One of our friends who is a former educator gave our family a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas. No one else seemed all that interested, so I decided to tackle the project. I have a quirky interest in maps and geography anyway, and I thought it might stimulate the children to get involved. Alas, working on the jigsaw puzzle simply got added to the list of “wacky things Dad gets interested in.”


You can see that this was a global puzzle. In addition to the standard jigsaw construction, there were several interesting characteristics. First of all , each country (also individual states and provinces in the United States and Canada) was its own correct geographically shaped piece. Some large countries were broken up into more than one piece. The ocean pieces were the usual random jigsaw shapes. Helping to place the ocean pieces was lettering on the pieces describing each country, its capital, population, and area, all arranged in alphabetical progression across the globe. So instead of a large area of featureless blue one could actually get some sense of where ocean pieces belonged from the lettering on the piece--but many pieces had only fragments of text.


In all, there were 600 pieces. I worked on it in spurts, whenever I needed to be still, but not thinking or talking, solving or planning, reading or figuring. Total time was about three to four weeks. I learned several interesting facts in the process. For example, did you know there was a Canadian province named “Nunavut?” Or that South Georgia Island is nowhere near the state of Georgia? Madagascar and Mauritius are both islands off the southeastern coast of Africa. Kazakhstan is a huge country formed from the former Soviet republic located south of Russia. Burkina Faso is a landlocked country between Mali and Ghana.

This was a “pseudo-cylindrical” projection of the earth’s surface in two dimensions. Some distortions are obvious, which made the puzzle a little difficult at times. Nonetheless, when I was done, I felt an embarrassing sense of accomplishment about the project. Sometimes little goals are better than big one.

Tags: Puzzles

Recently I’ve become interested in learning a little about HTML and CSS. I started with a reasonable desire: make a family web site. Its purpose: share thoughts, family news, photographs, and links to other projects (my boat-building endeavor) and hobbies (cycling). There was a web design program (iWeb) included in the iLife suite packaged with every Mac. I played around with it some but decided I wanted a little more flexibility. That led to a lot of web research and eventually I selected RapidWeaver because it seemed to have a good balance between ease of use and options in page layout. Or so I thought.

I also picked up a well-written intro textbook on HTML and CSS (Head First HTML published by O’Reilly) which was a perfect level of simple and useful for a semi-intelligent newbie like myself. As I began actually constructing the content of the site, I became dissatisfied with the built in themes of Rapidweaver and so I looked for additional themes. I started with research into free themes available on the web and there are quite a few. People have done a lot of work to put these themes together and provide the code underlying them. I selected one but rapidly learned it also had some elements that were sub-optimal (primarily due to color conflicts between fonts and page backgrounds). So I tried to use my newly-found meager HTML skills to pick new colors. That lead to more conflicts, more research, more web time, more confusion, with a slow slide into frustration and a gradually increasing obsession to get the thing right. I solicited help from my computer-savvy brother-who tried to help-but eventually I realized the whole project was out of kilter.
That is, the effort involved had outstripped the original purpose: enhance the family life. Now my little obsession was becoming detrimental to the greater good. It was time to re-balance.

So I ditched the original theme because it was too much work (even if it was free) and paid $12 for a commercial theme I liked just as well and was better designed. And I told myself to relax and let it go. The darn thing can evolve over time--doesn’t have to be perfect the first week. So the lessons:

• Free is great but sometimes means more work
• Projects must be re-assessed for harmony with their original purpose
• Don’t create pressure to finish something that’s really open-ended-or, in other words: enjoy the journey instead of anticipating the destination

Tags: balance, web