I will never forget my father’s words.

There’s this thing that men and women can do, that apparently a lot of men think about, that most women don’t want to do.

If I were a woman, I wouldn’t want to do it.

I was fourteen and just learning about these things, so I asked my dad about it.

He told me he wasn’t interested, because:

I was fourteen and had just found out about anal sex.

I asked my dad about it. He said he wasn’t interested, because (wait for it):

“I have too much respect for a lady’s vagina.”

It’s the comic pathos of that abstracted possessive that has always haunted me.

New York Life Tower as seen from Happy Cog

It won’t help your next web design project, but if you’re working in print, now you can use incredible images from the CSA library free when you print on French paper.

“This vast selection of rights managed black & white images are perfect for solid-color offset, letterpress, or silkscreen printing. Free CSA High Resolution Tiff Images capture the authenticity and detail of hand-drawn illustration and the beautifully tactile look of ink printed on paper, allowing you to keep the printing simple and let French paper provide the color.”

Free Images on French Paper

In 2008, Derek Powazek, who knows more about community on the web than just about anyone, shared 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments. It was a great read then, and still is, distilling of 15 years of online community experience into a brief, punchy list. If comments on your site aren’t where you want them to be, give it a look.

“A half-century ago, Afghan women pursued careers in medicine; men and women mingled casually at movie theaters and university campuses in Kabul; factories in the suburbs churned out textiles and other goods.

“There was a tradition of law and order, and a government capable of undertaking large national infrastructure projects, like building hydropower stations and roads, albeit with outside help. Ordinary people had a sense of hope, a belief that education could open opportunities for all, a conviction that a bright future lay ahead. All that has been destroyed by three decades of war, but it was real.”

Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan, a photo essay by Mohammad Qayoumi

Update! Episode 8, featuring Whitney Hess, is now available for your listening and viewing pleasure at 5by5.tv.

This Thursday 17 June at 1:00 PM EDT, join Dan Benjamin and me live on The Big Web Show as we interview Whitney Hess (bio | blog | Twitter) on on the ins and outs of user experience design—from research to wireframes to testing and beyond. Just what goes into making stuff online easier and more pleasurable to use? What kinds of projects (and clients) enable great user experiences, and which have bad UI written all over them? If a tree falls in the forest, will Whitney tweet about it? Join us for these topics and more.

Then on Thursday 24 June at 1:00 PM EDT, join us live as we interview Ethan Marcotte (bio | blog | Twitter), co-author of ">Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition with me and Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design with Dan Cederholm. We’ll talk about designing and coding for the likes of the Sundance Film Festival and New York Magazine, and the joys of responsive web design, working remotely, and swearing profusely on Twitter.

And then on Thursday, 1 July, join us as we coax 37signals CEO Jason Fried (tiny bio | book | book | book | blog | Twitter) into telling us how he really feels about bells and whistles, contracts, meetings, buzzwords, software that requires training, and startups that need investors. The controversial Mr Fried is a true rebel and innovator and one of our favorite people on the internet. Tune in and find out why.

The Big Web Show is taped live in front of an internet audience Thursdays at live.5by5.tv and can be watched afterwards via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web.

Episode 7 of The Big Web Show is now online for your listening and viewing pleasure. In this most excellent episode, co-host Dan Benjamin and I talk with special guest Jared Spool about usability testing in the real world, with practical advice for designers, UI engineers, and developers alike.

Jared Spool is the founder of User Interface Engineering, the largest usability research organization of its kind in the world. He’s been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term “usability” was ever associated with computers.

The Big Web Show features special guests and topics like the future of publishing, art direction online, content strategy, web fonts and typography, CMS shootouts, HTML5 and CSS3, building an audience, and more.

Watch on our website or via iTunes. If you like the show, review it on iTunes or become a member of the 5by5 network.

There is a new Safari update. After I installed it, my home iMac cannot reboot.

For about an hour, the iMac was stuck in the grey Apple screen (sometimes with, and sometimes without, a progress bar). The progress bar would “finish,” then the Mac would restart back into the grey Apple screen.

I decided to leave the iMac alone while I worked out.

When I returned two hours later, the iMac had progressed from the grey screen to a blue screen. Zapping PRAM and restarting gets me a grey Apple screen followed by a blue screen. The blue screen flashes twice while changing its color balance settings, indicating that some part of the operating system still works. Then a tiny white rectangle appears at the top left of the screen. Then, nothing further.

This machine contains my entire music collection and all my photos of my daughter.

I have a backup drive but cannot force the iMac to boot from it.

I have an OS X CD but cannot force the iMac to start from it.

Maybe this is what Apple means by “HTML5.”

In the late 1980s, while making efforts to move to New York City, I came up with the winning ad campaign for Hebrew National Kosher Salami. Only I didn’t win.

Hebrew National held a contest to see if people outside Madison Avenue could come up with a great ad idea for their 83% fat free salami. The grand prize was $83,000.

Even in New York, $83,000 would have more than covered a moving van, broker’s fee, and first and last month’s rent.

But creating the winning ad carried a benefit even bigger than the cash for someone like me who was trying to break into New York advertising. I’d worked for a couple of years at Washington, DC-area ad agencies, one of them pretty good, but that and my portfolio bought me nothing in the competitive New York advertising job market of the late 1980s. There were kids coming out of school with better portfolios than mine.

Winning that contest, I believed at the time, would make a New York ad agency take me seriously.

My then-girlfriend Eva S and I submitted an ad built around the headline, “You should be so fat.”

Well, we never heard back after entering the contest, and months passed the way they do.

I continued to drive back and forth from DC to NYC looking for jobs and an apartment.

A couple of times I flew to New York for an interview in the middle of my work day. I told my DC-area-agency creative director I was seeing a doctor. I still feel bad about that lie.

One day I open a magazine, and there’s a picture of an athletic woman wearing a leotard, working out.

The headline reads, “You should be so lean.”

Lean. You should be so lean.

It was our concept made safe. “You should be so lean” was a faster read and a much less interesting idea.

Hebrew National had said in the contest rules that, in the event of duplicate ideas, they would pick the one that was best executed. I am certain today that several people submitted similar ideas and Hebrew National and its agency chose the best-looking comp, which was not mine. Quite probably the winner even wrote “You should be so lean.” All perfectly ethical.

But at the time I was sure that we had gotten ripped off.

So I confided in the president of the DC-area agency where I worked—like he needed another reason to fire me—and asked him if I should sue Hebrew National.

I sought this advice while buying a drink for the president of the agency when I should have been at my desk, working. I figured if the president of the agency was spending the afternoon in a bar, he wouldn’t mind his peon employee doing likewise.

I was thirsty and not very bright. A while later, for many reasons, the agency let me go, surprising absolutely no one but me.

But meantime I’m in the bar buying my boss a drink on his time.

He tells me something I’ll never forget: a big company has lawyers on retainer, and you don’t.

When I was twenty, Barbie was a symbol of oppression with obvious food issues. No way would a future child of mine identify with that.

When I was twenty, “princess” was another word for “child of oppressor.” Monarchs went with pogroms and capitalists.

If I ever had a daughter, she would be one of the people. Or a leader of the people. Or an anarchist. Or most probably an artist. Art was problematic because it also went with corporate capitalism (when not going steady with poverty) but at least the few artists who made money disdained it, if only publicly.

Twenty wasn’t easy.

When I was twenty, when I considered bringing a child into this world of wrong, I pictured her enjoying organic produce and healthy ethnic cuisines.

Decades and chameleon lives later, I was married and we were expecting.

After our daughter was born, I suggested raising her vegetarian. It seemed wrong to feed an angel on the blood and limbs of slaughtered animals. Her mother said she’d go along with the vegetarian angle as long as I did the research and committed to preparing fresh, nutritionally balanced meals that supplied every nutrient our child would need.

So she eats meat.

Mostly she eats french fries.

She sometimes eats at McDonald’s. Also she eats candy and plays with Barbies. She says she is Barbie’s biggest fan. Soon after learning to say Dada and Mama, she asked if she was a princess. We said yes.

What used to be my elegant teakwood dining table is now the staging area for a Barbie apartment. The Barbie pool, Barbie camping van, and Barbie salon that comprise the “apartment” barely leave room for the Barbies, Stacies, and Kellys who make use of these facilities.

The princess turns six in September. She’s working on the party guest list and we’ve already decided on her birthday present: a Barbie house.

Barbie is now fifty. But fifty is the new 49. There’s a reason she’s stuck around all these decades. Turns out it has nothing to do with theory and everything to do with girls.

P.S. Hint to my people: when you go to barbie.com, enable Flash.

After finishing her late-night snack, she left the empty bowl beside her in the bed “for Emile’s spirit to nibble on.”

Sviluppare Siti Con Gli Standard Web: Designing With Web Standards, 3rd Edition, Italian translation.

Shop for it.

Prefer English?

• Order from Amazon.com
• Order from Barnes & Noble
• Order the Kindle Edition

In Issue 307 of A List Apart for people who make websites:

by Richard Fink

Everything you wanted to know about web fonts but were afraid to ask. Richard Fink summarizes the latest news in web fonts, examining formats, rules, licenses, and tools. He creates a checklist for evaluating font hosting and obfuscation services like Typekit; looks at what’s coming down the road (from problems of advanced typography being pursued by the CSS3 Fonts Module group, to the implications of Google-hosted fonts); and wraps up with a how-to on making web fonts work today.

A List Apart: Web Fonts at the Crossing

Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart

And I’m off on a mini road trip to Penn State and its annual web conference, where I’ll be honored to deliver the opening keynote on standards-based web design, from 1452 to the present.

The Penn State Web 2010 Conference (@PSUWebConf) takes place Monday and Tuesday, June 7 and 8, 2010 at the Penn Stater Conference Center. Patti Fantaske is chair. The conference is for all who manage, write, edit, design, program, or administer websites or web content at university offices, departments, colleges, and campuses.

Above, page one of “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the first story in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as seen in Stanza, a free reader for iPad and iPhone. Stanza has a simple interface for finding, buying (and downloading free) e-books.

Stanza lets you control font size and choose from a number of templates offering a useful variety of foreground and background color and contrast. As the screenshot shows, it also lets you set text ragged right, which is the most legible setting for onscreen text.

Below, the same page in iBooks, the reader that comes with iPad. As one would expect from the company that brought us iTunes, the iBooks application has a slick interface for buying (and downloading free) e-books. But as a reader, it is currently less feature-rich, and thus less usable and less pleasing, than Stanza.

In iBooks, one cannot turn off full justification. While full justification is lovely in carefully produced printed books, it has a long history of bad aesthetics and poor usability on the screen. Given a sufficiently wide measure, full justification can be used onscreen for short passages, but it is inappropriate for anything beyond a paragraph or two.

Combine full justification with a single high-contrast template, and you have a reader that is better to look at than to read. Indeed, the 1.0 version of iBooks seems more like a flashy demo intended to wow potential iPad purchasers in the store than an application designed to provide book lovers with a viable alternative to print.

One suspects that future upgrades of iBooks will address these concerns. Meanwhile, if you intend to do serious reading on your iPad (or iPhone/Touch), download Stanza for free from the iTunes store.

Addendum: One wonders what will become of Stanza given Amazon’s ownership of the parent company. More here. Best scenario: the Kindle reader incorporates excellent Stanza features, while Stanza continues to operate as an alternative to Kindle, iBooks, et al.

Thanks, Mr Sippey!

It shouldn’t be this much work, but hats off to Nick Cernis for showing us the trick to enabling multiple “from” addresses under a single Gmail account in Mail on the iPad and iPhone.

When Ads by Google Go Wrong

Update! Final audio and video are now available for your listening and viewing pleasure at 5by5.tv.

This Thursday, June 3, 2010, at 1:00 PM EDT, join Dan Benjamin and me for the taping of The Big Web Show Episode Six, as we chat with leading interaction designer Luke Wroblewski about designing for the mobile space, and learn why the mobile experience for a web application or site should be designed before the PC version.

Luke Wroblewski is an internationally recognized digital product design leader who has designed or contributed to software used by more than 700 million people worldwide. He is the author of Web Form Design (“That rare book capable of transforming the way an entire field does its business.”—Communication Arts) and Functioning Form, and an extremely popular speaker at leading web design conferences. After long stints as Chief Design Architect at Yahoo! and Lead User Interface Designer of eBay Inc.’s platform team, he is currently Chief Design Officer and co-founder of a stealth start-up.

Participate in the live taping by sharing your questions for Luke via chatroom or phone.

Soon after taping, video and audio versions of the Episode 6 podcast will be posted in the iTunes store and on our website and announced here and via Twitter. (The complete schedule of 5by5 podcasts is available for your pleasure.)

5by5 is an Internet broadcasting network, home to podcasts like The Pipeline, The Big Web Show, The Conversation, The Dev Show, and more, with over 120,000 downloads per week. The Big Web Show features special guests and topics like the future of publishing, art direction online, content strategy, web fonts and typography, CMS shootouts, HTML5 and CSS3, building an audience, and more. Previous episodes are available for your listening and viewing pleasure.

M.I.A. Takes to the Streets: a slide show at NYTimes.com.

Photos: Ryan McGinley for The New York Times.