The Jennifers

Fall asleep at a tea party, you might get decorated!

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 09:51:00 -0400

Fall asleep at a tea party, you might get decorated!

Story Resume

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:14:00 -0400

A couple of years before the turn of the century, I began studying web development at a community college and eventually was hired by the college to work on their sites. The college’s program developer told me I would benefit more from real world experience than from taking more classes, so I got a job at a web shop where I was promoted to a lead position.

I got married, took a break from work and spent about six months learning to cook gourmet food. I still love to cook.

My next adventure was teaching web development classes at the same college I had attended. The focus of my classes was to prepare students for real jobs using my own experience. One point I stressed was how to follow written instructions, as surprisingly enough, that had proven to have a steeper learning curve for me than the technologies I used. Teaching was a very positive experience for me, I still think about many of my students to this day.

I got pregnant, quit smoking and ate chocolate brownies for breakfast every morning, a chocolate shake for dessert every evening, and in between, developed a customizable DHTML script I called ‘Form Validation on Steroids’. I lost about 40 lbs before my son was 9 months.

As a stay-at-home mom, I mastered the art of homemade baby food and considered how I could turn teaching other moms all I had learned into a business. But my fascination with web development was too strong to resist. I continued to write JavaScript lessons on my personal site that I’d used while teaching and soon it ballooned to about 150 individual how-to articles. The site had enough regular traffic to generate a decent income through web hosting referrals.

In 2005, I began playing around with web page source code begotten from the lovely getElementsByTagName() method and built upon color-coding concepts I’d developed while teaching. Firefox extensions were all the rage at that time so I set out to put my ideas into the add-on embodiment.

View Source Chart was born.

During View Source Chart’s initial development phase I could think of nothing else. At one point, my family was served pizza for dinner 5 nights in one week.

For the next few years, I maintained and improved the add-on. It has appeared in Mac World magazine, several web development books including ‘Pro JavaScript Techniques’, written by the creator of jQuery, and was given the ‘Recommended’ (now called ‘Featured’) designation by Mozilla for a couple of years. It is still available on Mozilla’s add-on site and is closing in on 1 million downloads.

Lately I have been making problem-solving elastic belts, including a new one that has no hardware at all - a feat I am very proud of.

Another project I am currently working on is a zipper-pull attachment that I believe has fad potential, as creating a cultural fad has been a long-time dream. Another crazy idea I consider from time to time is opening a carry-out restaurant with a menu structured unlike any other. I also hope to be granted IP rights for View Source Chart’s GUI. In the meantime, I regularly find myself surprised by problems I encounter on the Web, considering how far it has come: I frequently think, ‘I should really try to help them.’

ViewSourceChart.com

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 19:45:00 -0400

ViewSourceChart.com is live and has the cross-browser bookmarklet code posted.

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Sun, 22 Jan 2012 00:37:00 -0500

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Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:11:00 -0500

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Tue, 17 Jan 2012 16:44:00 -0500

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Tue, 17 Jan 2012 16:19:00 -0500

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Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:45:00 -0500

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Mon, 02 Jan 2012 16:16:00 -0500

Add a View Source Chart link to your Tumblog (must be clicked...

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Add a View Source Chart link to your Tumblog (must be clicked while on the blog, not on the feed).

The link generates a “charted” view of the current page’s HTML source code, making the HTML very easy to read and troubleshoot. Themers are welcome to add it to themes.

INSTRUCTIONS:

from your blog’s dashboard, click “customize appearance”
click the “Edit HTML” button in the left sidebar.
copy the script below and paste it into the HTML TIP: place the script just above the closing body tag ()
copy and paste the following link into the HTML (anywhere you want it to show):
View Source Chart
I’ve placed mine just below the header on each page of my blog (not in the feed).
Click “Update Preview” on the top right of the HTML view.
Click “Appearance” to close the HTML view then click “Save” on the left side panel.

Go to http://viewsourcechart.com for more info.

Now when you view your tumblr site, clicking the View Source Chart link will generate a source chart in a new tab.

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Sat, 31 Dec 2011 22:31:00 -0500

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Sat, 31 Dec 2011 01:38:15 -0500

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Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:21:00 -0500

Social (Vehicle) Traffic Control

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 15:33:00 -0500

Problem: speeding vehicles on narrow residential roads.

Solution: residents supplying naturally occurring “speed bumps”

Ever notice how when a vehicle is broken down on the side of the road,
or people are walking on the road’s edge, or when the garbage truck is
present, moving vehicles slow down in order to pass these objects more carefully?

Those are spontaneous, “naturally occurring” examples of a technique traffic engineers already use to slow down moving vehicles. Round-abouts, trees, angled roadside parking and even extra-wide paint striping are used in the science of traffic control to create psychological risk in the minds of drivers. It works because drivers adapt their speed to the level of perceived environmental risk.

So instead of complaining and waiting for government or law enforcement to do something, residents can use the same technique to solve their own local speeding problems. And it would be cheaper and faster to boot!

Get together with neighbors and place vehicles on the road side in front of cooperating residences. It doesn’t require mass cooperation, just one or two strategically (and legally) placed vehicles, and moving traffic will respond. If executed properly and continuously, the plan may even convince passers-through to take an alternate route altogether, reducing traffic on your residential road.

*Disclaimer: I am not a traffic engineer and have not tested this theory.

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Mon, 05 Dec 2011 15:01:00 -0500

No Good Deed

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 14:17:00 -0400

Most of us have experienced it - we do something nice and we get punished for it. We have likely even punished someone else for something they did with good will.

The last time I observed this play out, I pondered for several weeks about why this occurs. I came up with three scenarios.

First, if someone doesn’t like you - whether you are aware of it or not - and you do something nice, it can cause them to feel guilty. Since guilt is a very uncomfortable feeling, and since humans strongly dislike being wrong, they may try to justify their original feeling/opinion of you and therefore find something wrong with what you did.

The second reason a good deed may get punished has nothing at all to do with the do-gooder; rather it is because it inadvertently interferes with a goal the recipient-punisher is trying to achieve.

Third, if someone believes you have wronged them somehow, then you go and do something nice for them without ever have addressed the perceived insult or injury with them directly, they have an urge to even the score. “Wait a minute, you can’t pretend that didn’t happen!”

Human behavior is fascinating, but also simple: we are ego centric and want to believe we are good.

How amusing.