Come Celebrate My Birthday With Me
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Today/tomorrow (depending on your timezone), it is officially my 27th birthday. I typically don't care that much about that sort of thing, but I do appreciate the excuse it gives me to invite my friends who live nearby to a rooftop bar and enjoy drinks with them all together.
This year, that plan falls through. For one, I'm not in San Francisco right now. For another, I'm not even in one place at all tomorrow, as I'll be driving from Pittsburgh to my next road trip stop. So for my 27th birthday I'll be in my trusty car for about 5 hours, watching the world pass by. This got me thinking: for the past nine years I've worked as a web development professional, making friends everywhere. Obviously I can't get all my friends from all over the world together in one place for my birthday… but I don't have to.
This year, I'm celebrating my birthday… online. And you're all invited! Here's what I'm doing:
For my 27th birthday, I pledge to donate $3 to Charity Water for every photo people post of themselves having a drink in my honor on October 1st, 2009, or for every $20 (or more) you donate to them yourself.
The drink can be a coffee or tea during the day, or a nice celebratory beverage at night—or a glass of Jack Daniels at 10am, if that's really your thing. I'm not here to judge. Anyway. Post that photo to your social network(s) of choice, add a link back to this very post, and then for every photo I find, I'll add $5 and the total sum will be donated to Charity Water (who are also on Twitter).
So please. Have a drink on me tomorrow, and take a photo of yourself with your drink of choice and post it either to Twitter, Brightkite, Flickr, Tumblr, Facebook, or what have you. And, if you like this cause, please help promote this to reach more people.
Notes/addendum: multiple entries by the same person will only be counted as one. If you're concerned I may not find your photo, you can @-reply me on Twitter or send me an email. If you're helping promote this or are posting your photo to Twitter, please add the tag #faruksbirthday so that I and others can easily find it.
Happy birthday, and thank you.
Road Trippin' the USA
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Those who follow me on Twitter or Brightkite have noticed already: I'm on a road trip across the United States. Meanwhile, this blog will be on hold for a bit as I won't find much time to write, given that my daily average driving time is 7 hours (sans stops).
I've created a little blog (using Tumblr) to chronicle my and Li'l Steve Jobs' travels: Faruk & Li'l Steve's Road Trip USA. It combines my Flickr and Brightkite RSS feeds and has a road-trippy design for it. It's by no means great (it's not even tested on anything but Safari), but it's a start of something bigger I have planned for it.
During my travels I'll still check in on Twitter as much as I can, but all e-mail and other communication will be haphazard and postponed for longer stops, of which there are only few.
The Things That Make Me Cry
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Hi.
Hey, hello. USA?
Yeah, I'm talking to you. It's me. Your pal. Faruk?
We met… a couple times, actually. Yeah so, okay, the first time was 15 years ago and I was twelve, and you were two hundred and sixteen…
I know, I know, age don't matter. Look… We gotta talk.
Yes, right now. I know you're busy, but hey, so am I. I've got a website to design, a webcast to prepare, slides to revise, a bedroom to empty, and a road trip of unknown length to pack and prepare for. Anyway, I'm busy, but that's not the issue here.
We need to talk about you.
Remember, you? As in, that awesome, amazing country I fell in love with those 15 years ago? Yeah… that one.
What the hell happened, man?! I mean, look at yourself! What have you done to yourself?
Six years ago we met again. I was dating this girl from here, came to visit over Christmas… yeah, you remember. I was seeing you through adult eyes for the first time, not the twelve year old boy of before. You were still looking great, back then. And after that, each year I came and visited you and, well, you had this bloke running you that I thought was kinda dumb and seemed to not really know what he was doing, but hey, whatever, you still seemed cool about it. A little edgy, but I just figured it was the two wars you were fighting. Nothing to worry about, just some stress.
Then I moved here and you were all "hey, welcome, make yourself at home"—and I did. You were a good host, and—no, I mean it, you were a good host. Oh, come now, don't be so hard on yourself. Remember? I wanted to live here. I was… no. I am still in love with you after all these years.
Yeah, I said it. I fell in love with you, all those years ago as a boy and…well…that hasn't changed ever since.
But you've changed, man. I mean… you get a new guy running you, and all around the world they cheered. And throughout most of this country itself, people cheered. And then? You go and sabotage the new guy from every angle you can think of? Spreading lies on a daily basis, rehashing them over and over and over again until people are just too tired to think for themselves anymore and start to believe you? Even in the face of all this evidence?
What's wrong with you?
No, seriously. What is wrong with you?
You're letting yourself be led straight into the most embarrassing state of hyper-delusion. You're suddenly more divisive than ever before, and only because you're suddenly afraid of change? Half of your people are constantly telling each other the same bullshit over and over again so that none of them stop believing the nonsense, and the other half is being too scared of wielding the power they rightfully received to just say "enough with this crap, move on already!"?
I'm seriously wondering what's going on here. One half is behaving like the most despicable kind of evil creatures I can imagine, and anyone calling themselves a Republican today should be fiercely ashamed for openly associating themselves with these lunatics, these backstabbing, fear-mongering vultures who only care about wielding power, not about the greater good or the wellbeing of the people they're supposed to represent. And the other half… the other half is too afraid of upsetting anyone to show even the slightest bit of spine?
Guys. Democrats. You're in control here. How about you wield some of that power you so justly and democratically earned? Your president has a pretty good idea of how this stuff works. Support him, pass these bills—just go for it, from time to time. Don't listen to the idiots and their insane posse on the other side of the room. They don't know what's going on anymore, they're horribly behind the times and it scares the shit out of them—and as a result, they're just screaming murder to get some of that attention they so desperately crave. They'll shout anything, anything to keep you from looking good.
So: ignore them. Use your power, pass a bill here and there ignoring their input, and just see what happens. They'll shut up eventually, because once it's done, it's no use for them to scream anymore. They'll have to wait three more years before their screaming will have any chance of an impact on the bill. Trust me, they'll have long forgotten what they were talking about.
They always do. For a party with an elephant as its representative animal, they're frighteningly forgetful. Then again, I suppose the elephant is as much a lie of a metaphor as all of their "values" and "morals" are which they so fiercely claim they represent yet violently abuse every chance they get.
So.
USA.
What're you gonna do, man? Because right now, you're making me cry. You're making me cry, because the country I love is tearing itself apart and the people shouting the hardest that they care about the place are also the ones working hardest to destroy it. The hypocrisy of it all is what brings about these tears.
And quite frankly, I don't know how much longer I want to continue seeing you be like this. You need to rid yourself of these poisonous people and fast, man. Because you know what?
You're slowly losing all of the good ones.
Your pal,
For life,
Faruk
Modernizr 1.0
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It's been only two months since I first announced Modernizr, and now it is my great pleasure to say that Modernizr 1.0—its first major milestone release—is available! With this release comes a slew of new features in the library, as well as a whole range of improvements and additions to Modernizr.com itself.
First, the new library features detection for @font-face, Canvas Text, HTML5 Audio and Video, CSS 3D Transforms, the new HTML5 input types and the Geolocation API. It also changes its behavior a little, adding the resulting classes ("borderradius", "no-csstransitions") to the html element instead of the body element. This is done so that you can include the Modernizr JavaScript file anywhere in your page.
The site itself has been revamped a little. It now sports a News section with RSS feed, a Documentation page with code samples for each of the features that Modernizr detects for, and a Sites page that will grow over time as more and more sites launch that use the library.
Modernizr 1.0 was not just a sole effort. I want to thank Paul Irish and Ben Alman. The two of them restructured most of the 0.9 codebase, leaving it functionally intact but reducing the file size by a stunning 35% and improving performance here and there. I also want to thank John Resig, Mark Pilgrim, Leonid Khachaturov, John Tantalo and Peter Speck for various contributions and feature suggestions.
Now that Modernizr has reached 1.0, it's time to really start exploring the potential of CSS3 and HTML5. I already have several exciting projects in mind that will take advantage of it, but I'm even more thrilled about seeing what everyone else will come up with. If 9elements' Canvas+Audio demo is any indication, well, let's just say it's an exciting time to be a web designer / developer.