I’d say they were the best two years of my life.

I’ve worked with incredibly smart people whom I admire. I worked on products that I truly care about and that helped an enormous number of people. I’ve learned more about the web that I thought there was to know (and now realize how little I still know). I’ve grown in all ways. I’ve made friends for life.

Now I’ve decided it is time for me to move on and devote my time to my own projects for a while. After doing some travelling this summer, I’ll be spending a lot more time on CSS-Tricks. I have a list of videos I want to record and articles I want to write a mile long. I want to be making more demos. I want to be finishing the almanac. I want to make the gallery more useful. And before the year is out (hopefully much sooner) I want to do a v10 of the site.

I’m also working hard on a new project called CodePen with some good friends of mine. Hopefully that will be in public Beta soon and I’ll be able to share it with you all.

For the first time ever, I’ll be able to dedicate all my time toward making these personal projects as best as they can be. I’m pretty stoked to see where they are able to go. I’m also going to be losing a significant amount of income, so you might see me trying to sell a few things here and there. I’m also thinking about doing a Kickstarter for the big CSS-Tricks redesign, where the rewards start with access to screencasts of the entire process and going up from there. Not entirely sure exactly what I’ll do, that’s part of the fun!

You know what they say: cheap tables and expensive chairs. I took that to heart with my cheap plastic fold-out banquet table and Herman Miller chair. I exclusively use one MacBook Pro, so my exact design and development environment comes with me wherever I go. At home at this desk, I have my Drobo for mega media storage and backup, a 27″ Cinema display, and super ergonomic Microsoft keyboard and Kensington trackball. Underneath, in the gross tangle of wires, is an APC power supply which has saved me through countless power outages. Albiet more often back in my Mac Pro days. The speakers are Harmon Kardon Soundsticks which sound and look wonderful. The printer is a WiFi enabled Brother laser printer which is the most recent addition and has convinced me to never go back to slow, expensive, garbage inkjets. The microphone is a rode podcaster set in a mini boom stand.

We live in different states so talking about them largely happened over the phone and Facebook chatting screenshots of the designs. The structure of invite was just complicated enough that communicating exactly what part of them we were talking about was starting to get confusing. So instead of worrying about it or potentially screwing it up, I made up a little set of graphics. I would put these next to each screenshot before I sent it so it was clear which area we were talking about exactly.

Worked great.

It’s extremely rare for me to eat a meal that is truly extraordinary wherein during and after eating it I am amazed at the deliciousness. It’s also extremely rare that I eat anything that I considered/consider disgusting.

The difference on the grand quality scale between a Big Mac Extra Value Meal and a “fancy” steak dinner is trivial to me. Take me either place for dinner and I’m equally pleased. And in fact because of the price, time efficiency, consistency, and lack of crazy bullshit, I’m often happier with fast food.

No big revelations here. Just a thought.

In other news I’ve been doing “low carb” eating for somewhere around 2 months and I’m nearly 30lbs down which feels great. I’ve been slipping a bit though. Looking forward to a few normal weeks at home starting next week where I can get back on it solidly.

“The fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about the Caribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn’t mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.”

A young kid might come into the room with the adults and say “I dropped my ice cream cone on the floor!” And the adults would clean it up.

A slightly older kid might come into the room with the adults and say “Excuse me where are your paper towels?” Then proceed to rub chocolate ice cream deep into the carpet without the adults even knowing what was going on.

It takes an pretty mature kid to give the perfect response: “I dropped my ice cream cone on the floor, can you help me find the supplies to clean it up?”

Notice that the young kid’s response was closer to the ideal response than the mature kid. The response is more useful because it starts with the facts. It’s easiest to help when you start there, rather than launch into a proposed solution in which the problem has to be inferred, if thought of at all.

This isn’t isolated to kids. I notice it just as often (actually more often, since I’m not around kids much) with adults.

Valid question, but doesn’t just come out with the facts of what the problem actual is:

“Can you float an element that is inline-block?”

Starting with the facts is far more useful to the potential helper:

“I’m having trouble with this layout, this elements is being floated but not behaving as I expected”

It’s obviously automated, but it’s from the owner of the company and lists his personal email address.

His first concern was our buying experience.

He assures us our email is safe.

He doesn’t opt us in to newsletters, he lets us decide if we are interested in those and what they are for.

He gives us some actionable information, like phone numbers and hours, that are likely to be useful in dealing with them.

Gosh that isn’t very nice of me is it? Well neither was the customer support staff that I dealt with. They were plain out rude.

Here’s what happened. I switched to Sprint because I wanted to be a Sprint customer. I got rid of my old AT&T iPhone and got a new Sprint iPhone 4S. This was on December 31, 2011. Upon getting home and getting it set up, I found I had very bad service in my home. I stuck with it for a few weeks, but it was no fluke, I just didn’t get service at all most of the time at my house. So I was forced to switch away. I went back to AT&T on January 26, 2012. That’s 27 days. I thought I’d do it within a month. But it turns out you only have 15 days Satisfaction Guarantee. So when I switched away, I was charged $350 termination fee.

Not only that, but the store wouldn’t take my phone back. So now I’m stuck with an iPhone 4S that doesn’t work on my new carrier. I’d eBay it, but the last time I did that I got scammed big time, so I’m just not looking forward to dealing with that again.

That’s OK. I’ll donate the phone to someone who can really use it. But you, for being so rude to me and not being willing to accept that I can’t use Sprint service because of the poor reception in my house, I’m going to get even with. I’ll update this post with how I’ve managed to cost you money.

@chriscoyier @sprint I’ll try to get my mom to ditch the service. Otherwise, I’m with another carrier. :)

— Alison Foxall (@alisonmf) February 15, 2012

@chriscoyier @sprint good to know. was thinking of switching to them but if they’re that awful, i’ll stick with verizon.

— jared (@imjared) February 15, 2012

@chriscoyier Ouch. I was just thinking of switching from AT&T, too. Bad coverage/service in general with Sprint?

— Harlan Lewis(@harlanlewis) February 14, 2012

I’m very familiar with every location from the whole movie. I’m sure there is some gang stuff and whatever, but it’s not like a dangerous neighborhood or ghetto or whatever (and for the record, I’m about as big of a pussy white boy as they come). I think it’s a pretty sweet song actually, I’m just saying.