I’m sure most people, at least from Canada and the States, are familiar with Groundhog Day. Basically, some cities/towns have groundhogs, and on February 2nd they come out of their burrows, and if there’s a shadow it means 6 more weeks of winter and if not, it’s an early spring, or something.

In Canada, 6 more weeks of winter actually IS an early spring, but whatever.

I’m not here to discuss whether or not this old Amish folk story holds any water, but I am going to show you our local groundhog, Balzac Billy:

…

I… uh… hmm.

…….

Yeah.

I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that isn’t a groundhog. What it is, it seems, is a waste of everyone’s time, since surely I could just see if I cast a shadow. A groundhog casting a shadow? Sure, you know, he’s close to the ground, so he might not cast a shadow. A human, however, casts a shadow on most days, even if it’s not incredibly sunny.

Anyway, Billy said we’ll have an early spring, which by Calgary standards means all the snow should be gone by June. :P

On the other hand, all the snow in Vancouver has melted, and is needing to be trucked in from the mountains… which is bad news for the Olympics which are commencing there shortly.

Quite a few of my loyal readers are quite nice and praise me for my various design related endeavors. However, my favourite part of designing something, like, say, this website, is the coding. Designing is always so picky. Things need to be laid out in a certain way, and they need to be pretty, but there aren’t a tonne of concrete rules to follow in regards to that. Coding, however, is like putting together a puzzle. There’s a right and wrong answer. I love that.

Actually, it’s quite contradictory to most other aspects in my life. I.E. I dislike science and abhor math and adore abstract studies such as English and history, as I’m sure you will figure out in the following paragraphs:

Valid HTML is like… the very attractive body of someone very attractive. And well done CSS is like… their very nice designer clothing. Together, they make this being that is like… unbelievably hot. You would not kick this being out of bed. But the thing is, valid HTML can still be VERY HORRIBLY WRONG. You can have valid HTML and good CSS and still be a mass murderer. You would kick a mass murderer out of bed. Which is why we have clean, semantic mark-up. It is like… the soul and personality of the incredibly attractive being.

Sure, spans may be placed all over, and they may have identical inline styles in each of them repeating all over the page like an infectious disease, and still be valid. But they’re not nice. They’re coming into my bedroom and murdering me in cold blood. And they’re murdering you too, you just don’t know it yet.

You might be new to the whole web development thing. You might think you’re saving time by not having to format things that are already formatted in Microsoft Word. Or that by clicking a button all your web dev problems are solved! Someone incredibly lovely, who you trust because she gives extensions, might be telling you that it is okay to do things this way. It’s not. It’s painful to society. Just so you know.

TL;DR: They’re making us use Dreamweaver in school, and not just as a suitable replacement for Notepad++.

(I should clarify, that I have an AMAZING web development instructor, and he does everything perfectly. We’re learning Dw for web DESIGN class, however, with the goal being to be prepared for Adobe certification tests at some point. Or something. Doesn’t make it any better, but yeah, I should say that web DEV class is awesome.)