9-11 Note



You might be noticing that the Raging 'toon for 9-11 is very late today. Needless to say, this is an important anniversary and I'd like to do the very best I can, so bear with me until I get this sorted out. Thanks!



=Lefty=



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Jumbo Shrimp



I'm begining to hate smartphones, and I'll tell you why.



Back in 1995 I added web design to my portfolio of artistic vocations. It paid well and was honestly fun at times. Any time, that is, that didn't include Internet Explorer (Fucking IE!) but that's another rant altogether.



The biggest challenge in the 90s was designing and building web sites that performed adequately within the limited bandwidths we all endured, while at the same time playing leapfrog with the constantly expanding monitor landscape.



You see, when I started building web sites 15-inch color monitors were hot shit, then along came 17-inch, 19-inch and, eventually, 'monstrous' 21-inch monitors. It naturally became part of my job to chart the acceptance rate of these bigger monitors and, once the larger sizes became the norm, made it my "sad duty" to inform my clients that a rebuild of their sites was necessary in order to keep them from looking puny and outdated. For which I got paid again, naturally.



This scam worked great until about 2010 when iPhone acceptance reached critical mass and it suddenly became important that a site work as well on a 30-inch monitor as on a 5-inch phone. (Yes, seriously.) My clients understand the problem but haven't yet been willing to write a check for a rebuild as the current one "works fine", even though their sales are falling.



Google looked the other way for about five years but a few months ago they began penalizing sites that weren't mobile-ready. They swear on a stack of C++ handbooks that only mobile searches are affected but you only have to look at my log files to know better.



A slight digression: I think there's a secondary explanation why Google made this decision. It's that the web is cluttered with old sites that are never updated and offer little useful information. What better way to save bandwidth and deliver more salient information than by relegating such sites to the back cybershelves where they'll never be seen again? Digression over.



So now, like every other web monkey, I have to grit my teeth and learn a whole new set of skills to update my personal sites in order keep up with the iPhoneses. I don't know how I'm going to make a graphic-intensive destination like my web portfolio cooperate but I'll figure something out. I have to.



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One more thing.... I posted new comic over at the Friendly Atheist last Friday. If you're intrigued by the teaser below just click this link or the image to see the hilarious punch line.







=Lefty=





