The pleasure (and pain) of independent discovery

Menu screenshotI was pretty proud of myself when I came up with the solution for the dropdown menus I use in the navigation bar in my current site design. They don’t require all of the cockamamie JavaScript most older solutions did. They surely don’t work in older browsers (I’m guessing), but that really doesn’t matter now. Most significantly to me, though, I had never seen a solution that worked like what I am doing.

I guess it was just a lack of looking. There’s even a term for this approach, Suckerfish Dropdowns, although I’m not doing exactly what they recommend as far as IE support is concerned. However, I haven’t actually noticed it being necessary.

Now that may well be because I’m not even trying to support versions before IE 7, what with all of the transparent PNGs I’ve got everywhere. But still, the solution I’m using works great across all of the browsers I’ve tested: Firefox 2.x, Safari 2.x/3.x, and IE 7. The only complaint I have with it is that the positioning differs slightly between the browsers: the menus appear a few pixels higher in IE than in Firefox or Safari, such that they’re jammed up against the text of the menu header. But if I move them lower, the necessary contact (or really, probably overlap) between the menu header and the menu itself doesn’t happen… and if there’s a gap of even 1 pixel between the bottom of the header and the top of the menu, the menu will disappear if you don’t mouse over it fast enough.

Geez. I read a paragraph like that last one and I just have to ask myself, what am I doing with my life???

Don’t Expect them NOT to Be Incompetent

It is always with mild amusement that I listen to people complain about the incompetence of the sales staff at CompUSA or Best Buy or Radio Shack, or of the technical support people they get on the phone late at night or on weekends.

Think about it for a minute. Even though the economy is down, there are still plenty of well-paying high-tech jobs for people with knowledge and skills. If a person actually knows enough to be competent with computers, they will be able to get a better job than a thankless, $6.50-an-hour sales floor job at CompUSA, or working the graveyard shift doing phone tech support!

Now I am not saying there’s anything wrong with these kinds of jobs. Nor am I saying people seeking these services don’t deserve to be met with intelligence and courtesy. But in a market-driven economy, some things have to give.

If you want to walk into a store and pay under $1000 for a brand-new PC that’s roughly 10,000 times more powerful than those used to guide Apollo 11 to the moon, you’re going to have to accept that the place you’re buying it from can’t afford the overhead to hire people who can tell their heads from their asses (much less their hard drives from their RAM).

And if you’re going to get 1.5 Mbps broadband Internet access in your home for a little more than the cost of dial-up, and a tiny fraction of what businesses used to pay for T1 lines (in the “olden days” — about 3 weeks ago), your ISP also won’t be able to hire people to answer your phone call at 2 AM on a Saturday who have any skills beyond basic literacy so they can step through the phone script they’ve been given.

Accept it. Do the research yourself so you know what you want before you get there, and be glad you live in a world where electronics hardware and demeaning, thankless labor come cheap.