For years, I’ve gotten used to interacting with high-tech/web colleagues via social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and the like, but the deeper life connections being made within Facebook are just too strong to avoid. Staying in touch with industry colleagues is great- don’t get me wrong – but the depth and breadth of connections on Facebook trump any of the other social sites hands-down.

So- I’m probably going to find myself posting on Twitter less and less, and Facebook more and more (especially as FB can send Twitter my status updates anyway). Interesting.

it depends on who’s calling the shots

If you’re a minority and you’re selected for a job over more qualified candidates you’re a ‘token hire.’
If you’re a conservative and you’re selected for a job over more qualified candidates you’re a ‘game changer’.

Black teen pregnancies? A ‘crisis’ in black America.
White teen pregnancies? A ‘blessed event’.

If you grow up in Hawaii you’re ‘exotic’.
Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, you’re the quintessential ‘American story’.

If you name you kid Barack you’re ‘unpatriotic’.
Name your kid Track, you’re ‘colorful’.

If you’re a Democrat and you make a VP pick without fully vetting the individual you’re ‘reckless.’
A Republican who doesn’t fully vet is a ‘maverick’.

If you spend 3 years as a community organizer growing your organization from a staff of 1 to 13 and your budget from $70,000 to $400,000, then become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new African-American voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, then spend nearly 8 more years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, becoming chairman of the state Senate’s Health and Human Services committee, then spend nearly 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of nearly 13 million people, sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran’s Affairs committees, you are woefully inexperienced.

If you spend 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, then spend 20 months as the governor of a state with 650,000 people, then you’ve got the most executive experience of anyone on either ticket, are the Commander in Chief of the Alaska military, and are well qualified to lead the nation should you be called upon to do, so because your state is the closest state to Russia.

If you are a Democratic male candidate who is popular with millions of people you are an ‘arrogant celebrity’.
If you are a popular Republican female candidate you are ‘energizing the base’.

If you are a younger male candidate who thinks for himself and makes his own decisions you are ‘presumptuous’.
If you are an older male candidate who makes last minute decisions you refuse to explain, you are a ’shoot-from-the-hip-maverick’.

If you are a candidate with a Harvard law degree you are ‘an elitist – out of touch’ with the real America.
If you are a legacy (dad and granddad were admirals) graduate of Annapolis, with multiple disciplinary infractions you are a ‘hero’.

If you manage a multi-million dollar nationwide campaign, you are an ‘empty suit’.
If you are a part time mayor of a town of 7000 people, you are an ‘experienced executive’.

If you go to a South Side Chicago church, your beliefs are’extremist’.
If you believe in Creationism and don’t believe global warming is man-made, you are ’strongly principled.’

If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you’re a Christian.
If you have been married to the same woman with whom you’ve been wed to for 19 years and raising 2 beautiful daughters with, you’re ‘risky’.

If you’re a black single mother of 4 who waits for 22 hours after her water breaks to seek medical attention, you’re an irresponsible parent, endangering the life of your unborn child.
But, if you’re a white married mother who waits 22 hours, you’re ’spunky’.

If you’re a 13-year-old Chelsea Clinton, the right-wing press calls you ‘First dog’.
If you’re a 17-year old pregnant unwed daughter of a Republican, the right-wing press calls you ‘beautiful’ and ‘courageous’.

If you kill an endangered species, you’re an ‘excellent hunter’.
If you have an abortion you’re not a Christian, you’re a ‘murderer’ (forget about if it happens while being date raped).

If you teach abstinence only in sex education, you get teen parents.
If you teach responsible age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are ‘eroding the fiber of society’.

…

Yeah, we sure do have a ‘liberal media’ in this country, don’t we… >:/

If you’re anything like me, this spells disaster.

I’ve NEVER been in and out of a DMV in less than 2 hours for something like this (at least since moving to the Bay Area where everything’s busy), so the thought of carving said chunk of time out of a rather insurmountable daytime schedule wasn’t particularly thrilling. Then I saw the note at the bottom- I could set an appointment online! God bless them Intertubes. I visited their form, made a few clicks, and had an appointment set for 2pm the following Wednesday- i.e. today. After the confirmation message was displayed, I realized that I was still going to have to go to the Oakland DMV and probably sit around for an ungodly span of time just to get waited on, so have been dreading today all week. Particularly because this week has been an absolutely freakin’ insane one at work.

I’m shocked. My fears were totally unfounded.

I waited for about 3 minutes to ‘check in’ at the front desk, and things seemed like they were headed in a Southward direction almost immediately when my name wasn’t on the appointment list, a multi-page behemoth in 8-pt Helvetica the bored desk clerk listlessly scanned thru at least three times until I saw an odd entry on the third page that didn’t seem like a name – ASP. Come to think of it, they did build that server app in ASP (Active Server Pages), so WTF. I had her check the confirmation number, and sure enough- it was mine. Gleeful at not being shunned at the gate, I took my number and sat alongside all the other bored-looking patrons in the waiting area with a prime view of the Keno-esque queue monitor so I wouldn’t miss my number being called.

My ass was in the seat for about as long as it took me to fire up my Kindle and read the next paragraph in the book I’ve been devouring (Small Favor) before my number was flashing full screen above me. Much to the chagrin of my fellow wait-ees, I walked up to desk 10, handed them my form and 25 bucks, they sent me to desk 24 for a picture and thumbprint, and I was back in the Audi before I even knew what hit me, new temporary license in hand. I hit the freeway home and checked the clock as I set the parking brake- 2:25 pm.

I left the house at 1:50. That’s 35 minutes, door-to-door, for a DMV appointment. May not be a record for you, but it’s easily halving my next best time, which to me- is one amazing feat. I may just have to renew my faith in public services at some point here, cause I sure as f@#k didn’t see that coming. With the time I saved, I could still read the rest of that chapter in the sanctity of my own home, grab a quick bite from the fridge, and get back on the clock before my belated lunch hour expired.

Now THAT’S what a DMV appointment should be like. I’m impressed.

There’s been a lot of speculation on if and when this would happen – and if so, why – so I wanted to at least give a little perspective on this from my vantage point – as a long-time Dreamweaver team member – on two of the main concerns I’ve heard around Dreamweaver taking the helm of our web design products.

Lack of Competition

Ever since the Macromedia acquisition, I’ve heard the pretty regular concern that Adobe’s competitors were systematically being eliminated, leaving the competitive landscape around our products bleak and quite frankly – non-competitive. Honestly, I couldn’t see that more differently – competitors are all around if you care to look for them- from lightweight web design/development apps like Coda, CSSEdit and others, to full-blown IDEs like Visual Studio and Eclipse. For design-centric web developers, apps like Freeway and the reasonably-newer Expression Web are viable options. GoLive was a worthy competitor, but lately we’ve even more competing tools to consider as we build out Dreamweaver’s roadmap, not less. That can only be a good thing for the competitive web design landscape – and Dreamweaver’s future within it – in my opinion.

Coders vs Designers

Web design has increasingly become a more technical discipline over the years, and Dreamweaver’s secret to success was always to follow what the pro web designers were doing on a project and workflow basis, and enable that within our tools. We occasionally hear criticism that Dreamweaver isn’t ‘WYSIWYG enough’, or needs to support more drag-and-drop features and get away from the code. But that’s not what the pro web design market has been telling us – web design is not like print design, or even Flash design. When was the last time you needed to hack your InDesign files to print correctly on that one, finicky printer? Web browsers are OUR printers, and they sure as heck don’t always play as nicely with one another- let alone render the same way even on the best of days. Visual tools can get you 90% of the way there with the current browser landscape- but that remaining 10% of your headache is almost always code-based- a browser hack inserted into the stylesheet or perhaps some judicious markup-juggling to get that layout working correctly. And when this bites you, you absolutely, positively, have to have access to your code. Plain and simple. Sure, a lot of print designers have become accustomed to GoLive’s more visual model, but at the end of the day Dreamweaver has to serve it’s primary market – professional web designers and developers – and the market spoke quite loudly on that subject years ago. We’re just following their lead, honestly.

But I’m sure there’s lots of good ideas to consider now too, do you have favorite GoLive features that you’d like the DW team to consider going forward? If so, please use our bug/wish list form here to send them in for consideration (always the most direct path to getting a request into the teams here, FYI):

http://www.adobe.com/go/wish

So What’s Next?

This will undoubtedly be a period of transition as there’s a lot of GoLive users who are now considering Dreamweaver, and we’d like to make sure that your transition’s a smooth one. I strongly recommend checking out the resources we’ve made available at the following URL:

http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/switch

These include:

• The GoLive to Dreamweaver migration extension – helping you convert the structure of your legacy sites to a format that can be imported and managed by Dreamweaver.
• GoLive to Dreamweaver Site Migration guide – written by GoLive experts Adam Pratt and Lynn Grillo.
• Training Video from Lynda.com – giving tips and tricks for getting up to speed quickly with Dreamweaver, including the migration process

Indeed, there’s a lot of areas of difference between GoLive and Dreamweaver, but hopefully these bits of info will help you make the most sense of them quickly.

For the Dreamweaver team, we’ve already seen many of the GoLive engineers join our ranks, who are all contributing quite a bit to the next release of Dreamweaver already. It’s been a pretty smooth transition internally, and is resulting in one amazing team. However, I realize that this news may be much more upsetting to you, but sincerely hope that the the transition is as painless as possible. Let us know how we can help?

I love my MT, but have to admit the dynamic/PHP nature of WordPress’ siren song has pulled me in for a closer look. Let’s see where this all goes?

Update: so far it seems OK, but I’m still getting random 404s/errors when clicking into individual post pages, and unfortunately the tags did not transfer, as I’d feared. 9 years of tagging down the drain is a bit hard to swallow, honestly- that may end up being a deal-breaker honestly. If you stumble across this site – and post – please feel free to bang around a bit, and let me know if you see any other weirdnesses (aside from the dismal default template I’ve got applied right now)?

Update: screw that- I’m testing out WordPress right now to see if it’ll work better for me.  So far, the import in WP 2.5 is working like a champ, and aside from losing my tags seems to have migrated everything pretty well.  We may be moving to WordPress in short order.

Scott explaining quantum physics

Originally uploaded by grewis

SxSW (South by Southwest, to the uninitiated) is my favorite event of the year, every year. Great conversations, amazing parties, and you get to meet up with all the cool people from around the globe you never see on a day-to-day basis (like Veerle Pieters and Geert Leyseele, behind me).

And apparently, riff on quantum physics. I guess when I get half a margarita in me my conversational skills increase exponentially… does that really surprise you, though?

• Kuler just got an update today, with a feature I’ve been drooling over since I heard about it a few weeks back- color extraction! You can now upload an image, and have Kuler extract the dominant color theme from it. Simply awesome feature- saves me from my old “Posterize > sample colors to a swatch” workflow in Photoshop. Make sure and give the Kuler team your feedback, too.
• The Web Standards Project (WaSP) announced at SxSW last week that the Dreamweaver Task Force is being renamed and expanded to the Adobe Task Force, covering a wider range of our products. Don’t fear, though- our historical cooperation with WaSP from the Dreamweaver team is alive and kicking as always, and will continue into the foreseeable future. I love those guys for keeping us honest over the years!
• Chris Charlton has been working overtime again and sneaked a peek at his upcoming DW extension for Drupal developers – the Dreamweaver Themer’s Kit extension for Drupal. I swear that guy never sleeps, if you’ve been following his developer site xtnd.us you know exactly what I’m talking about. You can also check the Adobe Technologies group he manages out over at groups.drupal.org. Get some rest, Chris- we need you for the 4th quarter, man!

Anyway, since I didn’t feel like posting yet another dissection of what went wrong in Sarah Lacy’s interview of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg last week (although I missed the beginning of the interview, I was drawn to the trainwreck ending like a moth to a flame), or general ‘wish you were here’ posts from SXSW, so I hope these tidbits are a little lighter on the fluff. If you want the blow-by-blow from last week in Austin, you can rewind my Twitter stream, after all.

If you don’t get the title reference, you can see a clip here that should explain it.

• You have to post the rules before you give your answers.
• You must list one fact about yourself beginning with each letter of your middle name. (If you don’t have a middle name, use your maiden name or your mother’s maiden name).
• At the end of your blog post, you need to tag one person (or blogger of another species) for each letter of your middle name. (Be sure to leave them a comment telling them they’ve been tagged.)

So here’s the answers, so I can get back to my rather insane Friday and still leave the office at a reasonable hour. Didn’t think I’d be doing this on my own hours, did you?

My middle name is, believe it or not, Scott. Feel free to guess my real first name.

• S = sarcastic. I’m not sure I’d have a communication style at all if sarcasm didn’t exist. If you didn’t see that one coming, be very careful in crosswalks.
• C = cat lover. Had one dog – a golden retriever named Tarka – who was absolutely amazing, but also the most needy companion I’ve ever had in my life. She passed painlessly of natural causes when I was about 27, and in honor of her storied life I’ll never own another dog again. Cats are much more self-sufficient and snarky, which (if you caught the first bullet point) is more my speed these days.
• O = overloaded. I always have more going on than I’ve physical and mental bandwidth to process. This has been either the direct or indirect cause of every failed relationship I’ve ever had, and the reason I take things way too seriously at times.
• T = terror on 4 strings. Just throw me a bass guitar, and I’ll rock the house into shambles. Seriously. If I could pick one thing I do better than anything else in my bag ‘o skills, it’s thumping a bass. Only problem- I fucking HATE the music industry, so rock stardom was something I took a pass on years ago. Sorry, ladies.
• T = total clean freak. I can’t leave the kitchen until all the dishes are done and either put away or in the washer, I can’t leave the living room until my empty drink glass and coaster are returned to their places of origin, and I’m compelled to pick up trash, close open cabinets and doors, and Windex counters should they stray beyond the general range of cleanliness. Oddly enough, closets are the only exception to this rule, and I basically use ‘em as junk drawers to get random personal items out of sight while I figure out what to do with them. Step at least a few paces back should you open my office closet, or I’m not responsible for injury.
• Y = Y the fuck am I still typing this? I’ve got work to do. (this is a bonus letter, as I still – for some unfathomable reason – get called ‘Scotty’ on a regular basis. Ugh.)

As the curse of these memes is to tag someone else to play along in chain-letter fashion (and god knows I have no patience for chain letters and pyramid schemes), I’ll simply tag someone who has bit on these hooks before, and break the rules of ‘one per letter’ with wanton abandon. Plus, she’s expecting her first child in short order, so probably has some pent-up editorial angst to work out.

Wendy, you’re up!

(note: apologies that you can’t even complain directly, as comments are currently disabled here while I sort out my latest Movable Type upgrade nightmare. Hah!)