the stock price of the most successful companies; capitalism is built around being the best.

The worst has several non-obvious benefits. There is no point in doing something if you can’t be the best at it. By being the worst, you can easily quit with little to nothing to lose. Being the worst means you can only go up and get better without fear of getting any worse. Life at the bottom offers a broader view of possibilities and paths in your quest to be the best including the option to dump the idea and focus on something else entirely. When you are the worst, the flexibility to move on with no penalty is the greatest asset you have.

Being in the middle is where you get stuck; it’s the toughest spot to shake free from. The middle leaves you the tough choice of pressing on or giving it all up which results in the waste of the time and energy it took to get you were you are. By concentrating on getting out of the middle you pay an opportunity cost to exploring other ideas that might may give you your next big break. But most importantly, being in the middle makes you average, and being average is like being invisible. Which team came in 5th place in the football playoffs last year? What college is ranked 23rd in the nation according to USNews? What is your favorite mediocre blog? All of these questions are hard to answer because they don’t stick out; they are average.

Bi-weekly web magazine A List Apart (ALA) launched two fresh new articles. Unfortunately I was saddened that Erin Kissane, editor at ALA, approved an entire article about designing specifically for the iPhone. I know the iPhone is amazing to many geeks out there but it is no where near as prevalent as the number of web enabled mobile devices.

According to market researcher iSuppli, the number of mobile phone subscribers topped 2.6 billion globally last year. Since I couldn’t find any statistics on mobile web devices, let us assume only a quarter of those can access the web on their phone. That works out to 650 million potential mobile web users. Apple reported it sold 270,000 iPhones over it’s launch weekend but let’s assume they sold 30,000 more shiny devices between now and then. Using the above statistics, the iPhone accounts for only 0.046% of all web-accessible mobile devices; a drop in the proverbial bucket. And I am supposed to be excited to specifically tweak my site for it?

The web design world has standards with the goal of being able to code once and access the content in any browser or on any device. Standards arose because in the late 90’s and early 2000 websites were often designed for one browser at a certain resolution. You may remember seeing such terms as “Best viewed in Internet Explorer 5+ with a resolution of 1024×768.” One of the founders of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, even expressed his displeasure of the trend in Technology Review (July 1996):

“Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.”

By designing for a single device, you are essentially jumping back to the dark ages of the web while cutting out a large chunk of the global audience. I agree that mobile web standards leave a lot to be desired but by essentially ignoring the rest of the world (remember iPhones are U.S. only for now) you are only making things worse.

Web technologies like Apple’s mobile Safari and Microsoft’s Deepfish show great promise in fulfilling the web standard utopia. These tools don’t require separate coding for mobile devices which in turn will speed up the adoption of the Internet on-the-go. But it will be several more years before they are in a majority of devices and until then we have to remember that there are other phones out there other than Apple’s precious iPhone.

Many grumbling tech nerds complain that Digg.com should really implement a picture section judging from the number of submissions with [pic] in the title. But what they don’t know is that Digg already has a picture section! Don’t believe me, look for yourself. Here is the most popular pictures of the day and here are the upcoming ones. So why is everyone so up in a huff?

I kind of like the mixture of stories which I will never see much of if they create a new section similar to what they have done for videos. What they really need is an “All” section so videos and news stories can mingle together for the benefit of nerd kind. Oh and while we are wishing, Digg might as well throw in a “Digg” category for all of the self-absorbed Digg news that seems to make it to the front page. That is a section I would not include in my filter.

Update: I wrote this last night before Kevin Rose published this entry on the Digg blog. Apparently an “All” section is coming in the near future and a true picture section will hit the scene sometimes around October. My psychic diggness has been off the charts recently.

For the past couple of weeks my Internet connection at home has been flakey and irratic. Sites would take multiple refreshes to fully load and there is a good amount of packet loss. Unfortunately this has been on and off making it very hard to troubleshoot exactly what is going on.

I called technical support and the lady on the phone said everything seemed fine on her end. Then she tried to ping my IP address and noticed an 80% packet loss proving there was something going on between my cable modem and Comcast. She put in an order for a tech to come out and replace my rented cable modem.

The tech came and said “Nothin’ is wrong with the modem. It’s something outside which should be fixed in 48-72 hours.” Low and behold 72 hours later nothing has really changed. The connection seems a little better but it is still unusable if I want to get anything done. Apparently I’m not the only person noticing this.

Over at DSLReports.com someone posted a topic titled “[Connectivity]Constant Downtim | East Coast | Maryland Area” and included a graph of his packet loss using a line monitoring tool.

Blue = Bad!

Looks like until this gets resolved, I won’t be updating my blog as much.

For a long time I have noticed well designed pullquotes that only had the beginning quote. The alternative was a standard text quote that was more bland but had both beginning and ending quotes. Here are some examples I found on SmileyCat.com to better illustrate what I am talking about.

The last example is a nice compromise but I prefer pullquotes with a little bit more style. It really bugs me how there is no easy, pure-CSS way of including the ending quotes. That is until now.

WebMasterWall.com has a tutorial featuring a simple method to create “double quotes” (as they call them) using CSS. The trick is to attach the ending quote background image to the

tag and use the pseudo-element

for the beginning quote graphic. The reason we can get away using this trick without any JavaScript is because IE 5.5+ actually recognizes

when applied to any block element. Huzzah, this is my second favorite pseudo-element after

.

The only gotcha to this is according to W3C specs “Unless you’re using a transitional doctype, text should not be placed directly inside a blockquote element without block-level tags surrounding it.” In other words the text within a

should be wrapped in

tags which would break the

styling. This could easily be corrected by using

as a selector and assuming you don’t have multi paragraph pullquotes. I think that is a reasonable compromise.

The release of the iPhone brought out a high supply of morons including this lady from Texas.

If you devised a plan to buy out the entire supply, let alone forking over $500 for just one iPhone, you would think investigating the details of the launch prior to arriving would be a given. How could you miss it? The entire Internet was regurgitating iPhone deets.

And selling them all on eBay? Ha! Too bad Apple was loaded with iPhones in all of their locations killing any eBay plundering that might have occurred. If there was a large supply of iPhones, then looking back at all of the suckers standing in line now seems like a complete waste of time. Apple wanted all the buzz it could get for its first foray into the phone business and creating a false sense of supply is the perfect way to lure consumers in. Of course having every media outlet in the world buzzing about the launch for the past six months doesn’t hurt either.

Another thing, why would you even think of buying an iPhone at an AT&T store? Apple is all about user experience and unlike the cell phone store, isn’t trying to shove a sales pitch down your throat or force you to buy accessories with your purchase.

I hope all of the iPhone maniacs out there are enjoying their shiny new device. Apparently there are quite a few shortfalls about the device that people are discovering after actually using the thing. If Apple’s number one strength is user experience design their number two strength, without a doubt, must be marketing. How else can you explain the throngs of giddy people who were more than willing to give up their hard earned moola for a device that can only tout that it is more “sexy” than anything else out there.

At least the idiot lady above probably didn’t drop her single iPhone right out of the box.

For the past couple of weeks I have been following Fox’s newest reality show called On the Lot which is like American Idol with wanna-be filmmakers instead of wanna-be singers. Maybe “wanna-be” isn’t the right word for everyone on the show but it certainly describes 28 year old Kenny Luby.

Kenny comes from a small town Owego, New York, but unlike his residence his dreams are big. He got into movie-making because of skateboarding (me too!) and is proud of the fact that he didn’t go to film school. In fact, he points this out many times in the earlier episodes claiming he doesn’t need a proper education in film if he knows in his heart that he wants to make movies. But for goodness sake I wish he had gone to film school to get all of these pieces of crap that he has been producing out of his system before making a fool of himself on national television.

Now I am on his side when it comes to the notion that you have to go to film school these days; you certainly do not. There are great resources out there to help you learn the art of making movies both on the technical side and on the artistic side. Apparently Mr. Luby didn’t take a gander at these offerings all over the net and instead has fallen victim to the “lets use effects because we have them” mentality. Take a look at his first video on the show titled “Wack Alley Cab”

Note the use of “explosive” text effects, random uses of color filters, and a poor job at even setting up a story. Looks like two people needed a cab home from bingo. I wish this cab would have come over to take Kenny Luby back home to Owego.

Observe his second video aired just a few hours ago called “Edge on the End.”

Kenny, what are you doing?!?! Have you ever shown anyone your films? Do you have anyone you can show your film to who will give you some honest feedback? The whole Internet can be your stage by simply uploading it on to Youtube and shopping it around on some forums for a critique. Is there any connection to the Internet in Owego?

This is the type of work I saw at the beginning of college by students who thought making videos would be neat but never got around to doing any research into how it is actually done. It is a shame you never went to film school so you could get a dose of reality before being thrust upon the cruel world. It’s not too late now. How Kenny made it on the show is beyond me, but I guess every reality show needs someone that the audience loves to hate. Kenny Luby, you are the Sanjaya Malakar of On the Lot.

Here I am starting my own personal blog. I have spent a good chunk of today figuring out how WordPress works and constructing a theme to match my portfolio site RussellHeimlich.com

My goal with this blog is to maintain a semi-frequent schedule of posting. At the bare minimum I hope to write 2 posts per week. Hopefully you are reading this page after discovering and reading through the hundreds of my other posts. I’m being a little forward thinking here, but it all starts with the first post.