I would not consider myself to be an engineer of the innards of the internets. I work my tool-kit on the outer skin, so when I say "Being Programmed" I am referencing the way we tell a machine with a set of knowledge what is true and false and what is a number and what kind of number it is. Bear with me, like I said I am not a programmer but I am going elsewhere with this programming metaphor.

Whether you are an atheist or devot Muslim you believe in something...trust me you do! Trust in some set of beliefs no matter how loose or strict is a religion or a contract...whatever way you prefer to speak of this agreement. 

In my 34 years of life on Earth the construct of civilization has not been able to beat it or program it out of me. It, is the connection to everything around us. It, is the connection you feel or once felt with the tree, the beauty of the exposed 100 year-old wooden beam in your office space or the magnificence of the moon. Scratching a little deeper into It I am speaking of the connection most of us have long since left un-nourished with the animate, yes you heard me living, beings around us. 

As kids we still had the freedom that our consciousness was not totally marred by our modern ritual to domesticate, beat or program out of us the ability to connect, communicate and feel something very real with a rock. 

So, as we read the paper and watch the glowing flat crystal (i mean what a let down, at least it could be round) and hear about how we are being cheated by politicians, "winning" battles, finding more natural resources to consume or about the latest and greatest gadget be mindful that this is all smoke and mirrors! 

Remembering

Even if you didn't grow up in the rural parts and run through the woods you can reconnect. 

Take a look at your hand, notice the creases, the scaling and the way the air flows differently around your fingers and palm. Palpate your hand, feel the outer texture, then the softer layers of tissue until you sense your skeletal system. Really travel though this experience. It feels good to slow down and remember your magic and reconnect with this part of your body that is more than a device to scratch your butt or reach for the phone, this is your tentacle an amazing sensory device.

Take a look around you. Approach the first thing that comes into your gaze that is not man-made. You may have to go outside for this, the horror! Let's say you approach a tree. Take some time to look it over. Ponder it from top to bottom. If you don't know much about trees that's fine, if you do then let all you know about their biology consume your thought. Reach out and touch this tree, feel the bark, look closely at it's skin and textures. Notice the moles, the hairs and the scars. 

Try not to forget that there's a life force, a community outside your cozy controlled 4 walls that has been waiting for you to remember it, with more life than even the coolest electronic gadget.

The time is now to trust yourself

The world is coming to an end. Global warming is a farse.

There is so much propaganda out there and it can get you down in no time. No matter what your opinion is on the status of the Earth and the human condition try to leave these programatic viruses aside for awhile. Take a leap of faith and trust that you will find your own path and reconnect with your own consciousness and maybe even that of the whippoorwill (bird).

IMHO

Don't let the system clearcut your forest or strip-mine your soul for the sake of profit. Without a respect for yourself you can not reclaim the friendship and true respect for the healthy co-dependance upon all things earthly. The distance that has been wedged between you and the soil upon which you tread daily is layered and patched constantly our of fear and lack of understanding. Now I am not preaching we drag our scrotums in the sand and abandon technology. I believe awareness and a shared consciousness are paramount and the cornerstone of the archway that will lead humans and the entire natural community to a revolution that will spin in the same direction as our spaceship once again. 

We are "that" animal that chose to step away from the rest. The one who "thought" and not for the first time that we were different, better and unique. This was our greatest fault to date and the fault that has led us astray. The very thing we feel separates us from the "rest," our consciousness, is our Archilles-heal. WAKE UP!

About the author

I don't usually write to inspire other people to understand this magical connection I have had since birth, a connection with the Eairth and it's many inhabitants. Typically I seek out or stumble upon other thinkers who do an amazing job of describing how they feel and the overlap of how "we" understand this commune with the "natural." I hope I have been able to pass along a litte pinch or a little spark of inspiration to you.

Github and I have recently started dating in the past 7 months. I like her. She's forgiving, thoughtful and remembers darn near everything. I have collected many of our love notes during the course of our courtship. 

Enjoy the juicy romance.

Where is that Git?

git status or gst

Branching Out But Not Too Far

git checkout -b branch_name

Cooperation 

git checkout -b branch_name origin/branch_name

Working on Our Relationship

git checkout branch_name

Adding Another Special Place

git add file_name(s)

git commit -m"commit_message" or gca -m"commit_message"

git fetch or git fetch (username)

git merge or git merge repo_name/branch_name

git pull (does a fetch & merge)

git push

git diff

git reset --hard HEAD

git log -p

git log -p --author=author_name

Closing a Chapter

git branch -d branch_name 

Moving On For Good...Kinda

git push origin :branch_name (be careful with this spell)

git stash

git stash list

git stash pop

git branch -v (local branches)

git branch -a (all branches)

gca -m"Commit message Closes #1" where #1 is the issue id

find . -name \*.css | xargs rm

grep 

ifconfig

As I have mentioned before I love Sass and Compass for authoring and maintaining CSS. In this installment I have come across a minor issue with turning an Internet Explorer Filter for Linear Gradients into a proper SASS Mixin.

Normally I would use the Compass Mixin by first importing the mixin file for gradient in my _base.scss file in this way,

@import "compass/css3/gradient"

and then specifying the gradient colors for my element like this,

.gradient {@include linear-gradient(color-stops(white, #aaaaaa));}

For Internet Explorer this mixin will not work for versions IE8 – IE5.5 (haven't tried it with IE9 yet), so it's your call on how you choose to solve the lack of support. The following are the choices I came across:

1. Give and alternate background color in the css before the gradient property
2. Write an alternate style in some sort of conditional style sheet or use a script like Modernizer to detect support and provide a suitable style
3. Provide an image to replace the browser generated gradient
4. Use CSS Pie or the like...
5. Take advantage of the IE Filters that provide support for Linear Gradients

For me I have to place the importance of the design element on a scale of graceful degradation and site design integrity. Many times I am satisfied with using a solid color or right angle corners but sometimes I don't want to let an element "slip." In my most recent case I didn't feel that the use of an image was maintainable because we Estately-ians want the flexibility to quickly iterate and test an upcoming release. 

I took this IE Gradient Filter,

filter:  progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorStr='#444444', EndColorStr='#999999'); /* IE6,IE7 */
        -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorStr='#444444', EndColorStr='#999999')"; /* IE8 */

@mixin ie-gradient($start-gradient, $end-gradient){
  filter:  progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr='$start-gradient', endColorstr='$end-gradient');
  -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr='$start-gradient', endColorstr='$end-gradient'

then in my page SCSS file I called the mixin BUT it didn't work 100% correctly...my gradient colors were off by a lot! So I wrote to Chris E and Divya Manian, two developers I highly respect. Divya suggested I post to the Compass Google Group.

This turned out to be wonderful. I had a whole host of responses but the "gem" was in a response from Anurag. Turns out SASS has a way of helping variables along in their interpolation (SASS Variable Interpolation) and it's no surprise that the IE Fileters need some help...right! 

The Final IE Linear Gradient Filter Mixin Resulted in Success!

@mixin ie-linear-gradient($start-color, $end-color) {
   filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Gradient(GradientType=0, startColorstr='#{$start-color}', endColorstr='#{$end-color}');
   -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr='#{$start-color}', endColorstr='#{$end-color}')"; }

@include ie-linear-gradient(#FFEFB6, #FFD020);

I was introduced to Scott Berkun's writing by Bryan Zug (@bryanzug) a coulpe years ago, so needless to say I have been following @berkun on Twitter for some time. Over the past year or so I have become more engaged with my own consciousness not because I wasn't engaged before, I think it was more about my "hit-and-miss" style of trusting my instincts. 

Wow. Instincts. What are those? Well way back in the day those were the things that kept us alive, like this..."Thunderous crash, breaking branches...hair on the back of your furry neck stands on end, every cell in your body knows injury is very possible." so yeah you duck, hide and out-smart the threat. Hopefully your idea worked. If not the grizzly decided what was next for you.

In small groups we are agile. Imagine the circumstances we just visualized but in a group of 2, now 4, now 16, now 32. Catch my drift. Casualties and the impact of poor instincts has really tremendous impact. Don't get me wrong, it could be all rainbows and unicorns, I am an optimistic hippie-geek.

Stay with me here. 

We are still quite primal. It's just so damn cluttered with gadgets, fancy clothes, make-up and well a chemically instilled belief of domestication. Trust me you and I were trained to believe we are not only different than "them" but better too. BTW, "them" could mean the obvious...such as animals or aliens but also the "client," the copywriter, the customer...I'll let you run with that!

As a designer of experiences (aren't we all) my challenge is to shed my bias (but not too much) so as to have a glimpse into the "pulse" of my audience. Well what if I am more or less emotionally and/or intelligently developed than my audience? What if I know my audience but my "gate keepers" are in need of a whack across the head with a dose of "wake-up" or humility, courage or just a better way of explaining themselves?

The "monster" is still out there. Behind the CSS and the HAML they lurk. Instincts still matter and group decision making is a real threat and/or tactical advantage. 

Well if you have managed to stick with me, I was simply inspired by Scott Berkun's article in the Economist. I have jumped around, made bold statements and silently administered "self-therapy." At the conclusion of this 15 minute free-write, nothing stood between me and bringing my idea to be published out there on the W-E-B and thankfully my ferocious kitties only ate part of my toe!

"Meow, what's the big idea papa?" Said the kitties as I neglected to serve dessert. The E-N-D.

I am relatively new to the usage of the Compass CSS framework. I have been using it for about two months over at Estately. A month ago we released a new home page that was a perfect instance for me to test out Compass and also make use of the Blueprint, a handy grid module. I was able to push that site update out with the help of the amazing Estately engineering team (Doug Cole, Ben Bleything, Anders Conbere) without much trouble.

Recently I have been working on a branch that rips the guts out of the current listings page design, yeah that's my way of saying I am redesigning the listings page template for our real estate listings! I have really fallen for Compass and SASS. This is largely due to a talk given by Divya Manian during a Refresh Seattle talk in early 2010. 

Recently I had been working on what I call the "Listings Information Bar" implementation. The design requires two CSS3 properties for the overall visual impact; linear gradient and border-radius. Using Compass to import the CSS3 Mixins for Border-radius and Linear Gradient are fairly straight forward once the basic architecture of Compass is running. In my _base.scss file I simply include this line:

@import "compass/css3/border-radius";
@import "compass/css3/gradient";

This now gives me convenient use of these properties.

#listing-header-infobar {@include linear-gradient(color-stops(#fffbe1,#fbf496));@include border-radius(5px); }

No big deal, right?

Well if you look closely at the left and right hand side "bumpers" of the bar you'll see that there are gradients running from right to left/ left to right. So I could have done this with the following:

@include linear-gradient(color-stops(#fbf496,#fffbe1),left);

BUT, this would not have achieved the subtly I was after where the gradient from the #listing-header-infobar and the #listing-header-left-bumper (see below blue bordered boxes) blended together! So I first looked to the documentation on the Compass site for Linear Gradients knowing I needed something that allowed for me to use RGBa color settings for my CSS3 property with the "a" for alpha being the decisive information I wanted to give the browser. 

I was stumped because even in the examples I could not find the use of RGBa color values within the linear-gradient mixin. So I contact Chris Eppstein and explained my confusion and he came through for me (BTW: I think Chris is one of the finest and most caring professionals I know. I have a list of stellar people, that have influenced my life but that's another post all-together.).

I was unsure if the Compass Mixin for Linear Gradient would support SASS RGBa values.

What Chris reminded me about was that SASS had this feature, which admittedly I knew in the depths of my mind but I was unsure if the Compass Mixin for Linear Gradient would support the RGBa values. This is really the whole point of the post

Chris sent me this snippet, which worked beautifully and also allowed me to use HEX color values, which would be converted to RGB values on the fly!

@include linear-gradient(color-stops(rgba(white,0.5),rgba(blue,0.5)),left top);